Tools/Utilities

Office 365 – Fast Track Network Analysis (EMEA) Connectivity/Bandwidth tester

Posted by Parm Bajwa on 10 Feb, 2015 in Office 365, Office 365, Tools/Utilities | 1 comment

If you are having issues with connecting to office 365 services in your office I recommend running the following tool to test your connectivity.  Its quite a thourgh test

http://em1-fasttrack.cloudapp.net/o365nwtest

• The first check is a port test to see if the ports are open.

1. SMTP – (TCP-25)
2. HTTP – (TCP-80)
3. https – (TCP-443)
4. imap – (TCP-993)
5. pop – (TCP-995)
6. stun – (UDP-3478)
7. lyncpush – (TCP-5223)
8. rtp-audio – (UDP-50000-50019)
9. rtp-video (UDP – 50020-50039)
10. lyncft – (TCP – 50040-50059)

• The second test is a route (hop) test
• The third test is a speed test.

• VoIP Test which is a jitter and packet loss test

• Capacity test which shows the amount of packets the upload/download can handle without packet lost.

• Round Trip time

• Packet loss

• The next three tabs show the data in graphical, summary and advanced forms. If you click on the summary tab and select test audit report this will bring up a URL you can copy and use later to bring back the results of this report.

• Having a high consistency of service is required to make sure you do not get outlook connection dropouts (80%+)

Office 365 – Azure Active Directory Sync Tool (password changes)

Posted by Parm Bajwa on 10 Feb, 2015 in Azure Active Directory Sync, Office 365, Tools/Utilities | 0 comments

If you are using office 365 you may be using the Azure Active Directory Sync Tool to sync up your active directory to office 365.

You are probably aware that by default DirSync runs by default every three hours. I have seen various websites showing how to change the default setting in the Config. file (Microsoft.Online.DirSync.Scheduler) to make the sync happen faster. The main reason is to sync up the changes faster. I have found that this is not necessary to sync password changes up faster as the DirSync tool will sync up the passwords within about 3 minutes in the background. It won’t sync the AD changes such as a change in name but will sync the password in the background.

The details of the sync can be found in the event viewing searching for event ID 656 which is the password sync request ID. You will see the time stamp a couple of minutes after the password is reset.

There are various IDs that you can search for regarding the sync. The list below is taken from the Microsoft site (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2855271)

Office 365 – Azure Active Directory Sync Tool (Synchronisation Service Manager)

Posted by Parm Bajwa on 10 Feb, 2015 in Azure Active Directory Sync, Office 365, Tools/Utilities | 0 comments

You can monitor and see the status of previous syncs to see what information has been synced up by the Azure Active Directory Sync using the Synchronisation Service Manager. By default you can find this application in the following folder:

C:\Program Files\Windows Azure Active Directory Sync\SYNCBUS\Synchronization Service\UIShell\miisclient.exe

When running the application you will see the screen looking like this:

You can see the previous syncs and the details of what information has been synced by double clicking the relevant name and selecting the relevant export statistics in the bottom left hand corner.