Joe Palarchio

Just a quick little script in this post that might save you some time when cleaning up DirSync sync errors. For several years, my primary focus as a consultant was on ActiveDirectory and one thing I learned is just when you thought you knew of all the ways to accomplish a task, you’d walk into […]

Congratulations! You’ve just wrapped up what may be your last email migration project by migrating from your legacy on-premises email platform to Exchange Online. So now what? Skeptics might think that as an Exchange administrator, if there is no on-premises Exchange, you just migrated yourself out of a job; the reality is that this couldn’t […]

As a consultant in our Office 365 practice, part of my role includes keeping up with the constant changes and features being added to the service by Microsoft. When I worked with on-premises versions of Exchange and Lync, it was fairly easy to keep on top of things. You knew when changes came as they […]

Understanding the archiving feature in Lync Online can be a bit confusing. Unlike an on-premises installation of Lync Server 2013, there is no option for storing archived data in SQL and thus the only option is integration with Microsoft Exchange. While having only one option might sound like this should be easier to understand, a […]

When running in an Exchange Hybrid configuration, DirSync/AADSync takes care of maintaining a consistent Global Address List (GAL) for both on-premises and cloud users. The one exception is with regards to Dynamic Distribution Groups; these objects need special care to ensure that the recipient filters produce the desired results and for the objects to show […]

When migrating a mailbox to Exchange Online via a remote move request, you’ll occasionally encounter an issue where the mailbox has moved successfully but the on-premises mailbox object has not changed to a remote mailbox. If you’re using migration batches, you’ll see a status of “Completed with Errors” for the batch and “Completed with Warning” […]

Microsoft added the “Password Sync” option to DirSync in June 2013 and in the past year it has become a viable alternative to AD FS due to its fewer on-premises infrastructure dependencies. The differences between Password Sync and AD FS are well documented elsewhere, the article “Choosing a sign-in model for Office 365” is a […]

The Office 365 Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW) was introduced back with SP2 for Exchange 2010; while it has been a vast improvement over the former manually-intensive process, at times it can feel more like the “Hybrid Configuration Gremlin”… Like most aspects of Office 365, the HCW has seen continual improvement from it’s initial introduction and […]

The release of Windows Server 2012 R2 brought with it a new version of AD FS (unofficially referred to as AD FS 3.0). This version of AD FS was a deviation from previous versions in that it no longer used IIS and the “AD FS Proxy” was replaced with the “Web Application Proxy” role. In […]

When deploying AD FS for Office 365, the ideal deployment scenario is to have the userPrincipalName (UPN) value in Active Directory configured to match the user’s email address; at a minimum, your UPN suffix needs to be a publically routable domain. For many organizations, changing user UPNs is a fairly easily scriptable change with little […]

As a follow up to last week’s post on an AD FS issue (Office 365 – AD FS Authentication Fails Due To Time Skew), I figured it was a good time to post another AD FS authentication issue I ran across recently. While the word “token” when used with AD FS is generally referencing the […]

I’ve run across this issue enough times now that I figured it was worth a short post. It’s a quick reminder to always check the simple things. On several occasions I’ve found AD FS environments where authentication via the internal AD FS servers works but authentication via the AD FS proxy does not. With this […]