Using O365 without On-Premise Exchange with System Center 2012 Orchestrator

I was checking over some Runbooks today in my lab and one failed when it hit the send e-mail activity.  Odd I thought and then it dawned on me that when I re-installed the lab a month or so back I didn't re-implement exchange as I went for a full Office 365 play.

Great, here comes the task of setting up SMTP e-mail relays, unless... will Orchestrator work directly with O365 using just the Send Email Activity?

It turns out it does and really simply too.

On the Send Email activity properties, fill out the information on the Details tab.

N.B. Make sure you untick the Task fails if an attachment is missing option if you're not putting an attachment on the mail.

On the Advanced tab enter the email username and password for the account you created in Office 365 that will be used for sending e-mail from Orchestrator.

You can leave the Domain field blank

Logon to Office 365/OWA as the Orchestrator e-mail account, click on the Options button and then About.

Make a note of the Server name and Port as highlighted in the screen shot below (pod51016.outlook.com in this example)

Enter this information into the Connect tab, along with the e-mail account you've setup for Orchestrator to send from

Make sure the Enable SSL option is ticked, otherwise you will get an error in Orchestrator informing you that the SMTP server requires a secure connection.

Check your Runbook in and give it a test run.
If it's setup correctly then this time you should see it succeed.

And voilà, you should end up with e-mails being sent to/from Office 365 without the need for any on-premise Exchange or SMTP relay.

Another, simpler method, is to use the Exchange User Integration Pack.

With this IP installed, you can configure the server to use (again the details from OWA) along with the e-mail and password by going to the Options menu and choosing Exchange User.

Then drag a Create and Send E-Mail activity to your runbook and provide at least the e-mail address to send a mail to, the subject and the body.  Other options are available such as priority and attachments via the Optional Properties... button.

 

Again, another successful e-mail can now be sent.

 

 

Renaming files using PowerShell and a CSV

During a migration of users from an outside organisation into ours, we had to bring across all their exchange data using exmerge.

The problem was, all their exported PST's were named incorrectly.

So, a quick CSV was knocked up with two columns.
Column 1 = Path and current file name
Column 2 = New file name

Add a header at the top of the CSV to give something like this:

Path,NewAlias
F:\Export\fredb.pst,fred.bloggs.pst
F:\Export\DSaster.pst,derdrie.saster.pst

Then use the following PowerShell line:
import-csv c:\PSTImport.csv | foreach {rename-item -path $_.path -newname $_.newalias}
Job done, one nicely renamed folder of PST files ready to exmerge (shame we're still on Exchange 2003!)

Service Manager 2010 Exchange Connector & Other Tools

A while back Travis Wright blogged about releasing a "Resource Kit" for Service Manager 2010 containing a lot of useful material, examples and some new tools.

Well the biggest part of that announcement was around the Exchange Connector and it's now available.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=0b48d1f1-434a-4ee6-8017-fc13f4c16785&displaylang=en

However, while the majority of the other bits are available but scattered all over the place, a good decision has been made that rather than just re-bundling them all up and releasing them, a dedicated page on TechNet is to be setup to reference all these tools instead.

I think this is a much better idea as it will pull all this useful information together in one place and allow new versions and additions to be easily added without having to wait for big releases.

More details can be found on the SCSM Engineering Blog here:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2011/01/13/exchange-connector-released.aspx