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.

 

Commands for Sumatra's Double-Booked Resources cmdlet for PowerShell

In PowerShell type

help Get-suDoubleBookedMeetings

and you will see:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Daylight Savings Time might be permanent? Your legacy systems might be in trouble.

So Congress voted to make Daylight Savings Time permanent.

 Last time the DST changed Microsoft got caught with its pants down.  Actually they were completely off and their underwear was dirty -- but who needs to remember that?

Well, actually we all do now -- because if you've got a legacy system -- and SOMEBODY keeps reading on our blog about Exchange 2007... you might need to do some legerdemain on your data to keep it working.

OR if you're migrating from a legacy system into Office 365 you are going to be facing problems.

If it's BIG for you -- drop us a line.

We did this before.

Aloha-oe to TravelTime

Per the fine, fine folks in Redmond:

Upcoming, we will be retiring the preview program enabling REST API access to on-premises mailboxes for Hybrid Exchange organizations.

Note: This will impact those who write code against Exchange mailboxes.

Key points

• Timing: Beginning early March 2023, we will begin to return errors for any requests made for mailboxes that remain on-premises.
• Action: Use Microsoft Graph for Exchange Online and Exchange Web Services (EWS) for Exchange Server on-premises
• Roll-out: tenant level

SO WHAT THIS MEANS FOR TRAVEL TIME,

Travel Time uses REST API so it's going to start giving you return errors.

Sorry, folks, we had some fun making it and we hope you had some useful times with it.

Video of Kerio calendar and contact data migrating to Office 365

 

Return with us to the days of the silents.  

To start -- a blank calendar and a single contact in Office 365.

We insert data using our latest tool from a single user.

You see the calendar data insert and then the contact data.

We then use our selective UNDO capability to remove the data.

This is all happening in real time -- no editing.

Prepare for TLS 1.1 and 1.0 to go away

You know the popup warnings that we've been ignoring -- Microsoft will deprecate Azure AD TLS 1.1, 1.0  and 3DES cipher suite:

It's time to pay attention.  Microsoft means it it this time.

We run regular recursion tests to ensure our application on older hardware (when we migrate legacy systems such as our newly announced Kerio migration tools.)  As part of that work, we have to register an Azure Active Directory application.  Our scripts started failing a few weeks ago during our test on an older machine.  The root cause -- Microsoft announced the deprecation of TLS 1.0/1.1 on January 31, 2022 (this machine was set to use TLS 1.1)

We're not going to reproduce the steps to enable TlS 1.2 that Microsoft published in November, 2021

1. Install Update 3140245.
2. Enable the registry values from the Enable TLS 1.2 on client or server operating systems section.

Microsoft provided a power shell script that does some of the work to check and enable TLS 1.2.  It might be time to do this.  The end of TLS 1.1 is near.

 

Omicron’s silver lining, or why this pandemic is a good time to migrate calendar data to Office 365.

If you've had a legacy calendar migration on your to-do list for a while -- the global pandemic is actually a really good time for it.

Why? You might ask. Short answer: conference rooms.  That makes no sense since everyone is working remotely.  Have the Sumatra guys lost it?

We’re going to share a secret about calendar migration for you today that will save you tons of future agony.

There are three groups you have to consider in a migration – CxOs, end users, and conference rooms.  Your most important calendars are the CxO’s.  Our tools migrate those correctly and with guest lists and responses intact.  

The next most important calendars are not your users – it’s your conference rooms.  

HUH? 

Sumatra has 20 years of real-world experience that users will accept disruption associated with data migration if you tell them in advance and apply the rules equally to everyone.  The exception to the rule is conference room bookings.  There will be hell to pay the second you mess with users' conference room bookings. 

Sumatra’s customer would usually chew on this for a few seconds and then go "Darn -- you're right!"  

With users working from home for the past year, there is minimal demand on the conference rooms, and therefor minimal risk in upsetting the proverbial apple cart.  Eventually there will be a return to the office, and that will complicate your future migration plans.   

So start your migration plans today and avoid the potential for future conference room migration headaches.

PS: in a future log post, we’ll talk about how to minimize the dreaded “double booking” found in conference rooms in Office 365 (we've been doing that for years, but somehow it's always a topic).

Kerio Connect to Office 365 Migration Field Proven

So we at Sumatra are very happy to announce in 2022 (entering our third year of the COVID pandemic!) that we have successfully field-deployed a Kerio Connect to Office 365 full-state calendar migration tool!

Huzzah!!!

A couple of screen shots of the capability:

We ran it in December 2021 at a law firm in the Boston, Massachusetts area!

Many thanks to all involved there for their testing and attention to detail that made it a success!!

The user IDs from legacy Kerio are mappable to new IDs on Office 365.  

We of course re-create meetings as meetings with guest lists and responses so it's a huge level above any export-import methods you see out there.

And we can also preserve resource bookings in a Kerio to Office 365 migration -- though our client did not migrate resources so we're looking for a partner to prove that works as well.

Details on request -- please just drop us a line.  Please also let us know the specifics of how many users you'd like to migrate.