I have been remiss in updating this site with information about posts to my “Exchange Unwashed” blog on WindowsITPro.com. All I can say is that WindowsITPro.com has been through the trauma of a content management system (CMS) upgrade. Like all technology migrations, people (like me) have been affected by user interface changes, functionality that works in different ways, and other quirks of the new system. In any case, things are settling down now and I have some time to go back and cover things that I would have done before.

Here’s the set of posts that appeared in March 2013. Some of these are now in the category of historical records, some will still be of interest if you haven’t seen the material before.

The Exchange Reports Codeplex Project (March 7): I’ve long said that Exchange is pathetic when it comes to generating reports that are of use to administrators. Microsoft’s attitude seems to be that this is an area best left to third parties. The Codeplex project is worth supporting because it provides a set of basic reports that are of use to pretty well every deployment.

EDA, PinPoint DNS, and a chat about Exchange 2013 (March 12). EDA is the Exchange Deployment Assistant, which was upgraded to cope with Exchange 2013. Still not perfect, but evolving over time to include support for different circumstances. PinPoint DNS is a useful technique to consider because of some upcoming changes in how certificates used to secure communications work. The chat refers to a session that I taped with Richard Campbell and RunAs radio. It was fun!

Why Exchange Online hates journal mailboxes (March 14). The cloud has limitless storage – right? So it must be a great platform for the accumulation of data that has to be retained for discovery searches. Or so you’d think… but Exchange Online disagrees and won’t let you use its mailboxes as the destination for journal messages.

Exchange 2010 Discovery Searches: What about users who leave? (March 19). You might be quite glad to see the back of some users and move swiftly to eradicate all trace of their presence within the organization, including their mailboxes. But what if those people had access to information that needs to be retained for regulatory or legal reasons? Well, then you’d need a process to retain their mailboxes for some time. Just what that process would be and how long you’d keep the data depends on your company.

101 Exchange Web Services code examples (March 21). Exchange Web Services (EWS) is the way that third party developers (and those who build the Microsoft Outlook 2011 for Mac client) gain access to the Store. Having a well-developed API is all very good, but some examples help to get the creative juices flowing. Here’s how to find some…

Preserving mailboxes when employees leave (March 26). Returning to the topic of how best to preserve mailboxes of users who leave the organization, we cover some practical steps that you can take to keep these mailboxes around to allow them to be accessible to discovery searches but not involved in day-to-day email.

Microsoft replaces OCAT with OffCAT (Office Configuration Analysis Tool) (March 28). Microsoft took a good tool (The Outlook Configuration Analysis Tool) and made it better by expanding its capabilities to deal with the other Office products. As it turns out, Outlook’s configuration is more complex than that of PowerPoint, but that’s no reason not to check what’s going on under the covers.

More soon about the April 2013 posts…

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