O365

O365 – Create and Manage Public folders using PowerShell

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Public folders are meant for shared access and to enable an easy way to collect and share information with other users in an organization. Public folders makes it easier to browse content and users will see the full hierarchy in Outlook using which they can find the content they are looking for.

Public folders can also be used to archive email sent to distribution groups. When a public folder is mail-enabled, and added as a member of the distribution group, email sent to this group is automatically added to the public folder to be referenced later.

Public folders use mailbox infrastructure for high availability and mailbox database storage technologies. This architecture uses specially designed mailboxes to store both public folder hierarchy and the content.

The main component of public folders are the public folder mailboxes. Before creating public folders, we must first create public folder mailboxes. There are two types of public folder mailboxes,

  • Primary hierarchy mailbox: This is the one writable copy of the public folder hierarch and is copied to all other public folder mailboxes. The first public folder mailbox created will be the primary hierarchy mailbox in the organization
  • Secondary hierarchy mailbox: Additional public folder mailboxes created are secondary hierarchy mailboxes and can also contain content. Is a read-only copy of the public folder hierarchy

Before proceeding further make sure you are connected to Exchange Online,

$o365cred = Get-Credential
Connect-ExchangeOnline -credential $o365cred

To create new public folder mailbox

To create first mailbox that will be the Primary hierarchy mailbox:

$Name = Read-Host "Enter a name for the Public Folder"
New-Mailbox -PublicFolder -Name $Name

To create additional public folder mailboxes that will be Secondary hierarchy mailboxes:

$Name = Read-Host "Enter a name for the Public Folder"
New-Mailbox -PublicFolder -Name $Name

To create public folders

To create a new public folder:

$Name = Read-Host "Enter a name for the Public Folder"
New-PublicFolder -Name $Name

To create a public folder under and existing folder:

$Name = Read-Host "Enter a name for the Public Folder"
$Path = Read-Host "Enter a existing folder name"
New-PublicFolder -Name $Name -Path $Path
example shows ‘Reports’ folder created under Sales
example shows ‘Monthly’ folder under ‘Reports’ folder created under Sales

To mail enable a public folder:

$Name = Read-Host "Enter Public Folder which you wish to mail enable"
Enable-MailPublicFolder $Name

To add permissions to a specific user on a public folder:

$Name = Read-Host "Enter name of public folder that you wish to add permissions"
$user = Read-Host "Enter email address of user"
$AccessRights = Read-Host "Enter permissions separated by comma"
$AccessRights = $AccessRights -split ' *, *'
Add-PublicFolderClientPermission -Identity $Name -User $user -AccessRights $AccessRights

To determine permissions on a specific folder:

$Name = Read-Host "Enter a name for the Public Folder to query permissions"
Get-PublicFolder -Identity $Name | Get-PublicFolderClientPermission | Select Identity, User, AccessRights

Hope this post helped you out.

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O365 – Determine Licensed users

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Who are the licensed users in our tenant and what licenses are assigned to them? This question comes up way too often in several scenarios and there are a few methods to determine this. I will go over those in this post. I’ve updated this post with some newer information about exporting from the admin portal when I learned them.

Using PowerShell

There are two versions of the PowerShell module that you can use to connect to Microsoft 365 and administer user accounts, groups, and licenses:

  • Microsoft Azure AD Module for Windows PowerShell, whose cmdlets include Msol in their name
  • Azure AD PowerShell for Graph, whose cmdlets include AzureAD in their name

Please make sure you have the MSOnline Module for PowerShell installed and loaded

The Get-MsolUser is a powerful cmdlet which provides a lot of details and I’m going to use it for determining the user’s license.

To connect to the service,

$credential = Get-Credential -credential "adminuser@tenant.onmicrosoft.com"
Connect-MsolService -credential $credential

To get all (licensed and unlicensed) users,

Get-MsolUser -All
Get-MsolUser output

To list only licensed users,

Get-MsolUser -All | Where {$_.isLicensed -eq $true}

To list unlicensed users,

Get-MsolUser -All -UnlicensedUsersOnly

To export all users to a csv with their user name, license status and license assigned,

Get-MsolUser -All | Where {$_.isLicensed -eq $true} | Select Displayname,userprincipalname,islicensed,{$_.Licenses.AccountSkuId} | Export-csv "C:\tmp\userlist.csv" -NoTypeInformation

The exported csv will look like this,

csv data

Using the O365 admin portal

Microsoft has enabled exporting licensing information from the portal.

  1. Login to O365 admin center
  2. Users –> Active Users
  3. Click Export Users
  4. Click Continue
admin portal licensing information

This is how the csv output looks like,

csv export from admin center

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Office 365 – Update Primary Email Address in Bulk using PowerShell

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In this post, I’ll go over steps on how to update users’ primary email address in bulk.

I had to update the custom domain name address for one of the tenants I manage. When the O365 tenant was setup, I didn’t have my domain name ready for various reasons and the users were setup with @{tenantname}.onmicrosoft.com addresses. Once I added the necessary DNS records for O365 and made sure my new domain name is listed as default in the domain tab(Microsoft 365 admin center -> Settings -> Domains) in the list of , I was ready to update the user accounts with the new domain name.

Before proceeding further make sure you are connected to Exchange Online,

$o365cred = Get-Credential
Connect-ExchangeOnline -credential $o365cred

To bulk update accounts from a csv file:

Note: csv file has User,Emailaddress as column headers. Enter the users’ email address with new domain in the csv file. It is strongly recommended to leave the onmicrosoft.com address in the users’ proxy addresses and specifying the new address as PrimarySmtpAddress with SMTP.

$users = Import-Csv C:\tmp\Update-Email\emails.csv
foreach ($user in $users){

$Mailbox= Get-Mailbox -Identity $user.User
$PrimaryEmail=$Mailbox.PrimarySmtpAddress
$SMTP ="SMTP:"+$user.Emailaddress
Set-Mailbox -Identity $user.User -EmailAddresses $SMTP,$PrimaryEmail -WindowsEmailAddress $user.Emailaddress -MicrosoftOnlineServicesID $user.Emailaddress 

}

To bulk update all accounts in the O365 tenant:

Note: This below script will change all accounts in the tenant from whatever your enter for the $oldDomain to the $newDomain. So, proceed with caution and comply with your change management process and steps.

$oldDomain = Read-Host "Enter existing domain name in '@domainname.com' format"
$newDomain = Read-Host "Enter new domain name in '@domainname.com' format"

$mailboxes = (Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox).where{$_.PrimarySmtpAddress -like "*$oldDomain"}
foreach ($mbx in $mailboxes){

$PrimaryEmail = $mbx.PrimarySmtpAddress
$newSMTPAddress = $mbx.PrimarySmtpAddress -split '@'
$newSMTPAddress = $newSMTPAddress[0] + $newDomain
$SMTP ="SMTP:"+$newSMTPAddress
Write-Host "Processing: $mbx.Name --> $newSMTPAddress"
Set-Mailbox -Identity $mbx.Identity -EmailAddresses $SMTP,$PrimaryEmail -WindowsEmailAddress $newSMTPAddress -MicrosoftOnlineServicesID $newSMTPAddress
}

You can also make this change in bulk in the portal as well,

  1. Select all the users whom you wish you update
  2. Click on Change domains
  3. Select the desired domain name from the drop down at the pop-up window
  4. Click Save changes

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