Merging calendars in Outlook

I was recently migrating from Hosted Exchange to Office 365. As the number of user accounts was limited I decided to go for the quick and dirty manual data migration. Export the Hosted Exchange user mailboxes from Outlook to a .pst file and import it into the Office 365 user mailbox in Outlook. Very straight forward and easy to do. The migration seemed to have gone smoothly until one of the users noticed that their calendar was missing. How did I miss that?  Continue reading

Permanently removing deleted user accounts from Office 365

While migrating from Exchange to Office 365 I ended up creating, deleting and recreating a lot of user accounts. When you delete an user account from Office 365 it is not deleted immediately, but rather suspended. This is nice, because it means you can recover if deleted by mistake. After 30 days the user accounts are automatically permanently deleted.

Removing and recreating a user account sometimes seems to create problems, so I decided to find out how to permanently remove deleted user accounts manually. This post describes how this can be done using PowerShell and the Azure Active Directory (AD) Module. The Azure AD Module for Windows PowerShell let’s you perform AD administrative tasks such as user management, domain management and configuring single sign-on. Continue reading

Change the default administrator email address on Office 356

When setting up Office 365 a default domain account.onmicrosoft.com is setup. This domain cannot be removed. An administrator account is  created as part of this domain. It has the email address name@account.onmicrosoft.com. The administrator needs to use this email address to log on to Office 365. What if you want to use your own email address instead? It took me a while to figure out how to change the the default email address to my own email address. Continue reading

Change the language of Office 365

Do you need to change the language of Office 365? Some how this is a little tricky as the language needs to be changed in two places:

  1. For most components use the Office 365 settings.
  2. For Outlook, Calendar, and People use the Outlook Web App Options.

In this blog post I explain how to change the language in Office 365 and an important gotcha when it comes to the names of default mailbox folders. Continue reading

Setting up catchall under Office 356

I’m busy migrating from Hosted Exchange 2007 to Office 356. While setting up the mailboxes I thought it was time to solve one of my long time irritations that my current hosted Exchange setup does not support catchall for my mail domains. It turns out that this is not straight forward to setup as Microsoft does not support it.Yes I know there are a lot of people out there who think it is bad practice to setup a catch all mailbox. Personally I use it for convenience and I think it is more customer friendly for the non tech savvy people out there. And no I do not mind going through (a lot of) spam mail to find that little gem.

O well, I Googled around and found a great blog post that explains the basics how to setup a catchall email address. However the instructions did not work as is for me and I feel they are not complete. Let me rephrase that last statement: I think Office 365 has been updated since the post was published and therefore some parts no longer work as described. Anyway, I decided to write this blog post that should cover all aspects of setting up a catchall email address under the current version of Office 365, as of 24-11-2015 🙂 Continue reading