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Migrate SBS 2011 Standard to Windows Server 2016

March 28, 2017 by Robert Pearman 174 Comments

Your trusty old SBS 2011 is finally being retired. It had a good run. It probably still works but you cant get the parts, and the cloud is so appealing and for whatever reason you have, you are putting in a new on premises DC.

Hey, you don’t have to justify it to me. Chances are you shipped Exchange off to the cloud long ago, your clients never really ‘got’ SharePoint and SQL was just used by the backup software and WSUS.

The only thing we want to migrate is Active Directory and File & Print services. Read more of this post

Filed under Exchange, General, PowerShell, SBS S, Tips & Tricks Tagged with Active Directory, Migration, SBS 2011, Server 2016

PowerShell Password Reminder Script Updated!

February 21, 2017 by Robert Pearman 19 Comments

Today I finally released my updated version of the now infamous, PowerShell Password Reminder script.

It has been a long time coming, and I have tried to incorporate a lot of the feedback (if not all from the 230 Q&As from the TechNet Gallery.

Now on GitHub https://github.com/titlerequired/public

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Filed under General, PowerShell, Tips & Tricks Tagged with Email, Password, PowerShell

DHCP Option Values and PowerShell

February 16, 2017 by Robert Pearman 2 Comments

Following on from my previous post, i wanted to share a small bit of PowerShell i created whilst on a site visit.

This was before i had worked on Vendor Classes but actually follows on quite nicely. In the previous post i mentioned a requirement to set an alternate NTP Server address, and used 1.uk.pool.ntp.org.

For those who may have worked with those NTP Servers in the past you may know that (as the name suggests) they are a pool of servers and the IP address returned changes frequently. So, setting that value statically and forgetting about it led me to find a new Phone on a clients desk was not syncing the time. Read more of this post

Filed under General, PowerShell, Tips & Tricks Tagged with DHCP, Option Value, Power Shell

Manage Multiple Office 365 Tenants from PowerShell

July 28, 2016 by Robert Pearman 14 Comments

Yep, another PowerShell themed post.

This is something I cobbled together a few years back, never thought it was worth sharing, but sitting here this evening with nothing much to do decided to write it up.

At it’s core it is not much more than a method of automating entering credentials to your various Office 365 ‘Clients’. I say ‘’clients” because I do not know if that is the correct terminology. If you are the Partner of Record or even if you are supporting more than one tenant on 365 this may be useful to you.

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Filed under General, PowerShell, Tips & Tricks Tagged with Automation, Office 365, PowerShell

SBS 2011 Standard – Disable TLS 1.0

December 14, 2015 by Robert Pearman 79 Comments

Post Updated 05/07/16

So you have completed a PCI Compliance scan, and you need to disable TLS 1.0?

You may have found the instructions here from TechNet which explain how to edit the registry to disable TLS 1.0, SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0. What they don’t go onto explain is that this will break your RDP/RDP Gateway Connections.

Given that , as I understand it, the requirement to disable TLS 1.0 is being enforced from June 2016 I thought it was worth running through and sharing the process.

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Filed under General, PowerShell, SBS S, Tips & Tricks Tagged with PCI, RDP, SSL, TLS

Quick Fix: Office 365 DirSync Hide a user from Global Address List

November 20, 2015 by Robert Pearman 18 Comments

This week i have been working on some process automation, around a user leaving an organisation using Office 365.

DirSync (and it’s newer iterations) has been a very useful for Password Sync and User creation, however it can be a bit of a drag when it comes to editing mailbox settings. In this case, Hiding a user from the Global Address List.

So to hide the Mailbox from our Office 365 Address List we need to use ADSIEdit and change the msExchHideFromAddressLists attribute to True, then wait for DirSync to do it’s thing. Read more of this post

Filed under Exchange, General, PowerShell, Quick Fix, Tips & Tricks Tagged with DirSync, Exchange, Global Address List, Hide Users, Office 365

Install Windows Server Essentials with a Custom Domain Suffix

June 27, 2015 by Robert Pearman 2 Comments

After a brief argument with Susan Bradley, and i use the term brief and argument loosely, Grey Lancaster and i were left with a problem…

So can someone blog that/post that on TechNet so that folks aren’t hacking up what they are doing now?

Grey, of course, deferred to me. So here i am Saturday night and I’m writing this. I don’t mind of course because i have nothing better to do, but i digress.

Yes, you can install Essentials 2012 R2 (and probably other versions) with any domain suffix, not just the “.local” that the Essentials Configuration Wizard (ECW) will default to..

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