Upgrade your Sign In Application

arvindsuthar — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 19:54:00 GMT

In mid-May, Microsoft Online Services will require an update to the Sign In application. Here are some details and a timeline to assist you in planning for this change to your environment. There are three ways to manage the installation of this update.

· Allow users to automatically upgrade the Sign In application when prompted

· Manage display of update notifications until you’re ready to upgrade

· Deploy the Sign In application to your users’ computers

Allow users to upgrade the Sign In application when prompted

This is the simplest approach. Installation is under the control of your users.

Manage display of upgrade notifications until you’re ready to upgrade

In mid-April, your users will begin to see optional upgrade notices in the Microsoft Online Services Sign In application. If you do not want your users to see these notices, you can suppress them by editing the registry on each computer. To do this, create a .reg file with the settings below and then run this file on each computer.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MOCHA\Preferences]
"HideDash"=dword:00000001
"ShowUpdateAlerts"=dword:00000000

Re-enable upgrade messages when you’re ready for your users to upgrade the Sign In application. To turn these messages back on, create a .reg file with the settings below.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MOCHA\Preferences]
"HideDash"=dword:00000000
"ShowUpdateAlerts"=dword:00000001

Note: The new version of the Sign In application will provide group policy control of the upgrade prompts. For more information, see Group Policy Settings in the Sign In Application.

Deploy the Sign In application to your users’ computers

This option gives you the most control over your environment.

When users upgrade their Sign In application in response to the upgrade prompt, their settings, including their user name and password are retained. To retain these settings when deploying this application to your users’ computers, you must set the following registry key before installing the application. To do this, create a .reg file with the settings below and then run this file on each computer.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MOCHA\Preferences]
"UpgradeInProgress"=dword:00000001

After setting the registry key, deploy the Sign In application using the command line below.

Msiexec /qb /I OnlineServicesSignIn-en.msi

To prevent your users from seeing the upgrade prompts before you deploy the Sign In application, you can implement the registry changes described in the previous section.

Get more information about .reg files.

Download the new Sign In application.

This post will be deleted after the Sign In application upgrade deadline has passed.

Exchange to Online!

arvindsuthar — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 01:47:00 GMT

This is Arvind Suthar, Director of Service for Microsoft Online. We are ramping up our community efforts and our team is excited to engage with you now that our service is live. We have a series of postings planned to introduce our team, dig into a series of technical topics, and trigger discussion around how we can make Microsoft Online more valuable for you. Please feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions through our feedback form or in the comments below.

We work closely with customers in our Beta and Technology Adoption programs during their migration to Microsoft Online. During this process, we have identified some frequently asked questions around migration. Erik Ashby is a Senior Program Manager on the Microsoft Online team focused on simplifying migration to Microsoft Online. I asked Erik to take some time to answer some of these frequently asked questions in a post. - Arvind

Customers running Microsoft Exchange who are interested in moving to Exchange Online often ask me questions about how to do ‘Exchange to Online.’ Exchange Online supports several migration models and offers a set of tools that make the move easy. Here I recap some frequently asked questions around migrating to Exchange Online from an on-premise Microsoft Exchange environment. Detailed instructions on the process referred to below are fully documented in our Migrate to Microsoft Online Services whitepaper.

How do I get started?

Purchase a subscription or sign up for a free 30 day Microsoft Online trial here. We will create a fully functional sample domain for you to test drive the service. You will be able to send and receive email and perform all the migration steps at this sample domain. Your domain will be named something like “yourdomain1.microsoftonline.com” or you can verify ownership of a permanent domain name like "yourdomain1.com" and begin using that.

Is migrating my Exchange environment to Microsoft Online complicated?

Not really. There are three basic steps that you will need to go through and the Microsoft Online Admin Console will walk you through each step with tools that will do most of the heavy lifting. The three steps to move to Microsoft Online are:

1. Configure Exchange to send mail to Microsoft Online: To get your mail traffic flowing to Microsoft Online, you will configure Transport Layer Security (TLS) and create an SMTP connector to start forwarding email from selected accounts on your Exchange server to your Microsoft Online account. Later, when all of your users have mailboxes on Microsoft Online, you can redirect all your email traffic directly to Microsoft Online by setting your MX records to point to:

mail.global.frontbridge.com

2. Install and run the Microsoft Online Directory Sync tool: This is a tool that will run in your on-premise topology and provide regular one-way synchronization of user accounts, e-mail–enabled contacts, and e-mail-enabled groups from your local Active Directory to Microsoft Online. This will allow Exchange On-Premise and Exchange Online users to see each other in GAL lookups. Also, once the GAL accounts have been copied to Microsoft Online you can activate the accounts within Microsoft Online.

3. Install and run the Microsoft Online Migration Tool: This is a tool that will bulk migrate Exchange mailbox content to Microsoft Online and establish mail forwarding so that all new mail will now be delivered to Microsoft Online.

Can I migrate to Microsoft Online incrementally?

One of the first questions customers face is how long they want to take to migrate to Microsoft Online. Broadly, there are two approaches:

1. perform a single large migration of all mailboxes at once (aka ‘Big-Bang’ migration), or

2. stage the migration over a period of time

Tools provided by Microsoft Online support both methods. For big-bang migrations the Microsoft Online Migration tool provides an easy-to-use migration wizard that can bulk migrate Exchange mailboxes and it can be fully automated with PowerShell. For migrations that are staged over a period of time, one-way synchronization directory synchronization from your local Active Directory to Microsoft online will allow users to share a synchronized GAL and unified messaging experience whether they have been migrated to Microsoft Online or are still using on-premise Exchange. We call this email coexistence.

Note that during coexistence, free/busy lookup and delegate access between a mailbox that is on-premise and a mailbox in Microsoft Online is not possible. Also, during coexistence, if a user has both an on-premise Exchange mailbox and a mailbox in Microsoft Online, these mailboxes can get out-of-sync after a migration. The migration will copy the content of a mailbox to Microsoft Online and establish a mail forward so that new mail will be directed to Microsoft Online, but any changes that are made to either mailbox after the migration will not be reflected in the other mailbox. Typically this is not a problem since most people will use only one of the mailboxes or will remove the on-premise mailbox after a migration.

Although we have had a fair mix of customers doing both big-bang and staged migrations, at this point most customers are going with quick ‘Big-Bang’ migrations and we have seen several companies with over 1000 users successfully execute a ‘Big-Bang’ migration.

Can I use email coexistence during a trial?

Yes, even if you are planning on a ‘Big-Bang’ migration, using the coexistence tools is a good way for you to have a few users ‘Try’ the Microsoft Online services. These tools allow several people to exist with mailboxes in Microsoft Online but still share the same GAL and messaging experience with others still on Exchange On- Premise. The same limitations for free/busy lookup and delegate access exist. Also, because mailboxes will get out of synch as mentioned above, you would need to copy any mail in the Microsoft Online accounts off to a local PST if you ultimately chose not to migrate.

To address synchronization issue between the Exchange and Microsoft Online mailboxes , Cemaphore, a Microsoft partner, offers a free 15 day trial of a full two way mailbox synchronization tool between your on-premise Exchange environment and Microsoft Online. MailShadow® for Exchange Online will continuously synchronize mailboxes from an on-premise Exchange server to Microsoft Online. This makes trialing Microsoft Online even easier.

Can I just export my mail messages to a PST and import into Microsoft Online?

Although Outlook is an option for migrating content, I would not recommend using it for migrating Exchange mailboxes. PST files store local email recipients and email senders using references to Active Directory. When your Active Directory server changes these references may no longer be valid. The Microsoft Online Migration tool performs the necessary translation when moving messages to Microsoft Online. Outlook is great as a generic tool to get content from non-standard sources like files, databases, and other sources into Microsoft Online, but for migrating Exchange mailboxes stick with the migration tools.

The bottom line is organizations are already moving from Exchange to Microsoft Online through different models and are using the Microsoft Online coexistence and migration tools to make their move simple and painless.

Erik Ashby

Sr. Program Manger

Microsoft Online

Plan for Microsoft Online Services Deployment and On-boarding

Lori - Microsoft — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:15:00 GMT

View the Webcast: Planning for Microsoft Online Services Deployment and On-boarding

Event Overview: Deploying the Business Productivity Online (BPO) Suite from Microsoft Online Services requires planning and preparation to ready an organization for the full use of the services. In this webcast, we discuss preparations for the BPO Suite, including infrastructure requirements and desktop application deployment, and we provide a working check list for IT professionals to reference as they on-board the services.

Presenter: Ryan Phillips, Escalation Engineer, Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft Online Services Team Blog : Deployment

Upgrade your Sign In Application

Allow users to upgrade the Sign In application when prompted

Manage display of upgrade notifications until you’re ready to upgrade

Deploy the Sign In application to your users’ computers

Exchange to Online!

Plan for Microsoft Online Services Deployment and On-boarding