I know that many of the readers of this fine blog don’t have the chance or the time to keep up to date with the “Exchange Unwashed” blog that I contribute to on WindowsITPro.com (of course, you could subscribe to Twitter and follow me there), so here’s a brief recap on some of my November posts on WindowsITPro.com that might be of interest to some.

Expiring Office 365 Passwords (Nov 28) considers the impact of the Office 365 password expiration policy for Plan E (enterprise) users, which forces users to change passwords every 90 days whether they want to or not (or realize that they have to). Plan P users like me are unaffected because Microsoft has thoughtfully allowed us to play with fire and passwords that don’t expire. Why is this an issue? Well, it could be a support problem for small to medium companies who have just moved to Office 365 and are now meeting that 90 day limit…

The economics of becoming a Microsoft Certified Master (MCM–Exchange) (Nov 22) discussed the relatively high cost ($18,500) charged by Microsoft for the three-week training course that they run for people who want to become a Microsoft Certified Master (Exchange). Alas, the course fee is only the start of the costs associated with this accreditation, which is what I explore in the article.

Exchange 2010 Transaction Logs: To Be Cerished, Not Ignored (Nov 17) arose from a recent post by the Exchange development group stating that “the number one reason why our Premier customers open Exchange 2010 critical situations is because Mailbox databases dismount due to running out of disk space on the transaction log LUN…”  This caused me to consider whether Microsoft is a victim of its own marketing success in selling the effect of the storage changes incorporated in Exchange 2010 that support deployments on low-end disks and so on.

Google improves support for Google Apps users and claims 80% customer satisfaction rating: What about Office 365? (Nov 15) A commentary after Google announced telephone support for all business users of its Google Apps application suite. Office 365 Plan P users are restricted to logging support calls on the Office 365 portal or searching blogs and other support forums, so is support now a competitive advantage for Google Apps?

Office 365 Troubleshooter: a start, but not as accurate as you need (Nov 11) is a review of the first release of a Microsoft troubleshooting tool that’s designed to guide Office 365 users to the answer for problems that they might meet. I found that the tool is a start but it can be misleading for inexperienced administrators.

So much fuss, but all part of the Google vs. Microsoft sales game (Nov 9). I was amused by all of the reports saying that Google had signed a deal with General Motors (GM) to supply Google Apps to GM’s 100,000 users. I’ve been through many sales campaigns to sell product to large corporations and this seemed to be the opening salvo in a battle that has many stages to go through yet.

The wonders of the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator (Nov 7) is a commentary on the latest version of the storage calculator, which apart from anything else is a wonderful example of just what you can do with Excel. There’s some interesting features in this release that are extremely useful to anyone who’s trying to design a Database Availability Group (DAG).

Gartner analyzes Google Apps revenue and the email race (Nov 1) reviews an interesting analysis that Gartner did of just how important Google Apps is to Google’s overall revenue and how Google might be using Google Apps to keep Microsoft focused on defending its application strongholds (with Office 365, for example) while leaving Google relatively unscathed in search.

I hope that you enjoy the articles!

– Tony