My Office 365 account password expired today and, somewhere in the midst of the password reset I managed to lock myself out.  As I only have one mailbox on the account (i.e. I am the administrator), that’s a bit of a problem…

I tried creating a service request to reset my password but I’m not sure it worked – I had no call-back and when I checked later in the Administrator control panel, there were no requests listed; however Dhaval Brahmbhatt (@DhavalBrahmbhat) gave me some UK phone numbers to try (0203 450 6455 or 0800 032 6417).

Using phone support I was able to log a password reset request, once the Technical Support Engineer had confirmed my details.  Because there was no phone number shown on my records, he had to email me so that I could respond with the details. Bearing in mind that I was locked out of my account, this could have been a problem but thankfully Outlook was still connected to Office 365 from my Mac.

After 26 minutes on the phone (at great expense to Microsoft, I guess), I finally had a temporary password to reset my account and then log in as normal.

Goodness knows how I’d have managed if I hadn’t been able to receive an email on the account – although the contact preferences on my Office 365 profile showed a phone number, there was no number in the information for my mailbox… so, lesson number 1, make sure you have a phone number in your mailbox properties (lesson 2 might be to have password resets sent to an alternative mailbox but that seems daft as it’s also where other announcements will end up…).

I’ve decided that I’ll reset my password when I feel like it, rather than when the system says so and making this change involves some PowerShell:

• First up, install the Office 365 cmdlets (intended for enterprises, not all of them will work on small business accounts). There are two components to install: the Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant; and the Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell.
• Next, connect PowerShell to Office 365 by either opening the Microsoft Online Services Module for PowerShell or opening a normal PowerShell session and typing import-module MSOnline.
• Authenticate the session by typing Connect-MsolService

(An older method from Office 365 beta can be found in my previous post on changing the primary email address for Office 365 users – I haven’t tested it recently, but I see no reason why the standard Exchange cmdlets wouldn’t still work on Office 365)

• Finally, disable password expiration with the following command (replacing MicrosoftOnlineServicesID with the appropriate username):
  Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName MicrosoftOnlineServicesID -PasswordNeverExpires $true