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

Gates: Momentous security memo

For computer security experts, January 15 marked the anniversary of a red letter day. It was the 10th anniversary of the day that Microsoft decided to get serious about security.

On that day in 2002, a memo from Bill Gates to Microsoft employees declared the company would be entering a new era, an era of “Trustworthy Computing.”

“In the past,” Gates wrote, “we’ve made our software and services more compelling for users by adding new features and functionality, and by making our platform richly extensible. We’ve done a terrific job at that, but all those great features won’t matter unless customers trust our software.”

“So now,” he continued, “when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security.” Continue reading Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Program Turns 10

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

Now that Exchange 2010 SP2 is available for download, I’m sure many of you (like me) have already downloaded the binary and are testing it in the lab. Of course, the reason we test is because we want to ensure that we don’t create problems in production which is prudent and a best practice for administration. SP2 is a great service pack, and in a vanilla Exchange 2010 organization I seriously doubt you will encounter a single issue with this service pack, but how many of us are running a vanilla org, freshly installed from scratch? For the majority of us who aren’t, here are some pointers about SP2 that should prove useful.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Exchange 2010 SP2 Installation

With 26 days left in calendar year 2011, the Exchange team at Microsoft stayed true to their word, and have delivered an early Christmas present to email admins all over the world. Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 has arrived! We’ve covered some of the things you could expect with the latest service pack to Exchange 2010, both here and here, and offered advice on getting ready for testing the service pack in your environment, and extending the schema as required for this service pack.

Service Pack 2 includes all the update from the release of Exchange 2010 RTM through Rollup 6, so some of you may be asking yourselves if you really need to rush right out and apply SP2. As with any patch or update, testing is required, so a measured and careful pacing is far better than a rush, but there’s a lot of great stuff inside SP2 that should appeal to you. Here’s the list from the TechNet article What’s New in Exchange 2010 SP2. Continue reading Christmas Comes Early – Exchange 2010 SP2 is here!

With the imminent release of Exchange 2010’s Service Pack 2, I thought it would be nice to share some of the more interesting details that may be in store. I was digging around the Microsoft site looking for some documentation on what changes are actually made to the Active Directory schema when you extend it, as some fellow engineers had (unfounded) concerns about extending the schema. In my quest for documentation, I came across some very interesting documentation made available by Microsoft.

The Exchange Server Active Directory Schema Changes Reference is a Microsoft Word document that defines every change made to the Active Directory schema since Exchange 2003. This one hundred and seventy-one page tome goes into specific detail, and will no doubt prove to be immensely useful to developers and AD archaeologists in the future. The reason I am sharing it with you now is because it details even those changes that SP2 will make to the schema (yes, that’s correct, you will need to extend the schema to apply SP2, as mentioned in this article).

Continue reading A Deeper Look into Exchange 2010 SP2

Back in October of 2009 the City of Los Angeles voted unanimously to outsource their email services to Google. While many other organizations have made similar moves, this move made Los Angeles the largest city in the United States to hand over its messaging services to Google, Inc.

For $7.2 million, all 30,000 city employees would be turning to the cloud for email.

This was a huge win for Google because not only did they beat out their rival, Microsoft, but a successful implementation would easily pave the way for future business with local governments. Continue reading For Los Angeles, Not Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining

Have you checked the spam flowing into your organization lately? Microsoft has, and it has reported its findings in its Security Intelligence Report for the first half of this year.

The report, which is based data collected from 600 million computers worldwide, noted that pharmacy spam remains a favorite of junk emailers. An analysis of telemetry data from Microsoft customers who process tens of billions of messages a month using the company’s Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) shows that 28 percent of all spam is non-sexual pharmacy junk. By comparison, sexual pharma spam is at the low end of the spectrum at 3.1 percent.

Behind pharma junk are non-pharmacy product ads (17.2 percent), 419 or “Nigerian” scams (13.2 percent), financial services (8.9 percent) and gambling (6.1 percent). Continue reading What Spam Is in Your Inbox? Microsoft Breaks it Down

Over the years, Microsoft has taken its lumps when it comes to security however as a company, they have taken some pretty impressive strides to make sure that their products are more secure.

However, their security efforts have not been limited to just their products. They have launched several educational campaigns aimed at helping users better secure their computers and networks. Continue reading Email Security Best Practices from Microsoft

There was a time when using PST files were thought to be the solution to file storage problems. Getting emails out of the user’s mailbox and onto a shared repository not only freed up email inboxes from increasing file sizes, but also gave admins a central location in which all emails could be backed up and archived.

Add to these benefits the fact that PST files could be separated so emails related to a project, client, subject, etc could be stored and archived separately, and many would think that this solution was all that an IT department would need to manage their archiving and storage needs.

Of course PST files aren’t a panacea; they have many problems associated with them. Continue reading Two Big Problems With PST Files