Office 365 & Exchange
Admin's Blog
Office 365, Exchange, Windows Server and more - a spam-free diet of tested tips and solutions.
Posted on Some applications and services for Microsoft 365 (for example, Skype for Business) use app passwords as an authentication method when multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enabled. The problem is that after enabling MFA for the organization, some or even all users may not be able to create and use app passwords. This article shows what you can do if you find out that app passwords are not working in your Microsoft 365 tenant.
Posted on If you have ever received a plain text email, you will know the message format will remain the same when you reply to it or forward it. Because of that, you won’t be able to add hyperlinks, formatting and images to your email. What’s more, instead of your carefully designed HTML email signature, the recipient will just see its simple plain text version. Fortunately, with some minor setup, you can reply to plain text emails using HTML format messages in Outlook or in other email clients. What’s more, you can force the HTML format in every email sent from your organization.
Posted on Microsoft 365 security groups, formerly known as Office 365 security groups, allow admins to easily manage access to e.g. SharePoint sites by grouping together users that require identical permissions. This way you only need to assign access once for the entire group, not for each user individually. In this article, we will show you how to create a security group as well as add and remove members from this group using Microsoft/Office 365 admin center and how to streamline the process using PowerShell cmdlets.
Posted on Out of office messages in Office 365 (let’s assume Office 365 = Microsoft 365, to make things easier) are an extremely useful thing. Not everyone knows though that this simple automatic reply is more than just an email. In this article, I’ll quickly go over the basics: what out of office message in Office 365 is and how to set it up for your account. For the real treat, I’ll show the easiest way to set up an out of office reply for another user (or all users).
Posted on End of Mainstream Support for Exchange 2016 is planned for October 13, 2020. It means that 5 years after its release, this on-premises server enters the Extended Support period. The end of extended support (or end of life) for Exchange Server 2016 is planned for October 14, 2025. Read on to learn how this affects you, what to do next and what will be the last on-premises Exchange version.
Posted on The support for basic authentication in Microsoft 365 (for connections to Exchange Online) is soon to be discontinued. The complete shutdown has been postponed to the second half of 2021. While it gives organizations more time to prepare, it’s a good idea to get tenants ready before the deadline. Continue reading this article to learn more about basic authentication in Microsoft 365, how to block it on your own and when exactly it will be disabled.
Posted on In one of my previous articles, I’ve shown how to create simple email signatures in Outlook using VBScript. In this article, I will show you how to take your email signatures to a higher level. I will use VBScript to create an HTML email signature for every Outlook (for Windows) installation in your organization. The script will create a professional email signature with data taken from Active Directory. Next, I will explain how to use GPO to distribute the script to every user in your organization.
Posted on As the digital transformation increasingly affects education, IT administrators in schools all over the world have their hands busier than ever. With limited time available to get everything ready for online classes and modern communication between teachers, students and parents, every second matters.
One of the challenges IT administrators have to face when working with schools is managing student and teacher photos that show up across various platforms and communicators, such as Microsoft Teams. Even though this task seems trivial, it might surprise you just how long it takes to set up photos for everyone. With very limited time and resources that are devoted to IT in most schools, it is crucial to make things as easy as possible. I’ll show you the simplest and a completely free way to manage profile pictures for school staff and students in Active Directory and Microsoft 365, to make remote teaching more personal.
Posted on Client Access Rules in Exchange Online are rules that you can use to control which client connections are allowed and not allowed to access your Exchange Online organization. They let you define the conditions based on various properties of a client. These can be, for example, the protocol they use to connect, their IP address or an Active Directory attribute. Thanks to that, you have an option to block (or allow) certain client connections to better protect your Office 365 organization.
Posted on If you are a Microsoft 365 administrator, it’s only a matter of time before you are tasked with restoring deleted emails (or other mailbox items). While you can use eDiscovery to recover deleted items, there is an easier way which lets you restore deleted items straight back to where they originated from. Below, I’ll describe how to recover deleted Microsoft 365 users’ mailbox items with PowerShell and with the Modern Exchange Admin Center.
