A recent article on CIO.com asked the question “Can Google Apps Unseat Microsoft Office and Exchange?” Many similar articles are published to help advise CIOs and budding CIOs about the deep and serious choices they will have to make about technology. Take the wrong decision and your career is a bust, make the right choice and your reputation is secure and you become a CIO par excellence. Or so the theory goes. Given the topic, I had a certain interest in the article. There’s always a possibility that you can learn something from the experiences of others, even if this article focused on a small 500-user company (New England Biolabs) in a highly specialized area (molecular biology) that might not be a good prototype for other companies that are considering making a switch.The trial to figure out whether Google Apps could replace Office and Exchange was carried out by 24 users over 60 days. Not many companies could dedicate nearly 5% of their total user population to testing new software, so this was somewhat out of the ordinary. All of the testers were Gmail users for personal email and the company operates heterogeneous platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux)....
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A recent tweet took me to a script repository for Office 365 maintained by Microsoft’s Thomas Ashworth. Now, despite the best efforts of Twinbox to integrate my Twitter feed into Outlook (a job it does quite nicely), I don’t always respond to tweets or even read their content. After all, there’s so much rubbish you can deal with during any one day. But discovering an exception to the normal dross is always wonderful and so it is when you discover something useful. When I visited it, the script repository offered just six scripts. Perhaps more will come over time. However, the point is that there’s some interesting stuff here that can be taken advantage of immediately, which I think is the hallmark of a truly useful repository. In this case, the PowerShell scripts deal with aspects of Office 365 tenant domain management. I think that most administrators who have to manage email in an Office 365 tenant domain limit their horizon to the Exchange Control Panel (ECP) and don’t attempt to navigate the depths of PowerShell for Exchange Online. ...
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Early-bird discounted registration for the much-anticipated relaunch of the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) finishes on May 18, which is tomorrow for most people. This public service message is brought to you in an attempt to help resolve the nagging question “which conference is likely to deliver the best Exchange content for me in the next year”.
The operational and technical environment that people deal with differs enormously from deployment to deployment and a single answer won’t apply in all cases. For instance, it’s pretty clear that Microsoft will use MEC as the launch vehicle for Exchange 2013 with Kevin Allison, GM of Exchange, promising that “MEC will be full of Exchange 15 content” when he keynoted at TEC in San Diego earlier this month. Therefore, if you really must learn all you possibly can about the latest and greatest version of Exchange, you’ll be one of those who packs their Mickey Mouse ears and heads to Orlando in September to join the MECfest.
On the other hand, if you’re more interested in the details of practical deployment, tips and techniques, and the nitty-gritty of current versions of Exchange, you’d probably be better off investing in a conference fee for either TEC or Exchange Connections. That is, if these conferences continue to function in a world where a lot of the available attention and attendee dollars is being vacuumed up by MEC....
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Even in an era of massive quotas, it’s annoying to find that mailboxes are cluttered with extraneous logging messages that accumulate steadily and are never removed without manual intervention. So it is with Outlook synchronization logs, which you’ll find tucked away in the Sync Issues folder (to expose this folder, click on the Folders icon and expand the folder hierarchy). Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 generate synchronization logs when errors occur when clients synchronize local replica copies (held in the OST file) of cached server folders. Logically, synchronization errors and log generation only happens when Outlook is configured in cached Exchange mode. There are many reasons why a synchronization operation might experience some difficulties. Network glitches are the obvious example – something that is extremely likely to happen when connecting Outlook to Exchange Online in Office 365 when transient network errors are common between the network that the PC client runs on and Microsoft’s datacenters. After all, no one controls the Internet and no one guarantees the speed, latency, or reliability of an Internet connection. ...
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One of the more interesting (and esoteric) sessions at TEC 2012 in San Diego was given by ESE developer Brett Shirley on the topic of how to write ESE applications. ESE is, of course, the Extensive Storage Engine, the database engine that underpins Exchange and Active Directory databases amongst other things. The flavor of ESE used by Exchange is “Jet Blue” as it’s tailored to meet the specific needs of Exchange. Scheduling a session about a database engine that is generally not well known amongst the Exchange community seemed like an extraordinarily brave step for the TEC organizers to take. Nevertheless they put Brett’s session on the schedule and I toddled along to take in the delights of discussing the many code examples that Brett positively delighted in explaining. The other highlight was the amazing outfit that Brett wore in an attempt to garner positive feedback from his audience. Suffice to say that his overalls were of a pattern and color sufficient to make some go blind if viewed in sunlight. ...
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When you fire up a PowerShell session for the Exchange Management Shell (EMS), the banner for the new session displays a “tip of the day”. The tips are things like examples of command syntax. Some people love this kind of information, others (probably the more experienced) find it relatively uninteresting as the tips eventually run out of something new and valuable to display. The behaviour hasn’t changed much between Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010. But now you have a chance to give direct feedback to the Exchange documentation team to tell them how you’d like to improve the information displayed when EMS initializes. It could be as simple as an expanded set of tips, some additional pointers to web sites that contain useful information about writing scripts for Exchange (a dangerous thing as URLs have a nasty habit of becoming outdated) or perhaps some artificial intelligence that analyzes your use of EMS and suggests how you can improve your personal performance. For example: “Welcome to EMS: I’ve noticed that you’re not very good at scripting. Can I suggest that you buy a good PowerShell book and read it at bedtime” or “EMS welcomes you, O lord of the scripts and master of the obscure. I can tell you nothing that you don’t know.” Everyone has a good idea from time to time. Maybe you can be the one to help EMS come to life. If you feel up to the challenge, go to David Strome’s blog and take the opportunity to reinvigorize the banner. ...
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I was both interested and impressed at Nuno Mota’s article describing how to enable a hidden performance section for the Exchange Management Console (ECP): impressed because the article is written well and interested because it reveals a detail about ECP that I had never heard of before. This either goes to prove that you really do learn something new every day or the worth of browsing through the many settings that exist in Exchange’s configuration files....
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I don’t want to seem to rain on Microsoft Learning’s recent announcement about the new cloud-based Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) accreditation program as there are some very good points, such as an alignment to real-world solutions delivered across multiple versions of technology, but some nagging doubts linger. There’s no doubt that the old-model Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (also MCSE) program had run into choppy waters. Apart from the problems with the word “engineer”, which has a particular professional meaning associated with multi-year university degrees in some countries, the old MCSE program lacked credibility in part, if only because there was little to differentiate between the “paper” MCSE who had qualified after cramming for two weeks at a boot camp and a real industry pro with tons of experience. Both MCSEs were equally valid in the eyes of Microsoft, which doesn’t seem right. ...
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A boring Tuesday in April brings me to contemplate the intriguing Slate.com article entitled “Death to Word” (the title, at least, got your attention). Basically the author’s premise is it’s time for Microsoft to put Word for Windows into the spare parts bin. Some of the targets identified in the article are easy to anticipate. For example,” Clippy” makes yet another appearance as the animated icon everyone loves to hate. Other Word features that the author identifies as not worth having will probably surprise because you might consider them worth having, such as the way that Word automatically adds a superscripted “th” after ordinal numbers. To each their own, I suppose. ...
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The canaries are really singing around Redmond to reveal details of the upcoming Office 15 product releases. At one level it’s kind of irritating to be bound by various Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) that are strictly enforced by Microsoft only to see how Microsoft clearly plants details with journalists in the obvious knowledge that this information will end up in the public domain in short order. But then you realize that this activity is all part of the game that plays out around the launch of any new product. It’s called marketing. One of the details that slipped out last week was the fact that Office 15 marks the introduction of FAST-based search technology into the Office 15 server products to provide a single, consistent, enterprise-class search capability across repositories managed by Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync. Microsoft announced their intention to acquire the Norwegian-based FAST company in January 2008 for $1.2 billion. The deal was completed in May 2008 and since then Microsoft has been working to integrate FAST into its line-up in products such as FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. The FAST engineering team remains based in Norway. Exchange has used different search capabilities over the years. Originally, it used MSSearch in Exchange 2003 and then upgraded to use its own content indexing search in Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010. The search feature has improved over the years through closer integration with the different parts of Exchange. ...
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