Month: February 2011

While I am delivering BPOS courses for Microsoft partners, there’s always a lot of interest in using commands to control directory synchronization, the migration tools, provisioning users and so on. Microsoft actually provides several PowerShell cmdlets with the two main tools that come with BPOS:

• Directory synchronization cmdlets become available when you install the directory synchronization software
• Migration and configuration cmdlets become available when you install the migration tools

There is one directory synchronization cmdlet of interest and that is the Start-OnlineCoexistenceSync cmdlet. That cmdlet starts a synchronization run from the on-premises Active Directory to the customer’s BPOS environment. When you start c:\program files\microsoft online directory sync\dirsyncconfigshell.psc1, a PowerShell session is started that allows you to run the cmdlet. If you just want to run the command from an existing PowerShell session, first load the Directory Synchronization snapin with the following command:

Add-PSSnapin Coexistence-Configuration

After the snapin is loaded, you can use the Start-OnlineCoexistenceSync cmdlet to start a synchronization run. Although I have not yet seen the next version of DirSync for use with Office 365, I presume that the above cmdlet will still be available since the DirSync tools will be very similar.

The cmdlets that come with the migration tools are much more interesting because they can be used to provision users, enable users, enable POP3 access for users, grant Send As or Full Mailbox Access and so forth. When the migration tools are installed, you will have a shortcut in the Start Menu in Microsoft Online Services > Migration > Migration Command Shell. When you click that shortcut, a PowerShell session is started with the Microsoft Exchange Transporter snapin loaded. You can ask for the list of cmdlets loaded by this snapin using the following command:

get-command -PSSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Transporter

Some interesting cmdlets:

• Add-MSOnlineUser: can be used to add users to BPOS from a script; note that the users are added as synchronized disabled users; you will have to use Enable-MSOnlineUser to enable the user in a separate step
• Add-MSOnlineMailPermission: can be used to grant Send As, Full Mailbox access or Send On Behalf Of rights on a mailbox
• Enable-MSOnlinePOPAccess: can be used to enable POP3 access on a mailbox
• Set-MSOnlineAlternateRecipient: can be used to set an alternate recipient on an Exchange Online mailbox; you can configure the mailbox to deliver e-mails to both the Exchange Online inbox and the alternate recipient
• Set-MSOnlineUserPassword: can be used to set a password on an online user

Note that there are no cmdlets to create contacts and distribution lists in the Exchange Online global address lists. You can also see that these cmdlets are specifically created for use with Exchange Online in BPOS and that they have no relation at all with Exchange Server 2007 or Exchange Server 2010 cmdlets in an on-premise solution. To fix those issues and provide many more options, Exchange Online in Office 365 will actually allow full use of Exchange Server 2010 SP1 cmdlets over the Internet. Naturally, not all cmdlets will be available and some cmdlets will not support all parameters.

By the way, if you don’t like to work with PowerShell commands, a company called MessageOps has a free tool called BPOS PowerShell GUI. You need to install that tool on a system that has the Microsoft migration tools installed. The tool looks like this:

The tool provides easy access to allmost all the available PowerShell cmdlets using the above GUI. Highly recommended!

Exchange Online, standalone or as part of BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), always comes with antivirus and anti-spam protection delivered by Forefront Online Protection for Exchange or FOPE. Mails are always scanned for viruses and, depending on your settings, checked for spam.

As a BPOS administrator you can control the anti-spam checking behavior by configuring safe and blocked senders in the BPOS Administration Center. E-mail addresses, IP addresses or domains added to the safe senders for instance are not checked for spam by the FOPE infrastructure.

When e-mail is marked as spam, it is held by FOPE. By default, a BPOS user gets an e-mail every three days (from FOPE) with a list of e-mails marked as spam. The user can then decide to move the e-mail to the inbox.

If you want more control and visibility into what FOPE does, and you want to grant users access to the quarantine website at FOPE for immediate action on blocked mails, you will need to ask support to enable the following for you:

• Access to the FOPE administration website at https://admin.messaging.microsoft.com
• Access to the quarantine website at https://quarantine.messaging.microsoft.com

You can initially ask that the BPOS administration account you are using is granted access to both. From the FOPE administration website, you can add other users so that they have access to their quarantine. Note that the password to access FOPE admin and quarantine is different from the BPOS password!

Now the question is: “What can you do in the FOPE administration website?”. The answer is simple: “Not that much.” Basically, you get read-only access to most settings. However, you can generate reports and, as stated above, add other users so that they can access the quarantine website. The screenshot below shows an example of a report (in Dutch):

A user with access to the quarantine, sees the following:

The user can easily select the e-mails that are not spam and move them to the inbox (or mark them as not spam).

If we look forward to how things will be in Office 365, administrators will have more control over the settings in FOPE. That, for sure, will be a welcome addition to the capabilities of Exchange Online and the administrative control customers will have over it.