I enjoyed the run of daily blogging for two weeks straight. I’ve stopped the daily as I’ve got something in the pipeline that I want to put more of my attention to. It’s a project and site that I’m working on that should provide some good assistance to IT Pro’s using cloud services.

Back to regular tech blogging: I ran into a problem with the Azure Active Directory PowerShell module on a brand new Windows Server 2012 R2 server today. Its a vanilla build with nothing installed, so it’s rather odd that this happened.

Scenario

I want to connect to an Office 365 and Azure AD tenant via PowerShell. I ran through the regular process of:

• Adding the Windows Server role: .net Framework 3.5 to the server
• Downloaded the Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant for IT Professionals v7.0
• Installed the MSO Sign-In Assistant
• Downloaded the Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell (64-bit version)
• Attempted to install the AD module for Windows PS but ran into the following error:

In order to install Windows Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell, you must have Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant version 7.0 or grater installed on this computer.

I uninstalled and re-installed a couple of times, but unfortunately no luck.

Solution

This is a rather odd solution. I did a little digging and found a TechNet support post that mentioned downloading the Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant for IT Professionals BETA and installing that. I uninstalled the RTW version, restarted the server, installed the BETA and voila! I’m now able to finish the install of the AD Module for Windows PowerShell.

Final words

Einstein said doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results is the definition of insanity. What do you call doing the same thing over and over but occasionally getting a different result?