Recently, I was working with a customer attempting to connect to Skype for Business Online PowerShell in order to configure Hybrid (aka Split Domain). We ran into a PowerShell error that I have never encountered before and my searches yielded zero results.

Here is the error that we got after running the following command:

$session = New-CSOnlineSession –Credential $Credentials –OverrideAdminDomain “TenantName.onmicrosoft.com”

“Processing data from remote server admin0b.online.lync.com failed with the following error message: The specified tenant ‘tenantname.onmicrosoft.com’ could not be found in current forest. Please verify the tenant identity and then try again.”

The error clearly states the Skype4B forest (‘admin0b’) it is trying to connect to is not correct. To verify our tenant’s forest address, I went to the Office 365 Admin Center and navigated to the Skype for Business admin page – low and behold, the browser address was ‘admin2a’.

Now we can see that the PowerShell session was indeed connecting to the incorrect Skype4B forest.

To overcome this, the ‘New-CSOnlineSession’ cmdlet has the ‘OverridePowerShellUri’ parameter to specify a PowerShell address.

In order to populate the PowerShellUri, we needed take the admin URL – https://admin2a.online.lync.com/ and add ‘ocspowershellliveid‘ to the end.
https://admin2a.online.lync.com/ocspowershellliveid
The complete command:

$session = New-CSOnlineSession –Credential $Credentials –OverrideAdminDomain “TenantName.onmicrosoft.com” –OverridePowershellUri "https://admin2a.online.lync.com/ocspowershellliveid" -Verbose

This is a workaround as I have yet to hear of a permanent solution from Office 365 support.

*Note – that the forest names presented here may not match with your situation.