As part of a Office 365 tenant rebuild, I had to move a custom domain to the new Office 365 tenant. The old tenant was not needed anymore, and the customer had to move to a Non-Profit tenant for compliance reasons. So the migration itself was no big deal:
disable AzureAD sync change UPN of all users remove the domain connect the domain to the new tenant setup a new AzureAD sync assign licenses time for a beer That was my, honestly, naive plan for this migration.
A couple of days ago, I wrote about our first steps to move our on-prem stuff to Azure. This post will cover how we adopted Office 365 and how we have started with our Azure deployment.
Our first step into Office 365 was Microsoft Teams. We needed a solution for calls (audio/ video) and chat. We skipped Skype 4 Business and started with Microsoft Teams.
Our Microsoft Teams deployment was pretty simple: We used our Microsoft IUR Office 365 E3 plans.
It was a bit quiet here due to the current COVID 19 pandemic. But now I’m back with a pretty interesting story on how my colleagues and I moved most of our on-prem server stuff to Microsoft Azure and Office 365.
It all started with the COVID19 lockdown in Germany in March 2020. We moved into our home offices after setting up a small VMware Horizon View deployment to access our PCs using physical View Agents and manual desktop pools.
A customer of mine asked for help to analyse a weird OAuth error. They are using a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Outlook plugin, which came up with an error:
"Can't connect to Exchange" In addition to this, they also faced an issueaccessing shared calendars of Exchange Online mailboxes.
Clearly an OAuth error. So we ran the Hybrid Connection Wizard again, which finished without any errors. But the errors persisted. Next stop: OAuth configuration.
The task was simple: Change the alias and the primary SMTP address of a Microsoft Teams team. This can be done by changing the alias and the SMTP address of the underlaying Office 365 group. But how? All you need is a PowerShell connection to Exchange Online.
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
All you need is a PowerShell on your local computer and Office 365 credentials with the necessary privileges.
When it comes to disaster recovery (DR), dedicated offsite infrastructure is a must. If you follow the 3-2-1 backup rule, then you should have at least three copies of your data, on two different media, and one copy should be offsite.
But an offsite copy of your data can be expensive… You have to setup storage and networking in a suitable colocation. And even if you have an offsite copy of your data, you must be able to recover the data.
In 2014, Microsoft announced the Azure Preview Portal, which was going GA in December 2015. Since January 8, 2018, the classic Azure Portal is turned off. The “Preview Portal” was more than a facelift. The classic Azure Portal was based on the Service Management mode, often called the “classic deployment model”, whereas the new Azure Portal uses the Resource Manager model. Azure Service Management (ASM) and Azure Resource Management are both deployment models.
Microsoft two different logins for their services:
Microsoft Account (former Live ID) work or school account (Azure AD) Both are located in different directories. The Microsoft account is located in another user database at Microsoft, as a work or school account. Latter are located in a Azure AD, which is associated with a customer. Both account types are identified using the email address. Microsoft accounts are used for service like Skype, OneDrive, but also for the Microsoft Certified Professional portal.
In the last months I came across several customers that were in the process to evaluate, or to deploy Office 365. It usually started with a Office 365 trial, that some of the IT guys started to play around with. Weeks or months later, during the proof-of-concept or during the final deployment, the customer had to choose a Office 365 tenant name. That is the part before .onmicrosoft.com.
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.
Update
On November 22, 2017, Ajay Patel (Senior Vice President, Product Development, Cloud Services, VMware) published a blog post in reaction to Microsofts announcement (VMware – The Platform of Choice in the Cloud). Especially these statements are interesting:
No VMware-certified partner names have been mentioned nor have any partners collaborated with VMware in engineering this offering. This offering has been developed independent of VMware, and is neither certified nor supported by VMware.
