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

There are many reasons why an organization would make the move to Exchange Server 2010. Features like email archiving, increased discovery capabilities, greater flexibility and the lure of anywhere access make this email solution a promising one.

However, these features are generally ones that are used to sell management on an upgrade or switch. For administrators, the PowerShell is usually a feature that gets them on board. Continue reading PowerShell Basics in Microsoft Exchange 2010

With another round of issues facing users of Microsoft’s Exchange Online service the launch of the Business Professional Online Services replacement, Office 365, is starting to face questions by consumers who are starting to think that Microsoft’s cloud based services may not have much of a silver lining.

Exchange Online is a hosted messaging solution, like Google’s Gmail for businesses, and is based on the same technologies that run the ever popular Exchange server. However as this is a hosted solution, the business does not need to dedicate the same resources towards messaging as they would if they were running their own email servers on-site. Since messages are stored in the cloud, Exchange Online users have “From virtually-anywhere” access to e-mail. Also touted by Microsoft’s website is:

• Improved email security
• Enhanced operations efficiency for a company’s IT staff
• 25-gigabyte mailbox storage size for the standard license

Most importantly, users who have become reliant on Microsoft Outlook and its tools can find the move to hosted email seamless unlike the issues that arise when using Outlook with other hosted email services.

Continue reading Is Microsoft Exchange Online Only Half-Baked?

Microsoft frequently develops and releases some great tools, and does so with little to no fanfare whatsoever. Some of my favourite tools; ones that I keep on a USB key and carry with me everywhere, are free downloads that almost no one has ever heard of. Occasionally I like to share the better ones with readers, and today I want to introduce you to a great tool for those of you getting ready to make the move to Exchange 2010.

The Exchange 2010 Pre-Deployment Analyzer is a free download from Microsoft, and is based in part on the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer. Some of the tests the Pre-Deployment Analyzer runs are the same as those run during the prerequisite checks the Exchange installer runs, but the approach of this tool is different in several notable ways.

Continue reading Getting ready for Exchange? Check out the Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer

The fruits of a partnership announced last year by HP and Microsoft have finally ripened with the announcement of a new series of application appliances aimed at simplifying the deployment of critical business software programs, including Exchange 2010.

The Exchange appliance, the HP E5000 Messaging System, will be available in March starting at $36,000, plus the cost of a software license. It’s designed to meet the design goals of Exchange 2010–including the creation of low-cost large mailboxes that can be scaled quickly to meet growing data demands and are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week–and to reduce the complexity of deploying and optimizing storage for critical business messaging.

With the new appliance, an organization can cash in, with a minimum of pain, on Exchange 2010 benefits, such as boosting user productivity by removing archival functions from the desktop with the elimination of *.pst files, improving performance by adopting new IO patterns that reduce IOPS requirements by 85 percent and decrease storage demands and costs with built-in replication for direct attached storage.

Continue reading New Exchange hardware released by HP-Microsoft

Most companies need an internal SMTP relay at some point. Whether this is for alerting systems, or the scan to email features of their printers, or the “phone home” capabilities many hardware systems offer, the ability for an internal device to send an email to both your internal systems, and out to the world is often needed, and frequently either over, or under engineered. 

Microsoft includes an SMTP service with all versions of the Windows operating system, and the SMTP service is perfect for the job of taking all the non-Exchange based emails in your company and passing them through a single point without having to pass them through your Exchange system unless they are destined for an internal mailbox.

I have seen companies establish dedicated servers, or purchase third party applications, for what is really a very light-weight task that can be added to any available file server or other server with minimal resources. Let’s look at how to add the service, how to configure the service, and some considerations for its use.

Continue reading Got relay? Using the Microsoft SMTP service

Microsoft and VMware are at odds over some “guidance” the virtualizaton software maker has issued about Exchange and disaster recovery.

At issue is a section in a document published by VMware titled “Microsoft Exchange 2010 on VMware Availability and Recovery Options.” which discusses using Database Availability Groups (DAG) clustering for fast recovery following a disaster.

“Database level high availability can be achieved through the use of database availability groups.,” VMware said.

“In the event of a server host failure, a passive copy of the affected mailbox databases is activated,” it continued. “Client access servers establish MAPI connectivity to the newly active database copy and client connections are reestablished.”

“In the background, VMware HA powers-on the failed virtual machine on another server host, restoring the DAG membership and bringing the newly passive database up to date and ready to take over in case of a failure, or to be manually reactivated as the primary active database,” it said.

“While the use of database availability groups on top of hypervisor based clustering is not a formerly supported configuration, internal VMware tests have shown that the two technologies can co-exist and can be a viable solution to ensure maximum recoverability in the case of a host failure.,” it added. Continue reading Microsoft tangles with VMware over Exchange “guidance”

Clarke: Defends forced migration.

More than a few administrators have been annoyed by Microsoft’s decision to omit an in-place upgrade when moving to recent versions of Exchange. Exchange General Manager Perry Clarke recently defended the policy in his Ask Perry blog.

Contrary to the opinion of some critics of the practice, in-place upgrades weren’t ignored because the Exchange team is full of lazy programmers, he joked.

As any Windows user knows, Microsoft designs its software for the latest hardware on the market. Sure, you can run it on legacy iron, but it will be a problematic proposition that will eventually force you to buy new hardware in frustration. That logic appears to be behind the forced migration policy for Exchange.

 ”In major releases we tend to make substantial changes to our architecture to take advantage of exponential changes occurring on the hardware front,” Perry wrote on his blog. “Doing this in a backwards compatible way often leads to substantial compromises that leads to a more expensive and less reliable TCO [Total Cost of Ownership].”

The new software can produce significant cost savings for organizations, but only if it’s run on new hardware, he maintained. Continue reading Microsoft defends Exchange migration policy

Microsoft’s reboot of its efforts in the mobile market with Windows Phone 7 has been greeted with kudos from some quarters, but its integration with Exchange Server leaves something to be desired, at least in the view of one Redmond watcher.

“While I’ve been an enthusiastic supporter of Windows Phone 7 since, well, Microsoft announced the new smart phone platform back in February, it’s time for a reality check,” writes Paul Thurrott at the SuperSite for Windows blog.

“Yes,” he continued, “Windows Phone 7 offers excellent competition to the current industry favorites, Apple iPhone and Google Android. And yes, I do think it will establish itself as one of the key mobile platforms going forward. But Windows Phone 7 is not an acceptable enterprise smart phone solution, at least not in its initial release.”

Continue reading WinPho 7 Exchange security questioned