Author: Adam Fowler

Outlook 2016 Secondary Mailbox Cached Mode

Posted on by Adam Fowler

After migrating to Outlook 2016 from 2010, I noticed this inconsistency.

If you use secondary mailboxes in Outlook, you’re probably going to want them in Online Mode rather than Cached Mode. With Cached Mode on, you’ll have an OST file created for each extra mailbox you add, and you’ll hit performance issues if you have over 500 folders over all mailboxes added to the account.

One of the ways to avoid these performance issues is turning off ‘Download shared folders’ in the mailbox settings:

‘Download shared folders’ disabled

This can be done manually, or company wide with the Group Policy setting “Disable shared mail folder caching” found in User Configuration / Administrative Templates / Microsoft Outlook 2016 / Outlook Options / Delegates. Enabling this will disable and grey out the option as per the screenshot above.

However, I was previously doing this through a registry setting ‘CacheOthersMail’ under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\outlook\cached mode with the value set to 0. This worked on Outlook 2010 fine I believe, but in 2016 it did something slightly strange. Although clicking on a secondary mailbox’s folders showed they were in Online Mode with the status bar status of ‘Online’, the ‘Download shared folders’ tickbox was still enabled. I’ve confirmed this on both CTR and MSI versions of Office 2016.

At first I thought nothing of this, as it seemed to be working as intended. However, after a while I worked out that having it configured this way lead to performance issues, and people who had over 500 folders had cases where the inbox would stop updating. Changing the tickbox setting resolved the issue, despite the secondary mailboxes before and after this showing as ‘Online’. I didn’t dig into this any further so I can’t explain what was actually going on, but at a guess it was still doing some sort of sync or connection on each folder despite it being in Online Mode.

My advice is – make sure the ‘Download shared folders’ tickbox is off rather than just checking that the folders show as being ‘Online’. If you really need a secondary mailbox in cached mode but want to disable it by default, you could add it as a seperate mailbox account which will have it’s own cached mode settings.

 

 

Updating the On-Premises Power BI Data Gateway

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Power BI’s on-premises data gateway needs updating from time to time – Microsoft are pretty good at communicating this to the Office 365 tenant administrator via email when required.

One of those times is now at the time of writing this blog post – due to end of support of TLS 1.0 on March 15th 2018. The installer itself is pretty much a next, next finish wizard, but there’s a few tricks that can cause the wizard to fail.

The gateway installation failed.

The error logs may not spell out what the problem is. I saw:

Product: EgwComponents -- Installation failed.


Windows Installer installed the product. Product Name: EgwComponents. Product Version: 1.15.6170.1. Product Language: 1033. Installation success or error status: 1603.

The reasons I’ve seen reported online are:

  • Installer not being run as Administrator (UAC may be in the way) – right click the installer and ‘Run As Administrator’
  • Installing .NET 4.6
  • Disable any Anti-Virus product

None of those fixed it for me, but I soon realised an obvious one – check for pending reboots. Windows update had run and was waiting for a restart, after that the installer worked perfectly. It won’t be the last time I forget to turn it off and back on again.

Excel – Something Went Wrong While Downloading Your Template

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Excel 2013 and 2016 have a great inbuilt feature of having online pre-built templates available for different purposes. You find them by going to File > New. Templates such as Family Budgets or Back to School Planners. They’re hosted by Microsoft and download the template as you need them:

List of Excel 2016 Templates

Normally you’d pick the template you want, and use the create option:

Creating an Excel 2016 Template

However, there’s a scenario I found that this doesn’t work, and you’ll see the message ‘Something went wrong while downloading your template’:

Something went wrong

After digging around for a bit, I found this Technet thread which mentioned uninstalling Visio Viewer to fix it. Seems strange, but I tried this and it worked. I wasn’t happy with that as a solution though, so logged a Microsoft case.

I went through the process of capturing fiddler traffic and logs, but was then asked a simple question: Was Visio Viewer 32 or 64 bit? I had a look and it was 64 bit, however the Office 2016 suite itself was 32 bit. I quickly guessed that 32 and 64 bit wasn’t a good mix for Office products, even if they were installed separately.

Sure enough, using Visio Viewer 32 bit with Excel 2016 32 bit fixed the problem.

 

TL;DR – Visio Viewer needs to match your Office/Excel install – 32 bit or 64 bit for both.

Azure AD DS Health Monitoring Agent Temp Files

Posted on by Adam Fowler

There’s a known issue with the Azure AD DS Health Monitoring Agent, which is a part of the Azure AD Connect Health offering from Microsoft.

I’m a big fan of this service, which after installing a small agent on each DC, will alert you of any issues such as replication failing, or a DC unavailable.

However, there’s a problem with how the agent handles its temporary files. As covered on this TechCommunity post, the utility creates a lot of temp files in C:\Windows\Temp locally on each DC. They’re 1/2KB each, but I see around 288 daily being generated. These are never cleaned up.

One one domain controller, since I’ve been running the utility from the 16th September 2016, there are now ~133,000 temporary files. The actual size of these log files is a small 90mb, but the space on disk due to how allocating blocks works, takes up 519MB. I’m going to assume there’s many factors that can change the size and number of log files.

Many people will have small drives for their DCs, and also having lots of files in a folder can cause weird performance issues.

The files are in a format such as 20160915T024226Z-20160915T031125Z-SERVERNAME-6acbd4cb99a1448d848298a59b6fc6e2.json.gz – so it’s easy to set up a daily scheduled task to delete anything older than a day. There’s a couple of examples on how to do this here.

Microsoft has advised this won’t be fixed anytime soon (at least Q3 2018 is what I’ve heard), so it’s worth checking out that C:\Windows\Temp folder and even doing a one time delete if it’s full of log files!

Controlling Microsoft Store Access

Posted on by Adam Fowler

If you’re managing a fleet of computers in a business, you may not want users being able to access everything in the Microsoft Store. Having users a few clicks away from installing ‘Slotomainia’ or ‘Ninja World’ might not be what you want readily available on a business computer. You may also not want other services that can contribute to data leakage, or shadow IT type solutions that users decide to adopt.

As long as you are running Windows 10 Enterprise or Education, you could completely disable the Microsoft Store functionality by either using Applocker to maintain a whitelist of allowed packaged apps, or using Group Policy to enable the “Turn off Store application” under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components.

For Windows 10 Pro and Home users, this won’t work so you’ll have to try other methods such as uninstalling Windows Store on each PC with the PowerShell command Get-AppxPackage ​*windowsstore*​ | Remove-AppxPackage

Disabling the Microsoft Store entirelybut you may find that there is a requirement to use a few of the Microsoft Store apps by your users. For this option (again just for Enterprise and Education, and you’ll need Office 365 or Azure AD), you can instead have a Private Store. This is enabled again in Group Policy, using the setting “Only display the private store within the Microsoft Store app” again under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components.

The Microsoft Store will look pretty bare at this stage (I see the 5 apps in the screenshot below by default), so you’ll want to add or remove some apps. This is done online, Enterprise customers go to https://businessstore.microsoft.com and education customers go to https://educationstore.microsoft.com. You’ll need to sign in with an account that’s an Azure AD or Office 365 Global Administrator, but can then grant access to others.

To add an app, under ‘Shop for my group’ you can search or click through options to find the app you’re after – I’ve chosen Microsoft To-Do for this example. Going onto the app’s page will give you a button that says ‘Get the app’. Once you click that, you’ll see the message “Microsoft To-Do has been purchased and added to your inventory.” After you’ve done that, go to the “Manage” tab and then the “Products and Services” option on the right hand side. Find the app, click the ellipsis (…) and choose “Add to private store”

You will finally see a message saying that the app has been added to your store, but may take up to 36 hours* to show.

There’s also the option to assign an app to a user, this is only needed if it’s a licensed or paid for app that you want to give only to certain users – you may have bought 10 copies of a particular Windows Store app and need to control who has access to it.

It’s worth having a look through the other options on this page as you can control settings such as letting users make purchases,  what your organisation will be called in the Microsoft Store app and if you get invoices for the store via email.

Overall the Private Microsoft Store is rather easy to set up, lets you give users self-service access to apps that you allow, and gives you an easy way of letting someone install a Microsoft Store app in the future without having to enable the entire store.

*Update 2nd August 2018

There’s been a great improvement to the 36 hour wait, it’s now within 15 minutes! More details here