Exchange News

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

MSExchange.org: Migrating a small organization from Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 (Part 1)

Now Exchange Server 2010 is in extended support, it is time to consider an upgrade to Exchange 2013. In this four part series, you will see that it is possible to rapidly migrate to Exchange 2013. We’ll take you through the basic planning and migration steps and demonstrate that small organizations considering an upgrade have a fairly straightforward process ahead.

from Exchange News Full Article

Monday, May 4, 2015

Exchange Team Blog: Hello from Microsoft Ignite

We’re excited to be kicking off Ignite this week in Chicago – doing it on Star Wars day is a nice bonus as the Exchange team is here in full force. It has been great catching up with our customers and Exchange MVPs as we prepare for this action-packed week. At Ignite we will begin sharing details about Exchange Server 2016 and dig deep into features in available in Office 365. You can catch many of us between the sessions on the expo floor showing off the latest demos or just geeking out on all things Exchange.

For those of you who made the journey to Ignite we look forward to seeing you in the more than 100 Exchange and Outlook sessions happening this week. If you couldn’t make it to Ignite in person, no problem—all Ignite sessions are being recorded and published for public viewing within a day or two after they happen. See the full list here.

The Meet Exchange Server 2016 session is where we kick-off the first round of details about the next version of Exchange Server. This session will be live streamed to everyone on http://ift.tt/1yHfOdV on Tuesday May 5^th at 10:45 AM Central time. The sessions will dig in from here, including a don’t-miss session on the Exchange Preferred Architecture with Ross Smith IV and the first set of guidance on deploying Exchange Server 2016 with Brian Day. Of course this event isn’t just about Exchange Sever 2016 – we are excited to see the dynamic duo of Perry Clarke and Vivek Sharma deliver the next chapter of Behind the Curtain: Running Exchange Online and numerous drill down sessions on features like document collaboration, Outlook, clutter, and many more.

For now we’re off to a busy and exciting week to share the latest news about Exchange and hear from our awesome Exchange community. You can follow the action all week long on Twitter with the hashtags #iammec and #MSIgnite.

Jon Orton

from Exchange News Full Article

EighTwOne: HCW fails on intra-organization configuration

For my lab, I often have to recreate the Exchange Hybrid configuration for a fresh setup of Exchange On-Premises using formerly used namespaces. Normally you would just run the Exchange Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW) after configuring certificates and endpoint URLs. If you don’t clean up the previous configuration information from your tenant upfront, you may then run in the following error message when running the HCW:

Updating hybrid configuration failed with error ‎’Subtask Configure execution failed: Configure IntraOrganization Connector Execution of the Get-IntraOrganizationConfiguration cmdlet has thrown an exception. This may indicate invalid parameters in your hybrid configuration settings. Multiple OnPremises configuration objects were found. Please use the OrganizationGuid parameter to select a specific OnPremises configuration object.

Multiple OnPremises configuration objects indicates there are multiple intra-organization objects defined in your tenant. You can clean up previous intra-organization configuration objects from your tenant as follows:

First, in your Exchange On-Premises environment, run the Get-OrganizationConfig cmdlet from the Exchange Management Shell:
Copy the Guid value, in the example 1a95d446-ff56-4399-a95e-8ab46c30912b.
Connect to Exchange Online (instruction here).
Check the existing On-Premises definitions in your tenant by running Get-OnPremisesOrganization. There should be more than 1 entry.
To remove the orphaned objects, remove all the objects that don’t match the Organization Guid you retrieved from your On-Premises environment earlier, e.g.:Get-OnPremisesOrganization | Where { $_.OrganizationGuid –ne ‘1a95d446-ff56-4399-a95e-8ab46c30912b’ } | Remove-OnPremisesOrganization
Now you could try re-running the HCW immediately, but chances are you will run in another error caused by orphaned intra-organization connectors (IOC). In those cases, when the HCW tries to run New-IntraOrganizationConnector, it will fail as the namespace defined by TargetAddressDomains is already used by an existing connector, and ‘The domain ‘contoso.com’ already exists in another intra-organization connector’ is reported.Those connectors exist in your tenant, and are named ‘HybridIOC – ’, where GUID is the Guid of previously used organizations. In your Exchange Online session, run the following cmdlet to remove orphaned connector definitions:
Get-IntraOrganizationConnector | Where { $_.Identity –ne ‘HybridIOC – 1a95d446-ff56-4399-a95e-8ab46c30912b’ } | Remove-IntraOrganizationConnector

After removing these orphaned objects, you should be able to run the HCW succesfully.

Filed under: Office 365 Tagged: Exchange, Hybrid, Office365

from Exchange News Full Article

Sunday, May 3, 2015

Tony Redmond: Launching Office 365 for Exchange Professionals at Microsoft Ignite

Over 20,000 people are attending Microsoft Ignite this week, where we are all busy attending and giving sessions, meeting partners and friends, and generally making sure that we are well plugged into the technology community. Paul Cunningham, our co-author and esteemed web master of exchangeserverpro.com, isn’t with us but has promised to join us at IT/DEV Connections in Las Vegas next September.

But sad as it is to be without Paul, his absence won’t stop us celebrating the launch of our new eBook Office 365 for Exchange Professionals with some spirit this week. You can reserve your copy of the eBook from exchangeserverpro.com now, but if you’re at Ignite, you might like to try and secure a copy from one of the partners who have helped us deliver the book.

Microsoft is our most important partner. We received a huge amount of help and support from the Office 365 engineering teams as we built the content of the book and Microsoft has 600 copies for distribution at Ignite. Even though we always intended the book to be an electronic consumable (we provide PDF and EPUB files from exchangeserverpro.com), Microsoft arranged for 200 special printed copies. This isn’t just a matter of printing off the PDF; Microsoft arranged for a printer to do a limited print run, just as if we were doing a traditional book. Some people prefer print to electronic and these copies will be unique. Getting hold of a printed copy might be challenging, but here is how you can secure one.

We will have the formal launch of “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” at 12 noon on Monday, May 4 at the “Geek Out” space in the Office 365 area in the exhibition area. Jeff Guillet (the technical editor for the book) and I will be there to celebrate the first edition of the book and will be giving away one hundred printed copies to those who join us.

The other 400 copies are available on USBs and will be distributed at my “Bumps and Blips on the Road to Cloud Nirvana: From On-Premises Microsoft Exchange to Office 365” (code BRK2164) at 1:30PM on Thursday. The problem here is that nearly 900 people have registered for the session. Clearly we can’t distribute 400 to 900 so Microsoft has stepped up to the plate to guarantee that everyone who comes to the session will receive either a USB containing the book or a voucher for a 1-year subscription to Office 365 Home.

If you miss out on a Microsoft-sponsored copy, you can visit our other partners on the exhibition floor:

ENow Software Inc is our monitoring partner. Apart from checking out MailScape 365 and the other ENow products, you should be sure to try their MEC Trivia game to be crowned the king of Exchange trivia. We’ll be running the final of the MEC Trivia Quiz at the ScheduledMaintenance party on Tuesday night. ENow is sponsoring a grand prize of $1,000 for the person who is best at answering the quiz questions about anything to do with the history of Exchange. It all promises to be an interesting evening.

TransVault Software is our compliance partner. They’ll be happy to talk to you about all aspects of dealing with pesky PSTs and how to migrate content from different archives into Office 365.

Binary Tree is our migration partner. Obviously the whole purpose of the book is to help on-premises customers move workload to Office 365 when they feel the time is right. Binary Tree offers a range of excellent migration options in their E2E Complete product, including the ability to deal with public folders.

Netmail is our data management partner. Netmail offers a variety of services for email, including security, archiving, encryption, and storage.

Our partners have a limited number of PDF copies and copies are likely to go fast. You’ll need to buy a copy from our site if you want an EPUB version of the book to read on iPad and other eReaders.

As I explained when we announced Office 365 for Exchange Professionals, we have chosen the eBook route because it allows us to keep pace with the development cadence of the cloud. Anyone who has tracked the announcements of new features and capabilities made on the Office blog over the last few weeks will understand the challenge involved in updating text to match what is delivered to Office 365 tenants, but we’re going to give it a go. The first update of the book is planned for release in September and we’ll probably launch it at IT/DEV Connections at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas. As noted above, Paul Cunningham can’t resist coming over to a conference in Sin City, so the entire team will be there to celebrate.

Follow Tony @12Knocksinna

from Exchange News Full Article

Friday, May 1, 2015

Exchange Team Blog: New Support Policy for Repaired Exchange Databases

The database repair process is often used as a last ditch effort to recover an Exchange database when no other means of recovery is available. The process should only be followed at the advice of Microsoft Support and after determining that all other recovery options have been exhausted. For many years in many versions of Exchange, the repair process has largely been the same. However, that process is changing, based on information Microsoft has gathered from an extensive analysis of support cases.

In short, Microsoft is changing the support policy for databases that have had a repair operation performed on them. Originally a database was supported if the repair was performed using ESEUTIL and ISINTEG/repair cmdlets. Under the new support policy, any database where the repair count is greater than 0 will need to be evacuated – all mailboxes on such a database will need to be moved to a new database.

Existing Repair Process

The process consists of three steps:

Repair the database at the page level
Defragmentation of the database to restructure and recreate the database
Repair of the logical structures within the database

Step 1 of the repair process is accomplished by using ESEUTIL /p. This is typically performed when there is page level corruption in the database - for example, a -1018 JET error, or when a database is left in dirty shutdown state as the result of not having the necessary log files to bring the database to a clean shutdown state. After executing ESEUTIL /p you are prompted to confirm that data loss may result. Selecting OK is required to continue.

[PS] C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Mailbox\First Storage Group>eseutil /p '.\Mailbox Database.edb'
Extensible Storage Engine Utilities for Microsoft(R) Exchange Server
Version 08.03
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Initiating REPAIR mode...
Database: .\Mailbox Database.edb
Temp. Database: TEMPREPAIR4520.EDB
Checking database integrity.
The database is not up-to-date. This operation may find that this database is corrupt because data from the log files has yet to be placed in the database. To ensure the database is up-to-date please use the 'Recovery' operation.
Scanning Status (% complete)
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|
.
Rebuilding MSysObjectsShadow from MSysObjects.
Scanning Status (% complete)
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|
...................................................
Checking the database.
Scanning Status (% complete)
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|
...................................................
Scanning the database.
Scanning Status (% complete)
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|
...................................................
Repairing damaged tables.
Scanning Status (% complete)
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|
...................................................
Repair completed. Database corruption has been repaired!
Note:
It is recommended that you immediately perform a full backup of this database. If you restore a backup made before the repair, the database will be rolled back to the state it was in at the time of that backup.
Operation completed successfully with 595 (JET_wrnDatabaseRepaired, Database corruption has been repaired) after 30.187 seconds.

At this point, the database should be in a clean shutdown state and the repair process may proceed. This can be verified with ESEUTIL /mh.

[PS] C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Mailbox\First Storage Group>eseutil /mh '.\Mailbox Database.edb'
State: Clean Shutdown

Step 2 is to defragment the database using ESEUTIL /d. Defragmentation requires significant free space on the volume that will host the temporary database (typically 110% of the size of the database must be available as free disk space).

[PS] C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Mailbox\First Storage Group>eseutil /d '.\Mailbox Database.edb'
Extensible Storage Engine Utilities for Microsoft(R) Exchange Server
Version 08.03
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Initiating DEFRAGMENTATION mode...
Database: .\Mailbox Database.edb
Defragmentation Status (% complete)
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|
...................................................
Moving 'TEMPDFRG3620.EDB' to '.\Mailbox Database.edb'... DONE!
Note:
It is recommended that you immediately perform a full backup of this database. If you restore a backup made before the defragmentation, the database will be rolled back to the state it was in at the time of that backup.
Operation completed successfully in 7.547 seconds.

Step 3 is the logical repair of the objects within the database. The method used to accomplish this varies by Exchange version.

In Exchange 2007, ISINTEG is used to perform the logical repair, as illustrated in the following example:

C:\>isinteg -s wingtip-e2k7 -fix -test alltests -verbose -l c:\isinteg.log
Databases for server wingtip-e2k7:
Only databases marked as Offline can be checked
Index Status Database-Name
Storage Group Name: First Storage Group
1 Offline Mailbox Database
Enter a number to select a database or press Return to exit.
1
You have selected First Storage Group / Mailbox Database.
Continue?(Y/N)y
Test Categorization Tables result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 0 row(s); time: 0h:0m:0s
Test Restriction Tables result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 0 row(s); time: 0h:0m:0s
Test Search Folder Links result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 0 row(s);time: 0h:0m:0s
Test Global result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 1 row(s); time: 0h:0m:0s
Test Delivered To result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 0 row(s); time: 0h:0m:0s
Test Repl Schedule result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 0 row(s); time:0h:0m:0s
Test Timed Events result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 0 row(s); time: 0h:0m:0s
Test reference table construction result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 0 row(s); time: 0h:0m:0s
Test Folder result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 4996 row(s); time: 0h:0m:2s
Test Deleted Messages result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 0 row(s); time: 0h:0m:0s
Test Message result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 1789 row(s); time: 0h:0m:0s
Test Attachment result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 406 row(s); time: 0h:0m:0s
Test Mailbox result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 249 row(s); time: 0h:0m:0s
Test Sites result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 996 row(s); time: 0h:0m:0s
Test Categories result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 0 row(s); time: 0h:0m:0s
Test Per-User Read result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 0 row(s); time:0h:0m:0s
Test special folders result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 0 row(s); time: 0h:0m:0s
Test Message Tombstone result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 0 row(s); time: 0h:0m:0s
Test Folder Tombstone result: 0 error(s); 0 warning(s); 0 fix(es); 0 row(s); time: 0h:0m:0s
Now in test 20(reference count verification) of total 20 tests; 100% complete.
Typically when ISINTEG completes, it advises reviewing the isinteg.log file. At the end of the file is a summary section, listing the number of errors encountered. If the number of errors is greater than zero, you need to re-run the command. Continued repairs need to be performed until the error count reaches 0 or the same number of errors is encountered after two executions.
. . . . . SUMMARY . . . . .
Total number of tests : 20
Total number of warnings : 0
Total number of errors : 0
Total number of fixes : 0
Total time : 0h:0m:3s

In Exchange 2010 and later, ISINTEG was deprecated and certain functions were replaced by the New-MailboxRepairRequest and New-PublicFolderDatabaseRepairRequest cmdlets, both of which allow for repair operations to occur while the database is online.

Exchange 2010:

[PS] C:\Windows\system32>New-MailboxRepairRequest -Mailbox user252 -CorruptionType SearchFolder,FolderView,AggregateCounts,ProvisionedFolder,MessagePtagCN,MessageID
RequestID Mailbox ArchiveMailbox Database Server
--------- ------- -------------- -------- ------
7f499ce3-e Wingtip False Mailbox. WINGTIP-E2K10.Wingti...

Exchange 2013:

[PS] C:\>New-MailboxRepairRequest -Mailbox User532 -CorruptionType SearchFolder,FolderView,AggregateCounts,
ProvisionedFolder,ReplState,MessagePTAGCn,MessageID,RuleMessageClass,RestrictionFolder,FolderACL,
UniqueMidIndex,CorruptJunkRule,MissingSpecialFolders,DropAllLazyIndexes,ImapID,ScheduledCheck,Extension1,
Extension2,Extension3,Extension4,Extension5
Identity Task Detect Only Job State Progress
-------- ---- ----------- --------- --------
a44acf2b {Sea False Queued 0

Upon completion of these repair options, typically the database could be mounted and normal user operations continued.

Support Change for Repaired Databases

Over the course of the last two years, we have reviewed Watson dumps for Information Store crashes that have been automatically uploaded by customers’ servers. The crashes were cause by inexplicable, seemingly impossible store level corruption. The types of store level corruption varied and they come from many different databases, servers, Exchange versions, and customers. In almost all of these cases one significant fact was noted – the repair count recorded on the database was > 0.

When ESEUTIL /p is executed, and a repair to the database is necessary, the repair count is incremented and the repair time is recorded in the header of the database. The repair information stored in the database header will be retained after offline defragmentation . Repair information in the header may be viewed with ESEUTIL /mh.

[PS] C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Mailbox\First Storage Group>eseutil /mh '.\Mailbox Database.edb'
Extensible Storage Engine Utilities for Microsoft(R) Exchange Server
Version 08.03
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Initiating FILE DUMP mode...
Database: .\Mailbox Database.edb
File Type: Database
Format ulMagic: 0x89abcdef
Engine ulMagic: 0x89abcdef
Format ulVersion: 0x620,12
Engine ulVersion: 0x620,12
Created ulVersion: 0x620,12
DB Signature: Create time:04/05/2015 08:39:24 Rand:2178804664 Computer:
cbDbPage: 8192
dbtime: 1059112 (0x102928)
State: Clean Shutdown
Log Required: 0-0 (0x0-0x0)
Log Committed: 0-0 (0x0-0x0)
Streaming File: No
Shadowed: Yes
Last Objid: 4020
Scrub Dbtime: 0 (0x0)
Scrub Date: 00/00/1900 00:00:00
Repair Count: 2
Repair Date: 04/05/2015 08:39:24
Old Repair Count: 0
Last Consistent: (0x0,0,0) 04/05/2015 08:39:25
Last Attach: (0x0,0,0) 04/05/2015 08:39:24
Last Detach: (0x0,0,0) 04/05/2015 08:39:25
Dbid: 1
Log Signature: Create time:00/00/1900 00:00:00 Rand:0 Computer:
OS Version: (6.1.7601 SP 1 NLS 60101.60101)
Previous Full Backup:
Log Gen: 0-0 (0x0-0x0)
Mark: (0x0,0,0)
Mark: 00/00/1900 00:00:00
Previous Incremental Backup:
Log Gen: 0-0 (0x0-0x0)
Mark: (0x0,0,0)
Mark: 00/00/1900 00:00:00
Previous Copy Backup:
Log Gen: 0-0 (0x0-0x0)
Mark: (0x0,0,0)
Mark: 00/00/1900 00:00:00
Previous Differential Backup:
Log Gen: 0-0 (0x0-0x0)
Mark: (0x0,0,0)
Mark: 00/00/1900 00:00:00
Current Full Backup:
Log Gen: 0-0 (0x0-0x0)
Mark: (0x0,0,0)
Mark: 00/00/1900 00:00:00
Current Shadow copy backup:
Log Gen: 0-0 (0x0-0x0)
Mark: (0x0,0,0)
Mark: 00/00/1900 00:00:00
cpgUpgrade55Format: 0
cpgUpgradeFreePages: 0
cpgUpgradeSpaceMapPages: 0
ECC Fix Success Count: none
Old ECC Fix Success Count: none
ECC Fix Error Count: none
Old ECC Fix Error Count: none
Bad Checksum Error Count: none
Old bad Checksum Error Count: none
Operation completed successfully in 0.78 seconds.

Uncorrectable corruption can linger in a repaired database and cause store crashes and server instability, we have changed our support policy to require an evacuation of any Exchange database that persistently has a repair count or old repair count equal to or greater than 0. Moving mailboxes (and public folders) to new databases will ensure that the underlying database structure is good, free from any corruption that might not be corrected by the database repair process, and it helps prevent store crashes and server instability.

Tim McMichael

from Exchange News Full Article

Subject Exchange: Weekend reading

from Exchange News Full Article

Tony Redmond: Exchange Unwashed Digest – April 2015

April was a very busy month. First, Microsoft had a lot of conferences to attend and therefore had many announcements to make. It seemed like every marketing manager had something to say, so we had a blizzard of announcements that needed to be reviewed and analyzed (rather than being simply recycled, as happens so often in the technical press). Secondly, I had lots to do for “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” to complete the content of the eBook for its launch at Microsoft Ignite on May 4. The good news is that everything is done and dusted and we will have PDFs and EPUB content available on the exchangeserverpro.com site from May 4 onward. We have the work done to provide books through Amazon’s Kindle program but the whopping royalties demanded by Amazon makes that route less attractive for now.

In any case, here’s what appeared on my Exchange Unwashed blog on WindowsITPro.com in April 2015.

Clearing the decks for Ignite – more on Office 365 numbers, anti-malware, and PST imports (April 30): Lots of interesting things pass by in the Interweb every day. The three things that caught my attention as I prepared for Ignite was an update from Mary-Jo Foley about Office 365 numbers, including a new goal for Microsoft to reach by the end of 2018, the news that the infrastructure used by Outlook.com and Office 365 is converging, and the arrival of the Office 365 import service to allow tenants to import large quantities of PST data into online mailboxes.

Enhanced NDRs for Exchange Online but no news for on-premises servers (April 29): Microsoft is doing a nice job to provide better information in non-delivery reports that tell people when their email didn’t get through to an Office 365 recipient. It would be great to see this in Exchange on-premises too. Maybe Exchange 2016?

Office 365 Groups show up in Outlook 2016 Preview (April 28): I like Office 365 Groups and it’s nice to see them finally show up in a version of Outlook, which remains the most popular or at least the most used of all Office clients. It’s Outlook 2016 Preview of course but there’s a rumor that Microsoft will update Outlook 2013 to support groups too. In the meantime, I tell you how to access groups with Outlook 2013 with a method that works without all the fancy new user interface.

Microsoft on course for $6.3 billion run rate for commercial cloud services implying 90 million Office 365 mailboxes (April 23): Microsoft doesn’t release any data about the number of paid subscribers for Office 365 business, but I have been tracking their financial results in an attempt to make sense of the annualized run rate they report for commercial cloud services (which include Office 365). The current best guess is that we are now north of 90 million mailboxes.

Treat the new Office 365 150 MB maximum message size with caution (April 23): It’s obviously nice to be able to send a mega-attachment, but even nicer if the intended recipient can actually receive it. Connectors, other mail servers, and clients all get in the way.

Customer lockbox the most interesting feature in Office 365 security announcements (April 22): I was interested in the announcements made for the RSA security conference but this post didn’t get too much of a reaction, perhaps because the implementation of most of the stuff described in it won’t be delivered until 2016. Kind of what you expect from a marketing announcement…

Microsoft teases about Exchange 2016 but the real detail will be at Ignite (April 21): The Exchange development group posted on EHLO about Exchange 2016 and managed to communicate not a lot about what will actually be in the new version. But they have Ignite audiences to excite and delight, so we’ll hear all in Chicago.

Struggling with the Dropbox integration with Office Online (April 17): Microsoft made a big thing about the integration between Dropbox and the Office Online apps but the prospect of users being able to save direct into Dropbox left enterprise administrators cold. However, it’s a good way to get information back out of Dropbox, if people will use this method to retrieve files and store them in a more compliance-friendly repository. But they probably won’t.

Why do so many different administration interfaces exist inside Office 365? (April 16): After four years of operation you’d kind of imagine that Office 365 would exhibit a certain consistency across the administrative interfaces used for its various applications. But it doesn’t. And there are good reasons why!

Four challenges facing Amazon WorkMail (April 14): So Amazon wants to run a cloud-based email service, which is nice. But I don’t think they will succeed and offer four major challenges that face the purveyors of books as they start to sell mailboxes.

Do you need Advanced Threat Protection? Maybe some new malware is en route to your mailbox! (April 9): Security researchers fear day zero exploits because they might use a new technique that is not easily detected by current anti-malware techniques. Microsoft’s grand plan is to provide an add-on ($2/month per mailbox) service that routes any suspicious content into a sandbox environment where it is probed and assessed to figure out whether it really is bad. ATP is coming soon. It will be interesting to see how many customers use it.

What’s your back-out plan if an Office 365 deployment is unsuccessful? (April 7): It’s unpopular to consider such thoughts, but it might just be the case that a move to embrace Office 365 turns out to be the wrong decision for a company. If so, what do you do then? It’s relatively easy to get information back out of Exchange Online, but not so easy for the other applications.

Enterprise Collaboration sessions selected for IT/DEV Connections 2015 (April 2): September seems so far away, but it will come around pretty soon and lots of work is ongoing to prepare for IT/DEV Connections. We’ve settled on an excellent group of experienced speakers to deliver the content for Enterprise Collaboration, which includes Exchange on-premises, Office 365, and other topics. Hopefully we’ll see you at the Aria Hotel in September.

Phew. That’s a lot of content – and more to come in May as we go through the information gathered at Ignite and report back on what’s important and what’s not. Stay tuned!

Follow Tony @12Knocksinna

from Exchange News Full Article