I’m not saying that email is taking a bad rap these days, but there are many people out there who believe that email’s days as the reigning king of workplace communication are numbered.

With more companies opening up the doors to social media communication, text messaging and instant messaging, email is no longer the only method used to send electronic messages out to co-workers and customers. Continue reading Making Email Pleasant Again

In Understanding Email Encryption Part 1 I covered not only why encrypting email is important, but also the two different types of email encryption: asymmetrical and symmetrical.

There was another section that briefly mentioned some of the barriers that impede buy-in from management when it comes to an encryption solution. But these were only touched upon.

Unfortunately when it comes to making a pitch for encryption, those who understand the need for it are an easy sell. Those who either don’t understand it or see the need for it often cite one or more of these stigmas that are attached to email encryption as reason to avoid it. Continue reading Understanding Email Encryption (Part 2)

If you have followed TheEmailAdmin for any length of time, you have probably gotten the idea that PST files are not anything we’re fans of. We’ve discussed the adverse impact to performance, alternatives to using PST files, and that with Exchange 2010 and Microsoft’s Large Mailbox Vision, there’s really no reason to have PSTs anymore.

And yet, time and again, as a consultant I find PST files on users’ hard drives, in their home directories, and even in team folders, accessed by large groups of users. Once, I even found a user storing their PST file in their Dropbox folder so that they could access it from multiple machines, but they couldn’t figure out why Outlook threw an error every time they tried to open their PST file.

Continue reading Your Mission: Seek and Destroy all PSTs

Some estimates peg the average amount of time a typical knowledge worker spends on email each business day at three hours. If the typical readers of this blog are anything like me at all, we can probably double that number, and add six or more hours each Saturday and Sunday to that. Continue reading 11 Tips to help you avoid inbox overload

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

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

Autodiscover in Exchange 2010 is one of those critical little black box services that just seems to work, chugging along quietly behind the scenes, making it incredibly easy to connect Outlook, Windows Mobile, and Entourage clients to Exchange. That is, until it doesn’t, and then things just turn ugly very quickly. While older Exchange 2007 implementations could function with an improperly configured Autodiscover, Exchange 2010 organizations depend upon it, especially when clients want to share calendar information externally, and/or integrate with Office Communications Server or Lync Server.

Autodiscover provides information to other Exchange servers within the organization as well, but in this article we are just going to cover the client side of things. To ensure that things go along as smoothly as possible, let’s take a look at what Autodiscover is and what it needs in order to run smoothly. Continue reading Inside Exchange 2010:Exchange Autodiscover

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

Despite the widespread use of instant messaging and the recent rise in the popularity of social networking tools, there is little doubt that the humble email remains the perennial form of digital communication for businesses today.  Its widespread use does imply the presence of the invariable blooper however, or of carelessly written messages that could come back to haunt you.  I call such situations the “Oops!” moment.

I’ve highlighted some of the most common ones below, and it is my hope that it can led to users exercising more caution before clicking on the “Send” button.  And yes, do feel free to chip in with a comment or two about similar mistakes that you may have witnessed, or have committed yourself.

Continue reading 5 Most Common ‘Oops!’ Moments with Email

The prevalence of free and high-quality web-based email services has undoubtedly helped advance the prevalence of emails. Indeed, one of the first stops for a new Internet user these days would be to first pick up an email account or two at one of the free webmail providers.  Given the familiarity of users with web-hosted emails, should Exchange Administrators be at all concerned that Exchange Server would eventually lose its appeal?

Well, my personal opinion is that Exchange Server will continue to retain its relevance for some time yet, especially in the realm business. I’ve highlighted some of the reasons below.

Continue reading 5 Reasons why Microsoft Exchange Server will Remain Relevant