Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

Category: Office 365

  • How I connect to Exchange Online with PowerShell

    Nearly five years ago, I wrote a post describing how to connect to Exchange 2010 with PowerShell. That post remains very popular, which indicates that lots of people still seek help to understand how to accomplish the task. Technology has moved on and while the Exchange 2010 post remains valid…

  • Second edition of “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” due September 14

    When we began working on the “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” eBook, we knew that this was not a once-off effort. The dynamic nature of Office 365 and the number of changes that appear I the service means that books that are just a few months old start to become…

  • Exchange Unwashed Digest – June 2015

    Sorry for the delay in publishing the June 2015 digest for my “Exchange Unwashed” blog on WindowsITPro.com. Travel and the need to crank up the organization of updates for the 2nd edition of the “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” eBook (available in PDF and EPUB formats on ExchangeServerPro.com and for Kindle…

  • The scourge of autosignatures

    Have you ever wondered just how much valuable storage is occupied in email databases by totally useless autosignature content? You know, logos and other tasteful adornments to the bottom of email, repeated ad nausem on every message, internal and external, unregarded and unwanted by recipients. Autosignatures serve a useful purpose…

  • 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…