Mac Does Stuff

Category: Microsoft 365

  • Install a previous version of Office365 / Office Professional Plus /Microsoft Office

    If you’re in the tech industry you may find yourself needing to use a specific version of Microsoft Office. Of course if you just install it from the Portal, or use the Office Deployment Tool with its enclosed configurations you’ll end up with the current version. 

    Fortunately, there is a fairly easy way to install a specific version. You do need to use the Office Deployment Tool – see here for details on that.

    Office Deployment Tool

    You can also see how to use it from a previous article I wrote a while ago – see here for that:

    Office 2016 Click to Run

    So, how do you do it? Firstly, find the version you want. You should be able to find the version numbers in here:

    Update history for Microsoft 365 Apps (listed by date)

    Next, you need to modify an XML file to include the explicit version number and platform type that you want. Here’s an example for a specific version:

    Save this as your configuration XML. In my example, I’ve called it ‘This.XML’.

    Next, you need to download the office package. To do that, you do this:

    -> Setup /download This.XML

    It may take a while as it is a couple of Gb.

    You will then want to install it – how do you do that? Like this:

    -> Setup /configure This.XML

    Ta daaaaaa. You can see a real live version below.

  • Adding multiple users to an Office365 Group

    I was recently trying to set up some security groups in Office365, and I wanted to add a subset of users to that group. Could I work out how to do it? Well, yes, I could….But it took a while.

    I tried the obvious approach of feeding each user to the add-msolgroupuser cmdlet and it just wasn’t having it. Some further google-fu and I worked out that this command doesn’t accept collections….So a different approach was needed. 

    In effect you create a variable with the users you want, and then feed that list of users to the add-msolgroupuser cmdlet. This worked for me anyway – so let’s have a look at how below. I was working with a group for SharePoint in this instance.

    Add your group to a variable

    $group = get-msolgroup | where {$_.Displayname -eq ‘SharePoint Users’}

    Add your users to a variable

    There’s various ways to get your users. In my case it was simply users with a certain domain name so I selected those using:

    $users=get-msoluser -domainname contoso.com|select-object userprincipalname,objectID

    Add the users in the variable to your group

    This is the bit I was struggling with originally. In effect you pipe the content of the users variable to individual add-msolgroupmember commands.

    $users | foreach {add-msolgroupmember -groupobjectid $group.objectid -groupmembertype ‘user’ -GroupMemberObjectId $_.objectid}

    Not as obvious as you’d imagine. Well, as I’d imagine anyway.

    You can have a look at the group members with:

    get-msolgroupmember -GroupObjectId $group.objectid

  • Who owns an email alias in Microsoft 365?

    A quick an easy way today – how do you find out if an email address/alias is assigned to a user in your Office365 tenancy?

    It’s pretty easy really – although not that obvious. 

    For both of these methods, you’ll need to connect to Office365 with PowerShell. To do that, you need to do the following:

    $cred=get-credentials

    At this point, you’ll be prompted to enter your Office365 Admin Credentials

    Then, you connect to the session using those credentials (below may be wrapped – the $session and Import-PSSession are two lines).

    $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $Cred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

    Import-PSSession $Session

    You could then if you wanted export all of your mailbox identities with their email addresses. You can do that with:

    get-mailbox -identity *|select-object Identity, EmailAddresses|export-csv csvout.txt

    This would put all of your mailboxes and associated Email-Addresses into a CSV.

    More specifically, you could just search for the email address you’re interested in – you can do that with this command:

    Get-Mailbox -Identity * | Where-Object {$_.EmailAddresses -like ‘smtp:emailaddress@domain.com‘} | Format-List Identity, EmailAddresses

    Obviously change the ’emailaddress@domain.com’ to whatever you’re looking for. You can use wildcards too, so for example DA*@contoso.com would find any alias beginning with DA and @contoso.com

    Output is similar to this:

    Example Output

    In the words of Heath Ledger…Da Daaaaaa.

  • Visio Stencil Shapes Wrong

    This has been driving me slightly bonkers – on a few of my machines my Visio has not been able to display stencils properly. In effect I get some random filled in shapes like this:

    Visio being wrong

    When of course it should look something like this:

    Visio being wrong

    Anyway, you know it’s going to be something simple, right? It was – themes.

    On the design tab, make sure you have ‘No theme’ selected when you import/open your stencil. That way it won’t try and apply the theme to those stencils.

    Visio Theme

    Things like this are enough to drive you to coffee.

  • Outlook 2016 – Cannot delete reminders

    I’ve been running into an issue recently where my Outlook 2016 for Mac would constantly bring up reminders that I had already dismissed. I noticed it seemed to be related to using Outlook on another Mac for the same Exchange account – I.e. As soon as I did it on another Mac, then boom all the reminders were back on *all* machines.

    It’s irritating, but not catastrophically so I guess.

    Anyway, after doing some research there’s a fix that seems to sort it.  Firstly, shut down the Outlook 2016 for Mac client on all of your Macs. 

    Go to the user’s library folder – you can do this by selecting the ‘Go’ menu in Finder, selecting ‘Go to Folder’ and entering ‘~/Library’:

    Go to folder

    Under the home user’s library, navigate to:

    /~Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/Main Profile/Data/Events

    …then just delete all the folders/contents of that directory. Do that on all of your Macs.

    Once done, fire up Outlook and they should stop popping up in such an annoying fashion.

  • Office 2016 Click to Run

    Moved – see here.

  • Building a Skype for Business Standard Edition Server

    Moved to here.

  • Enabling Administrator users for Lync

    More of a place-holder this one, as I get asked about it a lot. When enabling a user for Lync you get a message like this:

    Insufficient access rights to perform the operation.

    The reason for this can be seen by referring to this article here:

    Lync Server Control Panel returns that error “Insufficient access rights to perform the operation” when attempting a move user or enable user command

    It’s simple to work around – use the Lync Management Console (PowerShell) to enable or move the user, job done.

  • Outlook Advanced Searching

    The company I currently work for is in love with Email. Lots and lots of it. In fact, I’m fairly sure it’s their goal to deliver all the email everywhere.

    Anyway, a side effect of this is that often you know you have some information, from someone, somewhere, about something and it’s hard to track it down.

    Sure, Outlook has search, but hell you can never find anything, right? Well, having watched some people use the Outlook search I can understand why they can never find anything – I suspect people don’t realise exactly how powerful Outlook search is. There are great and simple ways to narrow the scope of your Email searches making it far, far easier to find the stuff you want.

    Simple things like AND and OR. Search for Andy Pandy for example and Outlook will search for messages that contain:

    Andy OR Pandy – and not in that order either. So emails with Pandy Andy will also show up.

    It’s the most common misunderstanding of Outlook search I see, and why people can’t find things. If you wanted something that contained Andy AND Pandy you could search for:

    Andy AND Pandy

    …or search for emails with Andy in, but not Pandy. Guess how we do that?

    Andy NOT Pandy

    You can also of course search for the explicit phrase by searching for “Andy Pandy” (I.e. In quotes).

    There are also some far more powerful search methods such as:

    From: Emails from that person.
    Hasattachment:Yes Only emails that have an attachment.
    Attachments:attachmentname Only emails with that specific attachment – very useful
    Received:=date Items only received on that day
    Received:yesterday Take a guess on that? Also tomorrow/today…
    Received:last week …wild stab in the dark?

    You can of course combine all of them – let’s imagine we want to find an email from Andy.Pandy@contoso.com, that has an attachment, and you received it last week. Well, you could search for:

    From:Andy.Pandy@contoso.com HasAttachment:yes Received:last week

    Boom, there’s your search.

    It’s really worth getting to know the search parameters, it makes finding stuff so, so much easier.

    In fact, Microsoft has made it even easier by listing it all in one cool place for you:

    Learn to narrow your search criteria for better searches in Outlook

    You can see a video run through of how it works, and why it’s so cool, below. This was produced by Webucator, they produce a number of Microsoft Outlook Online and Onsite Training Classes. Must admit I do like video run throughs of stuff – it makes things so much easier to, well, visualise. Always find quite astonishing when some companies ban things like YouTube – how many people now when they want to know how to do stuff would immediately turn to YouTube? I know I do.