Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

Category: Office 365

  • Managing offline access for Outlook Web App

    Offline access is one of the premier new features offered by Outlook Web App (OWA) in Exchange 2013 and Exchange Online. I have had the need to use OWA offline many times and think it is a very usable client, especially over low-speed or flaky Wi-Fi connections. Of course, Outlook’s…

  • Announcing a Kindle version of “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals”

    After a certain amount of struggle, mostly associated with the need to provide book files formatted in a certain manner, the “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” team is happy to announce that we now have a Kindle version of the book available on Amazon.com. Our original intention was not to…

  • Exchange Unwashed Digest – May 2015

    May was the month of the Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago. I’ve already provided my impressions of that event in another post, so I won’t rehash the topic here. There’s no doubt a lot of content was delivered at Ignite (I am still listening to recorded sessions) and so it’s…

  • Using PowerShell to convert Exchange Distribution Groups to Office 365 Groups

    At last week’s Microsoft Ignite conference, I had the chance of attending a session called “Evolving distribution lists with Office 365 Groups” (a recording of the session is available online). The session described the integration with Outlook 2016 (no plans exist to back port the technology to Outlook 2013) and…

  • New management cmdlets for Office 365 Groups

    Several of the sessions about Office 365 Groups given at Microsoft Ignite in Chicago have addressed the obvious deficiency in management controls that exist in the initial implementation. Part of this was the total inability to create new groups or remove existing groups with PowerShell. You can run Get-GroupMailbox to…

  • Understanding how Exchange Online runs

    Understanding how Office 365 operates is always an interesting challenge because Microsoft usually doesn’t say too much about how things work within the service. But the Exchange Online folks are pretty good at telling what they are up to, which brings us to the “Behind the Curtain: How we run…

  • Launching Office 365 for Exchange Professionals at Microsoft Ignite

    Over 20,000 people are attending Microsoft Ignite this week, where we are all busy attending and giving sessions, meeting partners and friends, and generally making sure that we are well plugged into the technology community. Paul Cunningham, our co-author and esteemed web master of exchangeserverpro.com, isn’t with us but has promised…

  • Exchange Unwashed Digest – April 2015

    April was a very busy month. First, Microsoft had a lot of conferences to attend and therefore had many announcements to make. It seemed like every marketing manager had something to say, so we had a blizzard of announcements that needed to be reviewed and analyzed (rather than being simply…

  • Formatting the “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” eBook

    The last stage in our preparations to launch “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” on May 4 at the Microsoft Ignite conference has centered on formatting the eBook. Those who buy a copy will be able to download PDF and EPUB versions. The PDF is best if you want to read on…

  • Preparing to launch “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals”

    As you might know, we closed off the formal writing phase for “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” on April 15 to be sure that we would have books available for the first day of the Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago (May 4). I guess it’s natural that some would ask…