Last year I did a little research project about Microsoft’s public cloud and how it cloud affect Small and Medium sized businesses. So I created a paper which should help Microsoft partners to decide how they can improve their services and solutions by using the Microsoft public cloud. I the paper I focused on Microsoft Office 365 and Windows Intune. This should be for the partner which do infrastructure solutions like Active Directory, Exchange and PC Management.

You can download this paper from my Windows Live SkyDrive.
The paper includes a lot of text copied from Microsoft documents and websites, and research I did by myself. All the sources should be marked, but if you find anything which is not marked please feel free to contact me.

After working with some test accounts in Microsoft Office 365 I realized I could not send mails to my own domain. In the Office 365 control panel everything looked right and the domain was active. I also added the mail addresses to the user accounts.

The error I got back was:

Final-Recipient: rfc822;thomas.maurer@thomasmaurer.ch Action: failed Status: 5.4.1 Diagnostic-Code: smtp;550 5.4.1 Relay Access Denied

After creating a support ticket with the Microsoft Office 365 the support called me and checked my account. Now the problem was I already added the domain to another Office 356 account. So the Forefront had the domain added as duplicated domain.

 You can check the status of your domains in Forefront by clicking on the Exchange Online Administration (Manage) like on the Overview site. Now you can click

Now on your Exchange Online Management page click on Mail Control on the left site.

On the right site you can click on Configure IP safelisting, perimeter message tracing, and e-mail policies.

Now in the Domain tap you can check if you have a domain entry whichs starts with “duplicated…..”. If you have a entry like that you have to open a support ticket and the Forefront Online Team will remove the entry from your Account and you have to add the Domain again.

By the way this was the first time I used the Microsoft Support for Office 365 and it was a really good experience. Microsoft really offers a great Service here with fast and qualified support.

In Office 365 you can do and automate a lot with Windows Powershell. Now this small post shows you how you can connect to Office 365 with Powershell.

1. Install the Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant
   32-bit
   64-bit
2. Install the Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell
   32-bit
   64-bit
3. Open Powershell and import the MsOnline Module or use the desktop shortcut which was created by the installer.

   Import-Module MsOnline

4. Connect to your Microsoft Office 365 account

   Connect-MsolService

   Use your Office 365 LiveID to login (for example bob@bobscompany.onmicrosoft.com)

5. Now you can start working with Windows Powershell in your Office 365 account, if you need some more help about the available Powershell cmdlets you can list them with

   Get-Command -Module MsOnline

You can add your own Domain to your Office 365 account. If your domain is hosted at Genotec, you can simply create the DNS records for your domain with the DNS editor Genotec provides in the Hosting Control Center.

Under Domainnames, yourdomainname.com you can create a new TXT entry to verify your domain. For example:

After you have verifyed your Domain you have to add some other DNS Records for Exchange and Lync Online to work.

Here the DNS records for Exchange Online:

And here the DNS Records for Lync Online:

Remember to add the dot at the end of hostnames.

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

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.

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.

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

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:

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

I found this solution in the technet forums