Little Tricks

Creating Connectors in Exchange Online

Connectors are an important basis for sending and receiving email in on-premises deployments of Exchange. In Exchange Online, you can also configure in the Admin Center from the connectors menu item. For example, you can define settings to stipulate where email is to be sent from the Internet, from partner organizations, or from other sources. The email that local Exchange servers send to Exchange Online can also be configured by connectors.

From the recipients | groups menu you can create your own distribution lists and groups in the Exchange Online Admin Center. Distribution lists receive their own email address. If an email goes to this address, all members of the distribution list will receive the message. This process also works for receiving email from outside the Office 365 subscription. In this case, you need to enable the Senders inside and outside of my organization option in delivery management in the distribution list properties.

Encrypting Email

Microsoft has integrated functions for encrypting email in Office 365, which means that users no longer have to take action themselves or make a special request to clients. The corresponding options for configuring message encryption can be found in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. In the web interface, the options are available under Admin Center and the selection of Exchange . You can access the page directly from https://outlook.office365.com/ecp.

Under mail flow | rules you can access the email rules for the organization. At this point you can create various transport rules. To create a new rule for message encryption, select the Apply Office 365 Message Encryption and rights protection to messages option when creating a new rule (Figure 1). The Apply this rule if drop-down lets you specify which email messages should be encrypted.

Figure 1: Message encryption rules enable secure communication without user intervention.

The functions for encryption are available in the Follow these rules item, which is where you determine how Office 365 should handle the messages. Under Do the following , activate the option Change message security | Apply Office 365 message encryption and rights protection to encrypt email.

Connecting Exchange with Office 365

With the Microsoft Hybrid Agent, local Exchange servers can be operated together with Office 365. Microsoft thus offers a tool that lets you connect local Exchange installations to Exchange Online. A script is also available online [4] that you can use to test the connection. After downloading, copy the file into the PowerShell Modules directory. The quickest way to open this directory is to use:

Cd $PSHome\Modules

For the script to work, you temporarily need to set the PowerShell script execution policy to Unrestricted, import the PowerShell script into PowerShell as a module, and test the connection:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted
Import modules .\HybridManagement.psm1
Test-HybridConnectivity -testO365Endpoints

By the way, Microsoft offers the free Office 365 IdFix tool that you can use to fix problems and incorrect data during Office 365 synchronization with local directories (e.g., Active Directory). The tool detects duplicates and incorrect formatting. You can download the IdFix DirSync Error Remediation Tool on GitHub [5].