Last year I had tried to create a tool which will include many methods to make the work easier for Office 365 Administrators. Mainly it all started with an idea to minimize the usage of PowerShell for simple tasks which could have been added to the portal or EXO but they are not. Secondly, there are some things which look just impossible to be done from the browser (OAC and EAC). One more thing which I felt as a support engineer was, why we need to teach the customers PowerShell and its cmdlets when they are least bothered and want to run their business with emails working properly for them. Especially, in the case of Customers with less number of licenses. The idea here is not moving away from PowerShell but giving a choice to the customers from GUI and PowerShell. The people who love GUI can still create and run their scripts in CLI but people who are comfortable with GUI sometimes don’t have a choice in Office 365.

This was just the beginning and alpha version of this software but I have not worked on it after that due to some other reasons.

Requirements:

.Net Framework 4.0

Azure AD Module for PowerShell

Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant

Things which are currently there in the tool:

1. Login using admin account, which runs the same script as we do it while connecting Windows PowerShell to EXO.

2. Recipients tab has different buttons to pull up the list of user mailboxes, shared mailboxes, contacts, groups etc.

3. You can click on the small ‘/’ symbol below ‘mailbox’ button to edit/view the properties of a mailbox.

4. Right now, only the general properties button is functioning and you can only save the firstname, initials and lastname.

5. In the ‘Tools’ tab, there is MCA and other tools will be added soon.

6. ‘ScriptBuilder’ is very important part of this tool which lets the user create customized scripts and save them or run them. (Credits: Sanatan Sanadhya ) It was his idea when I discussed this project that administrators should be able to create their own scripts and add them to use it later. It lacks a lot of things and will be improved the later versions. Right now for testing you can only select ‘Msolusers’ from Input, nothing from filter and ‘PasswordNeverExpires’ in the action field.

7. ‘ScriptExplorer’ shows the saved scripts which were created from ScriptBuilder.

There were many more things I wanted to add in this tool but as I told have not worked on it and left it as it was. I wanted to share this as it could be of some help to others doing research on same lines. You can get the code from the GitHub link and play with it in Visual Studio. Please contact me to get the word file which describes a basic way to use this tool’s executable.

Republished from cloudsentinelsstudio's blog post, Feb 11 2016

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