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.

Microsoft makes its own calendar UNDO!

 

Finally Microsoft does something to fix the terminated user problem of ghost meetings.

Remove-CalendarEvents -Identity user@domain.com -CancelOrganizedMeetings -Confirm:$false -verbose

Arm yourselves with knowledge!

Kerio Mail Contacts and Office 365 Migration

Our latest version of Kerio migration code adds two options to the XML file to deal with autocomplete contacts.

• Set the ‘migratesuggestedcontacts’ switch to FALSE if you don’t want to migrate them.
• If 'migratesuggestedcontacts’  is TRUE, the contact subfolder named in the migratesuggestedcontacts_o365foldername will be created (if it doesn’t exist) and those contacts added to the folder.

 

 

BusyMac and Kerio Bugs and Migration to Office 365

We found some weird calendar stuff in Kerio when using BusyCal. 

RRULE;X-BUSYMAC-REGENERATE=TRASH:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=12;BYMONTHDAY=16

This (really weird) addition to the iCalendar format was causing us some problems with the recurrence pattern until we coded around it.

Apparently it's been reported as a bug in in their forum since December 2020.  https://github.com/jens-maus/node-ical/issues/67

But rather than waiting for someone to fix a moribund client to moribund server we coded around it to make it easier for folks to get into Office 365.

Turning off EWS Throttling in Office 365

Microsoft must have realized this was an issue – they finally made it easier to temporarily change EWS Throttling under admin control.

And by "easier" I mean it is "possible if you know exactly what you are looking for."

So to remove EWS Throttling

Login to Exchange Admin 

Click Support and follow with New service requests.

In the search field, search for Increase EWS Throttling Policy. 

Select that from the list

Click Run Tests – it will first tell you are throttled (big surprise)

Click Changing EWS Settings – select 30/60/90 days

Run Tests again.  – Should now be good to go.

Multiple Domains in a Kerio Calendar Migration

You know how it is -- you've had your legacy system for YEARS and sometime in there you changed domains from say OLDCOMPANY.com to NEWCOMPANY.com or something like that.

And now as you are migrating into Office 365 you wonder if you can take all that over and have it work in calendars the way it used to.

Have no fear -- you can do that.  Just put both in as in the screen shot on your configuration page.

 

Kerio Calendar Data Weirdness

 One of those things we always worry about is data integrity.

We've seen weird stuff.

And now it's Kerio's turn to provide us with weird.

Take a look at this raw ICS file from some recent field data:

I'll cut to the chase.  The END date (line 14) of this recurring appointment is later than the UNTIL date in the RRULE (line 15).  So trying to insert this Microsoft Exchange Web Services called us very bad do-bees.   

Not hard to generate odd situations with a variety of clients on a technologically moribund server.

Block Mail to Recipients Outside of your Organization

We recently announced that we've started work on a  Kerio Server Migration to Office 365.  One of our clients gave us test data from a few departed/terminated users to test our code.  It's easy to test in our Exchange on-prem sandbox to ensure no "external" email gets sent to their users -- we unplug the Ethernet connection to the Router. It's a little more complicated in Office 365, but not all that difficult.  Here are the steps:

In the Exchange Admin Center, under Mail Flow, Rules, click the "+" sign to create a new rule.

• Name the rule.  We called it "Block Mail sent to External Email"
• Select the option from Apply this rule pulldown: "The Recipient is Located...."
• Select the option "Outside The Organization" from the subsequent pulldown that the recipient is located 
• Select "Reject the message with the explanation" from the pulldown "Do the Following..."
• Enter a message (optional):  We entered "The message was not sent. The Recipient is located outside the company."
• We chose to Enforce the rule, and finally
• Saved it

  Here is a screen shot:

So now let's say a user tries to send email outside your domain.  They will be informed that is an unsanctioned action with this message:

Kerio Connect Migration to Office 365

So we got a request for a Kerio Connect to Office 365 calendar migration from someone who we discovered was an old pal from the early days of group scheduling.

How could we say no?

So we've got that under development now -- anyone else interested in testing it out please drop us a line.

We've got full-state calendar migrations going, as well as contacts and tasks.  

Notes become tasks (because Microsoft's EWS API does not allow us to create Notes). 

A few of the recurrence patterns do not transfer to Office 365 so we insert them and flag them as problem children.  Biggest example: Last weekday or weekend day of the month is supported on Kerio but not in Office 365.  

Of course we include our UNDO functionality for testing and remediation. 

Sender-recipient pair receiving limits in Microsoft Office 365

 Got this in the mail today from our friends in Redmond, Washington:

We are updating our receiving limits in Exchange to help prevent attacks on your mail flow experience. Earlier this year in (February MC239262) we announced a stricter enforcement of our mailbox receiving limits. Taking your feedback into consideration, we are releasing an additional limit to block single-sender mail storms and deter DoS attacks. Our mailbox receiving limits, as previously stated, apply to the messages received by a Microsoft Office 365 mailbox. If volume exceeds 3,600 messages in a given 60-minute window, the mailbox will no longer accept messages from the Internet, from other tenants, or from on-premises senders. Starting in September 2021, we are adding a limit on sender-recipient pairs (SRP). This feature will apply to the messages received by a Microsoft Office 365 mailbox from each specific sender. If a single sender sends over 33% of the threshold (3,600 per rolling hour) to a specific recipient, the SRP limit will kick in, and the mailbox will no longer accept messages from that sender. The mailbox will continue accepting messages from other senders. Note: If the identified sender is from a Microsoft Office 365 mailbox in the same tenant, messages will be allowed even after the limit is exceeded. If the identified sender is from an on-premises mailbox, a Microsoft Office 365 in a separate tenant, or outside of Microsoft Office 365, messages will be blocked. This change helps prevent a malicious user from blocking mail flow to a Microsoft Office 365 mailbox, as part of our continuing efforts to improve your Exchange Online experience. Key Points: Timing: September 2021 Action: review and assess How this will affect your organization: Rollout of the mailbox receiving limit as detailed in (February MC239262) is ongoing. We are continuing to lower the threshold over the next few months until we reach 3,600. Rollout of the SRP limit will begin in September 2021. This limit is set to 33% of the mailbox receiving limit. Note: Most users are not likely to be impacted by this, as only a small percentage of mailboxes are currently hitting SRP limits. If a mailbox exceeds the SRP limit, messages to that mailbox from the identified sender will be throttled. Affected mailboxes will receive an email informing them of the throttling, while the identified sender will receive a non-delivery report under response code 5.2.121. Emails from that sender will be throttled until the limit resets one hour from when the threshold was exceeded. Administrators will be able to view users that exceed their SRP limit through the “Mailbox exceeding receiving limits” report in the Exchange Admin Center. Please contact affected users to understand why they are receiving so many messages from particular senders. What you need to do to prepare: No direct action is required on your part, though it is recommended that you review the new limits and update training and documentation as appropriate. Review the published receiving limits at Exchange Online limits - Service Descriptions | Microsoft Docs Review our NDR documentation at Email non-delivery reports in Exchange Online for 5.2.121, sender-recipient pair throttling View this message in the Microsoft 365 admin center

This is not going to have an effect on any of our calendar migrations unless you are a multi-domain tenant (we had one of those in the last year) or we've managed to so optimize the batch operations we've exceeded Microsoft's limits AND you have massive current meetings.