Office 365 & Exchange Admin's Blog

How to prevent users from changing profile photos in Microsoft 365

Posted on June 18, 2020 by Adam the 32-bit Aardvark

Update: This post was updated on July 22, 2020.

When you set up user photos in Microsoft 365 (Office 365), they propagate through the whole Microsoft 365 tenant and apps integrated with Azure AD. This means that they are displayed in Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and more. By default, any user can change their photo to anything they like. This might be a problem for admins who want to keep everything in order. In this article, I’ll show you why and how to block users from changing their photos in Microsoft 365.

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SBS 2011 to Microsoft 365 migration

Posted on May 26, 2020 by Adam the 32-bit Aardvark

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SBS (Small Business Server) 2011 is basically Windows Server 2008 R2 packed together with Exchange 2010 into a single suite. As such, you would expect migrating SBS 2011 to Microsoft 365 (Office 365) to be similar to migrating Exchange 2010 to Office 365. As it turns out, there are some differences that impact the migration process. Read on to learn why it’s a good idea to migrate from SBS 2011 and what options you have for migrating data to Microsoft 365, which is the most popular migration destination.

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Export Microsoft 365 mailboxes to PST with PowerShell

Posted on May 6, 2020 by Adam the 32-bit Aardvark

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Exporting Microsoft 365 mailbox content to PST is usually used for litigation purposes. However, it also works as a workaround for backup, archiving and migration. In a previous article, I’ve shown you how to use this mechanism with the eDiscovery tool. This article demonstrates how to produce similar results using PowerShell and New-ComplianceSearch cmdlet (with some follow-up cmdlets as well).

Export Microsoft 365 mailboxes to pst using PowerShell

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How to quickly check installed software versions

Posted on March 31, 2020 by Adam the 32-bit Aardvark

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There are situations where you need to check whether you or your users have certain software installed, and what is its version. You may want to check if the software is up to date or if your GPO-deployed software has been installed for a certain user. I’ll show you several methods you can use to check that with PowerShell.

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How to add user photos to Office 365 without PowerShell

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Adam the 32-bit Aardvark

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When users can see each other’s photos, online conversations and collaboration become more personal. In large organizations, the reason for using photos may be even more pragmatic. It may be the only way for people to actually see who they are talking with. This is why companies want to display users’ photographs in Office 365 applications like SharePoint Online, OWA, Outlook, or Skype for Business. In most cases, if you need to upload photos of just a few users to Office 365, it isn’t a big deal. However, adding photos to hundreds or thousands of users in a large organization can be troublesome. This is where CodeTwo’s free tool for Office 365 user photos comes in.

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New-ComplianceSearch: how to use the newer version of Search-Mailbox

Posted on February 28, 2020 by Adam the 32-bit Aardvark

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[Update]: This blog post was updated on April 3, 2020.

As announced in this Microsoft article, the date for retirement of legacy eDiscovery tools is moved from April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2020. That is when Search-Mailbox cmdlet will no longer be available. This means that all scripts using Search-Mailbox need to be rewritten and one of the most basic administrative tools needs to be relearned from scratch. In this article, I will demonstrate how to use the New-ComplianceSearch cmdlet in place of its long-lived predecessor, Search-Mailbox.

New-ComplianceSearch in place of Search-Mailbox

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How to back up Exchange Online mailboxes

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Adam the 32-bit Aardvark

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The question should no longer be whether to back up Exchange Online mailboxes or not, but how to do it. It’s no secret that your Office 365 data isn’t a responsibility of neither Microsoft nor any Office 365 services provider. To make sure your Exchange Online mailbox data is available and recoverable at all times, you should consider the idea of using a third-party Office 365 email backup tool. And here is why.

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How to automatically configure Outlook profiles after mailbox migration

Posted on January 7, 2020 by Adam the 32-bit Aardvark

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After you perform a server migration from one Exchange Server to another or to Office 365, Outlook clients need some manual configuration to connect with the new environment. Setting up Outlook Profiles is one of the last steps in the final (clean-up) post-migration stage. In this article, I will show how to reconnect Outlook profiles to the new environment in the most user-friendly way.

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How to migrate Exchange 2010 to 2016? A step-by-step guide

Posted on November 22, 2019 by Adam the 32-bit Aardvark

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On the Internet, you can find many comprehensive resources showing how to migrate Exchange 2010 to 2016 by using native methods. In this blog post, however, I’ll give you quick step-by-step instructions on how to perform the migration process by using CodeTwo Exchange Migration – a third-party tool that makes the process a lot easier, faster and more transparent. In other words, a perfect solution for busy admins.