How to hydrate user accounts in OWA to avoid warning or error in Signature Manager Outlook Edition

Relevant Products: Signature Manager Outlook Edition

Scenario

You have Exclaimer Signature Manager Outlook Edition, and you see a warning message similar to this: 

Reason

For Signature Manager Outlook Edition to deploy signatures and settings to a user’s OWA account, the user’s profile must have been created in OWA. This is known as ‘hydrating’ a user’s account.

- A user’s profile is hydrated the first time they log onto OWA and select their regional options.
- It is not hydrated when a user accesses their mailbox using an email client such as Outlook; they must log on to the OWA website itself for the mailbox to be hydrated.

Resolution

To avoid the need for all users to log on to the OWA website so their signatures are deployed, you can use PowerShell commands to hydrate a user’s profile.

To do this, follow the steps below:

1. Ensure that you are logged in as a user who is a direct member of the Organization Management and Domain Admin groups (Global Administrator in the case of Exchange Online).
   
   
2. Connect to your Exchange Server:
   - For Exchange on-premises, run the Exchange Management Shell.
   - For a remotely managed Exchange system, make a connection using the steps detailed here, then return to this section.
   
   
3. Once connected, run the following command to hydrate a user’s mailboxes:
   
   Get-Mailbox | Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration -TimeZone "" –Language -DateFormat ""
   
   - Replace <user> with the user’s account, <Time Zone> with the user’s timezone name, <Language> with the Language Culture Name, and <Date Format> with the required date format (retain quotes where shown).
   
   For example, for a user in the UK:
   
   Get-Mailbox uksales@example.co.uk | Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration -TimeZone "GMT Standard Time" –Language en-GB -DateFormat "dd/MM/yyyy"
   
   For example, for a user in the US Central time zone:
   
   Get-Mailbox ussales@example.com | Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration -TimeZone "Central Standard Time" –Language en-US -DateFormat "MM/dd/yyyy"

Variations

Commands detailed in step 2 above show how to hydrate mailboxes for specified users. However, if required you can hydrate mailboxes for all users, using the command below:

For example, if all of your users are in the UK, you can use the command below to hydrate mailboxes for all users:

If you have users in multiple different time zones, or that require different language options, you can use other input parameters available for the Get-Mailbox cmdlet to apply settings to a group or subset of users.

How to set up a remote session to Exchange Server using PowerShell

If you use a remotely managed exchange (Exchange Server 2010 or 2013), you need to set up a remote session to access the Exchange server.

To do this, follow the steps below:

1. Check system requirements for your operating system:
   - Exchange Online
   - Exchange Server 2010
   - Exchange Server 2013
   
   
2. Run Windows Powershell.
   
   
3. Use the command below to check your execution policy settings:
   
   Get-ExecutionPolicy
4. If the execution policy is set to Restricted, change it to RemoteSigned or Unrestricted using the command below:
   
   Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
5. Provide target server administrator credentials using the command below:
   
   $LiveCred = Get-Credential
6. Configure the connection using the relevant command below:
   - To connect to Exchange Server 2010 or 2013:
   
   $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https:///powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred
7. Start the connection using the command below:
   
   Import-PSSession $Session
8. When you have finished working and are ready to disconnect, use the command below:
   
   Remove-PSSession $Session