Thursday 22 September 2016

Validating email addresses for Exchange recipients before migrating to Exchange Online

*UPDATE*
This is now set to 400 from 200 as per this Microsoft article here. I've updated accordingly.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Recently Exchange Online has added a limit to the number of proxy addresses (email addresses) an object can have (mail enabled user or mailbox for example) in Exchange Online.


This has gone from a seemingly unlimited number to "400".


This poses a problem for any migrations, Hybrid or otherwise, where an on-premises mailbox has more than 200 email addresses assigned to it.


Microsoft has published this limiting change, although buried, here.


So before migrating to Exchange Online it may be wise to check for any recipients that have more than 200 email addresses; you can then resolve the issue and have a better migration experience.




To check:


Get-Recipient | Where {($_.EmailAddresses).count -gt 400}


In the example below I have used 'Get-Mailbox', but this is only to limit the number of returns for this blog post example. The first shows the command, the second shows the command bringing back any mailboxes with email addresses of more than 10, and finally in the third I am getting the all clear as none have over 200.




If you have over 1000 objects don't forget -ResultSize!

Get-Recipient -ResultSize unlimited | Where {($_.EmailAddresses).count -gt 400}



Have a great week!

Oliver Moazzezi
Twitter: @Olivermoazzezi



Friday 9 September 2016

Taking a peek at a UK provisioned Office 365 Tenant

Microsoft announced on the 7th of September that the UK datacentres for Office 365 and Azure services were now available to a great fanfare here and here.


But if you provision a UK tenant (which is as simple as selecting your region as 'United Kingdom' when you sign up - it's not so straight forward on getting an existing tenant moved - more on that in a future blog post soon) what exactly, is in the UK?


From a previous blog post you can see how we can identify the location of the service instances for your Office 365 tenant. So let's take a look!


At first glance it doesn't look much different to a normal 'EU/EMEA' provisioned tenant. But looking further we can see both Exchange Online and SharePoint Online are clearly UK based.





That's all well and good - but services like Exchange Online Protection still show their location as EMEA? Let's dig a little deeper to see if this is true.


Grabbing the MX records for the tenant I can look up the IP addresses against the RIPE database.





Looking on RIPE I can see that in fact, Exchange Online Protection is actually UK based also.





At this time, I haven't been able to confirm the location of Skype for Business Online - i'll update the post when I have dug a little deeper - but we can see your Exchange and SharePoint services are now hosted fully within the UK.

Sorry for the lack of posts for the last two months, I've become a father again and life is a little devoid of spare time (and sleep!) right now!

Update! You can view Microsoft datacentre regions here http://o365datacentermap.azurewebsites.net and it does appears that Skype for Business Online has not made it into the UK datacentres yet. The locales are London and Durham./


Have a a great week!
Oliver Moazzezi – Office Servers and Services MVP
Twitter: @Olivermoazzezi