As DirSync evolved to AAD Sync, and AAD Sync evolved to AAD Connect, there have been significant changes to the way we accomplish tasks with these tools.
With the recent release of Azure Active Directory Connect v 1.1, Microsoft has made several updates to how various aspects of the process of syncing your on-premises Active Directory accounts into Azure Active Directory. There have been some pretty significant changes in a couple of areas, with one of those being sync filtering. In this series of blogs posts, I’m going to walk you through the options and processes for filtering your sync jobs.
Read moreI am an IT consultant. My job is to advise and inform organizations on how best to manage their IT infrastructure. In doing that job, I often talk about security and encryption. In lite of the current news about the “FBI vs Apple”, I’d like to talk about security and encryption here.
Read moreIf you've even participated in an Exchange Online migration at almost any level, it's likely you've run into the issue of cross-forest delegation. You know that Exchange allows you to delegate rights from one mailbox to another, allowing users to access other mailboxes. When you do an Exchange hybrid migration, there are some special considerations you have to take to keep these delegated rights working. Depending on who you ask, you'll get all kinds of different answers about what works when. In this blog post I will explain the confusing case of cross-forest delegation, and what you can expect to work or not work.
Read moreMany Office 365 customers I talk to are concerned about how to audit changes to their organization’s mailboxes within Exchange Online. How do I track changes to the administrator roles in my tenant? How do I know if someone’s mailbox has been accessed by another person? How do I verify Litigation Hold is working? Read on and all shall become clear.
Read moreContainers are a new Microsoft technology coming with Server 2016 that functions like a virtual server, but are faster to deploy. You can read Part 1 of my Containers series here.
In Part 2 of this servers, we’re going to start looking at Hyper-V Containers.
Read moreThe Exchange team, or more specifically Jeff Mealiffe, has recently published a blog post detailing the sizing guidance for Exchange 2016. The short version is there is very little changed in the sizing guidance from Exchange 2013, but let’s take a closer look just to make sure we’re all on the same page.
Read moreI like to think I am a fairly smart guy. More than that, I know I work with a bunch of really smart people. Given this, I found it interesting to find that pretty much no one on my team has any idea what “containers” are, what they do, or how they work. All we know for sure is that Mark Russinovich thinks they are a nifty new feature of Server 2016 and Windows Azure.
I decided it was time to figure this stuff out, so I dove into a search on Channel9. Here’s a Q&A I had with myself after I watched a few of those videos.
Read moreWith the latest Cumulative Updates for Exchange server 2013 and 2016 Microsoft has made a change to “Mailbox Anchoring”. What does this mean? Why did they do it? How will it affect me? Read on, and I shall attempt to explain.
Read moreWelcome back. If you’ve read the first two posts in this series (Part 1, Part2), then your caught up. If not, I’d suggest you go back to those before proceeding on with this one. In this post, we’re going to talk about some new information about OOS, and some points I missed in the first two parts.
Read moreYour new OOS farm can be connected to any version of Exchange from 2007 to 2016. Connecting OOS to any version of Exchange previous to Exchange 2016 just allows users to open documents from OWA within the browser. That is not a terribly compelling feature, and I don’t recall ever deploying WAC for a customer to be used for just Exchange. The few times that I have connected WAC to Exchange, it was intended to be used for Lync or SharePoint and just connected to Exchange “because it was there”.
Read moreOne of the new features of Exchange 2016 is the inclusion of “Modern Attachments”. Modern Attachments are not attachments at all, but links to Office documents that are stored within SharePoint sites but presented to look like attachments within email messages. Modern Attachments are a great step forward in that they allow users to continue to use attachments in the way they are used to while removing those files from your Exchange 2016 servers.
Read moreThis is not really a surprise. I’ve been telling customers who are in the process of moving to Office 365 that they will need to stay current with their on-premises software for years.
If your organization is moving to Office 365, you HAVE TO align your organization to the new reality that the cloud moves forward, and it’s not going to wait for you.
Read moreIn the first article in this series, I coved the basic GUI based ways that you can use RBAC in Exchange Online to allow users to control their own contact information in Exchange Online and to allow you to designate administrators with limited sets of rights.
In this article, I’m going to show you how to really use RBAC. We’re going to dive into PowerShell and see how to do things like give an administrator rights to manage a specific sub-set of your users.
Read moreA common request I get while doing migrations into Exchange Online is to assist customers in setting up permissions so that they can limit administrator's rights and scope to control Exchange Online. The solution for this problem is Role Based Access Control (RBAC), and it can be a little confusing to setup.
In this article I am going to start into the easier, GUI based options for setting up RBAC in Exchange Online. If you're looking for the more advanced RBAC controls, skip ahead to Part 2.
Read moreDelve is a new service in Office 365 that is designed to assist in discovering information that is relevant to you from within your organizations Office 365 tenant. Selecting the home screen in the Delve tile will show you a screen filled with tiles that link to documents throughout your Office 365 tenant.
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