Office 365, Next Steps?

[chazzy2501]

OK I've got my users sync'd using dirsync to my pupils OU and I now have 815 pupils sitting on o365.

 

I've manually activated a test pupil, located and given the Student ProPlus and A2 plan with lync, sharepoint and onedrive. NO Exchange (yet)

 

Q1: I login as the student and the onedrive is not available? so none of the online word etc is available. How do I enable his onedrive and will I have to do this en-mass for every pupil later in powershell?

 

Q2: How do I get powershell to talk to my office 365? I'm looking at scripts on the forums I think it's doeable.. I've added the department "pupils" to my pupils and that should sync in a few hours...

 

Q3: I have onsite Exchange 2007 what are the broad steps in getting pupils accounts over to O365 with in mind that I "MAY" move staff over later?

 

Anything I should be doing right away before I give pupils the news about free office?

[sonofsanta]

1) Not sure off the top of my head - is the link not there, or is it telling you it's setting things up?

 

2) Install the Windows Azure Active Directory Module: Manage Windows Azure AD using Windows PowerShell. Start your scripts with

Connect-MSOLService -Credential $adminCredential

and it will prompt for your Office365 admin credentials then connect you as relevant.

 

To connect to Exchange in Office 365, use

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

 

3) Look up staged migrations - I just went through that in Feb half term, you can move people over a chunk at a time via CSVs and a few commands. Migrate Mailboxes to Exchange Online with a Staged Migration: Exchange Online Help and Performing a Staged Exchange Migration to Office 365 (Exchange Online) - (Part 1) :: Exchange Online :: Office 365 :: Articles & Tutorials :: MSExchange.org were guides I used, you can work out where you're at between them.

 

4) Here's a guide I wrote for students to run them through the free Office - seems to have gone ok for us Installing your free copies of Microsoft Office.doc

[chazzy2501]

The one Drive and newsfeed tabs are greyed out. It's been over 24 hours since I set it up.

[FN-GM]

For OneDrive check this. go to to the SharePoint Administration portal, go to User Profiles from the left menu and Click on Manage User Permission. What users or groups do you see in there? These are the users with permission to SkyDrive.

 

Do you see the OneDrive tab at all? It should be with the Outlook, Calendar, People tabs.

[chazzy2501]

"Everyone Except External Users" is in the user profile for sharepoint @FN-GM (Yes the onedrive tab is there just greyed out.) I've not enabled Exchange yet as I'll make that a phase 2 project.

[chazzy2501]

without changing a thing just looking at sharepoint perms, its now working?

[sonofsanta]

If you'd only just set up, it may have been chugging away doing stuff in the background - there was a long span of months between me signing up for O365 and actually doing anything with it, so the memory is a bit hazy, but I seem to remember Sharepoint whining about "we're setting things up". Certainly it takes five minutes or so for each person the first time they click on the OneDrive link.

 

To answer the original question: you shouldn't need to log in to people's accounts to do anything. There's nothing I've come across so far that has to be done one-by-one, everything can be looped through PowerShell at the very least.

[chazzy2501]

could you give me an outline of how exchange 2007 works with o365 and how you eventually migrate..

[sonofsanta]

The MS link from above should give you an overview, but essentially:

* You migrate a batch of users over, which uses the Outlook Anywhere mechanism to copy all the emails over (so get Outlook Anywhere set up if you haven't already - it's an easy job if your server is already accessible from the internet for webmail etc.)

* You assign those users a licence

* You run a couple of Powershell scripts on your Exchange box, one to generate a new CSV of details, the second to run against the CSV and disable the local mailbox and enable the cloud mailbox.

 

Once you've done all that, email is automatically forwarded onto the cloud mailbox by your local Exchange, and migrated users connect their Outlook directly to the cloud (your email domain's autodiscover DNS - internally, at least - needs changing to a CNAME record for autodiscover.outlook.com for this to work). This allows you to co-exist local mailboxes and remote mailboxes, if you want, but really it's designed to let you do the migration stage by stage (hence staged migration ) because really - why bother keeping a local server once you have Office 365 working? Once everyone is ported over you can change the MX records for your domain and mail will flow straight to the Office 365 set up, cutting your Exchange server out of the loop.

[chazzy2501]

1) Not sure off the top of my head - is the link not there, or is it telling you it's setting things up?

 

2) Install the Windows Azure Active Directory Module: Manage Windows Azure AD using Windows PowerShell. Start your scripts with

Connect-MSOLService -Credential $adminCredential

and it will prompt for your Office365 admin credentials then connect you as relevant.

 

To connect to Exchange in Office 365, use

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

 

3) Look up staged migrations - I just went through that in Feb half term, you can move people over a chunk at a time via CSVs and a few commands. Migrate Mailboxes to Exchange Online with a Staged Migration: Exchange Online Help and Performing a Staged Exchange Migration to Office 365 (Exchange Online) - (Part 1) :: Exchange Online :: Office 365 :: Articles & Tutorials :: MSExchange.org were guides I used, you can work out where you're at between them.

 

4) Here's a guide I wrote for students to run them through the free Office - seems to have gone ok for us [ATTACH]23310[/ATTACH]

 

@sonofsanta what does connecting to exchange in office 365 do? What does your script do? How will this affect my users.. at the moment my test pupil hit the outlook tab and o365 errors and wont let you leave the errored page.

[sonofsanta]

Connecting to an Exchange session lets you use all the Exchange commands like Set-Mailbox etc. that aren't available if you only connect to plain old Office 365. That script doesn't do anything in and of itself - it just gets you a command prompt running on your Exchange installation in the cloud, effectively. It redirects you to the appropriate place based on your admin credentials so you don't need to edit that, just run it as is and Office 365 does the cleverness.

 

The top (one line) script is what connects you to plain old Office 365, to use commands like Set-MSOLUser for actions like licensing.

 

Bear in mind that some changes can only be made locally and synchronised up if you keep your AD as the authoratitive source (which you're likely to, unless you have very specific reasons to do otherwise) - but you can script those changes in PowerShell locally if needs be.

 

What error is it throwing for students?

[chazzy2501]

I'll have a problem migrating.. I use selfcerts

 

The pupils issue right now is when they click on the outlook tab the page says "something went wrong :-(" details shows UserHasNoMailboxException. This is annoying by itself but the second issue is that you're stuck there. The back button logout & login again and it takes you back to the error page! Even on other PCs!

[sonofsanta]

You can get a single domain cert (webmail.school.sch.uk) for <£50 for a year from GoDaddy, I'm sure there are cheaper (or even free to schools) available.

 

Have your users got the Exchange licence ticked? Even if you've migrated nothing over, the act of licensing them for Exchange creates a mailbox IIRC.

[chazzy2501]

I wasn't ready to start phase 2 (the moving of email to 0365)

 

@sonofsanta couldn't trouble you for a power script to disable /remove the exchange license of all my users?

 

I seem to be leaning on you a little too much lately.

[snagrat]

Get a free 90 day certificate from InstantSSL. I use them when I need to do migrations and SSL isn't setup.

[snagrat]

And assigning a license doesn't create a mailbox if there is already a locally hosted one. The office 365 won't work until migrated.

[chazzy2501]

@snagrat this is what I assumed I just didn't expect o365 to handle it so poorly. (no synced mailbox) It seems they've made a change that will automatically take o365 users to the o365 owa instead of the start page. So all my new users are stuck now....

 

So much for testing

[sonofsanta]

Try sending them to

https://[tenancy]-my.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/MySite.aspx?MySiteRedirect=AllDocuments

instead - replace [tenancy] with whatever you signed up with, i.e. the part before .onmicrosoft.com for any accounts you've set up solely in the cloud. That takes them to their OneDrive page if you've assigned SharePoint licences - they can then get to Office 365 settings (and then to Software) from there.

 

Removing the Exchange licence... I think this would work, once you've connected to Windows Azure AD (not Exchange)

$AccountSKU = "tenancy:STANDARDWOFFPACK_STUDENT"
$LicenseOptions = New-MsolLicenseOptions -AccountSkuId $AccountSKU -DisabledPlans EXCHANGE_S_STANDARD
Get-MsolUser -All | Set-MsolUserLicense -AddLicenses $AccountSKU -LicenseOptions $LicenseOptions

That should go through and assign the student licence to everyone, but disable the Exchange option... never had to do it so I'm theorising on that script. Again, you need to switch the word tenancy out for whatever you have assigned to you.

[chazzy2501]

I solved my issues by removing the A2 plan entirely!

 

Get-MsolUser -all | Set-MsolUserLicense -RemoveLicenses "BeaminsterSch:STANDARDWOFFPACK_STUDENT"

 

few hundred errors (teachers with no licenses at all) but the job was done...

 

I have a new issue, I have an actual pupil who can't use her vista laptop... I have it here in the lab I looked at @sonofsanta 's doc and the option to install office 2010 isn't at the bottom of the page?

 

How do I find the office 2010 installer for my vista users?

[snagrat]

Once you remove the A2 plan how are you adding it again? Or will it simply readd when you reassign the license?

[sonofsanta]

I solved my issues by removing the A2 plan entirely!

 

Get-MsolUser -all | Set-MsolUserLicense -RemoveLicenses "BeaminsterSch:STANDARDWOFFPACK_STUDENT"

 

few hundred errors (teachers with no licenses at all) but the job was done...

 

I have a new issue, I have an actual pupil who can't use her vista laptop... I have it here in the lab I looked at @sonofsanta 's doc and the option to install office 2010 isn't at the bottom of the page?

 

How do I find the office 2010 installer for my vista users?

 

Don't think it matters what platform you look at the software page from - the Office 2010 link should be there for everyone, all the time, at the bottom of the Software > Office page. I've never seen it missing, sorry.

 

She has got the Office 365 ProPlus for Students licence assigned, yeah?

[chazzy2501]

yes she does have the 2013 installer right there but it fails.. (expected) no option for any other software but the 64bit version...

 

it downloads the 0365proplusretail installer...

 

this means for me that all vista and xp users can't use this benefit?

 

I'll have to raise a support request

 

EDIT: From what I can see is that office 2010 isn't offered as a download. if you already have 2010 installed, then it will detect that and offer to sync it with o365 if you have a PC with no office at all then 2013 is the only download option.

Edited March 26, 2014 by chazzy2501