Category: Office 365
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Why Exchange Online Administrators need to understand PowerShell
In my recent review of the free Microsoft Press ebook “Microsoft Office 365: Connect and collaborate virtually anywhere, anytime”, I concluded that the book was a curate’s egg for Exchange administrators. I’m not sure if the analogy worked for readers outside Ireland and the U.K., so in the spirit of clarity,…
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Creaking Office 365 infrastructure caused by Microsoft success?
Last April I was in sunny Las Vegas for “The Experts Conference” (TEC). While there, I reported on a keynote given by Kevin Allison, the General Manager for Exchange Customer Experience. Kevin discussed the challenges of developing a single product that has to function well both on-premises and in the…
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Bad week for cloud services, but at least RWC 2011 has started!
It hasn’t been a great week all round for cloud services. On Wednesday, Google Docs had an outage that lasted anything from 30 minutes to an hour, frustrating users who couldn’t do any work because all their data was “in the cloud”. The need for offline access for Google Docs…
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Have hosting companies a future competing against Office 365?
Microsoft has a habit of introducing products that suddenly set a new price point for a market. The best example I can offer is SharePoint 2001. Prior to its launch, products that allowed enterprises to build portals that allowed users to search document libraries were very expensive and usually complex…
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I never knew that my thoughts on Exchange and Office 365 were quite so fluent in German
The nice people from Quest have been kind enough to invite me to give a keynote at the European edition of “The Experts Conference” (TEC), which is scheduled for October 17-19 in Frankfurt. As part of the event, they asked me to interview with a German magazine called NT4Admins (you…
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Support – a different cultural experience when you move into the cloud
One of the great joys of moving an application such as Exchange to a cloud provider is that they take on the responsibility of all of the mundane but necessary tasks that have to be performed to keep things going. No administrator will shed a tear to transition tasks such…
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I wish I’d spent more on redundant network components…
The outfall from last week’s networking failure that stopped service to Exchange users of Microsoft’s Office 365 in North America rumbles on. My rambling on the topic is some reflections on just how much a network outage has cost Microsoft as they’ve decided to refund customers 25% of the monthly…
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BPOS and Office 365 cloud outages – not quite nirvana yet
Last night (my time) TweetDeck exploded with a mass of customer complaints, observations, witticisms, and moaning about the problems that afflicted the Exchange Online component of Office 365. On this occasion I wasn’t affected because the network problem that Microsoft reported as the root cause only caused problems for their…
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Office 365 sessions at Fall Exchange Connections
One of the factors that drives the selection of sessions for a conference is the kind of information that the conference organizers want to offer to attendees. In the case of Exchange Connections, that information is linked to Exchange Server. And right now, the biggest influence on Exchange Server is…
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Microsoft tells BPOS customers to wait until they can be migrated to Office 365
I just made this blog post on WindowsITPro.com. It reflects on some issues raised by Microsoft’s August 7 post on TechNet that explains that basic steps required to migrate an organization manually from BPOS to Office 365. If you are skilled with Exchange Server migrations and PowerShell scripts and can…
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