As dissatisfaction with email continues to mount, and the Zero Inbox movement gains momentum, more and more organizations will be looking at email management solutions to solve their email woes.

Are those hopes misplaced?

Certainly there have been management solutions that have been grabbing a lot of attention lately. For example, SaneBox. Continue reading Email Challenge May Defy Management

Exchange followers found a tantalizing morsel in their inbox last week. “Save the date. MEC is coming. April 2014. See, we told you it wouldn’t be another 10 years!”

Yes, flushed with the success of “The Lost Conference” last year in Orlando, Microsoft is planning a reprise, although a few details have yet to be worked out. For starters, when and where the conference will be held.

Details or no, Microsoft apparently wants to keep the pot of enthusiasm generated from MEC 2012 percolating. The conference drew generally good notices from attendees, like Michael Van Horenbeeck.

“To be honest, MEC 2012 was epic — at least it was to me,” he wrote in a blog recently. “People should have good reasons to be excited about the upcoming MEC.”

News of the announcement spread quickly with the help of social media, as did speculation about all aspects of the event. Continue reading MEC Will Return in 2014

Microsoft knows what Oracle is going through right now with its Java programming language.

At one time, its Windows operating system was a prime target for hackers. It was said a Windows computer that connected to the Internet without virus protection would be infected in seconds.

Java is in the same boat. Oracle has been plugging holes in the software for more than a year in what often seems like an unending game of vulnerability wackamole.

For example, earlier this month, Oracle rolled out a massive update to Java 7 that addressed 50 security threats in the software. This week — after widely publicized attacks on Facebook and Apple through Java vulnerabilities — Oracle rolled out another security update with five additional fixes. Continue reading Exchange 2013 Can Blunt Java Security Threats

A serious problem with the implementation of Exchange ActiveSync in the latest version of Apple’s iOS mobile operating system was addressed this week in an OS update.

Meanwhile, administrators were alerted by Blackberry that a flaw was discovered in its server software that could be exploited to run code on it remotely.

Apple’s update, version 6.1.2 of iOS, fixes a problem that occurs when a device accepts an exception to a recurring calendar event. Continue reading Apple Fixes ActiveSync Bug, Blackberry Stumbles

A technology that’s been actively deployed for just over a year has been rapidly adopted across the globe by organizations wanting to ward off phishing attacks.

DMARC — Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance — is an email specification designed to work with two popular email authentication methods, SPF and DKIM.

The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) authenticates where an email originates by comparing its IP address to a list of valid IP addresses submitted by the domain owner to the Domain Name System. If a message arrives at a mail exchange saying it’s from a certain domain, but the IP address where it came from doesn’t correspond to the addresses in the SPF record for that domain, the message is bounced.

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) insures a message’s origin by attaching a cryptographic digital signature to it that associates a message to a domain. That signature can be reviewed at any point in the message’s path to its destination. Continue reading Anti-Phshing Technology DMARC Touts Achievements

Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday was a fat one this month. All told, Redmond pushed fixes for 57 security flaws, including some in Exchange 2007 and 2010.

The flaws in Exchange were tagged “critical” by Microsoft, a rating reserved for the most severe vulnerabilities.

The update affects Exchange 2010 SP2 and 2007 SP3. Exchange 2010 SP3 and 2003 SP2 are not affected by the update.

Flaws addressed by the security update address are known to the public, Microsoft explained in its security bulletin for Patch Tuesday.

The most severe vulnerability is in Microsoft Exchange Server WebReady Document Viewing. Continue reading Critical Security Patches for Exchange Issued by Microsoft

With Exchange 2013 now available, the training industry has started rolling out products to get administrators up to speed on the new software.

TrainSignal, for example, has just released a set of training videos, Exchange Server 2013 Administration Training, by well-known Exchange expert, J. Peter Bruzzese.

“With Exchange 2013 Administration I’ll take you from deployment through Unified Messaging and High Availability,” Bruzzese said in a statement. “By the end of this course you’ll be able to fully administer an Exchange 2013 organization.”

In the videos, Bruzzese runs down best practices for getting the most out of the new Exchange. Topics covered in the training include:

• Deployment decisions and prerequisites.
• Mailbox configuration.
• Mobile device management.
• Unified messaging integration.
• Disaster recovery and high availability. Continue reading Exchange 2013 Training Gets Into Gear

In their search for an email alternative, detractors of the technology have turned to social media models. According to the research firm Gartner, for many organizations that turn will be down a dead end street.

Over the next two years, Gartner is forecasting that 80 percent of the businesses trying to incorporate social networks into their enterprises will not garner the benefits the networks were created for because of inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology.

That could be bad news for outfits like Atos and the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), two prominent advocates of social substitutions for email.

You may recall that the CEO of Atos, Thierry Breton, shocked the email world a little over a year ago when he vowed to scrap his global company’s internal email system and replace it with a social alternative.

The NNSA, too, is taking beligerant attitude toward email, too. It’s expected to launch a pilot program this spring called One Voice that will incorporate components found in popular social networking sites like Facebook to create what the agency hopes will be a productive alternative to email and one that will scale throughout the federal government.

The traditional IT mindset toward technology can undermine an organization’s social efforts, according to Gartner.

“Businesses need to realize that social initiatives are different from previous technology deployments,” Gartner Vice President Carol Rozwell said in a statement.

She explained that traditional technology rollouts — ERP and CRM, for instance — were ‘pushed’ on workers. They were trained in an app and then told to use it. Continue reading Most Social Email Substitutes will Disappoint

“Your mission, should you decide to accept it…”

For Mission Impossible fans, those words emanating from a reel-to-reel tape were an invitation to adventure. For email administrators, they could be an ominous warning.

Most folks know what happens when the tape delivering that message ends. It self destructs.

What if employees could create emails, messages, photos and multimedia messages that self-destructed? What’s more, what if they could do it on applications that run on their own devices. That would add a new dimension of scary to an enterprise’s Bring Your Own Device policy.

Such programs have begun showing up in online app stores. A program called Snapchat allows the sender of a photo to limit its lifespan to whomever it’s sent to. If the recipient of the picture tries to subvert the time limit by taking a screen grab of the photo, the program will alert the sender of the action.

Snapchat, though, is a toy compared to Wickr. “The Internet is forever,” the promo for the app proclaims. “Your private communications don’t need to be.”

The free Wickr app boasts military-grade encryption of text, picture, audio and video messages. It lets a sender control who can read messages, where they can be read and for how long. It also claims to have the best file shredding capabilities on a mobile phone.

According to Wickr’s developers, the program deletes all metadata from pictures, video and audio files — data such as device info, location and any personal information captured during the creation of a file. Continue reading Mission Impossible Mail Could Threaten BYOD

In a perfect world, calendar items in Exchange would always be accurate. As every Exchange administrator knows, they’re not living in a perfect world.

Flexibility, especially in versions of Exchange prior the 2010 edition, can contribute to the problem with keeping items like meetings squared away. It gives users a lot of  freedom on how they manage meetings on their calendars. That freedom can translate into inconsistencies in the calendars of people who create meetings and those invited to attend them.

Administrators are well aware of the kinds of problems that can occur in calendars in Exchange. The names of people invited to a meeting, for example, mysteriously disappear from a user’s mailbox. Meetings are duplicated on a calendar or the meeting’s organizer disappears. Meeting changes appear on desktop calendars but not on mobile calendars.

A number of tools exist to address calendar problems and make them less tedious and time consuming. Here are some of them. Continue reading These Tools Can Troubleshoot Exchange Calendar Problems