Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Double-Booking cmdlet and Scripting

You want to check for double-bookings and inform users on a regular basis without running scripts yourself?

Sure -- a really good tutorial is here: How to schedule PowerShell scripts

https://techgenix.com/how-to-schedule-powershell-scripts/

We're not re-inventing the wheel on this one, folks.

When you have the script and cmdlet working you can either:

  1. Invoke it manually whenever you want.
  2. Set up a timer to automate it (see above)
    1. Paranoid?  Run every four hours
    2. Less paranoid?  How about every day?
    3. Mellow?  Every week.

 


Wednesday, October 05, 2022

Sumatra Double-Booking cmdlet Updated for Modern Authentication Office 365

We got some demand for the Double Booking cmdlet, apparently because Microsoft Bookings has limitations.

We've removed our dependencies on Basic Authentication and updated for Modern Authentication and are about to put the tool into a test site.

Any other folks interested, please drop us a line.

Tuesday, October 04, 2022

Inform users of double-booked meetings in conference rooms

Yep -- we have the new Sumatra Double-Booking cmdlet re-written for Modern Authentication.

And it's field-proven,

After you've gotten your IDs and Secret, and loaded the cmdlet, you can have notices like this automatically sent.



One of our tenets for best practices about double-booked resources:  Start off by treating your users like adults and letting them work it out.  If that meets with inadequate success, ratchet the capability up from there.

Friday, September 30, 2022

Finding Double-Booked Resources via Get-Mailbox in PowerShell

 

Latest version of the Sumatra Double Booking cmdlet works very well with the Get-Mailbox command in PowerShell.




Tuesday, May 03, 2022

How long is your migration to Office 365 going to take?

 Your rate limiting step in a migration is moving and synchronizing your email.

It's going to take weeks at a minimum if you have a site of any size.  More likely it will take months.

Why?  Because likely you have over 100 Gb of email files and that's just going to take a while to process and (thanks to the IMAP protocol) continuously synchronize until your cut-over date.

The IMAP protocol is a godsend for these purposes.  So getting started early and watching the amount of data you have and have moved is going to be a key part of the process. 

Sadly, no ready protocol exists for calendars, contacts, and tasks.  So you need to one-off those and you should expect them to take hours just before cut-over.

That's why testing the snot out of everything is our mantra.


Monday, April 25, 2022

Kerio Connect to Office 365 Migration. We get it -- you're SMBs.

 OK, folks.  We get it.

Since we announced the Kerio Connect to Office 365 calendar, tasks, contacts, notes migration application we built we've gotten inquiries from several of you.

And we've learned you're mainly SMBs -- Small to Medium Businesses -- and very price-sensitive.

You want to get your users off of Kerio and get them on Office 365.

We want to turn a profit off the hard-earned effort we put into making this technology. 

So here's what we're going to do -- we're going to let some of you run this for no charge as an informed consent experiment.  We're limiting support -- but if you find you need help we're willing to talk about what it costs.  

There's a few rules here:

  • You need to contact us and tell us the domain name you're migrating into so we can give you a license key.
  • This offer does NOT apply if you've hired a systems integrator or consultant to do your migration (if you can afford them you can afford to work something out with us).
  • We'll give you a link to the code and you can download and try it out.
  • Experience with PowerShell and Office 365 permissions is a definite plus in migrating!
  • If you have under 25 users and little Microsoft experience then please use import-export methods or go cold-turkey.  There's a learning curve with our methods.  A small number of users is just not worth it.
  • No support for conference rooms or resources.
  • Current and future events only.  CAN we do history? Yes -- but that we think you should pay for if you want our automated process.
Questions?  Use the contact us link.

As always, to migrate email use imapsync (link is to our posts on how to migrate and the advantages).  You could use Microsoft's tools which are simple, but are also simple-minded.  If imapsync (official site) scares or confuses you, please be aware our tools require about the same level of expertise.