I recently had a problem with an Exchange Online tenant. There was an external mail contact which was previously synchronised from Active Directory to Exchange Online. So I had deleted the on-premise active directory mail contact but it still existed in Exchange Online. When I tried to delete the contact it gave the following errror message.

The action ‘Remove-MailContact’, ‘Identity’, can’t be performed on the object ‘Sean OFarrell ‘ because the object is being synchronized from your on-premises organization. This action should be performed on the object in your on-premises organization.

To trouble shoot this issue you can do a couple of things to ensure the external contact does not exist in your on premise Active Directory.

1. Perform a custom search in ADUC: Search Syntax : proxyaddresses=SMTP:sean.ofarrell@contoso.com 
2. Search the WAAD Mettaverse
3. Run this command on the Exchange Onpremise management shell
   remove-mailcontact sean.ofarrell@contoso.com

I recently uninstalled DirSync from a customer site where DirSync was installed using SQL Server and not SQL Express. 

I launched dirsync /fullsql and tried to launch ‘DirSyncInstallShell.psc1‘ and got the error message above.  

The fix was really simple , Download and install Powershell 3.0 on Windows Server 2008R2

Microsoft Office365 sign in assistant 

Microsoft Office 2013 Service Pack 1 x86

Microsoft Office 2013 Service Pack 1 x64

Microsoft Office 2010 Service Pack 2 x86

Microsoft Office 2010 Service Pack 2 x64

Microsoft Outlook 2010 SP2 February 2014 Cumulative Update

Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 3 x86

Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 3 x64

Microsoft Outlook 2007  Patch KB2596598

Microsoft Outlook 2007 Patch KB268704

Azure RMS Sharing Application

Lync2013 April 2014 Cumulative Update

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 3

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 3 Rollup 5

Windows Azure Active Directory Sync tool – 64 bit

IdFix DirSync Error Remediation Tool

Windows Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell (32-bit version)

Windows Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell (64-bit version) 

Windows Azure AD Rights Management Administration Tool

SharePoint Online Management Shell

Windows PowerShell Module for Lync Online

Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Service Pack 1 (SP1)

I recently carried out a large migration and my customer had 700 Distribution Groups. My customer asked me to restrict delivery of emails to the groups by members only. So end users could not email the distribution group unless they were a member. 

So how do I do this for 700 users!! Powershell to the rescue.

Connect to Exchange Online via Powershell and run this command.

1. Get-Distributiongroup | export-csv C:\users\disti.csv
2. I then deleted all columns in the csv except for PrimarySmtpAddress and then renamed that column to distiname.
3. Then run this command
   Import-Csv “C:\Users\sofarrell\Desktop\disti.csv” | Foreach-Object{get-distributiongroup $_.distiName | Set-distributiongroup -AcceptMessagesOnlyFromDLMembers $_.distiname}
4. And then run this command
   Import-Csv “C:\Users\sofarrell\Desktop\disti.csv” | Foreach-Object{get-distributiongroup $_.distiName | Set-distributiongroup -AcceptMessagesOnlyFromSendersOrMembers $_.distiname}

I recently migrated a large Google Apps tenant to Microsoft Office365 (10k + users). Google require a verification code to set up forwarding to a user’s .onmicrosoft.com alias. Which means it is not possible to automate the forwarding from Google Apps to Office365.

So the way we enable co-existence is as follows.

Domain Name : Contoso.com 

1. Add an alias domain into Google Apps. Relay.contoso.com. Google state that this can take up to 24 hours. I have seen it complete in 10 hours. This will add an alias to all Google Apps users  user@relay.contoso.com
   
2. Export all Office365 user’s userprincipal names to a csv.
    
3. Enable forwarding for all users in Office365 to their smtpaddress@relay.contoso.com. This is done by using the following powershell command in Exchange Online.
   Import-Csv “C:\Users\sofarrell\Desktop\RelayAddress.csv” | Foreach-Object{Get-Mailbox $_.DisplayName | Set-Mailbox -ForwardingSMTPAddress $_.MailAddress -DeliverToMailboxAndForward $true} -verbose
   
4. When the last mailbox has migrated we then remove the forwarding and edit the delivertomailboxandforward value.
   Get-Mailbox | Set-Mailbox -ForwardingSmtpAddress $null -delivertomailboxandforward $false

I have recently began using a product called CloudAnywhere from CloudiWay which has some really excellent features like:

• Syncronise multiple Active Directory Forests and passwords into Office365
• Syncronise Google Apps Directory into Office365.