Email is one of the most important communications tools for businesses. When it stops working, people start to get nervous.

While there are many things that a user can do to mess up their email, many of these problems can be resolved with a restart of the software or the computer.

However when the old standby of restarting doesn’t work, it is time for the email administrator to start looking into the issue a bit more deeply.

Here are some of the more common errors found in Outlook 2007 along with some of the ways you can make things right again: Continue reading 5 Common Outlook Errors and How to Fix Them

Google recently hung a ‘going out of business’ sign on its Message Continuity service for users of Microsoft Exchange. Google will continue to provide the service to its users until their contracts run out, but after that, they’re on their own.

Since the service was launched a little over a year ago, “hundreds” of businesses have subscribed to the offering, which uses Google’s cloud to provide email continuity when a Microsoft Exchange environment is interrupted for any reason.

Hundreds of users, though, can’t compete with the “millions” of businesses that have moved their entire email operation to Google Apps, so Searchzilla has decided to scrap its continuity product for Exchange  and concentrate all its resources on its application suite. Continue reading Google deserts Exchange users by killing Message Continuity

Customize the Exchange Management Shell as an Exchange administrator, it’s only a matter of time before you embrace the dark side and come to know the true power of shell. The Exchange Management Shell is the direct interface between you and the underlying PowerShell cmdlets that are used to query, configure, and manage Exchange. Getting comfortable with a command line interface after years of GUI work is a big shift for many admins, but if you start out slow, and work your way through things step by step, you’ll soon find that you are a PowerShell Jedi. Making something your own is the first step towards getting comfortable with it, so in this post, we’ll see how to customize the Exchange Management Shell to make it your own. Continue reading Customize the Exchange Management Shell

In an age where millions of emails are sent every day it is hard to find someone who hasn’t made a mistake when sending a message.

If you are using Microsoft Outlook and Exchange, you can quickly recall a message and delete unread copies, if you are lucky that is and no one has opened the email. If someone has already opened your errant message, then it’s too late.

Companies have become a bit more cognizant that some employees are just a bit too quick to pull the Send trigger on their mail. To compensate, many have put into place a time delay that gives someone the opportunity to think twice about a message that was sent out and stop it before it is delivered. Continue reading Common Mistakes When Sending Emails

Often Exchange administrators will receive escalated help desk tickets from users complaining that Exchange is “slow” and demanding resolution. These sorts of tickets (slow being at best a relative term, and never specific enough about what precisely is considered to be slow) can be extremely challenging to work, since the subjective nature of slowness is often combined with an inability to replicate the problem, or the problem is intermittent. The Exchange admin can take a look at the server(s) for high CPU utilization, low memory conditions, disk and network queue lengths exceeding the norm, and finding nothing, shrug it back off to the desktop support team as a client issue. While it is often a client issue, there are several places between Outlook and a user’s mailbox that can cause intermittent slowness, and are fair to call networking bottlenecks. In a six-part series of articles, we’ll look at how Exchange interacts on the network with various other services to help you identify network issues, and troubleshoot them when they occur. Continue reading Troubleshooting Exchange Networking: Active Directory (Part 2)

I want you all to go grab your favourite marketing person and make them read this post. You know the ones I am talking about. The one that doesn’t understand why they have to take the 3600dpi 8GB PDF that could be blown up to the size of the Empire State Building without looking grainy, and reduce it for sending over email to a customer. The one who came in early last week to send an email blast to a 1000 person customer list that they bought from a guy they know, which resulted in your corporate network being placed on every RDNS blacklist on the planet. The one who doesn’t understand why when he sends an email, the customer doesn’t have it open to read before he lets goes of the mouse. The one whose laptop you secretly want to replace with an Etch-a-Sketch. Continue reading How to Lose Customers and Infuriate People

When starting out, many small businesses set up their email using one of the free accounts available to them. Services like Gmail by Google, Hotmail from Microsoft or Yahoo!’s mail service, provide a working email address with almost no maintenance for a business just getting its feet wet.

However this may not be the best way to make a first impression with your potential customers.

Listed below are seven reasons why you need to ditch the yourcompany@freeemail.com and go with an address that better reflects the image you want your company to have. Continue reading 7 Reasons to Ditch That Free Email Address

BYOD can give administrators a headache.

More and more organizations are finding their employees using personal devices to access company data. Without some measure of control, those workers can create serious security problems for their employers.

As much as some administrators would like to block the use of personal devices in the workplace, that’s unlikely to happen for a number of reasons. For example, many employees are already using their own devices at work, as a recent survey by IDC shows. That poll found that 95 percent of workers use one personally purchased device on the job. Continue reading What should be in your BYOD policy?

You may have read the stories about how Atos Origin, a French IT services company, is looking to make their offices an email-free workplace by the year 2013 to eliminate what they call email pollution.

By turning to collaborative social medial tools, such as the Atos Wiki, employees have already seen a 20% reduction in “email pollution” six months after this initiative went into practice.

Volkswagen has also attempted to cut back on after hour’s emails being sent to and from employees Blackberrys in a similar effort. However, while cutting back on emails like Atos is trying to do may seem trend setting, it hardly seems to be a realistic goal.

Not only because of how many workplaces have become reliant on emails to get work done, but rather how these people use email to get work done.

As we all know, emails are not only used to deliver electronic messages. People in office buildings all over the world have found ways to “hack” their email accounts to do much more than send and receive messages. Continue reading 5 Creative Uses For Email

Recently we wrote about how workers in the United Kingdom felt compelled to check their email at all times, even during holidays like Christmas. Those same kinds of pressures are felt across the Channel, too, in Germany, but some employers over there are relieving those pressures by turning off the email spigot.

The latest employer to do that is auto maker Volkswagen. The Kaiser of Fahrvergnügen cut a deal with its unions recently to shut-off outbound mail from its Blackberry servers to rank-and-file workers from one half hour after close of business to one half hour before office hours begin each day. The agreement doesn’t apply to managers and executives at the company. Continue reading Will shutting off email be the next big employee perk?