One of the major new features to Exchange in Exchange 2013 is data loss prevention. DLP aides your company in ensuring that sensitive data is not leaked from your organization. Exchange 2013 SP1 adds an improvement to DLP in a feature called DLP fingerprinting.
Read moreAzure is making my gaming awesome too?
Even now, with my 40th birthday behind me, I spend a fair amount of my free time playing video games. Videos games have been a pretty consistent part of my life for 30 some years, and I expect this to remain the case for most of the next 40 years too. Normally I reserve this space for my professional interests; things like Exchange, Office 365, Active Directory, and Azure. However, today I figured out that my professional interests have intersected with my personal video game interest so I thought this would be a good excuse to bring video gaming into this blog. It turns out that Windows Azure is a key component in making the new video game “Titanfall” work.
Read more#IAmMEC
After a long hiatus, the Microsoft Exchange Conference returned about a year and a half ago. Now it seems that Microsoft intends to make MEC (as well and the Lync and SharePoint conferences) a regular thing. I will be heading to Austin TX in a couple of weeks to participate.
Read moreWhy does Exchange 2013 use RPC over HTTP for all communications?
I was recently asked an interesting question, so I thought I would share the answer here. The question was “Why did Microsoft decide to use RPC over HTTP for internal communication between Outlook and Exchange 2013?” As with most questions of design for a product as complex as Exchange, there are a lot of reasons for this design but I think the best answer comes down to simplicity.
Read moreExchange 2013 SP1: What’s new?
Many IT departments still like to stick to the adage that a Microsoft product is not complete until Service Pack 1 comes out. While I do not necessarily agree with that, I do have to admit that in the case of Exchange 2013 Service Pack 1 does put back a number of features that were in previous versions of Exchange but did not make it into the release version of Exchange 2013. Exchange 2013 SP1 brings back the following features that were available in Exchange 2010 but not in Exchange 2013 at release; Edge Transport Role, GUI cmdlet logging, and SSL offloading.
Read moreWhat I use: February 2014
Yes, I stole the idea for this post from Paul Thurrott’s Super Site for Windows. I will approach this from a bit of a different angle than Paul, but the idea is his.
I am an IT consultant. I assume that most people reading this will know that, but I figure it’s best to make that clear off the top. I travel a lot, and when I am not traveling I work from my home office. For this blog post, I am going to go over the products and services that I use professionally.
Read moreForcing DirSync from a remote computer
By default DirSync will run a delta copy of your Active Directory to Azure/Office 365 every 3 hours. You can, of course, log into the DirSync server and force it to run at any time. While this is a perfectly acceptable solution, it would be a better solution if there was a way to force DirSync to run without having to log into the DirSync server. As it happens, PowerShell does provide us with a way to do this.
Read moreHow long does it take to migrate a mailbox to Exchange Online?
On question I get from customers fairly often is how long it will take to migrate my mailboxes to Exchange Online from my on-premises Exchange organization with a Hybrid Exchange environment. As a consultant, I am required to answer “It depends”.
Read moreExporting email from Exchange Online
One question that comes up fairly often is “how do I get my email out of Exchange Online?” As with many questions about Office 365, the answer can be a bit less straightforward than you might think.
Read moreWhat do I use to replace TMG/UAG for my Exchange 2013 deployment?
Microsoft has stopped selling Forefront Threat Management Gateway, and will stop selling Forefront Unified Access Gateway later this year. With these products going away, a very common question I am hearing from customers these days is “What do I do to secure my Exchange deployment now?” As a consultant I love this question because it gives me a chance to give my favorite answer; “It depends”.
Read moreRBAC: Exchange vs Lync
On 10.11.12 Microsoft released Exchange 2013, Lync 2013, and SharePoint 2013. These three products were designed to work together in new and unprecedented ways. None of these products is “complete” without being intergraded with the other two. Given that, one would assume that if you know how a feature like RBAC works for one of these products you would know how it works for the others. Turns out that is not the case.
Read moreWhat is Managed Availability?
If there is one thing I have learned in my 20 years as a messaging architect, it’s that things change. Technology advances, new software becomes available, hardware becomes less expensive and/or more reliable.
Read moreHow is an Exchange 2013 Service Pack (SP) different from a Cumulative Update (CU)?
Assigning licenses to Exchange Online users with PowerShell
You’ve setup your Office 365 tenant, you’ve configured DirSync, and you’ve done a test migration. Now you’re ready to start migrating your user’s mailboxes to Exchange Online in bulk. The last hurdle before you can do a big batch migration of mailboxes is assigning licenses to user’s accounts in the Office 365 portal. Sure you can click through each user in the portal one-by-one and assign licenses, but I’ve done migrations with tens and even hundreds of thousands of mailboxes and assigning all those licenses one-by-one would make anyone crazy. Good news loyal readers, I’m going to show you how to license those user’s accounts with PowerShell.
Read moreScripting your remote PowerShell connection to Exchange Online
When migrating a customer to Exchange Online, one of the most time consuming parts of the project is training the administrators how to use a new set of interfaces for managing their new Exchange environment. Even administrators who are well versed in PowerShell tend to be unfamiliar with the process of connecting to the remote PowerShell instance of their new Exchange Online tenant. Today I am going to share with you a simple script that will make that learning curve a little easier.
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