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Setting Office 365 User Passwords to Never Expire

The default policy for Office 365 user accounts is to automatically expire their passwords after 90 days.

Some of our users experienced this today and the most annoying thing about it was that they were not warned beforehand about it. They were simply locked out their account until they changed it there and then; unlike the Windows OS counterpart which gives you a comfortable 15 day warning before forcing you to change your password.

Anyway, this article will tell you how to set the password expiry from 90 days to never.
Office 365 already enforces a strong password policy BUT I do not recommend you change this setting if your users often use public terminals or are prone to writing their passwords on sticky notes and keeping them under their keyboards 🙂

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Archiving a User’s Mailbox on Office 365

So an employee has left the company and you now need to archive the mailbox due to legal and/or company policies.
This article will give you a quick overview on how you can achieve this goal on an Office 365 mailbox while maintaining the integrity and security of your organisation’s 365 account.
Although not necessary, I recommend (as a pre-requisite) disabling account ‘sign-in’ capabilities and resetting the user account password.
This will prevent the user from logging in to the account and messing around with it whilst you are attempting to archive their mailbox.

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Disable Remote PowerShell for Office365 Users

For one reason or another, you may want to disable remote PowerShell access for all the users in your organisation.
The main reason for doing so would be to prevent ‘reconnaissance’ type attacks whereby a user will try to gain information about your network/organisation/topology/system etc by simply running (in this case) PowerShell queries against your organisation.

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Add E-mail Aliases to Your Office 365 Distribution Groups

If you’ve set up distribution groups on Office 365, you will notice a section in the DG ‘details’ page titled ‘E-Mail Options’… under this title is the following text:
“The group can receive messages sent to the following addresses.”

From this, you can safely assume that it is possible to add e-mail aliases to the group so that the group can receive e-mails sent to several different e-mails.
Sadly, there is no easy way of actually doing this via the UI so it must be done via a PowerShell command…

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Using Adsiedit to Add or Remove E-mail Aliases on On-Premises Active Directory – Office 365

If you are synchronising your Office 365 account with your on-premises exchange/Active Directory, you will know that you cannot edit exchange user properties using the Office 365 administrator portal.
If you try, you will come across this error or a similar one:

The operation on mailbox “X” failed because it’s out of the current user’s write scope. The action ‘Set-Mailbox’, ‘EmailAddresses’, can’t be performed on the object ‘X’ because the object is being synchronized from your on-premises organization. This action should be performed on the object in your on-premises organization.

The reason for this is due to the fact that the AD and O365 are synchronised. Office 365 knows this and does not allow you to make any changes on O365 if there is a corresponding attribute that links up with your Active Directory.