Thursday 23 November 2017

An error occurred while attempting to provision Exchange to the Partner STS 'Client found response content type of 'text/html; charset=utf-8', but expected 'text/xml'

This week I had a very interesting Exchange Hybrid Wizard error present itself that I haven't seen before, or at least seen the root cause before. The purpose of this post is to actually have some data on it searchable on the internet so if you are facing this issue you know what to expect and do.

The error is: "An error occurred while attempting to provision Exchange to the Partner STS.  Detailed Information "An error occurred accessing Windows Live. Detailed information: "Client found response content type of 'text/html; charset=utf-8', but expected 'text/xml'"

This error never presents itself in the HCW, infact once you have added your TXT records to your required domains, the HCW will just hang at 'adding Federated Domain...' and sit on this screen forever:


You'll wait and wait and wait, and nothing will ever happen. This is when you hopefully dig into the HCW log and get dig through it to find the cause. Now I have had this happen before, and we know we have to look to the HCW log to see what's going on. However the issue wasn't what I was expecting.

In my case the error was caused because the web service that allows the HCW to provision the domains onto the Microsoft Federation Gateway had failed, and was returning a 500 error. This is why the HCW log was complaining it was expecting an html xml response but instead was getting an html response with text.

So if you recieve this error what can you do to check that it's Microsoft's issue and not yours?

It's a good idea if you're getting any "An error occurred while attempting to provision Exchange to the Partner STS" to check https://domains.live.com/service/managedelegation2.asmx


When working it will give you the following


In my instance, with the HCW stalled it was due to Microsoft actually having a service health issue.

It's good to point out that if you're getting other "An error occurred while attempting to provision Exchange to the Partner STS" errors to still check the web service. You may find you have a proxy or firewall in the way causing issues between the HCW and the functioning web service. Compare https://domains.live.com/service/managedelegation2.asmx from another network that you know won't have proxy or firewall issues or even check it on your phone via 4G.

On another note I have reached out to the Exchange Product Group as I think Office 365 Service Health should be reporting on STS services as they will have potential impacts with enabling Exchange Hybrid and federation capabilities.

Take care,


Oliver Moazzezi
@OliverMoazzezi




Friday 10 November 2017

Managing gifs in Microsoft Teams


Microsoft Teams is turning out to be a great product. It's unifying a lot of Office 365 services in the solution stack to make the app a pretty much once stop place for getting work done, communicating and enabling productivity. However you may find you get a gif explosion in Microsoft Teams as users find, love and consume the service.

Well whilst we are still awaiting the Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams unified Admin Center that was announced and shown at Ignite we do have some administative functionality over Microsoft Teams.

Let's take a look how we can disable Giphy, or apply content rating to the gifs that are available to users to minimise inappropriate use.


  1. Login to Office 365 and browse to the Admin centre. Looking at your respective Admin Centers you won't yet find Microsoft Teams there
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2. Instead, go to Settings | Services and Add-ins. Here you will find Microsoft Teams!
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3.  Selecting it will show various administrative functions we can currently do - however expand 'Messaging' to see where Giphy is. You will see it can be enabled and disabled and also content ratings applied

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4.  The current content rating filter allows Moderate (the default setting), Strict and Show all content.
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5.  So what is the experience if you want to disable gifs? Disable the function and save.
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6. Within a short amount of time, users cannot insert gifs or see Giphy anymore. Old gif insertions continue to function
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I look forward to seeing the combined Skype for Business and Teams Admin Center that's due out at the end of the year - possibly in public preview rather than GA - it should be good! Here's a preview from TechCommunity
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Take care,



Oliver Moazzezi
@OliverMoazzezi