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?...More

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....More

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!...More

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....More

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....More

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....More

  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....More

  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....More

If employees leave your company, you should think about preserving the content held in their mailboxes. You might just be glad that you do this if your company becomes liable to legal discovery. Then again, it can be argued that deleting mailboxes immediately solves the problem... until you're forced to restore the mailboxes from backup by the legal department. So here's a discussion about some practical steps to help with the problem of what to do with those pesky mailboxes....More