Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

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

    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…

  • Taking a NYC helicopter tour

    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…

  • Exchange Unwashed Digest – November 2015

    Here is a digest of the posts that appeared on my “Exchange Unwashed” blog on WindowsITPro.com during November 2015. The Thanksgiving holidays distracted some in the U.S., but we kept on trucking along… Building efficient keyword queries for eDiscovery searches in Exchange and SharePoint (Nov 26): These days it’s somewhat strange…

  • How updates are provided for the Office 365 for Exchange Professionals eBook

    One year after we started to write the book, several thousand people have copies of “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals”. We are delighted at the feedback and positive comments that we have received. However, some questions have arisen as to how often we update the text and what right anyone…

  • Fitbit versus Microsoft: Charge versus Band 2

    I’m somewhat of a geek, so the notion of wearing a device that provides data about exercise seemed like a good thing, if only because it would help me convince myself that exercise is something that needs to be fitted into my daily routine. After a small medical mishap at…

  • Microsoft Cloud Roadshows use “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals”

    I’m pleased to let you know that Microsoft has selected the “Office 365 for Professionals (2nd edition)” eBook for distribution to select attendees who attend the Exchange sessions at the Microsoft Cloud Roadshows that begun in Dallas on November 2 and will terminate in Hong Kong on March 10-11. Microsoft…

  • All about the second Exchange Oscars award ceremony

    The first “Exchange Oscars” happened at MEC 2014 as a way for the Microsoft Exchange product group to come together with the Exchange MVPs and gently roast each other while enjoying some food and drink. Of course, in 2015 MEC succumbed to the Ignite conference and no Oscars were awarded…

  • Exchange Unwashed Digest October 2015

    October 2015 started with the launch of Exchange 2016, included a fight about a report issued by a security company to show how user credentials might be exposed by OWA and ended at yet another conference in Las Vegas. Lots of things to discuss… Here’s what happened during the month…

  • Exchange’s underappreciated single-page patching capability

    I really like single page patching, the facility first introduced in Exchange 2010 to enable a database to detect that a database page is corrupt and to retrieve replacement data from another database copy. It’s one of those elegant pieces of functionality that have been introduced as Microsoft improves levels of automated…

  • Office 365 Complete Guide to Hybrid Deployments available now

    Last month, I reported on the launch of the second edition of “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” at the IT/DEV Connections conference in Las Vegas. Subsequently, we made the Kindle edition available on Amazon after the usual struggle with the transformation of Word (2016) documents to EPUB format and hence…