Month: June 2012

Office 365 Identity Management with DirSync without Exchange Server On-Premises

This post describes how users, groups and contact are provisioned in Office 365 from the on-premises Active Directory. By using DirSync, these objects are created in and synchronized to Office 365. Without an Exchange Server and Exchange Management tools in place, it is not always obvious how these objects should be created.

The following sections describe the procedures you can follow without Exchange or the Exchange management tools in place.

IMPORTANT NOTE
The sections below only specify the basic actions you need to perform in Active Directory to have the object appear in the right place in Office 365 (user, security group, mailbox, distribution group, contact). Note that almost all properties of these objects need to be set in Active Directory. If you want to hide a distribution group from the address book or you want to configure moderation for a distribution group, you have to know the property in Active Directory that’s responsible for the setting, set the value and perform directory synchronization. You will also need to upgrade the Active Directory schema with Exchange Server 2010 schema updates. You cannot use the Exchange Server 2010 System Manager without having at least one Exchange Server 2010 role installed on-premises.

Create a user account

Create a regular user account in Active Directory. This user account will be replicated by DirSync and it will appear in the Users list in the portal (https://portal.microsoftonline.com).

Important: set the user logon name to a value with a suffix that matches the suffix used for logging on to Office 365. For instance, if you logon with first.last@xylos.com in Office 365, set the UPN to that value:
clip_image002

User accounts without a mailbox (or any other license) can be used in Office 365 to grant permissions such as Billing Administrator or Global Administrator. A user account like this is typically used to create a DirSync service account.

Create a user account for a user that needs a mailbox

Create a user account as above. Set the user’s primary e-mail address in the email attribute or you will get an onmicrosoft.com address only:

clip_image004

When this user is synchronized and an Exchange Online license is added in the portal, a mailbox will be created that has the E-mail address in the E-mail field as primary SMTP address. Automatically, a secondary SMTP address is created with prefix@tenantid.onmicrosoft.com:

clip_image006

What if the user needs extra SMTP addresses?

  • You cannot set extra SMTP addresses in Exchange Control Panel (or Remote PowerShell) because the object is synchronized with DirSync.
  • In the on-premises Active Directory you need to populate the proxyAddresses attribute of the user object. You can set the values in this field with ADSIEdit or Active Directory Users and Computers (Windows Server 2008 ADUC and higher with Advanced Features turned on)
  • In the proxyAddresses field, make sure that you also list the primary SMTP address with SMTP: (in uppercase) in front of the address. Secondary addresses need smtp: (in lowercase) in front of the address.
    clip_image008

Note: instead of editing the proxyAddresses field directly, you can use a free (but at this point in time beta) product: http://www.messageops.com/software/office-365-tools-and-utilities/office-365-active-directory-addin. The tool adds the following tabs to Active Directory Users and Computers:

  • O365 Exchange General: set display name, Email address, additional Email addresses and even a Target Email Address (for mail redirection)
  • O365 Custom Attributes: set custom attributes in AD for replication to Office 365
  • O365 Delivery Restrictions: accept messages from, reject messages from
  • O365 Photo: this photo will appear on the user’s profile and will be used by Lync Online as well
  • O365 Delegates: to set the publicDelegates property

When a user is created in AD, you can use the additional tabs this tool provides to set all needed properties at once.

To summarize the actions for a mailbox:

  • Create a user in ADUC with the user logon name (UPN) and e-mail address to the primary e-mail address of the user (UPN and e-mail address do not have to match but it’s the most common case)
  • Make sure the user has a display name (done automatically for users if you specify first, last and full name in the AD wizard)
  • Set proxyAddresses manually or with the MessageOps add-in to specify additional e-mail addresses (with smtp: in the front) and make sure you also specify the primary e-mail address with SMTP: in the front.
  • Let DirSync create and sync the user to Office 365
  • Assign an Exchange Online license to the user. A mailbox will be created with the correct e-mail addresses.

Create a security group

Create a security group in Active Directory. The group will be synchronized by DirSync and appear in the Security Groups in the portal. The group will not appear in the Distribution Groups in Exchange Online (obviously).

Create a distribution group

Create a distribution group in Active Directory. In the properties of the group set the primary e-mail address in the E-mail address field:

clip_image010

In addition to the e-mail address, the group object also needs a display name (displayname attribute). If the distribution group in AD has an e-mail address and a display name, the group will appear in the Distribution Groups list in Exchange Online after synchronization.

Note that specifying members and alternate e-mail addresses has to be done in the local Active Directory as well. If you have installed the MessageOps add-in, you can set easily set those properties.

Create a mail-enabled distribution group

You can add a display name and e-mail address to a standard security group to mail-enable the group. After stamping those two properties, the group will appear in the list of Distribution Groups in Exchange Online. When you list groups with the Get-Group cmdlet, you will see the following:

clip_image012

You can stamp the properties manually or use the MessageOps add-in to set these properties easily.

Create a contact

Create a contact object in Active Directory. In the properties of the created object, fill in the E-mail field in the General tab.

Conclusion

Although DirSync makes it easy to create directory objects in Office 365, without an Exchange Server and the Exchange management tools it is not always obvious how to set the needed properties in order to correctly synch these objects. If you find it too much of a hassle to set the required properties on your local Active Directory objects, there are basically two things you can do:

  • Turn off Directory Synchronization and start mastering directory objects in the cloud
  • Install at least one Exchange Server 2010 SP1 so that you can use the Exchange management tools

Issue with meeting invites during Office 365 staged migration

During a recent migration project, we migrated several mailboxes to Office 365 using the staged migration approach. Naturally, during the migration, users that had been migrated still sent meeting invites to on-premises users and meeting rooms. The problem was that meeting invites were actually received as clear text and stripped of the necessary attributes that make it a meeting request. The on-premises server was Exchange Server 2003 SP2.

As you might know, during a staged migration, DirSync creates MEUs (mail-enabled users) in the cloud. These MEUs actually represent on-premises users that have not been migrated yet and they make sure that the global address list in Office 365 matches the on-premises global address list.

When a user with a cloud mailbox sends a meeting invite to an on-premises user, he actually sends the invite to the MEU. The MEU has a TargetAddress that points back to the on-premises user. The MEU also has settings that control how mail should be formatted when sent to the actual on-premises user. The solution to the problem was to change the UseMapiRichTextFormat  to a value of Never using the following PowerShell command:

set-MailUser MEUname -UseMapiRichTextFormat Never

For all MailUser objects, use:

get-mailuser | set-MailUser -UseMapiRichTextFormat Never

After running this command, cloud users could successfully send meeting requests to on-premises users. Hope it helps!

A quick look at Windows Azure IaaS

I played around a bit with Windows Azure IaaS to see how it stacks up against Amazon EC2. We use Amazon EC2 internally for some test and demo setups that don’t always have to be running.

As a practical test, I wanted to install a Windows Server 2012 domain controller in a subnet of my choice. It turns out that getting started is pretty simple. The rest of this post presumes that you have a Windows Azure account with the Virtual Machines Preview activated (go to http://www.windowsazure.com to get started).

You can manage virtual machines from the new management interface at https://manage.windowsazure.com or with Windows Azure PowerShell (https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/downloads/). This post will not use Powershell. Sorry! Smile

The first thing I did was to create a new virtual network which also lets you create an affinity group. Affinity groups allow you to have some control over the location of components like storage in order to reduce latency for instance. To learn more about affinity groups, take a look at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/7916.importance-of-windows-azure-affinity-groups.aspx. Note that there are other ways to create affinity groups, but it’s easy to do when you create your virtual networks. I will not bother you with the details of creating the virtual network and just show the end result. I created a virtual network with two subnets: prod and dev.

image

The details for the subnets can be seen when clicking Configure:

image

Note that there is more you can configure here. You can specify DNS servers that will then be handed out to your VMs using DHCP. In addition, you can configure a connection to your on-premises network using a site-to-site VPN solution.

After the networks are configured (including the affinity group), it’s time to create a storage account. Storage accounts are not new in Azure and are traditionally used to store BLOBs, tables and queues. The virtual machine disks you create (or that will be created automatically as an OS disk) will actually be stored in BLOB storage. I created the following storage account:

image

During the creation of the account, you will be asked for the affinity group. You see that reflected above in the location property. Note that you can actually take a look inside the storage account with a tool like Azure Storage Explorer (http://azurestorageexplorer.codeplex.com/). After adding your storage account using the name and the key (you can get that from the old portal), you will see:

image

Above, you see the boot disk of a virtual machine of 30GB. Files in BLOB storage have a maximum size of 1TB so VHDs are also limited to 1TB. Depending on the VM size, you can add additional disks of 1TB to a VM. The maximum amount of disks you can add today is 16 and you can stripe these inside the VM to a 16TB volume if required.

Now we have our network and storage defined, we can create a virtual machine. It’s important to note that you should create the virtual machine with the From Gallery option to be able to specify all the necessary settings such as the network:

image

When you click From Gallery, you will get a wizard with the following questions:

  • OS selection: Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, CentOS, Ubuntu, …
  • VM config: name, administrator password, size (from Extra Small to Extra Large)
  • VM mode: here’s where you select the storage account and the network
  • VM options: here you can select the virtual network subnets that this virtual machine should belong to

The virtual machine will then be provisioned and shown in the list:

image

Connecting to the virtual machine is easy with Remote Desktop and the Connect option at the bottom of the screen (with the virtual machine highlighted). The connection will not be made to the standard RDP port. Behind the scenes, every VM (or multiple VMs) live in a cloud service and each cloud service has an associated public IPv4 address. Each VM in the cloud service has an external port mapped to its RDP port. The external port is generated randomly but you can change it in the configuration of the virtual machine:

image

The cloud service’s IP address is automatically mapped to servicename.cloudapp.net so in the above example you would connect to servicename.cloudapp.net:50248 to connect to the virtual machine.

When you create your first virtual machine, you will not see the associated cloud service in the user interface. When you create another virtual machine and select to connect to an existing virtual machine in the VM options page, the cloud service will be shown in the UI:

image

The cloud service provides a view on the group of servers in the service. You can see the total amount of cores in the service, aggregated CPU utilization and more.

Now we have a virtual machine running, what about its IP address? Virtual machines are automatically assigned an IP from the range that was specified in the virtual network assigned to the virtual machine. If you specified your own DNS servers, these will be supplied as well. If not, Azure DNS servers will be assigned. It’s important to know that IPs should only be assigned through DHCP. Do not configure static IP addresses, not even one that matches the IP that was assigned. You should be aware that if your virtual machine were to fail (e.g. because of host failure), the same IP will be assigned although the MAC address will change.

Now that this is all sorted out, is there something we have to think of regarding the deployment of a domain controller? The answer is: absolutely! In short:

  • Although you have always learnt to assign a static IP to a DC, forget about that now. Use the DHCP assigned address as stated earlier.
  • Do not place the Active Directory DIT, logs and SYSVOL on the operating system disk but on an attached data disk. Data disks do not use “write-behind” caching it seems.
  • Windows Azure today does not use Hyper-V 3 so the new VMgenerationID stuff in Windows Server 2012 is not supported.

Now how does Windows Azure IaaS stack up against EC2? I have not played around with it enough to know all the details and differences but this is what I found so far:

  • Connecting to virtual machines using RDP and the concept of the cloud service and port mapping makes it easier to connect to virtual machines in a private virtual network. In EC2 you have to set this up yourself or use a Terminal Services gateway.
  • Virtual machines seem to have the ability to connect to the Internet by default. In EC2 you need to assign an elastic IP or use some gateway solution inside the virtual private container.
  • It is relatively easy to get started. The EC2 learning curve is a bit higher but there are more options as well so that evens it out.
%d bloggers like this: