eDiscovery - Put mailboxes On Litigation Hold using PowerShell Script

O365 administrators can use GUI to put SharePoint sites, ODB, mailbox on litigation hold. Microsoft eDiscovery UI helps admins to create a Case and apply Hold to mailboxes. However, there are PowerShell scripts available to put mailboxes On Litigation Hold and you do not need to create Cases for it. 

Below is how we do that  -

1. Connect to Exchange Online

$UserCredential = Get-Credential
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session –DisableNameChecking

2. Check Litigation Status of the mailbox

Get-Mailbox -identity rajdeepc@onmicrosoft.com |fl Identity, LitigationHold*

3. Put the mailbox on hold

Set-Mailbox -identity rajdeepc@onmicrosoft.com -LitigationHoldEnabled $true

4. (Optional) Use the content search to get collection for your legal team

5. Release the mailbox if it is not needed to be On Litigation Hold

Set-Mailbox -identity rajdeepc@onmicrosoft.com -LitigationHoldEnabled $false

6. Disconnect the session (Must do to ensure the session is not occupied)

Remove-PSSession $Session

Enable SPO Site Collection App Catalog

By now everyone knows how to enable Site Collection App Catalog in SharePoint Online. It is simply to run the commands like below -

Connect-SPOService -Url {SharePointAdminSiteURL} -Credential rajdeep@domain.net
$site = Get-SPOSite {SiteCollectionURL}
Add-SPOSiteCollectionAppCatalog -Site $site

You may encounter an error like "Must have Manage Web Site permissions or be a tenant admin in order to add or remove sites from the site collection app catalog allow list". This is because if the person who's executing the command is not admin in the App Catalog site.

Add rajdeep@domain.net as admin in the site collection app catalog and run it again.

Backup and Restore Project Server Sites 2013

The below article outlines how to take backup and restore Project Server sites from one tier to another. The steps are tested successful in SharePoint/Project Server 2013 farm. The process assumes that you already have the Project Server database and content database backup files available from the backup/restore team.
First we will start by dismounting the existing running instances. Please have communication out for the downtime your application/site will have during the process.

• Dismount-SPProjectWebInstance -SiteCollection  <URL of PWA site that we want to refresh>
• The Project Server service application in CA the project site should have been removed
• Next we will dismount the content database - Dismount-SPContentDatabase “<Content Database name here>”
• Launch SQL server and restore the SQL database backups you have received from the B/R team.
• Mount the restored content database in the web application - Mount-SPContentDatabase “<restored content database in previous step>” -DatabaseServer “<SQL Server>” –WebApplication <web application URL>
• Mount the restored project server database - Mount-SPProjectDatabase -Name “Name of the restored Project database” –WebApplication “Web Application URL that the Project Web App database will mount to” –DatabaseServer “SQL Server where the database was restored”
• Provision the Project Web App site collection - Mount-SPProjectWebInstance –DatabaseName “Restored Project Web App database” –SiteCollection “site collection URL including the PWA path” –DatabaseServer “SQL Server where the database was restored”
• We can check the provisioning status using - Get-SPProjectWebInstance -URL "https://...." | Select ProvisioningStatus

If your farm is managed by different administrative accounts, you may have to consider adding the correct account permission in the newly provisioned project site. For that navigate to - CA > Manage Service Apps > Project Server Service App and choose to Edit the Project Server Instance, modify the Administrator account to be the correct account.

If Excel service reports are in use, will need to update to use the ODC files from correct environment.