August 15, 2014 Dave Stork Issue, Office 365 11 comments

Fixing Office 365 DirSync account matching issues

Recently I had to fix some issues with DirSync. For some reason (there were some cloud users created before DirSync was enabled) there were duplicate users, because DirSync failed to match the already present cloud user and the corresponding AD (Active Directory) user. There were also accounts that failed to sync and thus failed to sync all attributes properly. If there is already a cloud account and there is need for a synced account, you can create an AD account

August 13, 2014 Dave Stork Exchange, Issue, Office 365, Outlook 3 comments

Optimizing the Outlook AutoDiscover process by skipping the root domain query

Updated 8/15/2014: see the bottom of this article for additional information on changed AutoDiscover behavior of Outlook 2013. Consider the following scenario: An Active Directory (AD) domain named equal to the SMTP Suffx, so the mailaddress dmstork@contoso.com in the contoso.com AD domain. No on-premises Exchange, this means that there is no Service Connection Point (SCP) in A. Outlook 2013 (or lower versions from Outlook 2007 up). Exchange Online (or any hosted Exchange for that matter). Additional issue: You’ve got an external

June 5, 2014 Dave Stork Exchange, Exchange 2013, Issue, Office 365 Leave a comment

Office 365 users can't see free/busy of on-premises users

The past few days I was working on making an on-prem Exchange Server 2013 SP1 environment hybrid with the Office 365 tenant. You would expect that running the Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW) would be it, after setting all the requirements as they should. Unfortunately after running the HCW, Office 365 mailboxes couldn't access free/busy information of on-prem mailboxes. The other way round was functional. Enter troubleshooting mode! I will spare you the whole story and summarize it to the basics.

May 20, 2014 Dave Stork Events, Office 365, Personal, Windows Phone / Mobile Devices Leave a comment

Behind the presentation: Office 365 apps

Last Monday evening I presented “Office 365 apps” for the Dutch NGN-NGI interest group. And obviously the presentation was interesting, I think a little behind the scenes look for this particular presentation is worth a blog post. Actually, they might complement each other! So, I was asked to present something about apps on an Office 365 themed event. That was basically the assignment and please notice the very broad scope it could have. That was the first challenge. The first

May 15, 2014 Dave Stork Issue, Office 365 Leave a comment

Does your Office 365 DNS records check fail?

Recently I was working on building an hybrid Exchange 2013 environment. During the setup for specific mail domains, Office 365 didn’t seem to see the DNS records required. In this case it was the SPF record, that would not be accepted. However the record was made as specified as requested, TTL was an hour and after several hours it still didn’t pass the check. Other records made at the same time, were checked okay. Unfortunately that delayed other required changes…

November 8, 2013 Dave Stork ActiveSync, Events, Exchange, Exchange 2007, Exchange 2010, Exchange 2013, Lync, Office 365, OWA, Unified Messaging, Windows Phone / Mobile Devices Leave a comment

I will be presenting at the NGN Exchange evening event on 25th November

On the 25th of November the Dutch usergroup NGN (Netwerk Gebruikersgroep Nederland) will organize an Exchange themed evening event and I'm one of the speakers. I'm extra excited as it will be held at the OGD ICT Diensten head office in Delft, my employer! My session will be about Exchange and mobile devices, focused on ActiveSync but also on Outlook Web App and the OWA App for iPad/iPhone. A very interesting and currently relevant topic, if I say so myself

April 16, 2013 Dave Stork ActiveSync, Exchange 2013, Office 365, Windows Phone / Mobile Devices Leave a comment

The mysterious Exchange App, the new ActiveSync?

Recently the backend of my Office 365 P1 account was upgraded to the Wave 15 series of products, which obviously includes Exchange 2013. But going through the settings of the Exchange Admin Center, I noticed something that made me curious. When you go to the Exchange Admin Center, click to Recipients>Mailboxes and select a user, you can see in the Mobile Devices section the option to disable the Exchange App below the option to disable Exchange ActiveSync. I’ve highlighted it

November 29, 2012 Dave Stork Exchange 2010, Management, Office 365 Leave a comment

Managing mailbox storage use in Exchange 2010, Part 2

In the previous part (yes, I know. It’s from May… I’m very ashamed) I discussed using PSTs or the built-in Personal Archive (also referred to as Online Archive). In this post we will discuss third party archiving solutions and Exchange Online Archiving which in this case is service part of Office 365, although you can mix it with an on premises solution. (see the possible confusion) Third Party Archiving As it seems, organizations had long ago issues with overflowing Exchange

June 9, 2012 Dave Stork Office 365, Personal Leave a comment

See the difference Office 365 can make

I’ve blogged about my own experience regarding Office 365 in the posts Migrating to Office 365 Part 1: Business Case and Migrating to Office 365 Part 2: Exchange Cutover migration tips. I did show a picture of my “server room”, but now I actually have dismantled the physical servers and the difference is best shown in the following pic: To be fair, only the three computers on the floor are active. On the table two switches, a KVM and a

March 15, 2012 Dave Stork Exchange 2010, Management, Migration/Transition, Office 365, Question of the day Leave a comment

Exchange 2010 calendar publishing URLs are not updated after migrating to Office 365

With Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 it became possible to share your calendar with anyone outside of you organization, depending on the Sharing Policy implemented by your Exchange Administrator. Users can then share their calendar via an obfuscated or an relatively public URL without the need for authentication (and SSL for that matter). For more information on how to prepare your environment if you want to enable it, see this blog post. However, if an user has this enabled on

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