Posts

veeam office 365

How to manage Office 365 backup data with Veeam

As companies grow, data grows and so does the backup data. Managing data is always an important aspect of the business. A common question we get around Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is how to manage the backup data in case something changes. Data management can be needed for several reasons:

  • Migration to new backup storage
  • Modification of backup jobs
  • Removal of data related to a former employee

Within Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, we can easily perform these tasks via PowerShell. Let’s take a closer look at how this works exactly.

Moving data between repositories

Whether you need to move data because you bought new storage or because of a change in company policy, from time to time it will occur. We can move backup data by leveraging Move-VBOEntityData. This will move the organization entity data from one repository to another and can move the following types of data:

  • User data
  • Group data
  • Organization site data

The first two are related to Exchange and OneDrive for Business data, where the last option is related to SharePoint online data. Each of these types also supports four additional data types such as Mailbox, ArchiveMailbox, OneDrive and Sites.

If we want to move data, we need three parameters, by default, to perform the move:

  • Source repository
  • Target repository
  • Type of data

The example below will move all the data related to a specific user account:

$source = Get-VBORepository -Name “sourceRepo”
$target = Get-VBORepository -Name “targetRepo”
$user = Get-VBOEntityData -Type User -Repository $source -Name “Niels Engelen”

Move-VBOEntityData -From $source -To $target -User $user -Confirm:$false

The result of the move can be seen within the history tab in the console. As seen on the screenshot, all the data is being moved to the target repository. However, it is possible to adjust this and only move, for example, mailbox and archive mailbox data.

Move-VBOEntityData -From $source -To $target -User $user -Mailbox -ArchiveMailbox-Confirm:$false

As seen on the screenshot, this will only move the two specific data types and leave the OneDrive for Business and personal SharePoint site on the source repository.

Deleting data from repositories

We went over moving data between repositories, but what if somebody leaves the company and the data related to their account has to be removed? Again, we can leverage PowerShell to easily perform this task by using Remove-VBOEntityData.

The same algorithm applies here. We can remove three types of data, with the option to drill down to a specific data type (Mailbox, ArchiveMailbox, OneDrive, Sites):

  • User data
  • Group data
  • Organization site data

If we want to remove data from a specific user, we can use the following snippet:

$repository = Get-VBORepository -Name “repository”
$user = Get-VBOEntityData -Type User -Repository $ repository -Name “Niels Engelen”

Remove-VBOEntityData -Repository $repository -User $user -Confirm:$false

The same applies here. You can choose not to add an extra parameter and it will remove everything related to the account. However, it is also possible to provide extra options. If you only want to remove OneDrive for Business data, you can do this by using the following:

Remove-VBOEntityData -Repository $repository -User $user -OneDrive-Confirm:$false

This article was provided by our service partner : veeam

 

 

 

 

Veeam’s Office 365 backup

It is no secret anymore, you need a backup for Microsoft Office 365! While Microsoft is responsible for the infrastructure and its availability, you are responsible for the data as it is your data. And to fully protect it, you need a backup. It is the individual company’s responsibility to be in control of their data and meet the needs of compliance and legal requirements. In addition to having an extra copy of your data in case of accidental deletion, here are five more reasons WHY you need a backup.

Office 365 backup 1

With that quick overview out of the way, let’s dive straight into the new features.

Increased backup speeds from minutes to seconds

With the release of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v2, Veeam added support for protecting SharePoint and OneDrive for Business data. Now with v3, we are improving the backup speed of SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business incremental backups by integrating with the native Change API for Microsoft Office 365. By doing so, this speeds up backup times up to 30 times which is a huge game changer! The feedback we have seen so far is amazing and we are convinced you will see the difference as well.

Improved security with multi-factor authentication support

Multi-factor authentication is an extra layer of security with multiple verification methods for an Office 365 user account. As multi-factor authentication is the baseline security policy for Azure Active Directory and Office 365, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v3 adds support for it. This capability allows Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v3 to connect to Office 365 securely by leveraging a custom application in Azure Active Directory along with MFA-enabled service account with its app password to create secure backups.

Office 365 backup 2

From a restore point of view, this will also allow you to perform secure restores to Office 365.

Office 365 backup 3

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v3 will still support basic authentication, however, using multi-factor authentication is advised.

Enhanced visibility

By adding Office 365 data protection reports, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 will allow you to identify unprotected Office 365 user mailboxes as well as manage license and storage usage. Three reports are available via the GUI (as well as PowerShell and RESTful API).

License Overview report gives insight in your license usage. It shows detailed information on licenses used for each protected user within the organization. As a Service Provider, you will be able to identify the top five tenants by license usage and bring the license consumption under control.

Storage Consumption report shows how much storage is consumed by the repositories of the selected organization. It will give insight on the top-consuming repositories and assist you with daily change rate and growth of your Office 365 backup data per repository.

Office 365 backup 4

Mailbox Protection report shows information on all protected and unprotected mailboxes helping you maintain visibility of all your business-critical Office 365 mailboxes. As a Service Provider, you will especially benefit from the flexibility of generating this report either for all tenant organizations in the scope or a selected tenant organization only.

Office 365 backup 5

Simplified management for larger environments

Microsoft’s Extensible Storage Engine has a file size limit of 64 TB per year. The workaround for this, for larger environments, was to create multiple repositories. Starting with v3, this limitation and the manual workaround is eliminated! Veeam’s storage repositories are intelligent enough to know when you are about to hit a file size limit, and automatically scale out the repository, eliminating this file size limit issue. The extra databases will be easy to identify by their numerical order, should you need it:

Office 365 backup 6

Flexible retention options

Before v3, the only available retention policy was based on items age, meaning Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 backed up and stored the Office 365 data (Exchange, OneDrive and SharePoint lists items) which was created or modified within the defined retention period.

Item-level retention works similar to how classic document archive works:

  • First run: We collect ALL items that are younger (attribute used is the change date) than the chosen retention (importantly, this could mean that not ALL items are taken).
  • Following runs: We collect ALL items that have been created or modified (again, attribute used is the change date) since the previous run.
  • Retention processing: Happens at the chosen time interval and removes all items where the change date became older than the chosen retention.

This retention type is particularly useful when you want to make sure you don’t store content for longer than the required retention time, which can be important for legal reasons.

Starting with Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v3, you can also leverage a “snapshot-based” retention type option. Within the repository settings, v3 offers two options to choose from: Item-level retention (existing retention approach) and Snapshot-based retention (new).

Snapshot-based retention works similar to image-level backups that many Veeam customers are so used to:

  • First run: We collect ALL items no matter what the change date is. Thus, the first backup is an exact copy (snapshot) of an Exchange mailbox / OneDrive account / SharePoint site state as it looks at that point in time.
  • Following runs: We collect ALL new items that have been created or modified (attribute used here is the change date) since the previous run. Which means that the backup represents again an exact copy (snapshot) of the mailbox/site/folder state as it looks at that point in time.
  • Retention processing: During clean-up, we will remove all items belonging to snapshots of mailbox/site/folder that are older than the retention period.

Retention is a global setting per repository. Also note that once you set your retention option, you will not be able to change it.

Other enhancements

As Microsoft released new major versions for both Exchange and SharePoint, we have added support for Exchange and SharePoint 2019. We have made a change to the interface and now support internet proxies. This was already possible in previous versions by leveraging a change to the XML configuration, however, starting from Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v3, it is now an option within the GUI. As an extra, you can even configure an internet proxy per any of your Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 remote proxies.  All of these new options are also available via PowerShell and the RESTful API for all the automation lovers out there.

Office 365 backup 7

On the point of license capabilities, we have added two new options as well:

  • Revoking an unneeded license is now available via PowerShell
  • Service Providers can gather license and repository information per tenant via PowerShell and the RESTful API and create custom reports

To keep a clean view on the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 console, Service Providers can now give organizations a custom name.

Office 365 backup 8

Based upon feature requests, starting with Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v3, it is possible to exclude or include specific OneDrive for Business folders per job. This feature is available via PowerShell or RESTful API. Go to the What’s New page for a full list of all the new capabilities in Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.

This article was supplied by our service partner : veeam.com

office365

Introducing the Office 365 Secure Score

Ever wonder how secure your Office 365 organization really is? Time to stop wondering – the Office 365 Secure Score is here to help. Secure Score analyzes your Office 365 organization’s security based on your regular activities and security settings and assigns a score. Think of it as a credit score for security.

How do I get to Secure Score?

Anyone who has admin permissions (global admin or a custom admin role) for an Office 365 Business Premium or Enterprise subscription can access the Secure Score at https://securescore.office.com. Users who aren’t assigned an admin role won’t be able to access Secure Score. However, admins can use the tool to share their results with other people in their organization.

How does it work?

Secure Score figures out what Office 365 services you’re using (like OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange) then looks at your settings and activities and compares them to a baseline established by Microsoft. You’ll get a score based on how aligned you are with best security practices.

office365 secure score

If you want to improve your score, review the action queue to see what you can do to help increase security and reduce risks.

secure score 1

Expand an action to learn about what threats it’ll help protect you from and how you’ll get the job done.

To see the impact of your actions on your organization’s security, go to the Score Analyzer page and review your history.

Click any data point to see a breakdown of your score for that day. You can scroll down to see which controls were enabled and how many points you earned that day for each control.

How will it help me?

Using Secure Score helps increase your organization’s security by encouraging you to use the built-in security features in Office 365 (many of which you already purchased but might not be aware of). Learning more about these features as you use the tool will help give you piece of mind that you’re taking the right steps to protect your organization from threats.

But don’t just take our word for it. Customers who are using Secure Score have seen their score increase 5 times more than customers who aren’t using it. (The increase in score corresponds with the security features being used in their organizations.)

Check out this Microsoft blog post to learn more.

Microsoft enhances troubleshooting support for Office365

There’s a new tool from Microsoft for Office365 that scans files for headache-inducing problems in OneDrive for Business

It appears that last week Microsoft added a new and largely unheralded capability to the Office 365 checker tool.

A change to Microsoft’s main troubleshooting article for OneDrive for Business, KB 3125202, added a reference to an option in the Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant for Office 365 tool that can be used to scan for files that are too big, file and folder names that have invalid characters, for path names that exceed the length limit, and several other headache-inducing problems. This appears to be a new capability for the Office 365 checker tool.

Here’s what the new information says:

Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant for Office 365

The Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant for Office 365 is a tool that can diagnose and fix many common Office 365 problems. The OneDrive for Business option “I’m having a problem with OneDrive for Business” now scans for the following issues:

  • Checks the option to manually or automatically update the NGSC+B to its latest version.
  • Reports all files that have sizes exceeding the limit.
  • Reports all files that have invalid characters in the names.
  • Reports all folders that have invalid characters or strings in the names.
  • Reports all paths exceeding the limit and provides a link to this KB article.

The tool is available from http://diagnostics.outlook.com. When you run this tool, the initial page will display several options, including the new option for OneDrive for Business: “I’m having a problem with OneDrive for Business.”

This looks like an excellent tool for anyone troubleshooting OneDrive for Business problems.

 

This is a repost from InfoWorld

Office 2013 Activation error of death solved!

O365 Office 2013 Activation error code 0x8004FC12

This is something that has been annoying me for a while.  It only happens on my home computer and will not go away.  I’ve tried reinstalling setting up new profiles, un-associating my personal O365 account, repairing Office.  I even gave up and started using Office 2010.

The problem doesn’t occur on any of my other Windows 10 machines, yet a search on the Internet shows I’m not alone.  All the forums show frustrated people trying everything, only to end up being told to reinstall a clean copy of Windows 10 (uhh…no).

Luckily, on a tangent day, I decided to check up on the error messages.  To my surprise, I found a promising Microsoft article:

Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 – Briefing

Backgrounder:

Like everything Microsoft, downloading and applying updates and patches are the key to keeping your computer running efficiently.  Today, we are focusing on Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2.

It has been more than a year (December 2007) since Microsoft has released a single service pack to keep computers up-to-date without having to download a bunch of little patches.  This significantly reduces deployment times for any oganization.  Furthermore, while most service packs are just a compilation of previous released patches and fixes (through February 2009), Office 2007 SP2 will also include feature enhancements and performance enhancements.  Will the PDF support mean the end of downloading Acrobat Reader?  We’ll see…

Release Date:

End of April 2009.

Changes, Fixes, Patches, Enhancements:

  • Support for Open Document Format (ODF), XML Paper Specification (XPS) and Portable Document Format (PDF).
  • Improved Outlook Calendaring reliability.
  • Improved Outlook performance.
  • Enabling Object Model support for Charts in Microsoft Ofice PowerPoint 2007 and Microsoft Office Word 2007.
  • Improved cryptographic functionality by supporting all cryptographic algorithms offered by the operating system.
  • Improved functionality in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 charting mechanism.
  • Ability to ungroup SmartArt graphics (and as a result, the ability to add animations to them in PowerPoint 2007).
  • Ability for Visio 2007 to export UML models to an XML file compliant with the XMI standard.
  • Tool that enables the uninstallation of Office client Service Packs

Where can you get it?

Direct File Download Link

Downloads page link

Release info link