Exchange Online

Microsoft dodged the opportunity to fire a bullet into their own foot when they pulled back plans to launch “workspaces” in Exchange Online. Announced on Monday and withdrawn on Tuesday, Workspaces are a new form of room mailboxes, the difference being that room mailboxes are used to reserve traditional conference rooms while workspaces seem to…

Microsoft has announced new security capabilities for Exchange Online customers. The company has finally added support for SMTP MTA Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS) to its Exchange Online service that will use Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption to secure emails and prevent man-in-the-middle or downgrade attacks. As a reminder, Microsoft unveiled its plans to launch MTA-STS…

One of the most important infrastructure features Microsoft released with the recent Windows Server 2022 is HTTP/3. Since hitting the ‘General Availability’ milestone this past September, the Windows Server team has partnered with the Microsoft 365 team in starting a phased upgrade of the front-end Exchange Online servers with Windows Server 2022. Microsoft started with…

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that they had planned to retire the top senders and recipient report from Microsoft Defender for Office 365. While I do not know the exact thought process Microsoft went through when making this decision, they clearly didn’t anticipate the widespread backlash from its users. And it sounds like the feedback…

In a surprise development, Microsoft has released the source code for the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) on GitHub. Fans of the non-SQL database engine, which has powered every version of Exchange since the initial 4.0 release twenty-five years ago, now have the chance to peruse the ESE code. Although Microsoft isn’t accepting suggestions to improve…

Surprising Play from Microsoft Microsoft has published an add-on to allow Google Calendar users to create and use Microsoft Teams meetings in the Google Workspace Marketplace. From the age of the comments, it seems like the add-on has been available since late November. However, Microsoft isn’t saying too much about the topic and the only…

Last October, I wrote about One Outlook, Microsoft’s vision for the future of its family of email clients. The basis of the story was a collection of three technologies deemed critical for the long-term development of Outlook: OWA Powered Experiences (OPX), Microsoft synchronization technology, and the augmentation loop. Mary-Jo Foley’s recent story about the Monarch…

Removing Puzzlement Last month I reported my puzzlement about Microsoft’s announcement of priority accounts. I couldn’t figure out what value these accounts brought to the table, especially as they were targeted solely at tenants with more than 10,000 accounts with more than 50 active Exchange Online users. My report was based on details in a…

Time to Make Final Checks It’s natural to take time off during the holiday season to forget about the woes of IT operations. One of the nice things about using a service like Office 365 is that other people take care of running it while you’re away. On the downside, decisions made by the people…

Microsoft released a report in late October to demonstrate how well Microsoft 365 meets the compliance needs of the financial sector subject to U.S. regulations. The level of inaccuracy in the text meant that I didn’t think much of the report. In any case, the report placed great emphasis on two developments. The first was…