Tag Archives: PowerShell

Manually migrating from BPOS to Office 365

UPDATE on September 21: Microsoft has begun transitioning customers to Office 365 through its internal process. Before attempting the below process, we suggest that you change your password in BPOS and try logging in to https://portal.microsoftonline.com. If you can – then the user account has already been copied across to the new tenant and therefore manual migration is not possible.

Original post:
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Recently we (Paradyne) performed a manual  migration  from BPOS to Office 365 to start using the amazing new features and functionality it brings.

The team over at MigrationWiz have written a great step-by-step instruction list, over at http://migrationwiz.zendesk.com/entries/20049337-how-do-i-perform-a-bpos-to-office-365-migration

We followed this to the letter and had no dramas at all.

The only slight difference was that we added an extra level of mail retention to ensure that nothing was lost during the transition or while waiting for FOPE to update.

Our difference was to use mail store & forwarding services from RollerNet. The service only costs $5 per month and is a month-to-month subscription, so you can cancel the service when you’re done.

Effectively what we did before following the MigrationWiz instructions was to change our MX record to point to the RollerNet mail hosts which were in turn configured to accept our domain and to forward it on to ‘mail.global.frontbridge.com’. Before removing our domain from BPOS we set the RollerNet service to simply hold our mail instead of forward it on.

Once we completed the steps listed in the MigrationWiz article we then pointed the RollerNet service to forward to the custom MX record provided to us by Office 365.

After we re-established mail flow and that everything was 100% functional we then changed our MX record to point directly at Office 365 – and happy times ahead!

Before entering into this process I must caution you to wait at least 90 minutes between steps 10 & 11, otherwise you may end up with a duplicate domain in FOPE which requires some PowerShell magic to clean up.

Note: attempting the above is not a supported practice by Microsoft and puts the onus of mail flow and uptime onto yourself. Please be a) careful, and b) extremely careful!

New PowerShell cmdlets available for BPOS

The 4 new PowerShell cmdlets are finally available. They allow you to:
- enable/disable POP3 for an Exchange Online user
- set/remove alternate recipients on an Exchange Online user

Our list of available PowerShell commands has now been updated to include the links for these commands.
In order to get access to the updated cmdlets you will need to download the latest copy of the Microsoft Online Services Migration Tools.

New PowerShell commands for POP access and email forwarding

Something we have to do quite frequently is either enable POP access to Exchange Online mailboxes, or configure a mailbox to forward to another recipient (either local or remote to Exchange Online).

In the past these requests had to be actioned through a Service Request via the BPOS support team – however by the end of January customers and partners will be able to do this themselves using PowerShell scripts as a result of the new features being rolled out to BPOS this month.

The commandlets that give you the control are:

Set-MSOnlineAlternateRecipient
Clear-MSOnlineAlternateRecipient
Enable-MSOnlinePOPAccess
Disable-MSOnlinePOPAccess

The documentation on these will be available via the MOAC interface as the service update is rolled out. Once we get our hands on this we will update our own PowerShell commandlet reference page.

New capabilities of Exchange Online 2010

There’s a few links around the net listing some of the features coming in Exchange Online with 2010 but they are few and far betwee, so I thought it would be good to summarise them here.
The key components are:

  • Voicemail with Unified Messaging
  • Integrated archiving
  • Retention policies and legal hold
  • Transport rules
  • Multi-mailbox search
  • Conversation View
  • MailTips
  • Enhanced web-based administration
  • Role-based access control
  • Remote PowerShell
  • Free/busy between cloud & on-premise
  • Cross-premises management
  • Native migration tools

Let’s have a look at these in a bit more detail.

Client Access

  • IMAP
  • Customise ActiveSync security policies
  • Full OWA support in Firefox & Safari
  • IM and presence in OWA
  • OWA side-by-side calendar view
  • Mobile free/busy lookup
  • Mobile reply status
  • Mobile SMS sync
  • Over-the-air update for Outlook mobile

Email & Calendaring

  • Conversation view
  • Ingore/move conversation
  • MailTips
  • Mailk aggregation
  • Shared nickname cache across OWA & mobile
  • Message tracking (user self-service)
  • Free/busy interoperability with on-premise
  • Free/busy & calendar sharing with other organisations (ie. Exchange federation)
  • Publish calendar for anonymous access

Contacts & Directory

  • Dynamic distribution groups
  • Restricted distribution groups
  • Moderated distribution groups
  • Share personal contacts
  • Contact information update (user self-service)

Unified Messaging & Fax

  • Hosted voicemail (integrationon with PABX)
  • Outlook Voice Access
  • ‘Play on phone’ button
  • Missed call notifications
  • Caller ID
  • Company auto-attendant
  • Self-service PIN reset
  • Message waiting indicator
  • Voicemail preview
  • Call answering rules
  • Protected voicemail

Security

  • Sign in using AD credentials
  • Route outbound mail via on-premise for filtering
  • Multi-factor authentication (smartcard, soft certificate)
  • Integration with on-premise RMS (for search, pre-licensing)
  • RMS transport rules
  • Journal decryption of RMS messages
  • Outlook Protection Rules

Administration

  • Remote PowerShell
  • Role Based Access Controls
  • Exchange Management Console
  • Enhanced migration tools
  • No OST re-synchronisation after migration
  • Offboarding tools
  • Support for organisations greater than 30,000 users

Compliance & Archiving

  • Exchange Personal Archive
  • E-Discovery (Multi-mailbox search)
  • Message Retention (Archive & Delete policies)
  • Message Retention (Legal Hold poliy)
  • Compliance auditing
  • Transport rules
  • Custom disclaimers

What’s coming in the next version of BPOS

A blog post from the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/2010/07/12/next-generation-bpos.aspx
Some of the exciting features are:

  • Office Web Apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote)
  • Exchange 2010 features (unified messaging, archiving, retention policies, transport rules, multi-mailbox search, free/busy between cloud & on-prem, native migration tools, remote PowerShell, etc.)
  • SharePoint 2010 features (portal site templates, extranet & anonymous access, Office 2010 integration, tagging and social networking, better search, improved features & functionality, Visio & Excel Services, sandboxed solutions, improved workflows, SharePoint Designer 2010 access, better control of FQDNs, etc.)
  • OCS 2010 features (P2P audio/video & file transfer across firewalls, presence with pictures, federation, IM with Windows Live)
  • General updates (single sign-on, identity federation, redesigned admin interface, more administration and access control)

Mailbox sharing and delegation with Exchange Online

We’ve been asked a few times if it was possible to create and share Exchange Online resource mailboxes (mail accounts that do not have a specific user but need to be accessed by more than 1 person).
The answer with BPOS is yes!
There is a bit of PowerShell required, so fire up that console and hit this link:
http://www.microsoft.com/online/help/en-us/helphowto/9a12f089-01fc-4ff6-92a2-1b6f362b6be7.htm