Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

Category: Office 365

  • Exchange Unwashed Digest – November 2013

    November 2013 was quite a month for me. I was all set to go to the annual Microsoft MVP Summit in Redmond when I had a sudden and so far unexplained collapse (kind of like a personal reboot) on November 15 that resulted in a fifteen-day stay in hospital. Although…

  • Using an intelligent Twitter stream to keep up to date

    I am often asked how I track new developments and information about Exchange, Office 365, Windows or the other technologies in which I am interested. My response is “by using Twitter intelligently”. There’s no doubt that an extraordinary amount of dross is generated and shared daily on Twitter. People who…

  • Contemplating Yammer

    Microsoft’s $1.2 billion purchase of Yammer in June 2012 is now starting to get traction as the technology becomes more integrated with the rest of the Office suite. Officially described as an internal social network, Yammer is sometimes compared to a company-specific version of Twitter or Facebook (perhaps because all…

  • Evolving Office 365 monitoring tools

    I’ve been playing around with the Office 365 Admin app, now available for Windows Phone 8 and due to be available “soon” for Android and Apple iPhone. Think of the Windows Phone users like myself as the advanced beta testers before the more popular devices get their teeth into the…

  • Exchange Unwashed Blog Digest September 2013

    September was quite an active month because some bad things happened (like the Microsoft Learning decision to cancel some accreditation programs) and preparations were in full swing for the Exchange Connections conference in Las Vegas (from where I write this post). On the other hand, some interesting technical points came…

  • Hello from 38,000 feet

    Welcome to a blog post facilitated by Aer Lingus Wi-Fi at 38,000 feet en route from Dublin to Boston, a service provided by T-Mobile. Apparently the connections didn’t work at all two weeks ago so it’s good to have progress. It’s also nice that Aer Lingus has joined the modern…

  • Exchange Unwashed Digest: August 2013

    August proved to be quite an entertaining month in terms of the topics that were available to be covered in Exchange Unwashed. Here’s my take on the posts: The sad, curious, and brain-dead demise of TechNet subscriptions (August 1): While they are replacing CEOs and buying mobile phone companies with…

  • Exchange Unwashed digest for July 2013

    July – hot summer (or so it should be) – and vacations. But the need to publish posts on my Exchange Unwashed blog on WindowsITPro.com continues, so here’s what appeared in July. Interesting approach to public folder support in Outlook Web App 2013 (July 2): The month began with some…

  • Microsoft cloud revenues and investments

    Two recent reports attracted my attention. First, at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, Steve Ballmer noted that Microsoft runs more than one million servers in its datacenters. Second, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said that Office 365 revenues are now running at $1.5 billion annually. Both figures are impressive but as always,…

  • Exchange Unwashed Digest May 2013

    May 2013 produced some thoughts about site mailboxes, CU1 improvements, planning tools, and even a Windows Phone application in the Exchange Unwashed Blog. Here’s what happened in detail. Using an Office 365 free trial domain to test software (May 30): Sometimes it is just difficult to get all the parts…