Check last login activity date for an Office 365 or Exchange online user with Powershell command

Now that the latest update for Office 365 is rolling out to customers, I've seen some cool new features in the Dashboard area. For example there is a chart that is displayed that shows you how many of your users haven't logged into the system in the past 30 days or 90 days. Unfortunately it won't actually show you the names of those users so you can't really act on that information.

Here is a quick Powershell command that you can run that will give you a list of all of your users and display the date of the last time that they logged into the system:

Get-mailbox -resultsize unlimited| Get-MailboxStatistics | select displayname, lastlogontime

Note : If you need some help getting connected with Powershell, you can look at this earlier blog post of mine that tells you how to connect and run these commands.

Fix issue with too many contacts in iPhone caused by Outlook Suggested Contacts. How to disable them from syncing.

I had a client the other day that wonder why he was seeing so many unrecognized contacts on his new iPhone.  I had a quick look at it and it certainly showed many more contacts than are listed as contacts in Outlook.   I immediately thought of the "Suggested Contacts" list that Outlook automatically creates - it builds a list of other people that you've sent mail to or received mail from but haven't necessarily saved to your official contacts lists.  So I went into his Suggested Contacts list in his contacts area of Outlook and that list did appear to be the source of all of the extraneous contacts on his phone.

Luckily, starting with iOS 6, I believe, there is an easy way to prevent this Suggested Contacts list from syncing from Outlook/Exchange to your iPhone or iPad.

On your iPhone, follow these steps...

1. Open the Contacts app  (or go to Phone app and then switch to Contacts area).
2. Click the "Groups" button in the upper left corner of the screen.
3. You'll see a list of different contact groups so you want to un-check the "Suggested Contacts" group. 
4. Click "Done"!

Now it may take a few minutes for everything to sync again but this will remove all of the Suggested Contacts from the iPhone, leaving you with just your actual list of contacts from Outlook.

Check mailbox size and usage with Office 365 or Exchange online. Find users nearing their quota.

The other day I wanted to have a look at the mailbox usage for one of my Office 365 clients.  I wanted to see all 35 users and find out if anyone was close to their mailbox quotas.  There is no way to check this for all users at once using the Office 365 or Exchange Online GUI so you need to turn to PowerShell.  I had to go to 5 or 6 different sites to find all of the little details and troubleshoot some errors so I thought I'd compile all of that info into a blog post for you.

1. First of all, you need to use the regular version of PowerShell.  NOT the "Online Services Module" for PowerShell version that you would typically use for other Office 365 tasks, I guess because we are talking directly to the Exchange environment here and not the Office 365 portal itself. 
2. Make sure you run PowerShell as an administrator. (Right-click the icon and select "Run as Administrator")
3. The first time I ever tried to run these type of scripts, I got an error about running remote signed scripts or something like that. So you need to run this command the very first time you try any operations like this:  
• Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
4. Next are the 3 commands that you need to run to connect to your hosted Exchange server and start a new session:
• $LiveCred = Get-Credential (then enter your Office 365 email address and password in the box that pops up)
• $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic –AllowRedirection
• Import-PSSession $Session
5. Next is the basic command to get a list of all users and their current mailbox size:
• get-mailbox | get-mailboxstatistics | ft displayname, totalitemsize
6. When you are finished, it's a best practice to go ahead and close your session before you exit PowerShell, so you need to run this command:
• Remove-PSSession $Session

These steps should get you connected and give you a quick look at user mailbox sizes so you can see if anyone is in danger of hitting their quota.  There are a ton of other scripts that can give you all sorts of information about the hosted Exchange environment.  I even some scripts that would actually create a local Excel spreadsheet and pipe the output to that file so you could save it or analyze it further. I'll try to post more of this type of stuff in the future.