Comments from March 2016 Survey: Office 365 for Exchange Professionals

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Tony Redmond

We received over 1,000 responses to our survey about the “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” eBook and while we are still working through the details, I thought it would be interesting to post the comments that we received here so that people could see what came  in and post further views if they’d like.

First, we asked what people thought was their favorite part of the book.

Favorite part of Office 365 for Exchange Professionals

  • That it was written by the best professionals in the field and that each wrote the section that they are strongest in
  • Still reading it – but am really enjoying the real world references that it contains.
  • Yammer [TR: An interesting comment considering the relatively low amount of words we devote to this topic!]
  • I like at the time of release it was a one stop resource for Exchange and Office 365
  • All of it. the practical knowledge of the product was very helpful
  • Migration to Office 365 – Very well written, easy to understand.
  • The actual subject itself. It’s great to see it all (and updated) in one story line, if that makes sense.
  • Technical and information on how to pitch the service to management
  • language used in the book was good and the writing was current (as well as current as possible one can be with O365)
  • the practical info – saves me learning the hard way
  • Written and edited by very trusted Office 365 / Exchange sources.
  • It is a very good reference book. I have not found a topic yet that didn’t have something about it in the book.  This is the first thing I grab when something new comes along.
  • Haven’t finished reading it yet, but so far the technical details make it worth reading. Also the fact that you update it too so it keeps up to date.
  • All of it was excellent but I particularly liked all the stuff on hybrid. Also loved all the PowerShell examples.
  • No favorite part, different parts in various sections provided a lot of the info I was looking for in the book. As far as the writing quality I found myself sifting through the writing to get to the center of various technical details I was looking for in regards to actual implementation, namely for Hybrid Deployments. Wish there was a Step-by Step section as this is probably the most widely adopted deployment method
  • I’m a shell nerd, so the tidbits of useful shell script was good.
  • All the extra British “u”s [TR: No Brits were used or abused in the making of the book. I’m Irish and Paul’s Australian, so that’s where the “u’s” come from. MVH is Belgian, and probably doesn’t care too much about the details of the differences between British and American spelling of common English words]
  • Maybe not a “part” so much, but the incredibly detailed info contained in the book place it far above most MS-produced doc on O365.
  • I haven’t been through all of it, but “Doing More with Office 365” was a nice section.
  • Valuable real-world technical information from seasoned professionals.
  • The updates that keep coming out that detail the new enhancements to the service. The powershell scripts/tips are very good as well.
  • The in-depth technical detail that came from your experience with the products and services
  • The clear and straightforward manner in which it was written.
  • End to end document is very crisp and clear. Very easy to understand and interesting to read.
  • The hybrid connectivity and eDiscovery sections.
  • My favorite is less the content and more that it is searchable (as opposed to a paper book) so that if i need to reference something i know is in there, i can search and find it.
  • The writing style is very good – information is “to the point”, the book is not filled with a lot of “fluff”. The technical depth is pretty good. Overall I was very happy with the book.
  • The guidance on recovering disabled mailboxes and importing into existing mailboxes in one step. It came in handy when we were crossed with an issue and the info from the book pointed us in the right direction and helped solve the issue.
  • The writing style/quality of all three authors is amazing separately in each of their own blogs/books, and it meshes together very well in this one.
  • Migration section. This needs further attention and expansion as it’s a hot topic in the business world at the moment
  • All over the book has helped me with various tasks in my day to day job as I have developed my skills with O365 Exchange
  • Oh this is a hard one, I really liked all the book if I’m being honest. It was really in-depth but not overwhelming. It was written so I understood it and not so the author sounded over technical. There’s was enough information on each chapter for me to get a good understanding of what’s needed and where, there was also links to the appropriate subjects to gain a further understanding!
  • The PowerShell examples. The flow of the chapters. This is one of the best books I have ever owned for O365.
  • The sections on Office 365 Groups because it was the most detailed information on that feature that I could find.
  • For me it is clear that this book is delivered by individuals intimately experienced working with Exchange server
  • We bought a copy of this to have on hand for helpdesk staff. Everyone loves it. We listen to your podcasts and follow the blog. You are more informative than MVA!
  • Material has been great. Keep doing what you guys are doing and looking forward to the future releases.
  • It’s a great book written by some well-respected authors. keep up the good work!
  • It’s very well written and highly detailed.
  • A difficult book to write given the fast paced changes that happen with O365. A must read for any engineer who is moving Exchange mailboxes to the cloud. Keep it coming!!
  • excellent reference manual and love the dynamic updates
  • Keep up the good work. I think it’s a pioneering way to write an IT book about a cloud service that is changing very fast.
  • This ebook definitely fills a huge need, as the Microsoft TechNet site documentation is behind, typically sparse, and falling further behind daily. Of particular note is the information on hybrid configurations, that is invaluable, and I definitely desire more!
  • The update cycle you folks have embarked upon is impressive, and goes far beyond the often-outdated info scattered across multiple MS websites (and leaves all other “books” in the dust). As someone who has administered my company’s O365 tenant for a few years (and BPOS before that), I can say that I still find useful info in this book that I did not know and have not encountered elsewhere.
  • Keep up the good work – Love to see more Exchange/O365 architecture type of stuff.
  • Thank you for releasing updates on a frequent basis and including them in updates for existing purchasers.
  • I refer to at least a couple of times a week!
  • It’s essential for my job as a trainer to keep up-to-date and I do this mainly by reading your book.
  • Very comprehensive and I enjoyed the writing style.
  • Really good book! Bought this because MS itself doesn’t have any decent documentation for it.
  • Great book, this is my first source when looking for answers. More deep technical details would help more.
  • This book is the most practical and technical book on the market. My go-to resource.
  • My best resource so far for my company’s migration of one of our smaller divisions to Office 365
  • Really liked the way things are explained
  • Love the constant updates. Kindle edition would be nice, but I understand the difficulties with that. [TR note: The Kindle edition is available!]

Hybrid and migration seem to be the most popular sections.

Next, we asked people to suggest ways that we can improve the book in future editions.

Thoughts on improvements

  • keep the updates coming as Microsoft adds stuff to O365
  • Can you cover some multi forest migration to office 365 troubleshooting. Skype for business hybrid configuration. Lotus notes to o365 migrations.
  • More step by step guide on how to implement SSO with AD password syn to Azure
  • It should include troubleshooting scenarios as well like for different types of migration etc.
  • -It would be nice to have a chapter devoted to “things not available to you in O365 that were available in Exchange” [TR: Interesting idea!]
  • updates would be nice to be free. [TR: Updates are free to those who buy books from ExchangeServerPro.com or (in a lesser sense), the Kindle edition from Amazon. We restrict updates to a certain edition. The full explanation of how we manage updates is available for your reading pleasure.]
  • It would be great if the electronic version of the book came with a scripts library of the scripts used and if it was searchable.
  • more about migration scenarios – besides hybrid
  • The O365 Shell configuration from any machine to the required domain should be made easily accessible. This would help us work and get all the data just a click away.
  • more PowerShell commands would be nice
  • From a Consultant point of view, the information is great as a overall high level view. But, looking from the outside point of view, it would be nice to have some scenario based examples of how to approach or tackle implementation issues (troubleshooting), decommissioning steps to old environment, and validation steps for confirmation.
  • yes, im not clear on the assessment that I need to do prior to running the HCW. I would like to understand each and every tasks that I need to be prepared before installing the HCW.
  • should include scenarios of existing office365 Tennant migration to a different tenant (hybrid and online), mergers acquisition
  • Hybrid certificates in multiple SMTP domains
  • If someone has already purchased the original version, it would be nice to get the updates for free.
  • Keep up the good work. More in-depth stuff. Best practices.
  • A bit more info on how O365 servers secure their connection to CAS Servers (mutual auth or not) would be welcome.
  • Would like more details in cross-perm behaviours
  • would be helpful to have an example hybrid migration – step by step instructions similar to the migration docs such as 2003 to 2010 authored by Paul
  • Book should address changes in Domain Controller during Office 365 migration. like UPN etc.
  • You should include content relative to de-commissioning On-Prem Exchange servers after a Hybrid migration when there is no desire to host mailboxes On-Prem anymore. You should also discuss the Free-Co-existence Exchange Hybrid server to simplify End-User management if a company is using AAD-Connect or AD-FS. Make it clear in this situation how Cloud User in this scenario is Read-Only and discuss details of user management in this scenario. Also in this scenario can the Hybrid configuration be dismantled and the free co-existence server just be left to manage the users in the Cloud that were sync’d with AAD-Connect? A lot is unclear after all mailboxes have been migrated from On-Prem to Cloud when desire is to eliminate all On-Prem Costs, de-commission all On-Prem Exchange Servers but possibly leave one free co-existence Exchange server around to simplify end user management. Also speak to fact that ADSI-Edit use is possible but unsupported. Also I am not sure but in this scenario is it possible to simply use remote PowerShell only for user management and get rid of all On-Prem Exchange Servers and have No Co-existence Hybrid server as well? Also Put some links in Books to Videos where you actually us through some implementations like a simply Hybrid Deploment
  • I would love if it would go more into things like DLP and message encryption. [TR: There’s a full chapter on DLP (16) and we cover Office 365 message encryption in chapter 15. I am not sure what more is needed.]
  • Make EMS a chapter
  • I think a strong focus on hybrid transition needs to be explored better. Many professionals find the federation and upkeep of hybrid to be a very time-consuming challenge.
  • What to do when a user account is compromised via webmail.
  • I wish that it would be more in-depth of the decommissioning of the on-prem
  • Tony’s a great writer, but technical professionals is not so interesting to read the first chapter of a far far a distant galaxy. Maybe reduce it a little.
  • More info on managing remotely.
  • Please mention related to upcoming or expected new enhancements in office365.
  • My version has appendix A as the directory sync content. It has some detail on upgrading the sync tools, but i think expanding on the upgrading processes detail will be more important as O365 continues to evolve and the tools get replaced and rebranded.
  • I think it’s important not to skip over Exchange 2010 hybrid. I work as a consultant and while I see more and more Exchange 2013/2016 deployments I must say that the majority of clients I deal with are still running Exchange 2010. I think it’s important to include information on Exchange 2010 hybrid still as there are differences between the versions.
  • My most difficult moments have been migrating public folders. The more info you have on PF migration, the better.
  • Exchange online protection
  • A Chapter on ADFS
  • Keep improving it
  • Don’t charge full price again for a “new” edition within months after the previous release. That’s similar to an illegal practice called bait a switch here in the US. To me, it’s like selling a kite one day and withholding the string from the purchaser, and then selling the string at a later date for more than what the original cost of the kite was. It’s absurd.    Manage the purchasers list better to provide updates/offers. [TR: See the note above about updates. Our first edition was in May 2015 and our second in September 2015. There are lots of updates (250+ new pages) in the second edition so we thought that it was reasonable to charge for a new edition. The next edition is due in May 2016, so there’s more of a gap and it’s more like the cadence that we would like to have going forward. We’re learning about the mechanics of ePublishing and figuring out Office 365 too… and Microsoft keeps on changing Office 365 so we have to keep pace.]
  • Structure it a little better. Does jump around a bit especially in the hybrid sections. Would be nice to get that in one section with some good examples
  • Would love to see a more thorough walkthough with regards of hybrid configuration and AD FS and proxy.
  • Remove the history and just put in the facts.
  • To elaborate on Skype for Business implementations as well DLP.
  • More information on forthcoming features would be useful, since it is often hard to find usable technical information on new features.

Reactions:

The third edition should appear in May 2016 and will cover even more topics than before. We’re also taking the opportunity to restructure the book and move information around to create what we think is a better flow across the chapters. For instance, we’re building a new chapter called “Office 365 Identities” that draws together all of the information about directory synchronization, hybrid configurations, AD FS, single single-on, etc. The new chapter will include additional information and be presented at the start of book to set the context for other discussions. We’re also moving the Exchange history section out of chapter 1 into a separate appendix. It’s there for those who are interested in learning how the on-premises product evolved to deal with the cloud without interfering with the ability of readers to dive into the Office 365 straightaway.

We like PowerShell (a lot) and will include even more examples in the third edition. I think we should easily exceed 650 examples across all the chapters but we’ll have to wait and see.

We’ll share more details about our progress as we approach May. In the meantime, if you have other comments please post them as replies here. We need to get our heads down and get the writing done.

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Should we have a printed edition of “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals”?

Posted on March 16, 2016 by Tony Redmond

The recent survey that we ran to seek views and opinions about the “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” eBook attracted 1,097 responses. We promised a draw for five Amazon gift cards, which were duly won by Heather, Katishna, Adam, Peter, and Jack. Paul Cunningham is in charge of getting the cards to our winners and this will happen in the near future.

We are very grateful for the time people took to provide comments and insights. I’ll post something else to let everyone see the comments as well as the response we hope to achieve in the third edition, due sometime in early May. Given the amount of non-Exchange content in that edition, we might end up renaming the book “Office 365 for IT Professionals”!

A surprising aspect revealed by the survey was that 27.3% of respondents said that print books were their favorite way of consuming technical material and 20.8% said that print books were their second most popular method. We offer good electronic coverage with PDF (PC), EPUB (iPad and other eReaders), and Amazon Kindle, but up to now we have steered away from printed books, largely because the time required to produce books and the amount of control that authors cede to publishers when you go down this route.

We actually produced printed books for the Microsoft Ignite conference in May 2015. The exercise was funded by Microsoft as they wanted to have books to give to conference attendees. Overall, the project was expensive, time-consuming, and the resulting product wasn’t as good as we would have liked (in particular, the book binding was terrible). A lot of the issues were caused by lack of time, funding (perfect binding costs more), and a lack of experience on our part in terms of formatting text for different output. Substantial effort was needed to take our content (produced in Word) and format it using Adobe InDesign so that PostScript files could be given to the printer.

Investigation has proved that an easier route exists that might make it possible to consider print books again using Print-On-Demand (POD) through a service such as BookBaby.com. Nothing good comes with zero cost or effort and investment has to be made to repurpose the eBook content for print. For instance:

  • Reformat pages suitable for printing in U.S. 6” x 9” (trade) or U.S. letter size books
  • Replace hyperlinks with in-line text or footnotes
  • Create graphic files for front and back cover

Excepting the graphic design, it’s probable that a week’s effort will be sufficient to get the job done.

Doing the editing and formatting work isn’t such a great problem. The substantial up-front investment required to pay for the production of printed books is more of a concern. Without sponsorship, printing is likely to be a loss-making project. We’re talking to some potential sponsors to see whether this route can be used.

Most importantly, we cannot update books once text has been committed to the printing process, even when using POD, as the companies who offer this kind of production rely on creating a set of files that can be printed as required to fulfill demand from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other booksellers. We would therefore have to settle on text and create a print version from that content in the knowledge that changes would not be possible thereafter. At least, not without redoing the book at substantial cost.

After the content is formatted, the process of preparing and printing copies requires some additional time, all of which means that a print edition will lag the current content by a minimum of four weeks after it appears and up to eight weeks for POD copies. The additional delay for POD is accounted for by the need of Amazon and other vendors to build their inventories by ordering copies for sale on a POD basis. Again, the time lag is acceptable for books whose subject matter is static or at least (as in the case of traditional software releases) doesn’t change all that much over a period of a year or so. It becomes problematic for a topic like Office 365 where changes happen all the time. The basics and concepts would be OK, but the detail might suffer.

Although issues exist, the demand for a print version seems to be present. It might be possible to generate one after the third edition is released in May and we have some time to bed down the content to eliminate any initial glitches and formatting errors. With this in mind, producing a print version with a target availability for the Ignite 2016 conference (end September) is a possibility. Just a possibility.

The question that we’re grappling with is whether sufficient demand really exists to warrant taking on the work and the cost. Is it sufficient to keep going with our EPUB strategy or is now the right time to have a print edition? Your opinion is welcome – please comment here to let us know what you think.

In the interim, if you want to grab an electronic copy of the world’s most comprehensive book covering Office 365, head to ExchangeServerPro.com or Amazon.com depending on your preference…

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Episode #2 of Office 365 Exposed Podcast

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Tony Redmond

O365ExposedAs some of you know, Paul Robichaux and I get together to record an occasional podcast. Originally the podcast was called “Exchange Exposed” but our material has evolved to cover more of Office 365, so it’s now called “Office 365 Exposed”.

In any case, last week we were together in California and Paul had invested in a brand-new microphone that looked pretty heavy duty, so we recorded a new episode. You can download the podcast from Paul’s site or wait until it appears in iTunes, which I am assured will be any time now.

This episode is sponsored by ENow Software Inc.  where Paul is the CTO and I am an advisory board member (basically an excuse for trips to the LA area to talk software and plot with the rest of the board). We covered lots of topics, including the latest about Exchange on-premises, my experiences with Delve Analytics, what’s happening with Office 365, and so on including stuff that I can’t remember now. It was a lot of fun and the hour we spent chatting together passed very quickly.

We’ll try and do better in terms of getting new episodes out more regularly. The problem is that Paul and I need to be in the same location to be able to “spark” off each other – recording something like this over the phone doesn’t really work as well.

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Exchange Unwashed Digest – February 2016

Posted on March 2, 2016 by Tony Redmond

February is the shortest month of the year so fewer posts usually appear. Here’s what happened last month in the Exchange Unwashed Blog on WindowsITPro.com.

Dynamic Office 365 Groups might come with a big cost (Feb 25): I was very happy when Microsoft announced the preview of dynamic Office 365 Groups because I saw this as another step along the road of being able to move away from old-style email distribution groups. But over the last week or so the penny dropped (no pun intended) that using dynamic groups incurred a substantial fee for Azure Active Directory Premium licenses. Not a problem if you’ve already coughed up, but certainly a big issue if you imagined that this is the kind of feature that should be included in Office 365 enterprise plans. Microsoft has time to fix the issue before dynamic Office 365 Groups become generally available. I hope they do something smart.

In praise of the humble archive mailbox (Feb 23): I have concluded that I like archive mailboxes. At least, I like them a lot more than I like PSTs. You might disagree, but that’s your prerogative. And given the size of the quotas available to Exchange mailboxes today (especially in Office 365), it’s entirely reasonable to want to keep everything in your primary mailbox. But that’s a little untidy as you don’t really need to carry around every read-receipt you have ever received, do you? The downside with archive mailboxes is that they can only be accessed online. It can be a bit slow sometimes to fetch something – or even worse, put something there. But even these issues don’t take away from the essential goodness of archive mailboxes as the place where stuff can be put for ever and ever and ever…

How Microsoft’s focus on low-cost storage impacts the Exchange market (Feb 18): Everyone’s entitled to their view of what really matters in terms of hardware configurations for an application like Exchange. The server folks will argue the details of CPU and memory to the nth degree and the storage people really get into I/O, drive speeds, and capacity. It’s all goodness because it keeps people gainfully occupied. But we live in a world where simplicity is becoming a watchword as the influence of cloud services is felt. I wonder what affect this will have on storage vendors who sell into the Exchange market. Microsoft has shown its hand in the way that JBOD is used for Exchange Online and the on-premises market is declining. What will the storage vendors do?

The story of Exchange IOPS: How a crusade to make Exchange less of a storage hog enabled a successful cloud service (Feb 16): We probably realized it at the time (but thought it was OK) – Exchange 2003 was a storage hog. The software just loved to wallow in expensive storage and fully occupy the mind of pernickety Storage Area Networks (SANs). Everything was fine when large enterprises were footing the bill, but something had to be done to reduce the demand for storage. The subsequent project (or crusade in the minds of some) has lasted roughly 12 years and has been tremendously successful in transforming the ability of Exchange to run on low-cost storage. In fact, just the kind of disks that Office 365 has in abundance.

How Exchange’s Recover Deleted Items option could be improved (Feb 11): It’s always nice to have the chance to reverse course, which is what the Recover Deleted Items option gives you when you delete an item in error. Good as this option is, it is implemented in different ways in Outlook and Outlook Web App. It might be nice to have a common approach, but it would be even nicer if Exchange could recover an item to its original folder.

Exchange says no to .NET Framework 4.6.1 (Feb 10): One side of Microsoft is making .NET Framework 4.6.1 available to customers through Windows Update. That’s very helpful and nice, but not if you use Exchange. Some known issues and the need for testing to be completed by the Exchange development group means that you shouldn’t let .NET Framework 4.6.1 anywhere near an Exchange server for now. Be happy with 4.5.2 and be patient.

Office 365 Planner FAQ (Feb 9): Don’t we all love making plans? At least, we think we do when we start out, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed bursting with enthusiasm and ready to sort out whatever tasks we have on hand. Things go downhill rapidly afterwards when the whole task management process becomes so utterly boring. Microsoft thinks that they can help with Office 365 Planner, a new application that helps workgroups manage tasks and get things done. It’s much simpler than Project Server and here’s an FAQ to help resolve questions you might have.

Yammer for all (whether you want it or not) (Feb 4): Joy! Yammer is about to be activated for all Office 365 enterprise customers. What a lovely idea… but will it have any effect on how people collaborate and share information within Office 365? I’m unsure whether this will be the case but Microsoft appears to be determined to insert a touch of Yammer in as many places as possible across the breadth of the service. We’ll just have to wait and see how organizations and users take to this new approach over competing methods such as plain-old-email and Office 365 Groups.

Synchronizing user photos across Office 365 workloads isn’t easy (Feb 2): A user question about how to synchronize photo thumbnails across all Office 365 workloads caused me to peek into this subject. It’s not a pretty sight. Exchange Online works well and Skype for Business seems to co-operate nicely, but SharePoint Online is a bit of a mess. Oh dear…

Nine posts is a pretty good outcome for the month. Some are strategic, like those covering the dropping I/O requirements for Exchange storage over the last decade and what this means to the storage market. Others are observations on what’s happening, like the confusion around .NET Framework 4.6.1, and others complaints… Lots of complaints. It’s what I do best!

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Second edition of “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” updated

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Tony Redmond

We have now released the last update that we plan to make to the 2nd edition of the “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” eBook. This is not because we intend to leave the material to age gracefully (or not). Instead, we are starting work on the 3rd edition of the book. This edition should be available in late April or early May and will feature a lot of new material and updates covering anything from Delve Analytics to Office 365 Planner.

We also plan to restructure the book. The content has grown substantially from the original edition released in May 2015 (615 pages) to its current 833 pages spanning some 322,000 words. We will therefore spend some time to remove redundant information and what we think of as being less useful content to allow us to fit new information in without creating a thousand-page monster.

The fun fact I just found out is that we have 498 PowerShell examples in the book! Although slightly irritating that we didn’t make a nice round 500, that’s quite a few illustrations of how to use PowerShell with Office 365.

Free updates are available to those who bought the second edition through ExchangeServerPro.com. If you’re in this category, you’ll receive an email soon to tell you when the updated files are available to you.

We have started the process to convince Amazon to make an update available to Kindle purchasers. Hopefully they will oblige us and make the update available in the near future.

The current content for all formats is now dated 30-Mar-2016. More information about how we update the book can be found in this blog post. New purchasers can head to ExchangeServerPro.com or Amazon.com depending on your preference…

The following table lists the major areas that were updated for the 10-Feb-2016 update to the second edition. [We have since made a few minor changes and updated the release date to 17-Feb-2016].

Chapter Change
1 Addition of data for Office 365 from Microsoft Q2 FY16 financial results
2 Addition of Q3 2015 SLA figures for Office 365
2 Mention of Microsoft Cloud Networking posters for Cloud Architects
4 New section “Life after Hybrid” covering how to remove on-premises servers when they are no longer required.
7 New conversations view for Office 365 Groups in OWA (Figure 7-14).
7 Pointer included for example of how to use the REST-based API to explore Office 365 Groups data.
7 Clarification about being able to use Send As permission with an Office 365 Group
7 Now possible to set storage quotas for the site used by an Office 365 Group
8 New public folder favorite picker for Outlook Web App
8 New public folder mailbox limit of 1,000 for Exchange Online
10 New section on synchronizing Office 365 Groups to on-premises Active Directory using Azure AD Connect
10 Clarification about how user thumbnails are synchronized in a hybrid environment and within Office 365 workloads
11 Addition of DKIM support in EAC
11 Message tracing in EAC
11 Additional information about the usage of the Get-MailDetailTransportRuleReport cmdlet
12 Updates and corrections to reflect current Office 365 clients
14 Clarification about the use of discovery mailboxes
18 New download video controls for the Office 365 video portal
18 Problem with messages not being delivered when the Clutter folder is removed from a mailbox
Appendix A Notes and corrections about using the write-back feature with directory synchronization and Office 365 Groups

In addition, some incorrect figure numbering in Chapter 14 has been rectified and a number of misspelt words and incorrect instances of formatting have been addressed.

Update: Several minor changes have been made to the book since we released the Feb 10 set of changes. All are pretty inconsequential, but we like to keep on top of things.

These changes keep pace with what’s happening inside Office 365 and increase the value of the book to our readers. At least, we like to think that is the case.

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Exchange Unwashed Digest – January 2016

Posted on January 30, 2016 by Tony Redmond

The New Year brought the normal mix of events that needed to be covered in my Exchange Unwashed Blog on WindowsITPro.com. Here’s what happened during the month.

Microsoft fails to communicate over Exchange Online IMAP4 outage (Jan 28): I wonder has any Microsoft executive ever read the text used to report Office 365 incidents to customers? If they had, I suspect that they’d struggle with the lack of clarity, the strangled text, and the repetition that afflicts so many reports. It is a mystery why a company that spends so much time and energy in outbound communication should let communications lapse when dealing with customers in often stressful situations, which is what tends to happen when functionality doesn’t work for some reason. I’ve heard a lot from Microsoft executives over the years that they are going to do a better job reporting what’s happening with Office 365. It would be nice if that happened sometime soon.

No advanced training available, so what should experienced Exchange administrators do? (Jan 26): We all make personal decisions about how to progress our careers. Sometimes it’s a decision to switch jobs to look for a more challenging or lucrative position. Sometimes it’s a question of figuring out what we really want to do. And sometimes it’s simply a question of what training we need to ensure that we have the right skills for now and in the future. Given the focus on cloud that exists today and the relative lack of training that exists for Exchange, on-premises administrators have some decisions to make. I was asked what to do by a reader. Here’s what I said.

New OneDrive for Business sync client much better but not perfect (Jan 21): Having a way to be able to update files offline in the confidence that any changes will be uploaded to the server as soon as possible is a pretty big requirement for effective working in the cloud era, so it’s a little strange that Microsoft has allowed the OneDrive for Business synchronization client to be so buggy for so long. A new modern, improved, but most importantly reliable sync client is now available for OneDrive for Business. It’s based on the consumer version and the good news is that it works pretty well. That is to say, I haven’t noticed any glitches yet. But it doesn’t handle all sites that need to be synchronized and some work is necessary to get the new code into the hands of users. Perfection hasn’t yet been attained.

Online protection the only way to go (Jan 19): Spam, viruses, phishing attacks, attachments containing malware and other little threats are the kind of thing that anti-malware solutions are designed to detect and block. The problem is that attack surfaces and threat vectors are not static. New ways of penetrating email systems are found all the time and are usually blocked in a matter of hours, but unless you keep up with developments, the chances are that your email servers will be compromised. Online services that disinfect inbound email streams seem like the right way forward because they evolve and protect faster. Great if you can use an online service, not so good if you’re restricted to on-premises software.

Why public folder compliance gets no respect (Jan 14): Compliance was never considered when public folders first appeared in Exchange 4.0 way back in 1996. At least, we knew that the word existed and some famous examples existed where some organizations made their email available to the public. However, email was secret and anything posted to an Exchange server database was hidden away from all but its author and recipients (unless you had an admin who liked poking around in user mailboxes, but that’s another story). Twenty years later, compliance is a sine que non for email systems and public folders have to be compliant. So they are, but only a little bit. Just enough to make people happy and that’s a nice thing.

The woes of Exchange mailbox auditing (Jan 12): Mailbox auditing is one of those features that administrators usually don’t know much about unless a need arises that forces some rapid knowledge acquisition. Like, for instance, when the CEO wakes up and finds that some messages have disappeared. Of course, an executive could never have deleted something in error, so the problem must be with the software or someone who has access to the mailbox. Auditing can help determine what happens, but only when it works. And sometimes mailbox auditing is not so good at reporting the audit items it logs. Inconsistency in auditing is never a good thing, don’t you think?

How small glitches can cause big problems for complex cloud infrastructures (Jan 7): December wasn’t a fun month for Office 365 tenants in Western Europe because two incidents occurred at peak time in the mornings of December 3 and 18. The incidents were not linked except that both depict in pretty empathic terms just how dependent a service like Office 365 is on other moving parts within Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure. This time a faulty network component caused some packet drops within Azure Storage and stopped administrators being able to connect to the Office 365 portal. They could have had a coffee and relaxed, but you know administrators… they worry about these things…

No fear for Microsoft or Google as Amazon launches WorkMail (Jan 5): January 4 brought the news that Amazon had attained general availability status for their WorkMail managed calendaring and email solution. The price point is keen at $4/user per month for a 50 GB mailbox, but the sheer weight of presence that Microsoft and Google exert in the enterprise email market for cloud services means that Amazon has a huge hill to climb here. We’ll see what happens over the next year or so, but I can’t see many on-premises Exchange customers running to embrace Amazon’s solution.

Predicting the world of Exchange in 2016 (Jan 5): Making predictions about technology is a fool’s errand in many ways, especially when you attempt to figure out what a company like Microsoft might do with products like on-premises and cloud Exchange over the next twelve months. But it’s fun too, so here goes with a short list of what I think will happen during 2016. One thing is for sure – technology will change and we’ll all moan about it.

During January, I published two major articles in addition to the regular blog posts. These are:

Office 365 Planner and Office 365 Groups combine to deliver lightweight task management (Jan 27): Microsoft has made Office 365 Planner, its new lightweight planning application for teams, available to Office 365 First Release tenants. There’s lots to like about Office 365 Planner, but some flaws make it less appealing than it might otherwise be. But Microsoft has time to fix some of the shortcomings before Office 365 Planner attains general availability status and, like all cloud software, it’s likely to be updated many times over the years ahead. I’ve been playing with Planner for the last couple of weeks to check out its integration with Office 365 Groups and how tasks, buckets, and plans come together to make planning smoother.

Talking with Javier Soltero, the outsider Microsoft tapped to reinvent Outlook across platforms (Jan 6): Javier Soltero joined Microsoft after Acompli, the mobile email start-up he led, was acquired in November 2014. Since then he has overseen the rebranding of the Acompli apps for iOS and Android as Outlook and then took responsibility for the development of all of the Outlook family. Now a Corporate VP, Javier is acutely aware of the importance of Outlook within the Office portfolio and the need for continued innovation for the mobile apps. He’s launched an extensive review of the features and functionality delivered by the different variants with the mission of making email better.

Nine posts and two articles is a respectable amount of work for one month. I hope you enjoyed it. Stay in touch with me via Twitter @12Knocksinna to make sure that you don’t miss any news.

Posted in Cloud, Email, Exchange, Office 365 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

January 2016 update for “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” (2nd edition)

Posted on January 9, 2016 by Tony Redmond

We have just published an update to the second edition of Office 365 for Exchange Professionals. The new update is dated 9 January 2016 and is now available from ExchangeServerPro.com (PDF and EPUB formats) and Amazon.com (Kindle format).

The following changes are included in the January update.

Chapter Change/Update
1 New information about Outlook mobile apps
1 New Office 365 datacenter map
2 Ramifications of the January 12 2016 restriction on IE9 browsers.
7 New layout for Office 365 document libraries
18 Availability of the new OneDrive for Business sync client
18 New treatment of Delve favorites.
18 Rewritten section about the Delve mobile app
18 Added information about Delve Analytics application
18 Clarification about Clutter options in latest versions of OWA and Outlook 2016

See this page for more information about how to get updates for books you have already purchased.

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Posted in Cloud, Delve, Delve Analytics, Exchange Online, Office 365 | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Exchange Unwashed Digest – December 2015

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Tony Redmond

Another month (and year) has gone by but the posts keep on flowing in my Exchange Unwashed blog on WindowsITPro.com. Here’s what happened during December 2015. My two favorites are the posts that describe the Office 365 Group Connectors and asking the question whether Azure Active Directory is becoming the Achilles Heel for Office 365.

Looking back at the world of Exchange in 2015 (Dec 31): Lots of stuff happened with Exchange, Exchange Online, and Office 365 during 2015. Some was expected, some came as a bit of a shock. Anyone who makes predictions about the future can expect to get some right and some wrong. I think my set of predictions were reasonable. Some were on the mark, some missed, and some got near the bull. I’ll try and do better in 2016.

Probably not such a good idea to disable Managed Availability (Dec 29): Managed Availability consumes server resources such as memory (quite a lot really) and CPU to get its work done. Probes have to execute, the data returned by probes has to be analyzed, and responders sent out to fix problems. You get nothing free in this world, especially in software applications. Everything has to be paid for in code. So wonderful idea #1545 is to save all those system resources by disabling Managed Availability so that Exchange 2013 can work more smoothly and gracefully. Good idea? Hmmm…

Active Directory and Exchange – too tight for a rename (Dec 24): The relationship between Active Directory and Exchange began 15 years ago and is tight and enduring. So tight that renaming domains is impossible once Exchange is installed, simply because Exchange stores so many objects within the directory. That wasn’t always the case, but it is now.

Pretty Delve profiles need better synchronization (Dec 22): I like Delve a lot because it provides a great way to organize information. But I am a lot less impressed at the way that Delve profiles refuse to synchronize with other Office 365 directories. It seems like a curious omission and something that will cause people to have deployment problems when things like phone numbers turn up with different values in different places. Odd…

Why mailbox anchoring matters (Dec 17): Splice the mainbrace and knot some ropes, Exchange is heading for nautical times as mailboxes are now firmly attached to their databases with anchors for all protocols. The news from Tuesday is that Exchange 2013 CU11 and Exchange 2016 CU1 change the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) to follow the same path as other protocols do when connecting to a mailbox. Time was when the process was very simple, but now that Exchange can switch mailboxes between databases quicker than a ferret goes down a hole after a rabbit, you need help to find their current home. EMS used not to care very much but now it has to mind its Ps & Qs and play by the rules. Some will think the change is right and appropriate, others think it’s a solution looking for a problem. Make your own mind up.

IE9 to deliver “diminished experience” for Office 365 users from January 12 (Dec 15): A current refresh of the System Requirements for Office 365 brings the news that IE9 users will face a diminished experience from January 12, 2016. In other words, things won’t be quite as nice as they would be if you cared to use another browser. Such as Edge, because Microsoft’s new Windows 10 browser is the only one that Office 365 apparently likes. But that’s not true either because some things just don’t work in Edge. We live in a complicated world…

Is Azure Active Directory becoming the Achilles Heel of Office 365? (Dec 11): European Office 365 tenants woke up on December 3 to find that some of their users couldn’t access their mailboxes or SharePoint sites. In fact, the problem didn’t exist with the Office 365 infrastructure: a configuration error in Azure Active Directory caused authentication failures for web protocols, which meant that Outlook Web App (OWA) clients and the Office 365 service health dashboard and administration consoles couldn’t authentication and therefore couldn’t connect to Office 365. The same issue wreaked havoc with other Microsoft cloud services that depend on Azure Active Directory, all of which caused a great deal of concern for the five hours that it took for Microsoft to rectify the issue. Although we don’t yet know the precise root cause, it seems pretty clear that Azure Active Directory is a huge dependency for Office 365 and might even be sufficient to be regarded as its Achilles Heel. There’s work for Microsoft to do here as well as to fix the reporting of outages to Office 365 tenants.

Two years on: revisiting a conversation with Exchange development chief Perry Clarke (Dec 8): In December 2013 I sat down with Microsoft’s Perry Clarke to discuss the current state of Exchange and how things might evolve into the future. Two years is actually a long time in terms of technology and it’s interesting to look back to discover how good and bad the predictions made then turned out to be. As it happens, I think much of what we talked about in terms of Exchange and Office 365 remains true. What’s changed is Microsoft’s mobile email client strategy… Read on…

Interesting connectors make cloud data sources available to Office 365 Groups (Dec 3): Connectors provide a way to link different things together. In this case, we have Office 365 Groups on one side and lots of different cloud-based services such as Twitter and Trello on the other. Microsoft has some interesting code in developer preview to show how the link can be made so that information extracted from other services can be imported into Exchange Online and end up as conversations in Office 365 Groups. It’s a terrific idea and one in which I can see a lot of value. Definitely worth your while to investigate.

Microsoft releases Office 365 E5 Plan (Dec 1): We all want to have the best version of something – the best car, the best seat on an airplane, or the best PC we can buy. And now you can get the best-ever Office plan (E5), which is packed full of functionality and ready for deployment. Microsoft has included some very interesting technology. It will be interesting to see how features like Delve Analytics are used in production…

Now on to 2016. Technology keeps on changing and there’s more and more to uncover, describe, contemplate, and analyze. It kind of keeps life interesting…

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Posted in Cloud, Delve, Exchange, Exchange Online, Office 365 Groups, SharePoint Online | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

December update for Office 365 for Exchange Professionals (2nd edition)

Posted on December 16, 2015 by Tony Redmond

We have just published an update to the second edition of Office 365 for Exchange Professionals. The new update is dated 18 December 2015 and is now available from ExchangeServerPro.com (PDF and EPUB formats) and Amazon.com (Kindle format).

[Editorial note: The original December update was 16 Dec 2015, but I found a couple of places where some formatting adjustments were needed, so the wonders of eBook publishing makes everything good again.]

The following are the major areas of change in this update:

Chapter 4: Section covering the Hybrid Configuration Wizard rewritten to reflect new version. Several other changes made to remove or update material. Updates on using modern authentication with Office 365.

Chapter 6: Note on administrator accounts and the need to keep on-premises mailboxes under 45 GB before attempting to move them to Office 365. Update to settings available through the Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration cmdlet.

Chapter 7: New parameters for the Set-UnifiedGroup cmdlet. New section on Connectors for Office 365 Groups. Note on why OWA and mobile clients create fake posts in conversations. Notes about dynamic Office 365 Groups and the need for premium AAD licenses.

Chapter 10: Section added on recovery of soft-deleted hybrid mailboxes. New section on Public Folders and Directory-Based Edge Blocking

Chapter 11: Updated information about how to configure DKIM message signing in Office 365.

Chapter 14: Office 365 Groups can now be included in Exchange Online eDiscovery searches (through EAC). Public folders can be added to compliance searches (Compliance Center). Description of the new UI used to create queries in compliance searches

Chapter 17: Owner access is now supported for mailbox auditing. Changes to reflect the new UI for the Office 365 Activity Report.

Chapter 18: Updates for Clutter and Skype for Business

See this page for more information about how to get updates for books you have already purchased.

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Posted in Cloud, Office 365 | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Taking a NYC helicopter tour

Posted on December 7, 2015 by Tony Redmond

As some of you might know, I’m not really into tourist-style activities. Sure, I do stuff as the need arises (or the mood takes me), but most of the time I avoid activities specifically designed to relieve tourists of their money. On the other hand, the prospect of flying in a restored World War II B-17G bomber is quite another matter.

I have visited New York City many times and mostly enjoyed the experience, but aside from the times when flight paths have taken me the city at 5,000 feet on approach to JFK or LGA airports, I’ve never seen the city from above. Which brings me to last Friday, a superbly clear and crisp December day, when I turned up at HeliNY to take one of their helicopter tours with my wife and 80-year old mother (who was visiting NYC for the first time).

We’d been tempted to try the tour earlier on in the week but hadn’t because of the damp weather and low clouds. Friday couldn’t have been better as the visibility was superb.

A number of companies operate helicopter tours from Pier 6 on the East River, down near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. Even after scanning TripAdvisor and the web sites of the companies, it’s hard to determine which offers the best tour. All seem to offer the same kind of trips: a 12-15 basic tour, a slightly longer one that takes you further up the Hudson River, and some other variations on the theme. Prices vary from company to company and various discounts are available at different times. Apart from the prices quoted on the web, some companies charge additional fees for fuel or heliport charges. In other words, it pays to do a bit of research.

In the end, I went with the company recommended by the concierge of the hotel we were staying at (the Tuscany on East 39th Street – worth considering if you’re looking for a place to stay in NYC) in the full understanding that the advice might have been colored by some kickback. We selected the basic 12-15 minute “New Yorker” tour, priced at $144 (web) with an additional $20/head for heliport/fuel fees. Given the dropping price of oil, it’s curious that these companies still demand a fuel surcharge.

In any case, we turned up at Pier 6 and promptly found that I had made a mistake in the time. We arrived for an 11:30AM flight but the booking was for 1:30PM. No matter as HeliNY quickly assessed how to fit us into their schedule and assigned us to a flight. Given the number of departures (helicopters from different companies take off in a continual stream), it was unsurprising in one respect that they accommodated us so easily. I guess it might have been very different at peak time in the summer.

The busy heliport

The busy heliport

The safety briefing was quick and brusque. Basically, here’s your life jacket and here’s how to put it on and inflate it. Everything else was left to a video playing on a continual loop in the area where we assembled before going out to the aircraft. You can’t take bags on the flight and lockers are provided for storage.

Best seat in the helicopter

Best seat in the helicopter

Out we went and had our photos taken in front of the helicopter before boarding the six-passenger Bell 407GX. My wife was selected for the co-pilot seat and had the best view.

Battery Park and the Wall Street District

Battery Park and the Wall Street District

The tour follows a loop over Governor’s Island, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and up the Hudson River to about half-way up Central Park before turning and flying back again.

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Statue of Liberty with the Freedom Tower (One World Trade Center) behind

Flying over Governor's Island

Flying over Governor’s Island

It’s enough to see the major sights of NYC and I’m not sure how much additional value or pleasure we would have got from a longer flight. The photo opportunities were fantastic because the day was so clear and the only difficulty was caused by some dirt and streaks on the windows. Given that these aircraft are flying on a continuous basis it must be hard to keep the glass as clean as you’d want it to be for the best photos.

Midtown with the Empire State Building in the center

Midtown with the Empire State Building in the center

The flight was very smooth with hardly any bumps, much to the relief of some of the more nervous passengers. The pilot provided some guidance as to the various sights as we passed them, but not enough to qualify as a guided tour. Knowing something about the city so as to be able to pick out major sights and understand the basic geography is definitely an advantage before you fly.

I’m glad that we took the flight. I’ll probably not take another as this kind of trip is definitely in the category of “do it once” given its cost. It’s certainly something to consider if you find yourself in NYC and want to get a different view of the city. Depending on the time of year, you might be able to get a walk-up booking, but normally you need to reserve a day or two in advance to secure the preferred time for a flight.

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Posted in Travel | Tagged , , | 1 Comment