Stuff I Figured Out

M365 Exchange Online Archiving & Limits

Received a call that a VIP user was not receiving emails or able to send. The quick check to confirm how much room was left in the mailbox. With 20% available the assumption is some sort of connectivity issue. Checking the size of the Online Archive revealed that it was full, and the user must have been ignoring warnings.

By default an Online Archive mailbox is limited to 100GB, hitting this limit will prevent sending emails from the user’s mailbox even if it has plenty of room. When we added the license for this we read “autoexpanding” as the default but no, you have to activate it.

There are some downsides to activating autoexpansion:

you can no longer recover or restore the mailbox if it is made inactive
you can only use Content Search on the contents

You have two options for enabling:

Enable for the organization
Enable for just the user

Enabling for the organization seems like the easy way out however once Autoexpanding Archives and given the limitations you will want to be selective and limit it to super high volume email users.

Powershell>Set-OrganizationConfig -AutoExpandingArchive

Enabling for just the user has additional advantages:

The user’s existing Archive is expanded from 100GB to 110GB allowing email sending to resume and the warning quota moves from 90GB to 100GB.
If the primary mailbox is on hold or subject to a retention policy, the recoverable items quota is also increased by 10GB.

Powershell>Enable-Mailbox -AutoExpandingArchive

Until it breaks here is the source documentation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/enable-autoexpanding-archiving

Office 365 – Changing the office installation account after a user is deleted

When a user leaves the company before doing anything else you should deactivate their Office installations so that the existing install can be assigned to a new user. If you don’t do this, Microsoft recommends uninstalling and reinstalling Office.

I’ve found that you can trigger a new user activation of Office by modifying the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\
Microsoft\Office\
ClickToRun\Configuration\O365BusinessRetail.EmailAddress

Upon opening any Office application it asks to activate like a fresh installation.

Repurposing a coax cable run with MOCA

We switched between our cable provider coax distributed signal to ethernet/wireless based streaming boxes. To get the best performance I wanted to use a hardwired connection, but the main television location only had a coax run.

I had noticed that the previous services used MOCA for ethernet over coax, so I did a little hunting and found ethernet to MOCA transceivers. I put one at each end of the coax and we we’re up running with a 1GB connection.

Find the Installation Key for Office 2013

If you need to reinstall Office 2013 you will need the installation key but there is no way to view the key used. The key is visible if you login to your Microsoft account where you can view it.

This isn’t a problem if you only have one computer and key but many small companies they have many licenses rather than buying through the Open license program. Logging in here just shows you a list of licenses with no attribution to the computer.

Microsoft has made a note about how to get a hint at which key is used on a computer:

https://support.office.com/en-nz/article/How-to-find-your-Office-2013-product-key-after-installation-026bc81b-6b2f-4052-b433-f41e6cc31c5a

Find the Office 2013 product key associated with your PC

First, find the last five digits of the product key associated with your computer.

Go to the PC that has Office 2013 installed
Right click the Windows icon and select Command Prompt.
Enter the appropriate command:For 32 bit Windows:cscript “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office15\OSPP.VBS” /dstatus
For 64 bit Windows:

cscript “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\OSPP.VBS” /dstatus
The command prompt box will show you the last five digits of the product key associated with the installation on that PC.
Make a note of the PC the Office 2013 product is installed on, and five digit number. You will need this for reference.

Once you have the last five digits, log into your Microsoft account and find the matching code.

Excel 2013 Crashes when savng to PDF or printing certain files

One user at a client’s office was having problems printing certain Excel files when using Excel 2013. An internet search returns almost no working suggestions and none that worked in this case.

We noticed that the files which didn’t started on Row 17 and we determined that the line height of R1-R16 had been set to 0.

After resetting the height of the rows by selecting the entire sheet and double clicking on the row height cursor the first 16 rows appeared again and the problem printing was fixed.

Modifying NTBackup schedules on 2008 Server when NTBackup won’t let you

I had a problem with backing up just MS Exchange data on a MS 2008 Server. As discussed by others around the net, a fall-back solution is to copy the last version of NTBackup onto the server and use it. Unfortunately a common problem seems to be that after you Schedule the first backup task you can no longer edit the task schedule or job parameters like the destination.

Here is a solution: Read the rest of this entry »

Neat Labels – Brother PT-1230PC

I think most people will agree that a folder or a tab looks better with a neatly printed label however sometimes making them is a chore. Grab a label sheet, find the matching template in Word, fill it in and then print. Not too bad if you are doing many at once but you probably won’t do it for one. Read the rest of this entry »

What to do with all those receipts!

It took me a long time to come up with a way of dealing with receipts that I could live with. Envelopes get too messy and bulky, and because the number of the number of categories I wanted, required too many. I tried putting them in a plastic bin when I came home at night but that was really just another way of procrastinating.

Read the rest of this entry »

Entering a Cash Refund from a Vendor in QuickBooks

Every once in a while I return something for a cash refund and handling the transaction in QuickBooks isn’t intuitive. Doing them improperly can cause tax reporting errors too. The best description that I found was actually an instruction for QuickBooks online. Here is the process translated for the desktop application. Read the rest of this entry »

What am I doing here?

This blog is for me and those who stumble across it. While running our software development/consulting business we have to “Figure Out” stuff all the time and our notes need a home. Hopefully some of the posts will help someone else out.