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

I’ve been reading through several forums on the web to looking for resolutions to the blank email problem. Unfortunately there is no all-encompassing, single silver bullet out there that will satisfy everyone.

What originally got me started down this path is that I was reading through a blog forum – “Office for MacHelp.com” – and I came across a blog entitled, “Exchange Mail sent as HTML in Outlook 2011 is received as plain text”, written by Diane Ross. Continue reading Blank Email Messages

There are multiple management roles that are included with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. Many of the roles get assigned to management role groups or management role assignment policies. Together, these management role groups and management role policies control who is permitted to manage and use the various capabilities of Exchange Server. Continue reading List of Built-In Management Roles

Microsoft’s newly launched Office 365 offers powerful, intuitive controls for businesses looking to deploy a cloud-hosted collaboration and messaging solution.  I was able to get my own trial account activated in just 10 minutes, faster than any hosted Exchange providers that I’m aware of.  In addition, the presence of a free 30-day trial means that businesses and individuals can experiment with – or even deploy – various components of the service without having to part with a single cent. Continue reading A Closer Look at Exchange in Microsoft’s Office 365

A few months ago I wrote a post listing fourteen online resources for email admins that included several of my favourite troubleshooting resources. In this post, I want to take you for a closer look at the best one of the lot for testing remote connectivity to Exchange, the Microsoft Exchange Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer. You can access this test suite by clicking the link above, or directly at its URL, https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/. There are several great tests this tool can run through to ensure that you have properly set up remote access to your Exchange infrastructure, and you will want to bookmark this site and refer to it whenever you setup, or change, the external connectivity to Exchange.

Continue reading How to troubleshoot remote connectivity to Exchange

You must have heard about the launch of Microsoft’s Office 365 last week, which promised end-users and businesses alike with a way to attain “anywhere access to email, documents, contacts, and calendars”.  Understandably, the availability of a Microsoft-supported and run Exchange offering may have resulted in some amount of anxiety with some administrators.

To get a better feel of Office 365, I spent some time last weekend figuring out the various packages, and have also signed up for a trial Office 365 account to get a hands-on feel of Microsoft’s latest – and arguably best - cloud-based offering.  Today, I want to share my experiences as to why Office 365 may actually be good thing for Exchange Administrators. Continue reading Why Office 365 is Good for Exchange Administrators

In his article, “Cross Org Availability using Federation Trust and Organization Relationship”, Ben Winzenz discusses some of the issues that can occur when organizations need to share Exchange server availability status with other Exchange organizations. Continue reading Free/Busy Outlook Feature

The recent spike in security breaches resulting from meticulously planned and executed spear phishing attacks may have forced email administrators to start thinking of topics that they may never have considered previously, such as the repercussion of a hacked Exchange Server account, or the reasons why hackers would be interested in attacking your email server.  Indeed, you may have already read Securing Your Microsoft Exchange 2010 Server, and have duly implemented the various hardening measures that I’ve linked to in that article. Continue reading Simple Penetration Testing Strategies for Your Exchange Server

After a painstaking examination of the various pros and cons of signing up for a cloud-based email service and that of an on-premise deployment, your company finally decides on the latter option.  Before jumping into deployment phrase however, there remain a number of important decisions that need to be made first.  Today, I want to highlight some of these areas, and offer some suggestions that I hope will be helpful to administrator tasked with setting up Exchange Server. Continue reading Decisions to Make When Deploying an On-Premise Exchange Server

Installing software is always an activity that administrators must allocate extra time to in order to prepare for the unexpected problems that can occur. And of course there is the time that must be allocated to handle the prerequisites.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Installation of Exchange Server