Exchange News: September 2015

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

MSExchange.org: Integrating Exchange Server 2013 and Skype for Business Server 2015 (Part 2)

Configuring the integration between Exchange Server 2013 and Skype for Business Server 2015.

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msexchange.org: Download our free Office 2016 Quick Start Guides

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Monday, September 28, 2015

msexchange.org: Active Directory Domain Services Management Pack for System Center v6.0.8321.0

Download the latest version of one of the most important management packs for an Exchange infrastructure.

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msexchange.org: Be productive anywhere with Office 365

You are busy and need to be productive whether you are at your office, on the road, or at home. By installing Microsoft Office 365 for Business on your PC, tablet, and smartphone, you can keep up with your email and calendar, and work on documents, wherever you are.

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msexchange.org: Email and calendar on the go with Outlook 2016

Use Microsoft Outlook 2016 to keep your world in sync and stay more connected. Microsoft Outlook helps you manage everything you do, no matter where you are. Get your emails, calendars, contacts, tasks, and to-do lists all in one place, in a clear, unified view. Because Outlook is built into Microsoft Office 365, you can sign in from any browser, tablet, or phone.

from Exchange News Full Article

msexchange.org: Office 2016 Quick Start Guides

We’ve created new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote for your Windows PC. Download our free Quick Start Guides for an introduction to these apps.

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msexchange.org: Office 2016 Deployment Guides for Admins

Provides admins with links to information about how to deploy Office 2016, Office 365 ProPlus, and Office 2016 for Mac to users in their organizations.

from Exchange News Full Article

Friday, September 25, 2015

Paul Robichaux: Office 365 Exposed ep 01 / Exchange Exposed ep 05

http://ift.tt/1G82PlB We’re baaaaack…

Last year, Tony and I started producing a podcast for Windows IT Pro called “Exchange Exposed.” It was moderately successful, but the demands of producing and delivering the podcast on a regular schedule didn’t mesh well with Penton’s plan for world domination, so Tony and I took back the rights to the podcast and are recording and distributing it ourselves. However, because of some peculiarities of the way the iTunes Store lists podcasts, we couldn’t just add new episodes to the existing podcast… but we didn’t find this out until the current episode was recorded and ready.

Going forward, we’re retitling the podcast to “Office 365 Exposed” to reflect the reality that Exchange and Exchange Online are part of the Office 365 family. Unlike some other Office 365-branded media that focuses exclusively on SharePoint, we’ll be covering the non-SharePoint part of the ecosystem with vigor and depth. There’s a lot to talk about!

In this episode, recorded at IT/Dev Connections in Las Vegas, we get some quality time with special guest Bhargav Shukla of KEMP Technologies to discuss the release of Exchange 2013 CU10, the impending release of Exchange 2016, and what the future of on-premises Exchange looks like. Give it a listen below. In a day or two, iTunes should pick up the feed and you’ll be able to subscribe, or you can point your RSS feed reader to the “Podcasts” category here.

from Exchange News Full Article

Exchangepedia : Maximum number of In-Place Holds on a mailbox in Exchange 2013 and Office 365

Since the early days of In-Place Hold, the number floating around (and documented) is a maximum of five In-Place Holds before Exchange holds all content, but it’s incorrect. In Exchange 2013 and Exchange Online, you can use In-Place Hold to place messages (and other items, including archived Skype for Business/Lync conversations) on hold indefinitely or […]

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Exchangepedia : Maximum number of In-Place Holds on a mailbox in Exchange 2013 and Office 365

Thursday, September 24, 2015

MSExchange.org: Intune and Exchange ActiveSync (Part 7)

In the previous part of this article series we started exploring Intune’s Conditional Access feature. Now we will conclude it and look at the experience from a user’s perspective.

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msexchange.org: Preview of Azure AD PowerShell w/ Modern Authentication (MFA) and Device Cmdlets

Public preview of an update of the Azure Active Directory PowerShell with support for modern authentication (MFA). The preview will allow users (user accounts) protected with MFA to use the Azure AD PowerShell module.

from Exchange News Full Article

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Exchange Group Team Blog: OnPrem Lync/Skype and Office 365

Had an issue with mailboxes migrated to Office 365 while using OnPrem Lync/Skype.

Lync showed a constant “Enter Credentials” dialog:

The KB appears to have fixed it: Office 2013 and Lync 2013 periodically prompt for credentials to SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Lync Online

A simple registry key that you can rollout with a GPO.

from Exchange News Full Article

EighTwOne: IT/DEV Connections 2015 Wrap-Up

Note: For those that attended Jaap and my workshop on Monday, Managing Exchange On-Premises and Exchange Online using PowerShell, and are looking for the slide decks used in the workshop or demos, they are available TBD.

Last weekend, I returned from one of the largest, independent conferences on Microsoft technologies, IT/DEV Connections. The conference, which took place in the city of Las Vegas, is spread over a 3-day period on popular topics, like Exchange, Windows, SQL or SharePoint, and has a track for Infrastructure as well as Development (hence the ‘IT/DEV’). Apart from the many speakers, most of them experienced Microsoft Valuable Professionals, Microsoft celebrities like Tim McMichael were also presenting sessions.

Like many conferences nowadays, IT/DEV Connections took off with several pre-conference workshops on Monday. One of these workshops was done by fellow Exchange MVP and countryman Jaap Wesselius and myself. We talked a whole day about ‘Managing Exchange On-Premises and Exchange Online using PowerShell’. The turn-up was above expectation, which is always nice, and we had good interaction with, and feedback from the audience. This made our session, from a presenter’s viewpoint, very worthwhile.

Since I had no sessions after the workshop, I was free to attend sessions by fellow presenters. Tony Redmond kicked off with a keynote, analyzing the current landscape for Exchange and Office 365, and making references to sessions later that week, should people be interested in those topics. It’s also where you learn who is running what, and as it turned out most attendees are running Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2013 On-Premises, but with an increasing interest in Office 365.

During the week, apart from the excellent contents presented, I was very humbled to learn lots of presenters made references to several of my scripts, e.g.

Install-Exchange15.ps1, the Exchange 2013/2016 Unattended Installation script.
Connect-Office365Services.ps1, the script for profile inclusion, providing Office 365/Exchange Connect Functions.
Configure-IMIntegration.ps1, to configure IM integration.
Reference to my NTFS vs ReFS article.

This conference is also the place where Exchange MVP fellows Tony Redmond, Michael van Horenbeeck, Paul Cunningham and Jeff Guillet presented their 2nd edition of their book, ‘Office 365 for Exchange Professionals’. Congratulations to them reaching this milestone, looking at the non-stop amount of changes happening in the Office 365 environment. You can get your own copy of the updated book here.

It’s becoming a tradition that the last Exchange session of the conference is a ‘Ask the Experts’ panel session, where the audience can ask a panel of presenters questions, or where the current landscape for Exchange or Office 365 can be discussed. It’s a great way to close the conference, before everyone gets back to their corners of the world, back from the crazy city that is Las Vegas to reality.

If you didn’t consider IT/DEV Connections before, you should. The conference is a must-visit, especially with Microsoft having consolidated MEC, MMS etc. in a single, huge event which is Ignite now. Connections is not small, but the more intimate setting allows you to catch up with peers more easily, have discussions over a pint, great catering, and without the need to max out your step counter. The Aria resort is very nice place to host this event, great for business with a pleasant conference area without too much of the distractions like the other hotels. If you plan on visiting next year, save the date: September 19-22, 2016!

I also want to thank ENow for again hosting an epic Scheduled Maintenance party. Location this time was the Ghostbar at the 55th floor in Palms Resort, which gave an amazing view over the city of Las Vegas and the Strip. I put on my red NFL jersey, which I received last year from ENow. Because this is also the gear worn by people of ENow at events, it resulted in funny moments when people left the party at the Ghostbar, thanking me for the event.

Finally, here are some of the other Exchange Connections wrap-ups:

Filed under: Exchange, Office 365, PowerShell Tagged: Event

from Exchange News Full Article

MSExchange.org: Off-boarding email from Office 365 to Exchange 2013 (Part 6)

In this series we cover how to successfully migrate mail from Office 365 into a new Exchange organization.

from Exchange News Full Article

Sunday, September 20, 2015

msexchange.org: Microsoft IT migrates mailboxes to Office 365 Exchange Online (Microsoft IT paper)

Before Office 365 was released to the public, Microsoft weighed the pros and cons of migrating its many mailboxes to Office 365 Exchange Online. The company determined that the move was worth the risk and effort because of the many potential advantages of having its mailboxes in the cloud. The IT Exchange Email and Calendaring team at Microsoft IT undertook an extensive planning effort, announced the upcoming migration, prepared the affected teams, and then migrated mailboxes—thousands at a time—learning all the while. In each phase, Microsoft IT used the lessons learned from previous phases.

from Exchange News Full Article

msexchange.org: Optimizing network performance for Microsoft Office 365

As the earliest adopter of Microsoft products, Microsoft IT began deploying Microsoft Office 365 in 2011. To optimize for network capacity and performance, they implemented strategic plans for network-related technologies. Microsoft IT has continued to evolve industry-leading performance and migration approaches, and they have adopted cloud infrastructure services such as Azure ExpressRoute to promote a successful transition to Office 365.

from Exchange News Full Article

Friday, September 18, 2015

Exchangepedia : eDiscovery Limits and Throttling Policies in Exchange Server and Office 365

In Exchange 2013 and Exchange Online, In-Place eDiscovery allows you to search a large number of mailboxes. Although the searches are performed against the indexes built by Exchange Search, they can potentially consume significant system resources. In on-premises deployments, this generally happens in control of or with the knowledge of Exchange admins, who can and […]

from Exchange News Full Article

Devin on Earth: An Exchange 2013 AAP-less DAG cluster

Greetings, all!

One of the cool things you can do in Exchange 2013 SP1 and Windows 2012 R2 is create a DAG whose underlying cluster has no administrative access point (AAP). What’s an AAP? Well, that’s the combination of the cluster named object (CNO) and the IP address. Back in February 2014, the Exchange Team made a blog post about this and other new clustering features that Exchange 2013 can take advantage of — dynamic quorum and dynamic witness.

Many other bloggers have talked about the pros and cons of the AAP-less cluster, but let me summarize them:

You can’t connect to the cluster to manage it via the Failover Cluster Manager GUI. You have to use cluster.exe or the PowerShell cmdlets.
You can’t manage the cluster from a machine that’s not a member of the cluster. No more remote cluster management!
You can’t specify the cluster name in your management commands.
Third party utilities (like backup) that rely on the talking to the AAP will either need workarounds (such as HOSTS file entries) or need to be replaced entirely.

Knowing all of this, my customer decided to go with an AAP-less cluster for their DAGs, in part because they’re going to have stretched DAGs and want to avoid some of the potential networking issues that can come from the cluster IP address having to flip between subnets depending on which node holds quorum. What we found, however, is that when we went to modify specific properties of the cluster (to enhance the timeouts for the stretched DAG scenario) and the cluster network (to exclude the backup network from participating in the cluster or DAG replication at all), the lack of AAP was coming back to bite us. And once you create the DAG, you can’t flip it from AAP to no AAP and vice versa. You have to tear it down and build it back up. We were trying to avoid the scenario of having to rebuild the DAGs, mailbox databases, and extra database copies.

Thanks to some pointers from members of the Exchange Masters community, plus a little experimentation, what I found is that the key to getting this to work was two-fold:

Per the note’s in Scott’s blog, run the commands from a node in the cluster. I’d been trying this previously, but I only had half the solution.
Disable the DAG automatic network configuration feature in favor of manual network configuration.
Now run the desired commands.

Here’s how it looks in practice:

(From a member of DAG1)

(Configure the DAG for manual network configuration;

Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup -Identity DAG1 -ManualDagNetworkConfiguration $true

Set-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupNetwork -Identity DAG1\BadNetwork `

-IgnoreNetwork $true `

-ReplicationEnabled $false `

-Description “DAG1 Bad network”

cluster /prop SameSubnetDelay=2000

cluster /prop SameSubnetThreshold=10

cluster /prop CrossSubnetDelay=4000

cluster /prop CrossSubnetThreshold=10

Now, the bad network shows up as replication disabled in Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupNetwork, the Get-ClusterNetwork role for the interface on that network is now 0 (ignore) instead of 1 (heartbeat only, which lets the DAG use it as a replication network) or 3 (full cluster communication), and the cluster is accepting the actual property updates.

The post An Exchange 2013 AAP-less DAG cluster appeared first on Devin on Earth.

from Exchange News Full Article

msexchange.org: The new Office 365 Admin Center Preview

Our mission is to empower you to achieve more. For Office 365 IT administrators, this means improving the experience of the Office 365 Admin Center so that it is more delightful to use, by making it more intuitive, informative, scalable and insightful.

from Exchange News Full Article

MSExchange.org: Integrating Exchange Server 2013 and Skype for Business Server 2015 (Part 1)

In this article series, we will focus on the integration aspects between Exchange Server 2013 and Skype for Business Server 2015 where some of the configuration will be useful also for SharePoint administrators.

from Exchange News Full Article

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Tony Redmond: Launching “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” (2nd edition)

Yesterday, we seized the opportunity of having the three authors and our esteemed technical editor together for the IT/DEV Connections conference in Las Vegas to launch the second edition of “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals”. Binary Tree kindly sponsored a reception and once the 50 or so folks who came along had a drink, we shared some stories about the struggles of eBook publishing, especially when the subject matter changes so quickly, which is certainly the case with Office 365, and then distributed copies of the book on USB key that were also provided by Binary Tree.

In the halcyon days of print publishing, a book launch was an opportunity for those who attended to get a copy of the book signed by the author. It’s pretty difficult to sign an eBook, but we came up with the idea of signing the USB key with a Sharpie. I have no idea of how long these signatures will last, but creating an assembly line to have the four of us sign each USB was a bit of fun.

A signed (USB) copy of “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals”

Binary Tree also printed off a paper copy of the book that we signed. The photo below shows the writing team (Jeff Guillet, me, Michael Van Horenbeeck, Paul Cunningham) and three from Binary Tree, including Justin Harris and Gary Steere (both Exchange MVPs), and Val Vasquez.

Look! A signed copy too…

Those who weren’t able to attend IT/DEV Connections, which by the way is an excellent conference focused on practical issues involved in managing applications like Exchange, SharePoint, and Office 365, can now get the PDF and EPUB versions of the second edition at ExchangeServerPro.com. If you signed up to become a member of ExchangeServerPro.com and bought the first edition, you’re eligible to update to the second edition for $10. Otherwise the price is $38.20 until the end of September at which time the price will revert to $44.95.

We are preparing a Kindle version too. The Kindle version of the second edition of “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” is available for pre-order from Amazon and will be released on September 30. Some additional formatting work explains the delay in release. Unfortunately, we cannot offer a discount for the Kindle version for reasons that are too many and too boring to explain. Sorry.

Alan Byrne, the co-founder of Cogmotive (an excellent reporting solution for Office 365), reviewed the second edition on his blog. It was great to have Alan read the book and tell us what he thinks because he has been living the dream of creating an ISV product for Office 365 and using tools like PowerShell and the Office 365 APIs to extract information from the service for the tenants he supports. As such, he knows what he is talking about.

Of course, Office 365 doesn’t stop changing just because a new book is available. We know that we have work to do to keep pace with new updates, features and functionality that appear in Office 365. A third edition is planned and will probably appear in time for the Ignite 2016 conference next May.

Thanks to everyone who supported the first edition; the second couldn’t have been possible without your help and feedback. And special thanks to Binary Tree for providing the necessary financial sponsorship to allow us to dedicate sufficient time to producing the second edition. We have over 150 pages of new content and have extensively revised many of the chapters from the first edition. That takes time, energy, and a little bit of money.

Follow Tony @12Knocksinna

from Exchange News Full Article

EighTwOne: Exchange 2013 and .NET Framework 4.6

A quick heads-up that when you are running Exchange Server 2013, you should not install or update to .NET Framework 4.6. This version of the .NET framework is not only not supported, it may also cause your Exchange 2013 server to stop functioning correctly.

When you have updated from a previous version, a suggested workaround is to uninstall .NET Framework 4.6. However, with all the dependencies on the .NET Framework by Exchange Server, I recommend you prevent having to perform this step by not installing version 4.6. When you did install version 4.6, I personally would prefer to migrate contents, i.e. mailboxes etc., to a new Exchange 2013 Server, and decommission the one you installed .NET 4.6 on.

More information can be found in KB3095369.

Filed under: Exchange 2013 Tagged: .NET, Exchange2013

from Exchange News Full Article

EighTwOne: iOS 9 Outlook App & Lync 2013 App Issues

iphone6 After Apple released iOS 9 to public yesterday. From an Exchange or Office 365 perspective, iOS 9 supports the enhanced calendar features of Office 365 and Exchange 2016 when that is released. Unfortunately, several incidents have been reported with the Outlook app and the Lync 2013 app.

Regarding the Outlook App, iOS9 users might not be able to start the Outlook App or the Outlook app will just crash. The far from ideal workaround offered by the Outlook team, is to reinstall the Outlook app.

Of course, this also requires users to reconfigure accounts and Outlook App settings, so organizations can expect some calls to the service desk by users who upgraded.

For Lync 2013 users, there are sign-in issues when they have configured different region and language settings on their iOS device. Those users will be presented the following:

The issue has officially been confirmed through publication of KB3096704, which states:

“This problem is fixed in the Microsoft Skype for Business for iOS app that will replace Lync for iPhone and Lync for iPad when it’s released. No fix for this issue is scheduled for the current releases of Lync for iPhone and Lync for iPad”.

Since the Skype for Business app is not available yet, this is not good news. Mitigation is possible by matching the region with the language setting (or the other way around), after which you need to reinstall the Lync 2013 app from the store.

With all this in mind, should organizations wish to first test the new iOS against their Exchange environment for potential other issues, you can block iOS 9 from accessing your Exchange 2013 environment, or Office 365 tenant if you must, using the Access/Block/Quarantine feature. First you need to retrieve the reported DeviceOS string for iOS 9 for a device:

Get-MobileDevice | Where-Object {$_.DeviceOS -like “iOS 9*”} | Select DeviceModel, DeviceOSLanguage, DeviceOS

The reported DeviceOS strings then need to be used to create ActiveSync device rules. For example, my iPhone 6 reports DeviceOS as “iOS 9.0 13A344”. To block this device and put them in quarantine, run the following cmdlet in the Exchange Management Shell

New-ActiveSyncDeviceAccessRule -QueryString "iOS 9.0 13A344" -Characteristic DeviceOS -AccessLevel Quarantine

If you would like to know more about the Access/Block/Quarantine option, check out here.

Filed under: Exchange 2016, Mobile, Office 365, Outlook Tagged: IOS, Lync2013, Outlook

from Exchange News Full Article

msexchange.org: New Public Folder Picker for OWA

The Exchange Public Folder team has been working on improving the Public Folder experience in OWA. Today we are announcing a new feature available in Exchange Server 2013 CU10, Exchange Server 2016, as well as Office 365 customers over the coming months.

from Exchange News Full Article

msexchange.org: Office 365 Import Service—migration to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business just became easier

Traditional content migrations to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business can sometimes require lengthy data uploads over the network. The Office 365 Import Service enhances the document migration experience to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business by making it: Fast—Save time in migrating data to Office 365 by copying it to hard drives and shipping them rather than using the network to upload large amounts of data. However, if you prefer to use the network, especially for uploading smaller data sets, our new migration pipeline is faster than traditional migration methods by an order of magnitude. Simple—A free tool is available to package up your on-premises SharePoint or file share content and prepare it to be imported into Office 365.

from Exchange News Full Article

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Exchange Team Blog: New Public Folder Picker for OWA

OWA has long supported the ability to add Mail Public Folders (public folders that contain Mail and Post Items) into your Favorites collection from within OWA. In Exchange Server 2013 CU9, we added support for showing Public Folder Calendars and Public Contact Folders that have been added to your Favorites collection via Outlook. With Exchange Server 2013 CU10, and Exchange Server 2016, we are bringing you the ability to add those types of Public Folders to your Favorites collection within OWA directly.

In addition, we have redesigned the public folder picker to make it easier to navigate your organization’s public folder hierarchy, and select public folders to add to your favorites collection.

Opening the new public folder picker

Accessing the new public folder picker from the OWA Mail App is the same as accessing the existing one, you right-click on the “Folders” collection in the right, and select “Add public folder to Favorites”.

Opening the public folder picker from the OWA Mail App

New however, is the ability to open the public folder picker from the OWA Calendar App, and the OWA People App. To open the public folder picker from the OWA Calendar App, right-click on the “Other Calendars” section, and select the new “Add public folder to Favorites” option.

Opening the public folder picker from the OWA Calendar App

To open the public folder picker from the OWA People App, right-click on the “Other Contacts” section, and select the new “Add public folder to Favorites” option.

Opening the public folder picker from the OWA People App

Using the new Public Folder Picker

The new picker is larger, and has icons that allow you to identify which type of items are contained in the public folder.

The new public folder picker in OWA

Folders that can be added to your favorites collection are shown in bold, while folders that cannot be added (such as folders that contain Tasks or other item types) are greyed out.

After selecting any public folder, and clicking the “Add to Favorites” button, you will receive a confirmation message indicating that the folder was added to your collection successfully.

Example of adding a calendar folder to the Favorites collection.

It’s important to note that, when selecting a public folder and adding to favorites, it will be added to the favorites collection of the corresponding type. In other words, favorited Public Calendar Folders will appear in the “Other Calendars” section of the OWA Calendar App, and favorited Contact Public Folders will appear in the “Other Contacts” section of the OWA People App. This happens regardless of which App was open when you opened the new public folder picker.

Additionally, new favorited Public Folders added in OWA will show in your Outlook client as well.

Version Support

As of this writing, the new OWA Public Folder Picker, and associated menu options in OWA Calendar and OWA People apps, will only work when:

Both the callers mailbox and the public folder mailboxes have been upgraded to Exchange 2013 CU10
Both the callers mailbox and the public folder mailboxes have been upgraded to Exchange 2016.

There is a known issue where, even if the callers mailbox has been upgraded to Exchange 2016, and the public folder mailboxes have been upgraded to Exchange 2013 CU10, then the old picker will still show up. This is hopefully going to be addressed in an Exchange 2016 update.

Wrapping up

For organizations that have a large investment in Public Folders, we hope that you will find the new picker useful. We welcome your feedback.

Ben Spain

from Exchange News Full Article

msexchange.org: Azure AD Premium Dashboard is in preview!

A small bit of cool news to share today. We're just turned on the Azure Active Directory Premium Dashboard. This new feature provides a birds eye for your directory and is the one place to manage all of your services. It also makes it easy for you to keep up with new features and events.

from Exchange News Full Article

msexchange.org: Announcing the Office 365 Service Trust Portal

The regulatory compliance and business risk landscape is continuously evolving. At Microsoft, we appreciate our customers’ need to understand the Office 365 architecture and compliance with regulations to help them evaluate moving to Office 365. We also know you need to understand how we keep your data secure on the service on an ongoing basis.

from Exchange News Full Article

msexchange.org: Released: September 2015 Quarterly Exchange Updates

The Exchange team is announcing today the availability of our latest quarterly update for Exchange Server 2013 and Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 3 Update Rollup 11.

from Exchange News Full Article

msexchange.org: Issues Verifying Office 365 Domains

from Exchange News Full Article

msexchange.org: Day Zero Support for iOS 9 with Intune

from Exchange News Full Article

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Steve Goodman: New version of the Exchange Environment Report available now

2015-09-16_01-03-03 Version 1.6 of the Exchange Environment Report is hot off the press and ready for download.

New in this version…

Added Exchange 2016 support
Fixed issues with not showing latest Update Rollup
Fixed issues with not showing latest CU
Fixed bug detecting Autodiscover Service URI and added support for new Get-ClientAccessService command
Removed option to schedule – easier done from Task Scheduler directly and the built-in method was buggy
Added MAPI/HTTP hostnames to site hostname list
Added detection for Hybrid Server
Changed font to Segoe UI

As always the script is hosted on the Technet Gallery for Exchange and the original page for the EER is here.

Enjoy!

from Exchange News Full Article

EighTwOne: Exchange 2013 CU10 & Exchange 2010 SP3 RU11

The Exchange Team released Cumulative Update 10 for Exchange Server 2013 (KB3078678) as well as Rollup 11 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 3 (KB3078674). These version levels will be required for co-existence with Exchange Server 2016, which is scheduled for release on September, 29th. The updates raise the version numbers to 15.0.1130.7 and 14.3.266.1, respectively.

Cumulative Update 10 contains the following fixes for Exchange Server 2013:

KB 3087126 MS15-103: Description of the security update for Exchange Server: September 8, 2015
KB 3094068 Permissions for a linked mailbox are added to an account in the wrong forest in an Exchange Server 2013 environment
KB 3093884 The link in a quarantined email shows an empty list for ActiveSync-enabled devices in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3093866 The number of search results can’t be more than 250 when you search email messages in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3088911 Inline attachments are sent as traditional when you smart forward an HTML email in an iOS device in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3087571 Can’t edit or resend a delayed delivery message when you open the message from the Outbox folder in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3087293 “550 5.6.0” NDR and duplicated attachments when an encrypted email is sent in Outlook in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3080511 HTML forms aren’t available when the DisableFilter parameter is enabled in Outlook Web App in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3080221 LegacyExchangeDN attribute is displayed when you use Outlook Web App to view an appointment in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3079217 Outlook Web App replies to the wrong email address when an email has more than 12 recipients in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3078966 Outlook 2011 for Mac client displays emails as they come from the same senders in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3078443 Incorrect results are displayed when you search for an email that has a certain attachment name in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3078438 Performance issues occur in an Exchange Server 2013 environment that’s running BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5
KB 3078404 Can’t access a shared mailbox after you migrate from Exchange Server 2010 to Exchange Server 2013
KB 3076257 EWS returns a Success response code even if a batch deletion request isn’t completed in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3074823 No Send As audit events are logged when you use Send As permission in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3071776 “A problem occurred” error when you access shared folders in Exchang Server 2013 mailbox by using Outlook Web App
KB 3069516 Mailbox size and quota information are reported incorrectly in Outlook and Outlook Web App in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3061487 “FailedToGetRootFolders” error when you run an eDiscovery estimate search for archive mailboxes in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3058609 Wrong recipient is specified in an inbox rule that has the ForwardTo or RedirectTo option in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3009631 Advanced Find against the Sent Items folder in Outlook returns no result in Exchange Server 2013
KB 2999011 Documents are partially indexed by Exchange search when they embed other documents in Exchange Server 2013
KB 2983161 Organization unite picker is missing when you create a Remote Mailbox in Exchange Admin Console in Exchange Server 2013
KB 3091308 Can’t install cumulative updates or service packs when MachinePolicy or UserPolicy is defined in Exchange Server 2013

For Exchange Server 2010 SP3, Rollup 11 contains the following fix:

KB 3092576 Exchange 2010 Information Store crashes randomly

Notes:

When using Exchange hybrid deployments or Exchange Online Archiving (EOA), you are required to stay current.
If you want to speed up the update process for systems without internet access, you can follow the procedure described here to disable publisher’s certificate revocation checking.
This Cumulative Update does include Active Directory changes when compared to the previous Cumulative Update. If you have deployed a version earlier than CU10, make sure you run PrepareSchema /PrepareAD.
If you got an Exchange 2010 DAG, and want to properly update the DAG members, check the instructions here.

Note that Cumulative Updates can be installed directly, i.e. no need to install RTM prior to installing Cumulative Updates. Note that once installed, you can’t uninstall a Cumulative Update nor any of the installed Exchange server roles. The order of upgrading Exchange 2013 servers is irrelevant, unlike with previous generations of Exchange. Exchange 2010 Rollups are cumulative per service pack level, i.e. they contain fixes released in earlier updates.

You can download Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 10 here and Exchange 2010 SP3 Rollup 11 here. The Exchange 2013 CU10 Language Packs are available here.

Filed under: Exchange 2010, Exchange 2013 Tagged: CU10, Exchange 2010, Exchange2013, Rollup

from Exchange News Full Article

Exchange Team Blog: Released: September 2015 Quarterly Exchange Updates

The Exchange team is announcing today the availability of our latest quarterly update for Exchange Server 2013 and Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 3 Update Rollup 11.

Cumulative Update 10 for Exchange Server 2013 and UM Language Packs are now available on the Microsoft Download Center. Cumulative Update 10 contains the latest set of fixes and builds upon Exchange Server 2013 Cumulative Update 9. The release includes fixes for customer reported issues, minor product enhancements and previously released security bulletins, including MS15-103. A complete list of customer reported issues resolved can be found in Knowledge Base Article KB3078678. Customers running any previous release of Exchange Server 2013 can move directly to Cumulative Update 10. Customers deploying Exchange Server 2013 for the first time may skip previous releases and start their deployment with Cumulative Update 10 directly.

Cumulative Update 10 does not include updates to Active Directory Schema, but does include additional RBAC definitions requiring PrepareAD to be executed prior to upgrading any servers to CU10. PrepareAD will run automatically during the first server upgrade if Setup detects this is required and the logged on user has sufficient permission.

Microsoft recommends all customers test the deployment of a cumulative update in their lab environment to determine the proper installation process for your production environment. For information on extending the schema and configuring Active Directory, please review the appropriate TechNet documentation.

Also, to prevent installation issues you should ensure that the Windows PowerShell Script Execution Policy is set to “Unrestricted” on the server being upgraded or installed. To verify the policy settings, run the Get-ExecutionPolicy cmdlet from PowerShell on the machine being upgraded. If the policies are NOT set to Unrestricted you should use the resolution steps in KB981474 to adjust the settings.

Reminder: Customers in hybrid deployments where Exchange is deployed on-premises and in the cloud, or who are using Exchange Online Archiving (EOA) with their on-premises Exchange deployment are required to deploy the most current (e.g., CU10) or the prior (e.g., CU9) Cumulative Update release.

Also being released today is, Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 3 Update Rollup 11 (KB3078674). This release provides an important fix for an Information Store crash when customers are upgrading their Lync server infrastructure to Skype for Business. Exchange Server 2010 is in extended support and will receive security and time zone fixes on-demand on a go-forward basis.

The updates released today are important pre-requisites for customers with existing Exchange deployments who will deploy Exchange Server 2016. Cumulative Update 10 is the minimum version of Exchange Server 2013 which will co-exist with Exchange Server 2016. Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 3 Update Rollup 11, is the minimum version of Exchange Server 2010 which will be supported in a coexistence deployment with Exchange Server 2016. No earlier versions of Exchange will be supported co-existing with Exchange Server 2016. Exchange Server 2016 is anticipated to be released later this year. Customers who plan to deploy this new release of Exchange into their environment should be aware of these important prerequisites.

For the latest information and product announcements please read What’s New in Exchange Server 2013, Release Notes and product documentation available on TechNet.

Note: Documentation may not be fully available at the time this post was published.

The Exchange Team

from Exchange News Full Article

Exchange Team Blog: Ask The Perf Guy: What’s The Story With Hyperthreading and Virtualization?

There’s been a fair amount of confusion amongst customers and partners lately about the right way to think about hyperthreading when virtualizing Exchange. Hopefully I can clear up that confusion very quickly.

We’ve had relatively strong guidance in recent versions of Exchange that hyperthreading should be disabled. This guidance is specific to physical server deployments, not virtualized deployments. The reasoning for strongly recommending that hyperthreading be disabled on physical deployments can really be summarized in 2 different points:

The increase in logical processor count at the OS level due to enabling hyperthreading results in increased memory consumption (due to various algorithms that allocate memory heaps based on core count), and in some cases also results in increased CPU consumption or other scalability issues due to high thread counts and lock contention.
The increased CPU throughput associated with hyperthreading is non-deterministic and difficult to measure, leading to capacity planning challenges.

The first point is really the largest concern, and in a virtual deployment, it is a non-issue with regard to configuration of hyperthreading. The guest VMs do not see the logical processors presented to the host, so they see no difference in processor count when hyperthreading is turned on or off. Where this concern can become an issue for guest VMs is in the number of virtual CPUs presented to the VM. Don’t allocate more virtual CPUs to your Exchange server VMs that are necessary based on sizing calculations. If you allocate extra virtual CPUs, you can run into the same class of issues associated with hyperthreading on physical deployments.

In summary:

If you have a physical deployment, turn off hyperthreading.
If you have a virtual deployment, you can enable hyperthreading (best to follow the recommendation of your hypervisor vendor), and:
- Don’t allocate extra virtual CPUs to Exchange server guest VMs.
- Don’t use the extra logical CPUs exposed to the host for sizing/capacity calculations (see the hyperthreading guidance at http://ift.tt/1M8SkCT for further details on this).

Jeff Mealiffe
Principal PM Manager
Office 365 Customer Experience

from Exchange News Full Article

MSExchange.org: Deploying an Exchange 2013 Hybrid Lab Environment in Windows Azure (Part 33)

In this article we will take a look at the management side of things, decommissioning of the on-premises Exchange servers and mail flow considerations going forward.

from Exchange News Full Article

Monday, September 14, 2015

Steve Goodman: Off-boarding email from Office 365 to Exchange 2013

In this series we’ll look at a scenario where mailboxes started life in Office 365 and mailboxes must be moved, or off-boarded, to a new AD and Exchange setup. To do this we’ll need to perform the reverse of a Hybrid implementation.

Most organizations moving email to Office 365 are unlikely to consider a return to on-premises. However it’s important to understand that should needs change, it is relatively straightforward to move mailboxes to Exchange 2013.

from Exchange News Full Article

Friday, September 11, 2015

msexchange.org: Lepide launches three new suites: “2020 - Audit & Control”, “Meteor - Migrate & Restore” and “Quad – Have it all”

Auditing and migration can be troublesome tasks without the right tools, often proving complex and time consuming. Keeping in line with its motto of ‘simplifying IT Management’ Lepide has put together a few new suites to make its solutions more accessible for IT teams of all shapes and sizes.

from Exchange News Full Article

msexchange.org: Admins—get ready for Office 2016, rollout begins September 22!

In March, we announced the Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview. Since then, we’ve been listening to your feedback and continuing to build, refine and improve Office 2016 for Windows. This is a seminal release for Office and one you won’t want to wait to deploy to your users, and thanks to the many new IT management enhancements, you don’t need to wait!

from Exchange News Full Article

The EXPTA {blog}: Second Edition of Office 365 for Exchange Professionals

I am very pleased to announce that the second edition of Office 365 for Exchange Professionals will be released next week at the IT/Dev Connections conference in Las Vegas, where all four of us will be speaking.

This self-published eBook is the most comprehensive publication available of all things Office 365. Over 150 pages of new content has been added since the first release at Microsoft Ignite in May 2015. The book covers new features and capabilities of Microsoft's cloud offering from an Exchange professional's perspective. You will learn how to take advantage of all the cloud has to offer in this comprehensive but surprisingly easy to read book.

The MVP co-authors are Tony Redmond, Michael Van Horenbeeck, and Paul Cunningham. Once again I provide my services as technical editor for this 770+ page book. Together, we bring over 60 years' experience in the IT and messaging industry. We have spent many hours exploring and understanding, participating in technical preview programs, and developing best practices in order to update this second edition with brand new content.

You can preorder Office 365 for Exchange Professionals from Paul Cunningham's ExchangeServerPro.com website or for your Kindle on Amazon.

If you are attending the IT/Dev Connections conference please join us for our second edition book launch party hosted by Binary Tree.

from Exchange News Full Article

MSExchange.org: Intune and Exchange ActiveSync (Part 6)

In the previous part of this article series we saw how we can use Intune together with Exchange ActiveSync to manage mobile devices that have not been enrolled with Intune. Now we will be looking at Intune’s Conditional Access feature.

from Exchange News Full Article

Tony Redmond: Exchange Unwashed Blog Digest – August 2015

It’s taken me too long to get around to collating the Exchange Unwashed digest for August 2015. I plead vacation, the need to manage the submission of session presentations for this month’s IT/DEV Connections conference in Las Vegas, and the final preparation of the second edition of “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” in mitigation. However, better late than never, so here’s what happened during August.

ESEUTIL – even more evil for DAGs (August 27): A continuation of a previous article outlining why the ESEUTIL utility can be problematic when used to process mailbox databases that belong to a Database Availability Group (DAG). Quite a few people responded that they liked using ESEUTIL and consider it part of their toolkit. That’s just fine, as far as it goes, assuming that you understand what happens when ESEUTIL processes a database and what might occur when you bring the database back online. A brain surgeon can cut into your central cortex with confidence, but would you allow some guy off the street to do the same?

SharePoint’s interesting hybrid cloud search service (August 25): There’s no doubt that I am writing more about non-Exchange elements of Office 365 and this is a good example. But the technology is interesting as it allows for the tons of documents and other data held in on-premises SharePoint servers to be exposed to tools like Delve running inside Office 365. At least, I think it’s interesting…

Removing on-hold items from Exchange and SharePoint: unsupported but doable (August 20): Despite what some of their spokespeople might imply, Microsoft does not have the answers to all the technical requirements that companies might have. At times, little gaps are left that are either filled by a third party product or by a workaround. In this instance, it’s the latter – a set of steps that can be taken to remove on-hold items when required. The key is to do so in a way that will stand up to legal challenge – and that’s the hardest bit.

Windows 10 Build 10525, PowerShell, and Office 365 (August 19): Everyone knows that Exchange uses remote PowerShell to manage its services, but in an Office 365 environment you have to connect to different endpoints to access different services. The Compliance Center is one of those, but running PowerShell to connect to the Compliance Center on any Windows 10 build after RTM is guaranteed to be a frustrating experience. I’ve complained to Microsoft but no one seems to be able to fix the problem. The other PowerShell endpoints work quite happily.

New report slams Office 365 compliance features unfairly (August 18): Independent reports about product functionality serve a useful purpose by holding vendors like Microsoft to account and providing potential customers with a view as to whether the products will actually work for them. I received a report authored by Osterman Research and didn’t think it was accurate enough and contained too many broad generalizations to be useful, so I said so. You can read Michael Osterman’s response to my comments too. We haven’t fallen out – I think!

Frenetic pace of change continues in Office 365 (August 13): Microsoft told us that they had made 450 changes to Office 365 in the last year. That’s a staggering number. Think of how you would manage such a volume of change in one of your own IT systems – it would be terribly difficult, if not impossible. Now think of scaling up for tens of millions of users. Uuugh.

Office 365 numbers growing but report identifies some bad user habits in SharePoint and OneDrive (August 11): It’s difficult to believe, but users don’t suddenly acquire good working habits when they move to use a cloud system. A report released by Skyhigh Networks explained that many of the documents now stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business contain sensitive data that isn’t very well controlled. Sounds just like on-premises storage…

Tony’s surprising session choices for IT/DEV Connections 2015 (August 6): With IT/DEV Connections just around the corner, I like to examine the sessions to decide what ones I would attend if I had the choice (as I’m a conference chair, I’ll probably be running around too much to get to many sessions). This year I selected some of the sessions that go into detail about SharePoint Online, the Office Graph, and Delve because I think these will help those who are moving to the cloud to maximize the value they get from Office 365. I hope I have made the right choice!

The unnecessary renaming of Outlook Web App (August 5): Microsoft is making an attempt to convince the user base that the old OWA name should be modernized to “Outlook on the web” (note small w for web). I think it’s a silly exercise. What do you think?

Power BI’s odd integration with Office 365 Groups (August 4): The news that the Power BI team had enabled Office 365 Groups as a way to manage workspaces seemed like a great idea. But the integration work is not well done and leaves many holes that should be filled. And now Microsoft wants a Power BI Pro license before you can use the integration. Fortunately, the Power BI team acknowledged that they should have done better and are working to improve the situation. Hopefully, we’ll see the result of their work soon.

September has already proved interesting and I anticipate even more to talk about once I meet with my MVP buddies and other technologists at Connections in the Aria Hotel next week. I look forward to meeting those who attend Connections. It’ll be a fun time.

Follow Tony @12Knocksinna

from Exchange News Full Article

MSExchange.org: Off-boarding email from Office 365 to Exchange 2013 (Part 5)

In the previous part of this series we completed our hybrid configuration. In this part of the series we will configure mail routing – crucial to a successful migration and setup and migrate mailboxes.

from Exchange News Full Article

Tony Redmond: Announcing the 2nd edition of Office 365 for Exchange Professionals

When Paul Cunningham, Michael Van Horenbeeck, and I set out to write the best possible book covering all aspects of Exchange Online and the other parts of Office 365 that administrators should understand, we knew that the old publishing model of write-edit-print could never keep pace with the development cadence used by cloud services. We therefore resolved that we would update the content frequently and issue new versions to make that content available to readers.

Our first version was released at the Microsoft Ignite conference in May and spanned some 630 pages. We learned a lot about the process required to take raw text and bring it together to make an eBook. We learned even more about formatting and layout to support the EPUB and Kindle formats. And then we found out that we had a lot of work to do to understand, assess, and write about all the new information released by Microsoft at Ignite.

Now we’re done and the second version is almost ready. We plan make the eBook generally available at a reception sponsored by Binary Tree at the IT/DEV Connections conference in Las Vegas at 5:30PM on September 16. Naturally, if you are at Connections, we would love for you to come along and join the party. Please RSVP mailto:susan.padien@binarytree.com?subject=Book-Signing if you’d like to be at the event.

The second edition contains 150 pages of new content together with a heap of changes, updates, refinements, and responses to questions asked by readers. We have extensive coverage of Office 365 Groups, Delve, the Compliance Center, and the Import Service and consider the eBook to be up to date with the current state of Office 365 – or as close as we can make it. But given the nature of Office 365, we know that we have even more work to do to keep pace as Microsoft releases more updates over the next few months. That work will be seen in the third edition, due in April 2016.

The full price for the second edition is $44.95. However, if you bought the first edition from the ExchangeServerPro.com site and took out membership of the site, you’ll be able to update to the second edition (PDF or EPUB formats) for $10. The upgrade offer will be available from September 16 to September 23 and after that date site members will have to pay the usual price. We will not be able to extend the update offer to you if you didn’t buy a PDF or EPUB version from ExchangeServerPro.com. However, to launch the second edition, we will make the book available to everyone for $38.20 (a discount of 15%) until September 30.

If you bought the book from ExchangeServerPro.com, please wait until we send email to you with the discount code to obtain your copy of the second edition for $10. Otherwise, if you’d like to buy at the reduced rate of $38.20, you can place your order now.

Unfortunately, we are unable to create the same type of upgrade offer for Kindle purchasers. There are multiple reasons for this, including the fundamental points that Amazon doesn’t support the kind of model that we would need to be able to provide a discount to previous purchasers plus the large percentage of income taken by Amazon for their royalty.

In fact, the Kindle version of the second edition of Office 365 for Exchange Professionals will be treated by Amazon as a completely new title that has no relationship to the first edition. We could release the second edition as an update to the first, but that doesn’t make commercial sense as we would then be giving away the new edition for free to all who bought the first edition. Believe me, no one does books like this to make their fortune. Technical books do not sell in the same quantity as bestselling novels! We have some work to do to prepare the Kindle version so the second edition will not be available on Amazon until September 23.

Creating this eBook has been both terrific fun and a real challenge. It’s fun learning, but it’s a challenge to keep tabs on what’s happening inside Office 365. At times, we almost think that the engineers are playing with us when a new and unexpected feature turns up to throw our carefully managed schedule into disarray. But that’s the world of the cloud and it’s the reason why we are publishing in the manner we are.

Stay tuned for more news about Office 365 for Exchange Professionals. We hope that you enjoy the second edition and that it justifies the same kind of reviews we received for the first edition. And thanks again for all the support received from friends, fellow MVPs, and readers.

Tony Redmond, Paul Cunningham, Michael Van Horenbeeck, and Jeff Guillet (our esteemed technical editor)

Reviews posted on Amazon for the first edition of Office 365 for Exchange Professionals

Absolutely Fantastic Book!

By Ryan M. on June 3, 2015

I’ve been working with Exchange for as long as I can remember and I’ve read many-of-book on the subject from the authors of this particular book. I’ve always found books written by them very, very useful on all areas of the chosen subject. This book adds to that great collection – if you’re looking for something that really explains the ‘What’s, If’s and How’s of Office 365 – get this book! Even if you think you know the subject inside out I bet there’s something written in here that will even surprise YOU!

Great technical resource on office 365

By Peter Day on June 11, 2015

There is plenty of technical depth to the book – there are at least 15 pages on Active Sync, for example. However, this is not merely a dump of technical information and specifications. The authors use practical examples to illustrate scenarios you are likely to encounter. There are many examples of PowerShell commands and code that relate to the discussion in the body of the text. Potential readers should note, however, that this is not a book about PowerShell, and the syntax of the commands is not explained (-one example of why this is not a book for beginners). Overall, the explanations tend to be clear and precise, but some technical knowledge is assumed, and even then the book is over 600 pages. This book would be suitable for someone who had intermediate or advanced knowledge about email systems, which to be fair, accords with the title of the book itself. Another good attribute is they explain why some things might not work as expected / predicted, which is not always easy to find out. While it is not written as a study guide, there is plenty of technical material in the book that is relevant to studying for the Microsoft exams on Office 365, especially exams 70-346 and 70-347. As someone who has worked with Office 365 since when it was called “BPOS” I can heartily recommend this book to email administrators and technical staff working with Office 365

great material from the author

By Efrain on June 3, 2015

As always, great material from the author! I carry this book with me on my phone as a quick reference. Great tool!

Probably One of the Best Books on Office 365

By Lewis Noles on June 3, 2015

I’ve been reading the eBook version of this work. From what I have read thus far, I have to say it is the best book on Office 365 that I’ve seen. I have read a lot of books on Office 365 and from the index this looks to be the most comprehensive. I own the eBook version, but if I what I have found continues, I will probably order a copy of the print edition

from Exchange News Full Article

Thursday, September 10, 2015

The EXPTA {blog}: Second Edition of Office 365 for Exchange Professionals

Subject Exchange: Weekend reading

from Exchange News Full Article

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Subject Exchange: Weekend reading

from Exchange News Full Article

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

MSExchange.org: Off-boarding email from Office 365 to Exchange 2013 (Part 5)

Monday, September 7, 2015

Tony Redmond: Announcing the 2nd edition of Office 365 for Exchange Professionals

Tony Redmond, Paul Cunningham, Michael Van Horenbeeck, and Jeff Guillet (our esteemed technical editor)

Reviews posted on Amazon for the first edition of Office 365 for Exchange Professionals

Absolutely Fantastic Book!

By Ryan M. on June 3, 2015

Great technical resource on office 365

By Peter Day on June 11, 2015

great material from the author

By Efrain on June 3, 2015

As always, great material from the author! I carry this book with me on my phone as a quick reference. Great tool!

Probably One of the Best Books on Office 365

By Lewis Noles on June 3, 2015

from Exchange News Full Article

Saturday, September 5, 2015

msexchange.org: Introducing the Microsoft Office 365 Hybrid Configuration Wizard

The Exchange hybrid team has been working hard over the past year getting the 3rd version of the Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW) ready. This new version is called the Microsoft Office 365 Hybrid Configuration Wizard. This article tells you what’s new and shows you how to run the wizard. We also explain the various issues that have been addressed with the new Wizard, and touch on some of the telemetry we pull with every run of the wizard. We think this new wizard has enough of the old to reduce the learning curve while adding plenty of enhancements to make your hybrid deployment as friction free as possible.

from Exchange News Full Article

Friday, September 4, 2015

Exchange Team Blog: Introducing the Microsoft Office 365 Hybrid Configuration Wizard

Running Exchange 2013 CU8 or higher? Download the new wizard!

The Exchange hybrid team has been working hard over the past year getting the 3^rd version of the Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW) ready. This new version is called the Microsoft Office 365 Hybrid Configuration Wizard. This article tells you what’s new and shows you how to run the wizard. We also explain the various issues that have been addressed with the new Wizard, and touch on some of the telemetry we pull with every run of the wizard. We think this new wizard has enough of the old to reduce the learning curve while adding plenty of enhancements to make your hybrid deployment as friction free as possible.

Microsoft Office 365 Hybrid Configuration Wizard Stand-Alone Application

This version of the HCW is a standalone application that is downloaded from the service. This is an important change because one of the bigger limitations of the previous versions of the HCW was that it was included with the on-premises product. This led to the following issues:

Up-To-Date hybrid experience: When you ran the HCW you got the experience consistent with your on-premises version of Exchange Server. This meant that if you are running Exchange 2013 CU7 you got the CU7 experience. If you ran Exchange 2013 CU9 you got the CU9 experience in HCW. Each customer would have a different HCW experience.

Solution: The new HCW will download the latest version every time it is run, therefore providing the latest and improved experience. As soon as we make changes to, or fix any issues in the HCW, customers will see the benefits immediately.

HCW not tied to Cumulative Updates: Since the previous versions of the HCW were part of the on-premises product they were updated per the regular Exchange Serviceability model. This means that the hybrid team had to wait for a new Cumulative Update (Rollup for Exchange 2010) every three months to deliver any enhancements or changes. For a component like hybrid that is a problem, we have to be agile enough to handle changes not just to on-premises, but also in the service.

Solution: Again, every time you attempt to run the HCW we will ensure you have the latest version. This version will of course go through its rounds of validation, but it is in no way tied to the releases of a CU. No more waiting months for fixes!

Piloting Changes: As we move forward with this new HCW we will be making some aggressive changes. In the months ahead we want to add more capabilities to HCW. One of the most important changes in HCW will be the ability to roll out feature changes slowly and in a controlled manner.

Solution: We have built in the capability to allow customers who are on “first Release” and any other customers we specify (for example TAP customers) to see the latest version of the HCW. Often the latest release and the production release will be the same version, but we do have the ability to pilot versions of the HCW as needed.

Improvements to error handling

The HCW has a lot of dependencies and relies on various prerequisites for a successful completion. For example, you have to add an external TXT record for the HCW to create the Federation Trust, you have to have your certificates properly installed on your Exchange servers, and you have to have Internet access from your Exchange servers to name a few. I am not trying to scare you away from hybrid, in fact the wizard does walk you through most of the prerequisites. I am instead trying to point out that there are many failure points for the HCW to contend with.

Up till now the solution was to provide you an error message that included a stack trace. These error messages are extremely difficult to decipher and often the first reaction after a couple of failed Internet searches was to call into support. Figure 1 shows the old error Experience for those that may not be familiar with it.

Figure 1: Old error messages

Our goal is to allow you to successfully configure without an error, but we also want to make sure that we give you the information needed to get past any hurdles you may face. Figure 2 shows a sample of the new (much more informative) error experience. In the sample you can see the following major improvements to the error experience:

Improved Title: We have added the ability to see what Phase and Task were being completed at the time of the failure. For instance, you can know if we failed at the prerequisite check or configuration phase. You will also immediately know if you failed to create the Organization Relationship or Outbound Connectors.
Error code: We have added a new error code for all the possible error messages in the new wizard. You will now see all errors prepended with a code HCW8***. This change allows for our errors to be easily searched and it allows them to remain searchable even if we change the context of the errors.
Humans can read the errors: One of the previous challenges was that we provided a stack trace as the error message instead of just a friendly actionable string. We now keep the stack trace in the logs for anyone who may want that information.
New “More info” feature: We added the “More info…” option under the error message. We have recently associated a KB or TechNet article as the most likely solution to EVERY error message the HCW throws. Simply click the “More Info…” link and you will be taken to that solution
Access to log Files: You can easily access the HCW log file by clicking on the link that says “Open Log File”. In addition, you will find the log file on the system were you ran the new wizard from by going to “%appdata%\Microsoft\Exchange Hybrid Configuration”. Keep in mind the old location for the logs in the Exchange install directory is not used.
Coolest addition: When you run the HCW you will more than likely have the Exchange Admin Center already open, but there is a chance that if you run into an issue you will need to use either your on-premises or Exchange Online PowerShell. The new HCW error experience includes a link that will open the on-premises and/or Exchange Online PowerShell. We already have the credentials you entered into the wizard, so you can seamlessly open PowerShell by using those credentials. In addition, we open the Exchange Online PowerShell with a blue background and the Exchange on-premises PowerShell with a black background so you can easily differentiate the two.

Figure 2: Awesome error experience

Top issues solved by the new HCW

About a year ago we came out with a tool to assist you to troubleshoot your hybrid experience. This tool collects and parses the HCW log and provided a link to an article that gave a solution to your issue. The tool has been run thousands of times and has given us great insights into what the top failure points are for the HCW. This telemetry tells us what we need to focus on and allows us to see any failure trends, but in the end we were limited to the information gathered from folks that ran the HCW troubleshooter.

Because we want to be as helpful as possible, we now by default upload the HCW logs to the service when you run the new wizard. Gathering this data will allow us to serve you better by limiting the amount of time it takes for someone in support to find out more about your environment and it allows us to see any trending issues and failure points that we need to address. Even with the limited amount of logs we have collected from the troubleshooter, we have been able to identify the following issues and are addressing them in the new HCW. I think you will see why the log collection is so important to the hybrid team.

Note: If you want to opt out of uploading the Hybrid logs you can do that by using the registry key below on the machine were you are running the HCW from:
1. Navigate to the following location in the registry, create the path if needed:
Exchange 2016: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v16\Update-HybridConfiguration
Exchange 2013: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v15\Update-HybridConfiguration
2. Create REG_DWORD “DisableUploadLogs” with value 1

TXT proof string issues

Any time you are required to add an DNS entry you are dealing with a potential for failure. HCW includes a step were you need to add a record to an external DNS to prove to the Azure Authorization Service (known as Microsoft Federation Gateway) that you own the domain. This step may seem trivial but it accounts for ~15% of our HCW failures.

Usually the TXT proof string get messed up in one of two ways:

Incorrect string entered: when creating the DNS record to provide domain ownership we often see that the incorrect value was provided. This is in large part due to the way the HCW copied the value. In the previous version of the HCW, when you copied the TXT string, we prepended the words “Domain Proof” so it looked similar to “Domain Proof = t4jnhkjdesy78hrn…”.

Solution: While simple, moving forward we are only going to copy the part of the string that is needed from the “copy link” option in HCW, which should lead to less issues with incorrect TXT strings.

Domain name lockouts: The point of providing this TXT string to the external DNS is so the service can validate that you own the domain and federation certificate. After a few failed attempts to validate a domain we lock you out from federating that domain for a few hours. The purpose of this lockout is to prevent a denial of service attack. Often this issue occurs because someone put the wrong value in DNS (see the first bullet), someone created the record and did not wait for replication of the record, or someone created the record in internal (not external) DNS.

Solution: To resolve this we created a new external endpoint in the service that will perform the DNS lookup for the TXT record and only try to federate the domain if the record is correct or if that new service endpoint cannot be found. The logic for this is as follows:

First we try to hit the new external service endpoint and see if the TXT record is resolvable externally and is correct in DNS. If so, we move forward with federating the domain.
If the record is either wrong or not resolvable, we inform you that you need to verify the record and wait for replication.
If the new external TXT validation service is not reachable, we will warn you that we could not verify the TXT record but allow you to continue anyway.

Figure 3 show the new TXT experience you will be getting with the Microsoft Office 365 Hybrid Configuration Wizard.

Figure 3: TXT records

Missing Certificate in Wizard

The HCW has a screen that asks you for the “Transport Certificate”. The HCW looks to ensure this certificate is installed on every server that you designated to be part of the Send and Receive Connector Configuration, as shown on the pages in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Send and Receive Connector

In order for the certificate to properly display you need to ensure that the following has been completed on all of the servers designated in the wizard pages shown in figure 4:

The Certificate must be a third party trusted certificate.
The proper names must be on the certificate such as mail.consoto.com or *.contoso.com.
The SMTP service must be assigned to the certificate on each of the sending and receiving servers.
The certificates must have a private key.

These requirements are nothing new, but if you have a large environment, getting all of this correct on a large number of servers can be a tough task. If even one server was missing any of the requirements, we would fail to show you the certificate. In previous versions of the HCW you were left with a blank screen (see figure 5) which offered no direction or solution.

Figure 5: Blank certificate

The Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Hybrid Configuration Wizard experience will not remove the certificate requirements, but it will help you solve the issue. The HCW will now show you a list of certificates that meet the requirements, and it will show you the servers that do not have a proper certificate installed (see figure 6). This will allow you to either remove those servers from the HCW receive and send connector pages, or you can properly install the certificate on those servers.

Figure 6: Better certificate error

A more efficient Hybrid experience

One of the things we tried to do with the HCW is ensure that we are performing the various configurations in the most efficient way possible (this is our on-going green effort). A good example of an inefficient task that the HCW previously performed was the Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) enablement process. In the HCW logs collected from the troubleshooter, we could see that this cmdlet was often taking an extremely long time to complete. What we do now, is enable the Migration endpoint on the servers in your environment so that you can start moving mailboxes when the HCW is complete without having to enable the endpoint. One of the cmdlets that we used in the previous version of HCW was get-WebServicesVirtualDirectory. In a larger often geographically dispersed environment this cmdlet could take over eight hours to run. In many cases you would end up getting the following error:

ERROR: Updating hybrid configuration failed with error 'Subtask Configure execution failed: Configuring organization relationship settings. Execution of the Set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory cmdlet had thrown an exception. This may indicate invalid parameters in your Hybrid Configuration settings. Unable to access the configuration system on the remote server. Make sure that the remote server allows remote configuration

Solution: We have resolved this issue in the new HCW using the -ADPropertiesOnly option with Get-WebServicesVirtualDirectory. This changes things so the HCW reads the MRS settings using a local directory call instead of waiting for a response from every server in the environment. This change along with a few others in this area, makes the process take around 15 minutes instead of 8 hours (your deployment times will vary) in these large environments. This is just one example of the type of cleanups we did in the HCW to improve the reliability and speed of the configuration tasks.

Autodiscover issues in HCW

The single most common failure point for the HCW is the inability to retrieve the Federation Information via the Autodiscover call initiated by the Get-FederationInformation cmdlet. The output of this cmdlet is needed in order to create the Organization Relationships so you can do things like free busy sharing. This accounts for nearly 30% of all HCW failures based on the logs collected from the troubleshooter (are you starting to see the importance of these log files?). When looking at the issue there are certain things the wizard cannot directly address. For instance, at times the issues are related to an improperly configured firewall, or someone doesn’t have a third-party certificate for IIS on the Exchange servers. However, a good portion of you have had things configured correctly and still we failed to complete the Get-FederationInformation cmdlet.

One of the things this cmdlet does is use DNS settings from the server you are connected to in order to resolve the Autodiscover endpoint and retrieve the federation information. Many customers do not have a DNS record created for Autodiscover internally since there is often no need for this. The internal Outlook client will use the Service Connection Point to find the Autodiscover endpoint so there is no need for this from an outlook standpoint, however the Get-FederationInformation cmdlet does not use the Service Connection Point. Therefore, if there is no forwarding configured for this zone in DNS the Get-FederationInformation cmdlet will be unable to resolve the autodiscover endpoint and the HCW will fail.

Solution: To resolve this issue, we have added a new method for checking for the federation information. We still try to use local DNS first and if it fails we then will try to hit an external service to see if we can get the federation information externally. This will ensure that if you have Autodiscover published properly externally the HCW will complete as expected. See figure 7 for details:

Figure 7: Get-FedInfo

OAuth Integration

Another common failure point is the OAuth portion of the HCW. The HCW today shows you an option to configure OAuth if you are Exchange 2013 native, but not if you coexist with previous versions of the Exchange. OAuth is required for some features today, such as cross premises discovery and automatic archive retention. Because of that, we want to ensure that OAuth is by default configured so all of the Hybrid features work when you complete the HCW.

One downside to this is that the current OAuth configuration experience previously had a high rate of failure. We have gone through and fixed a good portion of the experience and we have also added logic to the new HCW so that if the OAuth portion fails we will disable the OAUTH configuration by disabling the IntraOrganizationConnector and let you know we disabled it and give you remediation steps. This will ensure that a failed OAuth configuration does not prevent other hybrid features such as cross premises Free Busy from working.

Many more…

The above are just a few of the issues that have been addressed with the latest version of the HCW. There are many example that we could have used such as a couple of issues we addressed with mail flow, Multi-Forest deployments, and many more. In this latest version we strived for feature parity, while improvement the failure rate, and allowing for future innovation. We think we have hit the mark.

Running the HCW

Now that we have covered some of the new features and benefits of running the Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Hybrid Configuration Wizard, let’s take a guided tour. We are not going to go through each option in depth as most of them have not changed from Exchange 2013.

How to find the new HCW

We have not moved the location of the HCW in the Exchange Admin Center, the entry point look and feel is consistent with previous version of the Exchange 2013 HCW. The only difference is that instead of calling local code when you click “configure” or “modify” in the hybrid node of EAC, we now initiate the click once application. Figure 8 shows the entry point.

Figure 8: Entry Point

HCW Landing Page

The next screen you will see is the HCW landing page, which is a page that serves two purposes. The first and most important purpose is that we can redirect a small subset of customers (based on pre-defined criteria) to an alternate HCW experience. As discussed previously in this blog, this allows us to pilot new features without affecting the production HCW experience. The second benefit of this landing page is that it allows us to provide a proper error message if the browser version, popup blockers, etc. are not configured in a way that would support the HCW. When you are on the landing page you will select the “click here” option to download the HCW. See figure 9 for a view of the landing page.

Figure 9: Landing page

Welcome Screen

The Welcome screen (see figure 10) will provide you with a link that will inform you about what a Hybrid configuration is along with an additional link at the bottom that explains what the HCW application is going to do. The Second link is at the bottom-left of the screen and says What does this application do? On this screen you will simply click next to continue.

Figure 10: Welcome screen

Server Detection Page

The next screen allows you to choose which server you will use to perform your hybrid configuration. This is the machine that the HCW will remote PowerShell into in order to perform all of the hybrid configuration tasks.

The selected server must be running a version of Exchange that is within two releases of our currently released Cumulative update. This means at launch the new HCW will work if you are connecting to an Exchange 2013 CU8 or newer version of Exchange. However, when Exchange 2013 CU11 releases you will see that we will no longer allow you to run the new HCW from Exchange 2013 CU8 and will require a minimum of CU9. Keep in mind that even though the HCW will allow you to proceed if you are two versions older than the current release (n-2), we actually only support going one version back for Hybrid (n-1).

If for you were to select a server that is running an unsupported version, the HCW will provide you with an error stating that you are not running a supported version. In addition, the HCW will provide you with a list of servers that are running a supported version (if any exist).

Figure 11: Unsupported version

The HCW will try to select the best server to perform the configuration tasks from using the following logic:

First we look to see if the server we are on is running the latest supported version of Exchange in the organization.
Next we look to see if there is an existing Exchange server in the site running the latest supported version of Exchange.
Finally, we attempt to connect to an out of site Exchange server (typically in a different geographical location) running the latest supported version.

If you do not like the server selection the HCW made via the above mentioned detection logic you can manually specify the server name that you want to connect to. You can use the short name (ServerName) or the long name (ServerName.Contoso.com) in the provided box to select the appropriate server running the supported version of Exchange.

The last option on this page allows you to select the tenant location. For most the tenant location is simply “Microsoft Office 365” but if your Office 365 is operated by 21 Vianet, you can also use the “21 Vianet” option.

Figure 12: Server detection

Credentials page

The main improvement on this page is the fact that we do not force you to type in your on-premises credentials. However, if you are not signed in as the user with the Organization Management Role you can manually override this behavior and provide separate credentials.

Figure 13: Credentials page

Connection Status page

We will then show you the connection status window, which will let you know if improper credentials were provided on the previous step. Usually this is a pretty uneventful window and you just click next.

Figure 14: Connection status

Mail flow options page

The rest of the questions in the HCW from this page on are related to the mail flow options. The experience and windows you see from this point forward may vary depending on the options selected. For more information on the mail flow options you have please review this article.

Figure 15: Mail flow options

Receive and Send Connector Configuration

This page of the wizard allows you to select the Exchange 2013 and/or Exchange 2016 servers that you intend on configuring for sending and receiving mail for your on-premises environment. You can have a mix of 2013 and 2016 servers selected. We do not allow you to choose Exchange 2010 servers from these menus.

Figure 16: Receive Connector

Figure 17: Send Connector

Certificate selection page

We described the enhancements to this certificate selection page previously in the blog, we covered the experience you will get if a valid certificate cannot be found on any one of the Sending and Receiving servers selected on the previous page (figure 16 and figure 17). This certificate page is what you should expect to see when the certificates are installed properly on all servers. In this case you will get a list of certificates that are meeting all of the requirements and installed on all of the selected servers. In most cases the list includes only one certificate that meets the list of requirements.

Figure 18: Certificate

FQDN for Mail Flow

The final question in the wizard will allow the HCW to properly configure the smart host settings on the outbound connector in Exchange Online. You will usually provide the FQDN that matches your MX record in this window.

Figure 19: FQDN

Update page

Up to this point in the HCW there has been no modification made to your on-premises or Exchange Online environment. When you select the update option on this page we will start making the modification based on the answers to the questions you provided on the previous screen. Similar to the old version of the HCW we will store those answer in the local Active Directory in a configuration object known as your desired state. We will then read from that configuration object to make the modification.

Figure 20: Update

Wrapping this up

The Exchange hybrid configuration process is something that has evolved rapidly over the past few years. We have done a lot over that time to simplify these complex configurations. With this latest version we have continued that trend by adding flexibility for innovation, more HCW stability, better HCW performance, a cleaner configuration experience, and (if needed) a proper error experience. However, our tools and services are built for you so let us know what you think, when you try out the wizard send us feedback through the feedback widget in the HCW. Just look for the “give feedback” link on the bottom of the page in the wizard and please rate the experience.

The Exchange Hybrid Team

from Exchange News Full Article