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PowerShell books for Exchange Administrators
Following my post on why I think every Exchange administrator needs to know PowerShell, I was challenged to say what books someone should read to get up to speed on the topic. So here goes (click here to see my list of good technical books to read). To begin, the…
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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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Some light appears at the end of the tunnel in the strange case of Exchange, IE9, and MMC
There’s been lots of debate about the issue that appears on computers running the Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010 management console (EMC) after the installation of IE9. The symptoms are described in the EHLO post of 9 September. Interestingly, the problem doesn’t appear on every computer, a point that has…
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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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Be careful when you use BCCs
I’ve just posted a mea cupla to WindowsITPro.com describing a recent embarrassing situation that I caused for myself by copying someone as a BCC recipient on a note sent to a confidential distribution list. That person then promptly sent a note to the distribution list and exposed the fact that they…
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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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Offline Gmail returns but doesn’t make Microsoft quiver (too much)
Yesterday Google relaunched offline access for Gmail, Calendar, and Docs. The new HTML5-based capability replaces the previous functionality built using Google Gears. Gmail is the first application to get an upgrade in the form of a Chrome application that can be launched using a new tab within the Chrome browser…
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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…