Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed Blog

Migration challenges await in City of Boston's transition to Gmail

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:00:00 +0000

Microsoft lost its most recent fight with Google as the City of Boston decided to move from Exchange to Gmail and Google Docs. I see some challenges ahead to migrate Microsoft Office documents to Google Docs but the most interesting question that arises from this situation is why Microsoft failed to win with Office 365. After all, when you are the incumbent, it's hard to lose. Isn't it?

Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed

New email features from Microsoft and Google prove the worth of competition

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:00:00 +0000

Apropos to my recent post about the importance of the competition that has occurred between Google and Microsoft in the evolution of email since the introduction of Gmail in April 2004, two other recent developments by Google seem worthy of positive comment.

Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed

Configuring site mailboxes: a candidate for automation

Thu, 09 May 2013 10:00:00 +0000

Exchange 2013 supports site mailboxes, a new way of document-centric collaboration that bridges the gap between Exchange and SharePoint. To use site mailboxes, you need to deploy SharePoint 2013 alongside Exchange 2013 and use Outlook 2013 as the client. Outlook is clever enough to mask the join marks between the email items stored and managed by Exchange and the documents held in SharePoint, with each site mailbox using a form of shared mailbox in Exchange and a SharePoint site. So good so far and we’re off to a new era of collaborative bliss – or maybe not.

Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed

The curious lack of Exchange 2013 hardware planning tools

Tue, 07 May 2013 10:56:00 +0000

Exchange 2010 has a great mailbox server role calculator available to help plan server configurations. Yet eight months after its release, Microsoft still has not updated its tools to support Exchange 2013. What's going on and why might this be so? Perhaps it's the nature of the changes that have been made to Exchange 2013. What's for sure is that you will need to equip servers with more memory...

Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed

Exchange Connections - Calling all speakers

Thu, 02 May 2013 09:10:00 +0000

Las Vegas in October - conference time again. But with a difference - Exchange Connections is back and it's going to be packed with insightful and practical information about Exchange and its surrounding ecosystem. Opportunities exist for speakers and you can submit session ideas until May 14. It should be great fun!

Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed

Why Exchange 2013 asks you to restart the Information Store after creating a new database

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:00:00 +0000

You might be surprised when the Exchange Administration Center or the Exchange Management Shell prompt to restart the Information Store service after you create a new mailbox database. It's a side effect of the new memory management model used by Exchange 2013's Managed Store.

Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed

MRMAPI, the Little Brother of MFCMAPI

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 08:06:00 +0000

You've probably heard of MFCMAPI, a very useful program in the hands of any administrator who wants to learn just what's stored in an Exchange mailbox. MRMAPI is less well known, but it is also pretty useful for other reasons.

Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed Blog

First tests of Exchange 2013 on Azure point to the future?

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:10:00 +0000

The first test deployments of Exchange 2013 on Windows Azure makes you think about just how far we have come with virtualized Exchange in the last eight years or so. And where we might be heading...

Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed Blog

Microsoft and Google War Over First Ajax Webmail

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:45:00 +0000

Google claims they were the first webmail client based on Ajax but Microsoft's Outlook Web Access was Ajax-based in Exchange 2003. But the competition has moved the state of email far in a short time.

Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed Blog

Blocking OWA access for a user is a problem for Exchange 2013 CU1

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:04:00 +0000

Some people like to track the stream of knowledge base articles as they are released by Microsoft. I do not, possibly because there always seems to be better things to do such as write blog entries. So I am grateful to those of you who pointed out KB2835562, otherwise known as “You can't disable Outlook Web App (OWA) access for users in Office 365 or on-premises Exchange Server”.

Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed Blog

Individual fix for Exchange soft delete problem proves worth of support contracts

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:13:00 +0000

Microsoft now has individual fixes for the soft-delete bug that affects Outlook clients configured in online mode for certain items that contain voicemail or PDF attachments. The fixes are only available to customers who have support contracts, proving once again that support contracts are a necessity for most companies that use Exchange.

Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed Blog

Microsoft announces MEC 2014 will be in Austin

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:37:00 +0000

Building on their original teaser that announced the next iteration of the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) would be held in 2014 rather than a year after last September's event in Orlando, Microsoft has revealed that the location of the next MEC will be Austin, Texas from March 31 to April 2, 2014.

Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed Blog

Managing groups with groups in Exchange 2013 CU1

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:49:00 +0000

One of the small but very welcome changes made in Exchange 2013 CU1 is the reintroduction of support for “groups managing groups”. This feature was supported in previous versions of Exchange but was removed in Exchange 2010. Microsoft published some workarounds to help companies migrating to Exchange 2010 cope with the problem. The net effect was a real mess.

Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed

Installing Exchange 2013 CU1 on DAG member servers - some care and maintenance mode required

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 09:21:00 +0000

Installing Exchange 2013 CU1 is a build-to-build (B2B) upgrade. The process is straightforward. These are the steps that I followed to successfully update a number of multi-role servers running on Windows 2012:

Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed

Exchange 2013 CU1: The software that RTM could have been

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 15:38:00 +0000

The first cumulative update for Exchange 2013 (CU1) has arrived. The new release can be installed using a “build to build” (B2B) upgrade if you already have Exchange 2013 RTM in place. Otherwise you can simply install Exchange 2013 CU1 and use it as your starting point for Exchange 2013. An Active Directory schema update is required to support Exchange 2013 CU1. This is a different version to the schema update released with Exchange 2010 SP3.