Powershell: How to connect to Office 365 with Powershell

Posted on May 12, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

You can simply manage and administrate Office 365 from your Powershell prompt or with your own Powershell scripts.

office365

Here is how you can connect to Office 365 with Windows PowerShell:

First create a object with your Windows Live Credentials. This command will open a Windows in which you can enter your Windows Live Credentials for your Office365 Accout. In my case tmauer@tmaurer.onmicrosoft.com and my password.

$LiveCred = Get-Credential

You can open a new Session:

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

Now join the session with:

Import-PSSession $Session

To close the Session:

Remove-PSSession $Session

Now if you join the PS session with Enter-PSSession you can now work online and run commands like Get-User. More about working with Powershell and Office 365 in the next posts.

Microsoft Office 365

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

office365

In the last days I started to work with the Microsoft beta of Office 365. After testing it for a while I think this could be a great solution for small & medium businesses. And its a really hard competitor to Google Apps. There are a lot of advantage which Office 365 has agains Google Apps and I think because it is a Microsoft Solution for a lot of companys this is the better way to go, if they already used Microsoft Products or have a Microsoft enviroment.

More options and features instead of Google Apps, for example in Exchange or Forfront which protects Exchange and SharePoint Online for free.
Microsoft Solutions – the most people and companys already use them.
Powershell - This is a really cool feature. You can administrate the whole Office365 online serivce with Windows Powershell.

In the next few weeks I will post some blog post about how to use Office 365 and some Powershell How To posts.

Import Evernote notes to OneNote 2010

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Since I work more and more with Windows 7 I had a look at Microsoft OneNote 2010. Before I used Evernote and I was happy with it. But as I saw OneNote and startet using it, I can’t think being without it. There are alot of features I really love and OneNote 2010 is really nice integrated into Windows 7 and the Office products.

So if you wish to migrate from Evernote to Microsoft OneNote 2010 you can do that in diffrend ways.

Import Notes via Outlook (send Evernote Notes via email and import them in Outlook via the Send to OneNote button)
Export Notes as HTML and Import Them Into OneNote
Import Notes via the OneNote Printer

You can read a great HowTo on howtogeek.com

Btw. Microsoft released also OneNote for iPhone

Sharepoint 2010: Upload Multiple Documents button grayed out – This control is currently disabled

Posted on November 18, 2010 by Thomas Maurer

In the last days we had a customer ticket which was escalated because a user in our Hosted Sharepoint 2010 environment had the following problem. He could not upload multiple documents because the button was grayed out and he got the message “This control is currently disabled”.

This is a feature which is a client integration component, which is available on machines with a installed Office 2010 client. So if you have a Windows 7 PC and Office 2010 installed you get the following:

The first time you navigate on the Document Library you get asked about a ActiveX Control Object
You can accept that
Maybe you get asked again
Now you can use the Upload Multiple Documents Button
And choose the Office Files

I found this solution in the technet forums

Microsoft Office 2010 Migration Guides

Posted on November 17, 2010 by Thomas Maurer

Microsoft released a article about migration to Office 2010. With the Office 2010 Migration Guides you can easy guide user trough the new interface of Office 2010 with Ribbons and how you convert Office 2003 documents to Office 2010 documents.

You can find more here on the Office support page.

Docs.com

Posted on August 6, 2010 by Thomas Maurer

I think this is not really new but it looks like a lot of people don’t know about the new service of Microsoft called Docs.com. Docs.com is a kind of a online Office Suite connected to Facebook.

You can simple upload or create Microsoft Office files and share them with your Facebook friends. I think this is the first time Microsoft gets his Google Docs rival right. It’s very simple to use and you can login and share documents with something nearly every person has.