Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

  • Should we spend less time discussing software bugs?

    Is there a vague possibility that the technical community spends too much time complaining about software bugs? This rather startling proposition came up during a discussion with Paul Cunningham, of ExchangeServerPro fame. Paul remarked that we seem to spend a lot of time finding bugs, reporting them, checking for workarounds,…

  • 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Windows counterpart in terms of functionality, it’s also because its applications like Outlook for Mac 2011 looks so outdated and horrible.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…

  • How to report spam that arrives in Office 365 to Microsoft

    Ten years ago, Bill Gates told the World Economic Forum that the problem of spam would be solved within two years (by 2006). To be fair to Gates, he also noted that his predictions have not always been on the mark. I guess his views on the demise of spam…

  • 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…

  • The strange case of the MailboxSentItemsConfiguration cmdlets

    Microsoft introduced the rather useful cmdlet set of Set-MailboxSentItemsConfiguration and Get-MailboxSentItemsConfiguration a long time ago (Exchange 2010 SP2 RU4 – August 2012). As you might recall, these cmdlets allow an administrator to exert control over where Exchange stores copies of messages sent by delegates. What’s surprising and genuinely puzzling is that the cmdlets were not…

  • 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…