Archive for Office 365

Download Microsoft Office 2013 from Office 365

imageMicrosoft Office 365 makes available the most recent version of the Office software for licensed users to download. In this case that would be Office 2016.

But for any number of reasons, there are still cases where someone may need Office 2013. Up until March 1, 2017, Office 2013 was easily available through O365.

Now that we are pass that deadline, the question is: Can we still download Office 2013 for our O365 account users. And the answer is: YES!!!!

My good MVP buddy, Boon Tee, recently posted directions (click here) on where one can still download Office 2013 from Office 365.

Using Office 365 instead of Exchange with SBS 2008

Yes, SBS 2008 is no longer supported. But I still have one remaining customer using it. This weekend I moved their email over to Office 365. I figured if I still have one site, there may be others in the same boat.

For this customer, after making a backup PST file for each user, I went into Services from the SBS 2008 server and disabled of the Exchange services from running.

The other thing that needs to be done is to prevent Outlook from looking to the SBS server for its AutoDiscover information. The process is very easy using two Exchange Powershell commands. Mark Berry’s excellent blog post from August 2011 provides the detail steps, including doing a quick backup of IIS, before removing the AutoDiscover Virtual Directory.

Here are the basic steps involved, all done from the SBS 2008 console:

  • Open up an elevated Exchange Management Shell
  • Display the current AutoDiscover virtual directory settings using this command
    Get-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory | fl Name, Server, InternalUrl, ExternalUrl, Identity
  • Make note of the value of the Identity field.
    In my case it was: SERVER01\Autodiscover (SBS Web Applications)
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  • Remove the AutoDiscover virtual directory with this command:
    Remove-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory –Identity "<identity value retrieved above>"

    In my case I entered:
    Remove-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory –Identity “SERVER01\Autodiscover (SBS Web Applications)”
    You will be prompted to respond with “Y” to proceed
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  • Then verify that the AutoDiscover virtual directory is no longer there
    Get-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory | fl Name, Server, InternalUrl, Identity

Note: no rebooting of the server is required. At this point after installing Office 2016, click to start up Outlook. My understanding is that these steps will also work with SBS 2011.

Error 30143-37 When Installing Office 365 (Office 2016)

Customer had Office 2010 on his computer, and was upgrading to Office 2016 via his GoDaddy Office 365 account. But the installation would fail half way through  with error code 30143-37

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GoDaddy support said it was because anti-virus was running. We stopped A/V but still encountered the error. I then right clicked on the downloaded setup executable, selected Properties, and clicked to “unblock” the file. That did not help either.

I found a couple of web sites that suggested deleting (or at least renaming) the folder “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15”.

That seemed to do the trick, as I was able to then install Office 365. Note: I did NOT reboot the computer after deleting the folder.

Sorry, Something Went Wrong with Yammer Invite

I was setting up a private Yammer group (external network) recently. The first three people I sent invites to were able to register and sign in with no problem. So with that success in hand, I went ahead and sent invites to the other 16 people.

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Wouldn’t you know? 3 of the next 4 people who tried to use the invite button from the email they received, told me that they were not able to register. They said that they were getting an error message: “Sorry, something went wrong and we couldn’t update your information. Please try again.”

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Of the three with this problems, two have AOL email addresses, and the third a GMail address. Sure enough, when I tried to register using my AOL or GMail address, I encountered the same error.

I then searched the Yammer Community Forum (http://help.yammer.com) and found a post where several other people have been reporting this same issue since Dec 22, 2015. Yammer Support responded to me last night and said that this is a known issue and that they are currently working on a fix.

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That’s the bad news.

The good news is that there is a workaround!

I asked those users that had encountered the error to pull up the invite email on their smart phone, and click on the invite link from their phone. Success! They were able to complete the Yammer initial sign-in process.

I will post a follow-up when I hear that this issue has been fixed.

Configure Ricoh Aficio MFP to Office 365 for Scan To Email

I recently migrated a customer from SBS 2008/Exchange 2007 to Office 365 with AppRiver and BitTitan’s MigrationWiz tool.

Migration went like a charm … that is, until one of the employees tried to “scan to email” a document from their Ricoh Aficio MP C2500.

A quick search of forums suggested that a lot of people had been down this road before, and with a myriad of possible ways to configure or fix it. Quite often, the suggestion was to use a 3rd party SMTP  service.

I submitted a ticket to AppRiver’s support at 11:57am this morning and received a phone call from their tech support within 15 minutes. A quick remote connect session, and we had everything working within minutes.

Here are my notes for future reference:

First, the solution we followed

Second, gather the following information

  • Your public IP address to your office. You can use WhatIsMyIp.com if you don’t know it)
  • Your Office 365 MX record. It should look something like this: Contoso-com.mail.protection.outlook.com

Next, setup the Exchange connector within Office 365

  • Login to your O365 Admin Center portal (http://portal.office.com)
  • Click Exchange –> Mail Flow –> Connectors
    • Create a new connector with this information
    • Enter a name for your connector, such as “Ricoh Copier On Prem”
    • From: select Your Organization’s Email Server
    • To: select Office 365
    • Description: enter something like this: This is the connector that will allow traffic from the SMTP services for Ricoh
    • Enable the option Retain Internal Exchange Email Headers
    • IP Address: enter your public IP address

Next, let’s go to the Ricoh web portal to finish things up:

  • Go to your Ricoh’s web portal (local IP address, such as 192.168.1.xxx)
  • Click to login as the administrator.
    If you don’t know the login/password, here’s a web site that may help you:
    https://default-password.info/ricoh/
  • Click Configuration => E-mail (under Device Settings)
  • Enter the following information as appropriate:
    • Your Admin O365 email address
    • Protocol: SMTP
    • SMTP Server Name: your O365 MX name you looked up previously
      (such as Contoso-com.mail.protection.outlook.com)
    • Port: 25
    • SMTP Authentication: OFF
    • SMTP Authentication Email/Username/Password: your O365 Admin email address
    • SMTP Authentication Encryption: DISABLE

That’s all we did. Hope it works for you!

PowerShell for O365 Now Available!

Microsoft announced yesterday (June 30, 2015) the availability of the PowerShell for Office 365 for IT administrators.

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I would suggest that you first read their blog post on Getting Started with PowerShell for O365.

PowerShell for O365 is not intended to replace the O365 Admin Center, but rather it provides complementary tools for such scenarios as:

  • Adding or editing a large number of users
  • Using multiple filters when sorting data
  • Exporting data such as user lists and groups
  • And more …

The web site includes sample scripts, scenarios, and community interaction. Check it out!

O365 Status Web Sites

Here are some useful web sites to check on the current status and outages for O365 —

Office 365 Down Detector: https://downdetector.com/status/office-365

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Office 365 Service Health Status: http://status.office365.com/

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Office 365 Twitter Status: https://twitter.com/office365status

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Update on Essentials O365 Wizard Issue

Earlier I posted about a situation where the O365 Integration Wizard that is built into the 2012 R2 Essentials Server would fail when trying to set it up the first time.

https://kwsupport.com/2015/05/2012-r2-essentials-fails-to-integrate-with-o365/

Today, the Windows Essentials and SBS support team posted a revised blog saying that the problem with the PCNS.zip file had been resolved.

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http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2015/05/29/windows-server-2012-essentials-r2-essentials-may-fail-to-integrate-with-microsoft-office-365.aspx

The revision eliminates the need to download the correct PCNS.zip file. Apparently there’s no hotfix or update to be downloaded. They fixed it on their end so that when you run the O365 wizard it will download the correct zip file.

2012 R2 Essentials Fails to Integrate with O365

I have an existing client with a Windows 2012 R2 Essential server. I was migrating their email from a GoDaddy POP3/IMAP host over to Office 365. This was going to be my first opportunity to try out the O365 Integration Wizard that comes with the 2012 R2 Essentials dashboard.

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On May 23rd I set up their Office 365 accounts, setup the DNS records on GoDaddy, and then migrated their email to Office 365, all which went smoothly.

On May 26th I attempted to run the O365 Integration Wizard. After entering the O365 admin account and login info, it errors with this message: “There was an issue configuring the integration. Make sure the computer is connected to the internet and then try again.”

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I did a lot of web searches, and finally located several posts from people indicating that the error may be related to a corrupt or invalid PCNS.zip file:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/dba06f4f-1011-4de3-946b-2a39718c2cc0/windows-server-2012-essentials-r2-and-office-365-integration?forum=winserveressentials#eb76b50e-6304-48b0-afef-b5fd79978ebf

What’s PCNS? It stands for Microsoft’s Password Change Notification Service which synchronizes user passwords in an enterprise environment.

I confirmed that this was the error by looking at the SharedServiceHost-EmailProvider Config.log file located at C:\Program Data\Microsoft\Windows Server\Logs folder.

The suggested fix was to rename the existing PCNS folder and PCNS.zip file, then download a different PCNS.zip file, and then rerun the wizard. Initially it did not work for me, because I was manually unzipping the corrected PCNS.zip file before running the O365 Wizard. Finally it dawned on me to just download the zip file, and sure enough, the O365 Wizard unzipped it, and we finally had success!

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Bootstrapper error during Office 2013 installation

I was attempting to install Office 2013 Professional Plus on a new workstation that had already been joined to the SBS 2011 domain. It kept crashing just a few minutes into the intallation with the error message: “Microsoft Setup Bootstrapper has stopped working”.

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If you search the Microsoft forums, you will see several recommendations, including:

  • Remove all prior installations of Microsoft Office
  • Make sure that the Task Scheduler is running
  • Try burning the Office .iso to a DVD to do the install

In my case, we were good in all those departments.

Then I came across a forum post that raised the question:

Have you implemented a Cryptolocker group policy at your site?

Oh, my, yes! I quickly logged onto the server, moved the new workstation out of its normal OU. Voila! Office 2013 installed immediately.