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Quick Thoughts: Operating Between G Suite and Office 365

(I’ve decided to change things up a little bit and add some tech opinions every now and then, especially since I’ve changed jobs and I am now working for a medium-large school district. I’m titling these, “Quick Thoughts” that I’m going to write during my lunch breaks. Perhaps first of many…)

As a systems engineer for a school district, one of the tasks I have is to assist in the configuration and maintenance of our end-users working with whatever tools are offered by and Microsoft and Google. At our school district, we are primarily a G Suite shop, with students and staff working within the G Suite apps, but what about the tools that Microsoft offers with Office 365 such as OneNote, Microsoft Classroom, and others? How do we, as the administrators of such tools, give these users the ability to work with whatever tools they want?

It seems a bit difficult at times because each platform, G Suite and Office 365, appear to really rely on their email services to leverage alerts and messaging, so if you miss a conversation in Skype for Business, you’ll only receive the email within your Exchange email, but you won’t receive it on the Gmail side. I’m not entirely sure this is a two-way street on the Google side, as I’ve seem to have no problems logging into services like Meetup.com with my G Suite account, but receive my emails from the account on my Office 365 account.

It seems like Google is playing fair with their services, but Microsoft certainly doesn’t seem that way. So do we move email services to Office 365, and will this provide our users a better experience?

I’m not sure, and of course I don’t make those decisions, but I do think about it.

Maybe the more accurate question is “How cleanly can users operate in both worlds?” Sadly, while Google appears to behave better than Microsoft, this behavior actually hurts them a little bit for organizations like ours that want to use both services, as it forces us to consider using Exchange services for email to make the overall user experience better.

Microsoft seems to be the bad actor in this situation because they’re services don’t behave well with email systems other than Exchange. Even on-premise Exchange takes a bit of work to get working with Office 365 services.

Microsoft really wants all the business and tries to push organizations that way, but Google plays better with others, and Google’s platform seems to be more easily adopted by teachers than Microsoft’s (especially evident by how much marketing Microsoft has to do for education).

Of course, I’m assuming Google does play nice, but I haven’t tested every Google product, but Google has shown signs of not playing nice too, like dropping XMPP support for Hangouts, but that’s another conversation, and I’ve got to head back to work.

Exchange 2016 Updates: Don’t forget to activate the components!

I’ve done a number of Exchange and Skype for Business server deployments over the last year, and recently I moved to Exchange 2016 versus 2013 just to get the deployments up and running on the latest. However, after performing my upgrade to Exchange 2016 (per these instructions), my EWS connections between Skype for Business and Exchange were not working correctly. Of course, Exchange isn’t fully running for anyone, I’m still testing things out, so not a big deal, but still. What the hell is going on?

In S4B, when I run Test-CSExStorageConnectivity, I’m getting “Test-CsExStorageConnectivity : ExCreateItem exchange operation failed, code=50043”.

testcsexstorageconnectivityerror

The standard response, and search result in Google, for a 50043 error is to check and make sure that your “ExchangeAutodiscoverUrl” property after running Get-CSOAuthConfiguration is configured for the Exchange server’s autodiscover metadata json URL (“https://<exchangeAutodiscover>/autodiscover/metadata/json/1”). But what happens if you’ve already checked that? The URL is correct and you’re good to go, so what changed?

Wait, didn’t I say I upgraded to the latest Exchange 2016 CU (CU3)? Did I completely follow the instructions?

Hmm..let’s check the Exchange server components (something new, AFAIK, to Exchange 2016):

Well. Guess I didn’t the follow instructions at the end that states you to have run the following:

Set-ServerComponentState EX2016SRV1 –Component ServerWideOffline –State Active –Requester Maintenance

followtheinstructions

I’m going to start tagging moments like this as ‘ya dummy’ moments.

Now, let’s check the component status:

get-servercomponentsactive

And then running Test-CSExStorageConnectivty works, and all is well.

So I guess one thing to look at if you’re getting a 50043 error and your have the Metadata URL correct is to verify that EWS is running on your Exchange box.

Skype for Business: “Prerequisite installation failed: MSSpeech_TTS_pt-BR_Heloisa”

While doing a Skype for Business deployment, I encountered this strange error that was preventing the S4B server components from installing: “Prerequisite installation failed: MSSpeech_TTS_pt-BR_Heloisa”.

The log file showed the following:

languageErrors

After doing some Googling, the consensus was to find the MSI file and replace it.

The file was located here: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Skype for Business Server\Deployment\cache\6.0.9319.0\setup\speech\pt-BR\

However, the question was where to get the speech files. I tried getting them from the ISO, but it appeared the files on the ISO were corrupted, so I had to get the files here:

Microsoft Speech Platform – Server Runtime Languages (Version 10.1)

I ended downloading what I needed, but subsequent MSI files were also having problems, so I ended up just replacing MSIs in the the directories “pt-BR” through “zh-TW” just to be safe.

The installation then continued successfully as expected.

Hope this helps someone.

Update (06/07/16): Had this problem again (forgot to replace ISO), and I found out that if you keep the S4B ISO mounted or DVD in the system, then S4B will re-download the bad packages from the ISO/DVD. Dismount or eject the media, then copy the MSI files.

Update 2 (09/20/16): You can also just re-download the ISO. Problem solved. 😀

How to Find the Microsoft Store GPO in Server 2012 and 2012 R2

Edit (02/15/16): I learned recently that a better approach is to just copy the Administrative Templates from group policy on a workstation and copy it into your AD administrative templates. Not as ridiculous, but still annoying.

This is probably one of the most ridiculous things I’ve encountered.

If you’re a system administrator, you sure as hell don’t want to deal with the Microsoft Store for your image deployments. It’s a superfluous piece of software that’s imposed on us, and Microsoft doesn’t give any tools during the deployment to get rid of it.

They make it even more difficult in a very asinine way to get the GPO you need to manage the Store.

In order to get the Store GPO, you have to install the ‘Desktop Experience’ feature.

Why Microsoft decided to do this is beyond me. Why would do I have to install a piece of bloat on my servers in order to get the GPO to manage the Microsoft Store?

Then you can go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Store.