The next part in my Lab setup now that I’ve gotten network configured is to actually no longer touch my new Lab machine… While that might sound strange at first, the reason for this is simple. My Lab should be a headless server, stuffed in a cabinet somewhere with power and a network connection and I should be able to do ALL my management tasks remotely. This should be a simple task you’d say, but for the sake of clarity [and to learn this process better myself] I have decided to write down all the steps required to do this.

Since I’ve decided to get more serious about updating my skills and knowledge again [also why I started blogging], I thought about getting a proper lab setup. The goal is to have a small, portable but powerful Hyper-V based lab which I can carry along with me from home and to work if need be. Now I tend to have a test setup on my home machine and one on my work laptop, depending on what I need at that moment.

I’m loving the way Microsoft is currently pushing PowerShell as THE go-to tool required to manage all your solutions. I’m at a loss however at why they aren’t providing out of the box solutions so that you can manage all of your workstations/servers through PowerShell. Sure, you can head over to every machine and configure PowerShell using 1 Enable-PSRemoting However I can understand that people have better things to do with their time [I sure do!

Today I ran into an issue where I had to quickly import x amount of users into an empty trial tenant from Office 365 in order for to prepare the future mail migration. Because I'm trying to get everything running through PowerShell, I thought this would be a nice moment to document everything for future use and for other people to see how it's done [or give tips 😉 ] Getting user information from Active Directory First of all I had to get the current user information from Active Directory in a format that I can use in

In order to manage your Office 365 tenant(s) using PowerShell, there are some pre-requisites required. Ensure you are running Windows 8.1, Windows 8, or Windows 7. Make sure you have the .NET Framework 3.51 feature [enabled by default on Windows 8 and up] Make sure you have the latest updates. It is important to run this after you install .NET Framework 3.51, so you get updates for that in addition to updates for your operating system.