Category Archives: Office 365

[Office 365] Delete a user account sitting in Recycle bin

Normally, user accounts that are deleted within Office 365 sit in "The recycle bin" where they can be recovered if needed. You can't, however, delete users from that gray area within the web GUI. If you wanted to, say, delete and remove the license from a user and create a non-licensed shared mailbox, you're boned without emptying it from the recycle bin first.

Before you start,you'll need Microsoft Online Services Module for Powershell

  • http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/Office365-enterprises/ff652560.aspx

To remove a specific user account from the Recycle Bin

  1. Connect normally, except add in connecting to the MSO server
    1. $LiveCred = Get-Credential
    2. $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
    3. Import-PSSession $Session
    4. Connect-MSOLService -Credential $LiveCred
  2. The ReturnDeletedUsers switch returns accounts found in the recycle bin. To return all:
    1. Get-MSOLUser -ReturnDeletedUsers
  3. If you find the account you want to remove, it's a simple cmdlet to do so: where "Email Address" is the upn of the actual account
    1. Remove-MSOLUser -UserPrincipalName "Email Address" -RemoveFromRecycleBin
  4. If you're removing an account in order to recreate it, you'll have to wait 5-10 minutes before O365 will allow you to recreate over the deleted account.

If you don't have a problem nuking them all, you can empty all via piping the get to the remove

#Haven't tested this one; have a nagging you may need to fill an array and foreach through all the elements actually.

Get-MsolUser -ReturnDeletedUsers | Remove-MsolUser -RemoveFromRecycleBin -Force

 

Office 365 - Change UPN on a user in the cloud

I ran accross some issues when moving to Office 365, particularily with my account that I created when creating our Office 365 site. In doing so, the account on Office 365 and my on-premise account had strange issues where even though the account was syncrhonized with our on-premise active directory environment, the Office 365 account was still the active address.

To fix this, follow the instructions as mentioned in this KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2523192