Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

Category: Exchange 2013

  • A brief history of Exchange Time Management

    It might just be me, but the sounds of bitter complaints by users whose calendars have been thrown into confusion by some combination of user error, Exchange server bug, and client mess-up appear to have quietened recently. At least, my mailbox is less full of sad tales of corrupted meetings…

  • Brick backups and Exchange – not recommended

    I was recently asked whether a company should invest in brick-level backup for Exchange 2010. This request came as quite a surprise because I hadn’t run into anyone who was interested in this kind of technology for a number of years. Curiosity got the better of me so I agreed…

  • ePublishing for Technology: a new book on Exchange 2013 High Availability

    Time is both the greatest enemy and greatest friend of technical books. I know that seems like a statement which makes little sense, but truth lurks in these words. We all know that technology now evolves at an ever-increasing cadence. The upshot is that the traditional publishing cycle struggles to…

  • Outlook 2013 and site mailboxes

    Although the new-and-interesting Office 365 Groups have taken some of the shine and luster off site mailboxes in terms of the collaboration options that are now available in Office 365, some companies have site mailboxes deployed because they like the way that site mailboxes exploit Exchange mailboxes and SharePoint document libraries (for the…

  • Good and bad in the new Outlook for Mac

    Being an Office for Mac 2011 user is sometimes hard. Really hard. And not just because Office for Mac 2011 is so far behind its Windows counterpart in terms of functionality, it’s also because its applications like Outlook for Mac 2011 looks so outdated and horrible. In the case of…

  • Exchange Unwashed Digest – October 2014

    October 2014 was an interesting month for my “Exchange Unwashed” blog on WindowsITPro.com. I had the chance to write about some new technology (Delve), old technology (Exchange 2003 mega-clusters), bad technology (Chrome bugs), and current technology (various posts). All in all, a pretty productive month. Azure beckons for Exchange DAG witness…

  • AQS and KQL: Two query languages for different versions of Exchange

    Exchange 2010 uses AQS (Advanced Search Syntax) to construct its discovery searches. Exchange 2013 takes a difference approach and uses KQL (keyword query language). Why the change? AQS is shared with other Windows search components such as Windows Desktop Search. As explained in my article “Exchange searches are limited to…

  • Using Search-Mailbox to look for items with a specific date

    A question from a reader is often a good start to a useful discussion or to probe into a topic. Tim Read contacted me to discuss some problems he had with using the Search-Mailbox cmdlet (available in cloud and on-premises versions of Exchange). In this case, he was using Exchange…

  • Recoverable Items and Calendar Versioning

    Keeping track of calendar items such as meetings to ensure that a definitive version of the item is available is sometimes hard to do, especially when multiple clients or multiple users access a calendar. Exchange 2010 made architectural changes in the server to concentrate processing in a common set of…

  • Exchange Unwashed Digest – September 2014

    September 2014 included Exchange Connections in Las Vegas (all seemed to have a great time) plus some upheaval in Microsoft, so there was plenty to discuss in my “Exchange Unwashed” blog at WindowsITPro.com. Here’s what happened during the month: The best Exchange documentation update ever? (Sept 30): I received criticism…