BPOS – Absoblogginlutely!

Last week I needed to reset a BPOS account password for a new user that I was setting up. I logged into the BPOS control panel and reset the users password, copied the new one to the clipboard and then proceeded to try and login as the user through the web interface. The web interface took the new password and as expected it then prompted me to change the password as this was the first time of logging on as the user. However on entering a new password I got "server is busy or you’ve lost your internet connection". I obviously haven’t lost my internet connection and I am hoping that the Microsoft servers are not that busy.

Attempting to login through the single sign on client gave me the following error message – ”Your password could not be changed due since we couldn’t connect to the service. Please check your network connection or contact your service administrator”.

I couldn’t find anything useful online for this issue so I logged a ticket with BPOS support. They came back with a powershell script (below) that fixed the issue and admitted that this is a known problem that sometimes occurs when a password is changed in the gui.

First the BPOS migration tool needs to be downloaded on a machine with powershell installed. Although the migration tools themselves are not required for this particular issue, it provides the extensions to powershell to allow you to manage BPOS. If you are managing BPOS users then you should have this installed already. If not, the migration tools can be downloaded from either the 32bit migration tool (transporter tool) or the 64bit migration tool pages.

Once installed, from the migration tool powershell prompt, enter the following

$tcred=Get-Credential
Note: In the Credential Popup Window, type in the Exchange Online Administrator account & password.
Once it is saved, type in the following command. I’m not sure that this first step is needed as you are prompted for the credentials again when you enter the next line, but as Microsoft said it, it must be true Winking smile

The second command resets the user password –
Set-MSOnlineUserPassword -identity emailalias@bposemaildomain.com –Password strongpasswordhere -ChangePasswordOnNextLogon $True

You will then be able to login as the user with the new password provided above. Note you will be prompted to change the password again, but this time the password change should be accepted.

Cost for bulk uploading to Microsoft’s Exchange Hosted Archive

By Andy on Wednesday, July 14, 2010

As part of our investigations into hosting mail online using Microsoft Exchange Hosted services I have spent several hours on the phone with several companies to obtain prices and quotes. A couple of companies are out of the running as they didn’t bother to return my calls and although Microsoft were helpful, they just did not get it.
One of their offerings is email archiving. Every email sent and received, both internally and internally is copied to the archive service which is then searchable for ediscovery or just in case you can’t find that one email you know you received way back when. The only downside with this is the old email currently sitting on the exchange server that would not be searchable. However according to the Buy Microsoft Exchange hosted Services, “”You may bring historical data into the archive for a one-time charge, which is priced per GB”
As you can purchase the standard archive service from Microsoft and the same page contains prices for this service, it makes sense that Microsoft would be able to provide costs for this data import. About 2 hours on the phone later I realised that Microsoft unfortunately do not have a clue and nobody was able to give me a straight answer or even a ballpark figure. I was bounced around to several departments until eventually someone said that this service is purchased through the reseller channel. This doesn’t really make sense as the BPOS service itself can basically be purchased direct so why not the data import?
Our reseller is Ingram Micro, but their price list is only available to people with an account – useless for a tech like me who is trying to get some data together. However, CDW came to the rescue and this service is available by purchasing the “Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive Historical Data Load at a cost of $60 per user (not per GB as in the original Microsoft documentation). The part number is 74P-00053. If you have an Enterprise Select agreement the part number is 74P-0059 but the price is still the same.

I’m not sure why Microsoft can’t give this price in the original web page and say to contact your normal reseller for more information.
Once the order has been placed there are more hoops to go through to get the data sent to Microsoft. The data can apparently be ftp’d to Microsoft – I’m hoping this is actually secure ftp – but as most users are going to have many Mb’s or Gb’s of data the normal scenario is to put the data onto a USB drive. I was pleased and also surprised to see they support Truecrypt. For more details of the process, continue to read the rest of the entry.

Email Exchange / Outlook Microsoft

BPOS active Directory Synchronization does not work on 64bit or domain controllers.

By Andy on Friday, July 2, 2010

Thinking about BPOS to host the exchange mail for your small office? – I discovered a small gotcha this afternoon but first a couple of thoughts in our recent experiences between Google Apps and Microsoft BPOS.

We’ve had several requests from clients to host their email in the cloud using services like google apps or Microsoft Hosted Exchange. Our first deployments were with google apps due to the lower cost per year, but as we’ve found out the support from Google is severely lacking. We had a peculiar issue where one users email sent through outlook would get marked as spam all the time, yet if they used the gmail web interface and sent exactly the same content the mail would get sent with no problems. The service that marks the destination mail as spam is postini – now owned by Google so it should really be a simple matter of turning over the problem to Google to investigate. Unfortunately Google’s response so our request was basically “thanks – if we feel like getting back to you, we might do – in a couple of days”. As it turned out, the issue was resolved by deleting the google sync profile and recreating it again.

Contrast this to a Microsoft issue which started off as a pre-sales technical call to get a user id setup and ended up with the gtlv owa issue I blogged about earlier. I had several calls from Microsoft within an hour to work on the issue. They worked really hard to ensure my problems were solved and it almost felt like they were harassing me as they kept following up for a status even though I’d told them a couple of times that I was happy for the case to be closed – I even got a call at 5pm on Saturday afternoon from support – something I’ve not experienced (at least from a end user experience!)

So, after singing Microsoft’s praises – the gotcha. Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange service has a directory sync service that synchronises AD information to the cloud ready for newly created users and distribution lists to appear in the hosted exchange environment. Unfortunately, according to the Directory Synchronization prerequisites the server needs to be running 32bit AND not be a domain controller. Unfortunately for small companies just starting out from a peer to peer network and getting their first server (but don’t want SBS2008 for some reason), this first server is very likely to be 64bit (crazy not to nowadays) and also a domain controller – possibly/probably even THE domain controller. Installing a 32bit member server is totally out of the question. It’s not *that* big a deal as all the information can be created online, but it’s twice the amount of data entry along with the possibility of typos but also every AD change of membership and user creation/deletion now needs to be duplicated online. For large organizations this is not going to be a problem as they’ll likely have extra servers lying around, but for small businesses this is very unlikely. For very large organizations (ie Universities hosting mail through live.edu) it seems that the AD sync program actually requires extra software functionality with the Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) package (however I’m not too familiar with these details just yet)

This is the second flaw in Microsoft’s online feature list that extols the virtues of Microsoft vs Google that I’ve found – Active Directory synchronization is not always possible and the other is the benefit of not having to download an application to synchronize data from outlook to the cloud/google – fair enough a client doesn’t have to be downloaded for that application but instead a single signon client needs to be downloaded to prevent the various Microsoft apps asking for the password multiple times. I did think that was the whole point of the “save password” option is for in the outlook and browser applications!

I was also really surprised that the Exchange online is not running Exchange2010 – the Outlook Web App is so much nicer in 2010 compared to 2007 – as I run Outlook 2010 at home and Exchange2010 in the office I’m spoilt (but I still need Office 2010 on the work laptop – thats hopefully coming real soon)

Tag Archives: BPOS

Fixed: “Server is busy or you’ve lost your internet connection” when changing a BPOS password

Cost for bulk uploading to Microsoft’s Exchange Hosted Archive