Office 365

Interview Questions and answers:

1. Which Office 365 subscription plan provides live phone support

24/7 and includes enterprise voices capabilities, which plan meets
these requirements?

Office 365 E5 Plan

2. What are the levels of Office 365 Administration and what

functionality does each level provide or limit?

 Global Admin: has access to all admin features

 Billing Admin: makes purchases, manages subscriptions, manages
support tickets, monitors service health
 Password Admin: resets passwords
 Service Admin: manages service requests and monitors service health
 User Management Admin: resets passwords, manages user accounts,
user groups, and service requests
 Exchange Admin: has administrative access to Exchange Online
through the Exchange admin center
 SharePoint Admin: has administrative access to SharePoint Online
through the SharePoint Online admin center
 Skype for Business Admin: has administrative access to Skype for
Business through the Skype for Business admin center

3. Who can assign permissions in Office 365?

 In Office 365 Enterprise, Office 365 Midsize Business, Office 365

Business Essentials, Office 365 Business, and Office 365 Business
Premium, only global admins can assign an admin role
  In Office 365 Small Business and Office 365 Small Business Premium,
any Office 365 admin can assign admin permissions to other Office 365
users

4. What are the three main identity models Azure Active Directory
users to manage user authentication in Office 365?

 Cloud Identity
 Synchronized Identity
 Federated Identity

5. What servers are needed to accommodate single sign on (SSO)

aka Federated Identity?

 ADFS 2.0 Proxy Servers (minimum of 2 for redundancy)

 ADFS 2.0 Servers (minimum of 2 for redundancy)
 DirSync Server

6. How do you reconcile a user with disconnected Cloud and on-

Premise identities?

“SMTP matching” or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol matching matches

on-Premise accounts to the Office 365 account

7. What is the Compliance Center and who can access it?

The Compliance center manages compliance activities across Office 365,

Exchange Online, and SharePoint Online. It can be accessed by the Global
Admin. This includes: archiving, data loss prevention, device management,
eDiscovery, import, permissions, retention, search

8. You need to determine whether someone other than the mailbox

owner most recently accessed a specific Office 365 user’s mailbox.
What should you do?

Run a non-owner mailbox access report in the Microsoft Exchange Control

Panel
 9. What should you modify in order to prevent users from initiating
remote wipes of mobile devices in the Office 365 portal?

Exchange ActiveSync Access settings

Power shell Questions:

How familiar are you with PowerShell scripting commands?

What is your favorite Exchange Online PowerShell one-liner?

Your company has an Office 365 subscription for midsize businesses

and enterprises. You need to create a user account. Which PowerShell
cmdlet should you use?

New MsolUser

How would you evaluate the expression “2+2=4” from the PowerShell
command line?

type in 2+2 <ENTER>

How would you get a list of all cmdlet available?

Get-command, or gcm

If you are looking for an answer in Help, how will you know if a
command is optional?

It will be enclosed in square brackets. These are rarely used.

Mention what are the new features in MS Exchange 2013?
 Integration with Lync and SharePoint: With site mailboxes and in-place
eDiscovery, it offers a greater integration with Microsoft Sharepoint and Lync
 Provide a resilient solution: It built upon the exchange server 2010 and
redesigned for simplicity of scale, feature isolation and hardware utilization
 Supports a multigenerational workforce: From multiple sources users
can merge contacts as well as smart search allows to search people in the
network
 Provide an engaging experience: MS web app focused on a streamlined
user interface that supports the use of touch, enhancing the use of mobile
devices
 Meet the latest demand: With improved search and indexing, you can
search across Lynch 2013, Exchange 2013, SharePoint 2013, etc.
 DAG system: A new evolution of exchange 2010 DAG

Mention what are the roles in MS exchange 2013?

In MS exchange 2013, there are two roles Client Access Server and Mailbox Server.

Mention what is the role of Client Access Server?

The Client Access Server gives connectivity to various services like

 Microsoft Office Outlook

 Outlook Web App
 Mobile devices
 POP & SMTP
 Accepts mail from delivers mail to other mail hosts on the internet
 Gives unified namespace, network security and authentication
 Handles all client requests for Exchange
 Routes requests to the correct mailbox server
 Allows the use of layer 4 (TCP affinity) routing

Mention what is the role of Mailbox server?

Mailbox servers help in

 e-mail storage
 Host public folder databases
 Host mailbox databases
 Calculate e-mail address policies
  Performs multi-mailbox searches
 Provide high availability and site resiliency
 Provide messaging records management and retention policies
 Handle connectivity as clients don’t connect directly to the mailbox services
 For given mailbox, it provides all core exchange functionality
 When a database fails over, it also fails access to the mailbox

Explain what are the important features of Transport Pipeline?

Transport pipeline is made up of three different services:

 Front end transport service: It does basic message filtering based on domains,
connectors, senders and recipients. It only connects with the transport service on a
mailbox server and does not backlog any messages locally
 Transport service: It runs on all mailbox servers, and it handles SMTP mail flow. It
helps in message categorization and content inspection. The transport services routes
messages between the Mailbox Transport service, the Transport Service and Front End
Transport service. This service does not queue messages locally
 Mailbox Transport: This system includes receiving and sending SMTP to the
transport service from mailbox using RPC (Remote Procedure Call).

Explain what is the role of categorizer?

Categorizer performs following functions

 Recipient Resolution: The e-mail address of the recipient is resolved to decide

whether the recipient has got a mailbox in the Exchange Organization or an external e-
mail address
 Routing Resolution: Once the information regarding the recipient is resolved, the
ultimate destination for the mail is routed, and the next hop are determined
 Content Conversion: Once the mail has reached its determined address, the SMTP
is converted into readable format like HTML, rich text format or plain text

Explain the term DAG (Data Availability Group)?

DAG or Data Availability Group is a framework build is MS Exchange 2013. It is a group of

upto 16 mailbox server that hosts a set of databases and provides automatic database level
recovery due to failure of servers of databases

Mention how many types of delivery groups found in MS Exchange 2013?

In MS Exchange 2013, there are five types of delivery groups

 Routing DAG
 Mailbox delivery groups
 Connector source service
 AD site
 Server List

Explain how message is delivered to the mailbox database in Exchange 2013?

In exchange 2013, after the message reaches the target mailbox server in the destination
AD site, the transport service avails SMTP to carry the message to the mailbox. After that,
using RPC, Transport Service delivers the message to the local mailbox.

What action does Front End Transport service does?

Front end transport service does one of the following actions based on the number and type
of the recipients

 For the message with a single mailbox recipient, choose a mail box server in the
target delivery group and based on the proximity of the AD site, give preference to the
mail box server
 For the message with multiple or several mailbox recipients, it uses the first 20
recipients to select a mailbox in a closest proximity or delivery group, based on the AD
site proximity
 If the message has no mailbox recipients, it choose a random mailbox server in the
local AD site

Mention what is the function of mailbox Transport Submission service?

Mailbox Transport Submission service does one of the following actions based on the
number and type of recipients.

 For the message having only one mailbox recipient, it chooses a mailbox server in
the target delivery group and give priority to the mailbox server based on the AD site
proximity
 With multiple mailbox recipients, it uses first 20 recipients to choose a Mailbox server
in the closest delivery group, based on the AD site proximity
 If there is no mailbox recipient, select a mailbox server in the local delivery group

How the flow of the mail is tracked in MS Exchange 2013?

To track message flow in MS Exchange 2013, Delivery Reports are used. It is applicable
for Outlook and Outlook web only. However, Message Tracking Logs are also helpful to
know the flow of the mail.