Steps to adding and verifying a domain:

One thing you need to know about the steps we take here – if you currently have any production mail servers or websites in use with the domain you’re going to verify, you need to expect some down time. Even if you perform all the steps exactly right, the possibility is still there.

Ok from the main screen of the Office 365 Portal let’s click Admin.

In the left hand column find Domains

In the center of the screen find Add a domain

This brings us to the Specify domain page where we will type the name of the domain that we are interested in verifying now.

When we click check domain, we should get the Domain confirmation with the correct registrar information.

Click next and we’ll be taken to the screen of information we need to do the verification.

At this point we leave the Office 365 portal and go to the application that you use to manage your DNS. Now, there are as many ways of doing this as there are web hosts and domain name registrars. The information you will need to have is where to go to add a TXT record to the DNS for your domain.

After we have added the TXT record to our DNS server, we need to go back to our portal and scroll down to the verify button and click it.

Wait on the Verifying domain dialog.

When that dialog disappears it doesn’t look like much happened, but if you will scroll back to the top you’ll see that the domain verified and that we now need to change our domain’s name servers.

I’ll just pop into my registrar’s application, but this is another place where you will have to check on your own registrar’s procedure.

After the name servers are updated we’ll just need to go back to the portal and click next. We’ll get one final screen that this update could take up to 72 hours to update, but typically it should be ready to go in less than 24. Click finish and we are done with the add and verify a domain task of Office 365.

Note: I will keep this article updated as I find other solutions.

In the case of the software that uses SMTP to relay messages to you, you will have to change the server information as well as set up TLS encryption for the connection. Many low cost or older utilities do not include the ability to encrypt an SMTP session or change the port that it tries to connect to.

If you have a special POP3 or IMAP mailbox for an application to receive communications, then you will need to waste an O365 user to have it check for mail on your domain.

Here is what I did and recommend as a very simple solution if you have:

• Not delegated your domain to Microsoft
• A web hosting account that includes email
• A DNS provider that allows it.

My website (www.domain.com for example) is hosted on an account that includes pop3/imap email. Since I moved my email MX record to O365 it broke the utility mailbox’s email address.

I created a subdomain called util.domain.com and created mail accounts under that subdomain. ie: user1@util.domain.com instead of user1@domain.com.

Depending on your webhost, your costs and procedures may vary.

Shameless advertisement here: If you Host your site with me and make me your partner of record for your O365 account I will help you with the details for free.

Update 1:
Someone pointed out this Technet article outlining how to setup shared mailboxes n Exchange Online, and they don’t require an extra user license to create. The feature will solve some of the variations of the problem, but you still need a paid license for each account that wants to check the mail.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchangelabshelp/ee441202

Here is the original Windows Home Server Blog article that introduced the video.

Before connecting to any Office 365 PowerShell interface, the following must be installed:

• Power Shell V2.0
• Windows Remote Management
• BITS 4.0
• Organization IDCRL*
• Windows 7 or Windows 2008*

Note: Requirements that are marked with an asterisk (*) are only for the Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell cmdlets.

The core prerequisites can be installed by downloading and installing Windows Management Framework.

Supported operating systems

The supported operating systems are as follows:

• Windows Server 2008 R2*
• Windows 7*
• Windows Vista Service Pack 1 SP1 or SP2
• Windows Server 2008 SP1 or SP2
• Windows Server 2003 SP2
• Windows XP SP3

Note; Requirements that are marked with an asterisk (*) are only for the Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell cmdlets.

Connect to Exchange Online by using Remote Shell PowerShell

The following steps assume that you have met all the installation requirements. To connect to Exchange Online by using Remote PowerShell, follow these steps:

1. Open PowerShell 2.0. (Run as Administrator)
2. At the prompt, type $cred = Get-Credential. The user is prompted to enter their administrative credentials.
3. Create a Remote PowerShell object. To do this, type the following:

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $Cred -Authentication Basic –AllowRedirection

1. Before you can run remote scripts, you must run set-executionpolicy remotesigned
2. Download all the available cmdlets from the server. To do this, type Import-PSSession $session. After this command is run successfully, the available cmdlets are downloaded.

To obtain a complete list of cmdlets that are available in this interface, after you are connected, run the Get-Command command at the PowerShell prompt.

I recently hooked a Kill-A-Watt (Amazon Affiliate Link) meter up to a modest computer typical of what I might find at my clients’ offices and found that it uses 1.7kW in an eight hour workday. This was at an idle – I did no work on it at all on it. So here is a little math on the cost of leaving the system on outside of working hours:

Assuming 10 cents per kWh we burned 17 cents worth of electricity. (Roanoke area residential cost in January 2011)
If I leave it on all night (5pm-8am) we burn an extra 32 cents outside of “working hours.”
For 20 work days we have $6.40 of excess cost.
For 8 weekend days we have $3.92 of excess cost.
That gives us $10.32 every 28 day period, of which we have 13 in a year, for a total of $134.16 per year in excess costs.

So on this computer’s fourth birthday, it will have used $536.64 if I had a habit of leaving it on all night. As a small business owner, will that $134/yr for each computer help your budget?

Let’s turn them off!

Is it getting a little tedious to remember where all your sites are?

What about the mix of frequently and infrequently updated sites? RSS might be a simple solution.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is nothing more than a different, standardized format for the web content that you already enjoy. Most sites that feature frequently updated content will have and RSS feed and its usually indicated by an icon similar to this: ) You might also see them refer to RSS as their “feed” or “channel”.

To see this site’s RSS feed, click here .

You probably have access to several feed readers or “aggregators” as they are sometimes called. When you clicked on this site’s link above, depending on the web browser that you use, you saw the quickest to use and setup. Internet Explorer, FireFox and others do a great job with RSS feed aggregation, but there are better ways still to manage them. In some future articles, I’ll mention a few of these.

Small Business Server

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/windows-small-business-server-2008-router-setup.aspx

Windows Home Server

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/windows-small-business-server-2008-router-setup.aspx

http://www.homeserverland.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Broadband_Router_Configuration

“Cannot connect the computer to the server because either another software installation is in progress, or, the computer has a restart pending. Either complete the installation process, or, restart the computer and try to connect again.”

If you are trying to install the client connector for Windows Home Server 2011 and you get this error, you have restarted and insured there really isn’t any installation in progress, try the following:

1. Open Regedit
2. Find the key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager”
3. Rename the “PendingFileRenameOperations” value to “PendingFileRenameOperations2″

Then restart the installation.