Office 365 password expired - How to disable 90 day password expiration

I ran into an issue with my first Microsoft Office 365 cloud hosted deployment.  I went to go log in as the administrator to work on an issue and I found that my password had expired.  I then discovered that by default, all user passwords are set to expire every 90 days.  If you don't want such a policy, it IS possible to disable.  Though you won't find the settings anywhere in the Admin portal GUI.  You'll need to use some PowerShell scripts.

You'll need a few tools installed on your workstation in order to get Powershell working.

Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant

32-bit download
64-bit download

Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell


32-bit download
64-bit download

Now that you have the tools in place, launch PowerShell but going to Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft Online Services -> Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell.

Now to you need connect and log in to your Office 365 account with PowerShell.  Type the following command in the PowerShell window...

Connect-MsolService


Then you'll see a login window. Enter your Office 365 username and password.

Now you can disable the password expiration for all users in your Office 365 domain with this command...

Get-MSOLUser | Set-MsolUser -PasswordNeverExpires $true


If you'd like to make the change for just a single user, you can use the script below (replacing user@mydomain.com with the proper user's email address.)

Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName user@mydomain.com -PasswordNeverExpires $true


You won't get any confirmation or anything, but as long as PowerShell doesn't give you an error, then you've done it correct.

Transferring my Blogger.com blog and custom domain to GoDaddy for hosting and dns management

I've just transfer my custom domain over to GoDaddy to do my DNS and domain management there.  Since I no longer had a hosting plan with HostGator, only a domain management plan, it seems they would not allow me to add custom A records to my domain, which is critical to getting Blogger to work with a custom domain.

So I signed up at GoDaddy and initiated the domain transfer. It wasn't too painful. Clicking on some confirmation emails, entering some keys that were emailed to me to verify that I owned the email account associated with the domain, unlocking my domain at HostGator, talk to HostGator chat support and getting them to send me an authorization code to approve the transfer.  Then I just had to wait a day or two until I received an email from HostGator saying the domain was ready to be transferred and asking me to click a button to approve it.

Once I got the domain into the GoDaddy system, I went to the Domain Manager, selected my domain and hit the Namersevers button. I told it I wanted to "park" my domain and use all of the default GoDaddy nameservers.  

Then I went to DNS Manager and clicked on Edit Zones under my domain name. Here is where you enter your custom A records. Just hit the Quick Add button in the "A (host)" section and add these records...

yourdomain.com    216.239.32.21

yourdomain.com    216.239.34.21

yourdomain.com    216.239.36.21

yourdomain.com    216.239.38.21 

Then go down to the CName (Alias) section and add the following record...

www   ghs.google.com

In my case, I already had a www record there that was setup by default. I'm not positive but I thought that might cause I problem so I deleted the other WWW record.  Might cause problems if you had the same subdomain pointing to two different destinations.

So then you just go back into your Blogger settings, switch your publishing destination to be your *.blogspot.com address for a moment, save settings, switch back to custom domain (advanced settings) and enter in your full domain name - www.jasonhartman.net.    Then you can also check the box that says to redirect the naked domain to the full domain name with WWW.    My blog is now working fine, with and without WWW in the address.

I initially had some problems because I went into GoDaddy first before I started the actual domain transfer and set some Offsite DNS settings and indicated that this domain soon would be transferred to GoDaddy. But it seems that it didn't transfer in correctly, because the Domain Manager showed my domain name twice - one of them said (Pending Transfer).  So I just deleted that one and started off with the new clean domain and all the default settings for DNS stuff.

I think this issue also lead to some other early problems trying to get my email account and email forwarding accounts working.  After I would create an email account, the status of the account would change to "Pending setup: validating MX record" and never seemed to leave that status, even if it was just a forwarding account to bounce my mail to another server.  But once I got rid of the bad domain, parked the new domain and reset all of the nameservers to the defaults, I could create email accounts and email forwarders with no problems.  

Problem loading and finding drivers for Windows Home Server (WHS) PC full system restore from backup

I'm a big fan of the Windows Home Server (WHS) product - specifically the earlier versions prior to WHS 2011 before they removed the Drive Extender feature. I've deployed several HP MediaSmart servers for small businesses and home offices.  The full PC restore feature has come in handy on several occasions. You just boot from a CD, connect to your WHS box and select the image that you want to restore and sit back and relax while it completely restores your PC.

The only real tricky part of this process is making sure that the WHS boot environment recognizes your hardware drivers - network cards, hard drives, disk controllers, etc.  If it can't talk to your network card, it won't be able to find your WHS server, if it can't talk to your disk drives, you won't see any drives available when you try to select the drive mapping during the restore process. 

Most of the time it seems to find all of my hardware without any issues. Sometimes it will be missing the Ethernet controller so you'll need to provide drivers for that.  Typically you can just go to another PC on your WHS network, open the WHS console, go to Computer & Backups, select the PC that you are trying to restore, right-click and select View Backups, select one of the recent backups and hit "Open"..., select a partition, and let it open the backup so you can see the files.

On each partition, you'll find a special folder that WHS has created called "Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore".  You copy all of these files to a USB flash drive and then put it into your PC that you are trying to restore.  Then boot into the WHS environment again.  When it gets to the screen were it detects your hardware, you'll need to hit the button to tell it to scan your drives for additional drivers.  It will then scan your USB drive and it SHOULD find all of the proper hardware drivers.

This method has worked for me 100% of the time until last week.  I was trying to restore a Dell Inspiron laptop that would no longer boot.  Even when I copied the drivers from the "Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore" folder, I was still missing Ethernet and storage controller drivers.  So what I did was look up the service tag on the Dell laptop, go out to the Dell.com support and drivers page and manually download the Ethernet and any storage-related drivers I could find.  These will be compressed .exe files.  Make sure you run them first, so they will extract all of the files into a folder tree.  Then grab these extracted files and put them on your USB drive.  The location on the USB drive doesn't seem to matter - it scans the whole drive.

Once I manually downloaded my drivers and put them on the USB stick, I rebooted into the WHS restore environment once again, told it to scan for additional drivers and thankfully it found them this time!  My Ethernet card was listed as well as the hard disk controllers.  Now I could browse and see my WHS box on the network, select my PC name, select my most recent backup and then it asks you to map the partitions that you want to restore C: to C:, D: to D:, etc.

Hopefully this will help if you run into this situation.

6 more free apps for your HP TouchPad | ZDNet

For those of you with brand new HP Touchpads, here is a link to get a few free apps. Typically these cost $$ but there are promo codes in the article that allow you to get them for free.

6 more free apps for your HP TouchPad | ZDNet:

'via Blog this'

Free Box.net account for HP Touchpad user - max file size limit of 100MB

As part of your HP Touchpad purchase (like the $99 version I just purchased), you are also entitled to a free 50GB of online storage from Box.net.  As far as I can tell, this seems to be pretty similar to Dropbox.  You get an online folder that you can sync and access from different devices - including the HP Touchpad obviously.

Just look for the Box.net app in the HP app store on your Touchpad. When you launch it the first time you'll be asked to create your free account and get your 50GB of space.

While the 50GB of free space sounds great, there is at least one "gotcha".  If you have a paid plan, even a smaller 25GB for $9.99/month, the max file size is 1GB.  That would be enough if you wanted to upload some lower res movie files to watch on your tablet.  BUT the free HP Touchpad accounts have a max file size of 100MB per file!!  Ouch!

I guess thats fine for some music or documents but don't plan on keeping an online movie archive on box.net and transferring them to your Touchpad.  You can always connect your Touchpad to the USB port on your PC and transfer files that way of course.

I was able to buy a $99 HP Touchpad tablet with WebOS - Quick Review

The HP Touchpad Tablet

I'm a real sucker for a deal. I always say "Hell, I'd buy an elephant if I found one for 80% off!".  Well how about a $400 tablet for 75% off?  HP introduced the Touchpad tablet just a few months ago and they've already discontinued it due to dismal sales, dropping the price down to $99 (16GB) / $149 (32GB). The trick is finding them at the sale price before they are all gone.  I was able to score one from Bestbuy.com and pick it up at the store last weekend.  You may have luck for the next week or so just showing up at your local BB in the morning to see if they have anything.  It's possible that HP.com maybe be getting more in next week as well.

I've been planning to get an iPad at some point - maybe waiting until next year to get an iPad 3 but I certainly couldn't pass up a $99 tablet with a very similar feature set.  Even if you never use a single "app", the browser built into the Touchpad is excellent and it fully supports Adobe Flash.  This means that most of your favorite websites will be fully functional.  You don't need an app for every little thing - news, weather, sports scores, music streaming,  etc.  In fact, the most impressive thing was that I was able to run a Yahoo Fantasy Football mock draft on it, which is a major Flash-heavy site.

The app store is very limited.  Maybe 7,000 apps.  But it's got the biggies like Facebook, various Twitter clients, weather, CBS Sports, USA Today, Pandora (though it's designed for small screens like a Palm phone), etc.  No Netflix streaming app that I could find. Though maybe the site works via Flash?  I read reports that Hulu.com works in the browser.

Honestly, I haven't done much email on it but the email client seems just fine.  You can add multiple accounts and the OS has some cool features for sliding the windows around to let you determine what you want to see - email accounts list, inbox list, message body, etc.

I've ran into a few articles talking about ways to boost the performance and make it run a little quicker, via overclocking and disabling some of the excessive system logging.  Check out this article from ZDNet for details.  I haven't tried it yet myself.

I also like the fact that I can print directly from the Touchpad to my HP Color LaserJet CM1415 wirelessly.

You'll probably want a few accessories.  Here is the official HP case.














And there is also an official HP wireless bluetooth keyboard which could be pretty handy.

You have not been added to the Blackberry Enterprise Server error - no enterprise data plan

I was trying to add a new Blackberry Curve to a Blackberry Professional Server (predecessor to the Blackberry Express Server) but it would not connect to the server. I entered the email address and wireless activation key but it just sat on "Contacting Server..." for several minutes.  Then I would get an error message that read "You have not yet been added to the Blackberry Enterprise Server. Please either cancel this request and contact your support team or continue and wait for a response".

The issue in my case was that the user was using his personal Blackberry and he did NOT have an enterprise data plan (Blackberry Enterprise Plan, Blackberry Corporate Plan, BES Plan, etc. Not sure what each carrier calls it.).  He just had a regular consumer data plan called Blackberry Internet Service plan I believe.  Another clue was that the Enterprise Activation option was missing from his phone.  Even when looking in Options -> Advanced Options there was no mention of Enterprise Activation.  I found one post that recommended going into Options -> Advanced Options -> Host Routing Table and click "Register".  Once I did this, I COULD see the option for Enterprise Activation.  But that's when I ran into my error message above.

He's going to contact Verizon and upgrade his plan to a corporate plan and then I should be able to add him to the Blackberry server.