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.

Can't activate Windows 8 Enterprise from Technet - Error 0x800700B or 0x8007007B

I'm using an installation of Windows 8 Enterprise 64bit from TechNet. I finally got around to activating my software and I received the following error message - "Code: 0x8007007B   Description: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect."

It turns out the issue is pretty simple. There is a default license key that is baked into the software, you just need to change that key and input your key that you got from TechNet, MSDN, etc. and then activate it with that key in place.

1. Pull up the "Run" dialog box
2. Enter "SLUI 3"  (no quotes)
3. Enter your true license key in the window that pops up
4. Hit "Activate" button and you are done!

Windows 8 is fast on an SSD drive - installation, boot time, start time, shutdown time (OCZ Vertex 4)

So I bought myself an early Christmas present. I got a great Black Friday deal on an OCZ Vertex 4 512GB SSD (solid state drive). One of the top rated SSD's at the moment.  This was going into my laptop - a 3 year old HP Pavilion DV7 - Core i7 with 8GB of RAM.

I then installed a fresh build of Windows 8 Enterprise as part of this project. I had the Windows 8 ISO file extracted to a USB stick for installation to help speed up the process.

I know SSD's are blazing fast and I know Windows 8 has a ton of performance enhancements so I was really anxious to see how the pair would perform together. I was not disappointed!

It look less than 5 minutes to install Windows 8!!   I still had some setup questions to answer - selection of my wifi network, etc but the actually installation part was already done.  Wow!

Here are some other numbers for you...

Start up time to login screen - 15 seconds
Full reboot to login screen - 25 seconds
Shutdown time - 8 seconds
Sleep - 3 seconds
Wake - 1 second!

Fix "No Program Name" with FIOS DVR STB channel guide when channel information is missing. Especially in a bridged configuration.

This isn't really "IT" related but I thought I'd post this here anyway in case it might help someone out of a jam.  I'm a FIOS customer and my setup is slightly unusual in that I have a "bridged" network setup - meaning I have my standard FIOS router/cable modem as well as a Linksys Wireless N router bridged together.

As a result, about once a month or so, I lose my channel guide on my FIOS cable boxes for some reason. The title of all of the shows says "No Program Name".  So what I need to do is login to my FIOS router and restart a particular network connection.  This always fixes it in MY case, your mileage my vary. I'd suggest first simply rebooting your FIOS router to see if that helps. If not, give these steps a try...

1. Enter the IP address of your FIOS router into your web browser and then login with your username and password.

2. Click on the "My Network" icon at the top of the page.

3. Click on "Network Connections" on the menu on the left side

4. Scroll down to underneath of the "Bridge" section and click on "Broadband Connection (Ethernet)"

5. On the next page, I always see a button at the top that says "Enable" (because mine has been disconnected or disabled) so click on that button if you see it.

6. Click "Apply" on the bottom of the page.

7. Wait maybe 20-30 minutes and your channel guide should be populated again.

Let me know if this works for you.

Add or link your SharePoint calendar to Outlook so you can view it in Outlook client using "Connect to Outlook" feature

One cool feature of a SharePoint calendar is that you can add it to your local Outlook application and view your SharePoint calendars right along side your normal personal calender.  This may work in other versions but my example is dealing specifically with Outlook 2010 and SharePoint Online (as part of Office 365).

1. Login to your SharePoint website and locate the name of the calendar you would like to add to Outlook. In my case, it's called "Team Calendar".  Click on the name to pull up that calendar.

2. Now on the SharePoint toolbar, there is a section called "Calendar Tools" with a tab called "Calendar".  Click on that tab.

3.  Next click on the button that says "Connect to Outlook".  You'll probably see one or two prompts popup that will ask that you want to confirm this action.

4.  After you've confirmed the prompts, you'll now see your calendar has been added to Outlook.  You can use the checkboxes to turn on and off various calendars, depending on how many you want to see at a time.  You can fully interact with this SharePoint calendar - add/edit/delete appointments, drag and drop between your other personal calendars, etc. 

Where to find the email signature setup window in Outlook 2010 to add a new signature

Most people are familiar with HOW to create a "signature" in Outlook but sometimes it can be hard to find WHERE to setup a signature in a new version of Outlook.

Here are the steps to help you find the signature setup window in Outlook 2010.

1.  First, click the "File" tab in the upper left corner of Outlook.

2.  Then click on "Options"

3.  Then click on "Mail" 

 4.  Finally click on the "Signatures..." buttton

Now you can start creating your email signature!

Adding multiple contacts to Lync Online in Office 365 using distribution groups since there is no import tool

One headache that I ran into early on with Microsoft Office 365 (hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Lync) is that your Lync client is completely empty when you start deploying your software.  I assumed it would automatically pull in all of your Office 365 user accounts and pre-populate them as contacts.  No such luck.

Also there doesn't seem to be any sort of "import" feature in Lync where you could pull in contacts from an Excel sheet or Outlook list.  So that leaves you having to manually add all of your employees as contacts on each Lync workstation.  No thank you!

So what I typically do is create a distribution list or two in the Office 365 portal.   Then you can just add that whole group to Lync all at once.  

So first, login to your Office 365 portal with an admin account.  Under the "Exchange" section, click on "Manage".  Then go to the "Distribution Groups" tab.  Now click on "New..".  Now you can give your group a name (such as "Office Staff", "Sales", "Service", "All Users", etc.).  Then scroll down to the Membership area and hit "+ Add..." to begin adding your Office 365 users to this group. When you are finished, hit "Save".  You'll now see your new distribution group listed on this page.

You may not be able to add this group to Lync immediately.  It could take a few hours for everything to update in the cloud.  But after some time has passed, you'll be able to go into your Lync client and in the "Find a contact" field, enter in the name of your distribution group ("Office Staff, Sales, etc.").  Once it finds the group, you can just hit the "+" symbol or right-click and "Add to Contacts".  Once the group shows up in Lync, you simply hit the little triangle indicator next to the group name to expand it and show you all of the individual members of that group.  So now you only need to add one or two groups on each Lync client that you install, rather than manually adding every user.

One awesome perk of using this method is that now you can control and update the contact lists from a central location.  If you get a new employee or if someone leaves, you just go back into your distribution group settings and make the changes and just wait for them to propagate out to the clients. You don't need to have the users manually adding or deleting contacts.