Exchange Server

Microsoft is obviously putting a lot of effort into improving the functionality available in the OWA and Outlook clients, but only for Office 365 users. It’s now got to the point where on-premises customers must be wondering where their next update will arrive. The answer may be “Never”.

As part of the Office 365 data governance framework, tenants can now create retention policies that apply to the mailbox and team site belonging to Office 365 Groups. The process is quite straightforward, but some gotchas exist that you need to think about!

The U.S. patent office granted IBM a patent in January that seems to cover email auto-reply. The only problem is that auto-replies existed a long time before IBM claimed to have invented them. But it’s all good now.

Exchange 2007 reaches end of life on April 11. The importance of this version cannot be overstated, especially in terms of its contribution to Exchange Online and Office 365. But it is time to let go and move to a more modern platform.

Changing from one mobile platform to another can be interesting. I went from Windows 10 Mobile to iOS and so far, no major damage is done. Some interesting differences exist in how Outlook for iOS and Outlook mobile synchronize email to devices. I wanted to learn more, so I poked and found out why the differences exist.

Microsoft introduced the Safe Attachments feature as part of its Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) offering in 2015. ATP is an option for Exchange Online Protection (EOP). It is included in the Office 365 E5 plan and can be licensed as an add-on for $2/user per month for other Office 365 plans. Now Safe Attachments can handle dynamic delivery and the improvement is noticeable.

Microsoft has moved 400 million Outlook.com mailboxes to an Office 365 infrastructure. Outlook.com mailboxes are now powered by Exchange Online and exploit other parts of the infrastructure like EOP. It’s a good change from a engineering and economic perspective.

On January 20, Microsoft unexpectedly updated their original blog post from July announcing the Focused Inbox with information about client updates to support the feature. The update contains some answers to questions why people have not been able to use the much-trumpeted feature.

Microsoft has finally provided an effective method to allow users to recall messages. Outlook’s Recall Message function usually doesn’t work, but OWA’s new Undo Send will stop messages that should never be sent. Five seconds might be too short to realize that you have made a mistake and should stop an outbound message, but ten seconds is about right. And if you are really indecisive, you can take up to 30 seconds to decide whether a message should go.

You might be familiar with the DLP policies available in Exchange or SharePoint. These policies work, but they are workload-specific. Microsoft has embarked on a journey to replace them with Unified DLP policies, which provide protection across multiple Office 365 workloads. The new policies are not yet as functional as those available for Exchange, but they will get there.

Shane Young dives into the different PowerShell for SharePoint Online and Office 365 cmdlets available, how to get them installed, and then the tricky part of connecting.

It’s impossible for an email hygiene service like Exchange Online Protection (EOP) to suppress every possible piece of malware that attempts to penetrate Office 365. Even the broad array of anti-malware techniques will let some small percentage of spam through. Email administrators need to be on guard all the time.

Microsoft is increasing the default mailbox quota for the Office 365 E3 and E5 plans to 100 GB. That’s quite a lot of space to fill, but Microsoft has good reasons for upping the limit.