Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

  • Fast track Office 365 migrations by Microsoft pose some challenges for partners

    Microsoft’s announcement that they intended to accelerate the on-boarding (migration) of customer seats to Office 365 through the “FastTrack” program surprised some attending the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) last month. Apparently the idea is that Microsoft will hire (or has already hired) between 250 and 600 new employees to take…

  • Thoughts about Microsoft’s unified technology conference

    As expected, Microsoft’s announcement that they would run an uber-conference focused on the enterprise to replace TechEd and the individual Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, Project, and MMS conferences did not receive universal approval. The new conference takes place in Chicago next May and, if TechEd is anything to go by, should…

  • Exchange Unwashed Digest – July 2014

    Another month has gone by and it was a busy one for my “Exchange Unwashed” blog on WindowsITPro.com. I published thirteen posts covering everything from the thorny question of just how many paid subscribers Microsoft has for Office 365 to some lingering system registry entries for long-departed Exchange 2013 servers. Here’s…

  • A warmed-over MCSE program is no pinnacle

    Apparently the head of certifications at Microsoft (Tim Sneath) has said that Microsoft is going to make the MCSE exams “harder for everyone” by introducing new types of questions for which answers are harder to memorize. In other words, they want to eliminate the “certification by rote learning”, brain dumps, and…

  • And now for something completely different – Monty Python Live

    I’m sure many of you don’t appreciate the humour of Monty Python because it is very much an acquired taste. But those of us who were brought up in the black-and-white TV era appreciate the wit and insightful comment that Monty Python brought to the screens at the end of…

  • Automatic mailbox move requests in Exchange 2013

    Soon after writing about the need to clean out lingering mailbox move requests for Exchange 2010, I requested the developers to add the ability to remove move requests automatically after a certain period. After all, it’s a royal pain to find that you can’t move a mailbox just because an ancient move…

  • Why it is easier for Microsoft to innovate inside Office 365

    My last post discussed the fact that an increasing level of integration to create new features by the Office server products creates some issues for hosting companies (other than Office 365) and on-premises customers. At least in the case of Exchange, Microsoft uses the same code base for its cloud…

  • Exchange Unwashed Digest – June 2014

    June 2014 was an interesting month for my “Exchange Unwashed” blog on WindowsITPro.com as the material covered was pretty diverse as we went from platforms like Azure to storage firmware and all points in between. See what you think! Why running Exchange on Azure is an unattractive proposition (June 26): Quite…

  • Increasing Office 365 integration poses challenges for hosters and on-premises customers

    It seems to me that a fundamental transformation is occurring within the Office 365 datacenters that has some consequences for those who offer alternate hosted services as well as on-premises customers. And it’s all to do with the level of integration that Microsoft is now building into their Office servers.…

  • NFS and Exchange: Am I a sheep? Some at Nutanix think so…

    A number of people working for Nutanix have been in the vanguard of those who would like to see NFS supported as a valid storage option for Exchange deployments, some of whom cheerfully recommend that “customers continue to run Exchange on Nutanix containers presented via NFS.“ In my mind this is…