Exchange Online

Office 365 Licensing Should be Part of Operational Reviews Many businesses are conducting operational reviews because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Previous standards, like the need for people to turn up in an office every day, have gone by the wayside as remote working becomes the new normal. Companies with Office 365 tenants should consider their…

Microsoft Forces More Artificial Intelligence onto Office 365 Tenants On May 13, Microsoft issued Office 365 notification MC212676 to inform tenants that a new Cortana daily briefing email was coming, saying: “The Briefing email from Cortana helps users start their day on track by surfacing information on upcoming meetings and outstanding tasks as well as…

The Graph is the Source for Report Data The usage reports available in the Microsoft 365 admin center give a reasonable picture of user activity within a tenant. However, they don’t deliver the kind of flexibility that a customized report can provide. Given that the data comes from the Microsoft Graph, it seems reasonable to…

A New Start for Exchange PowerShell Last November, Microsoft announced a refresh of the Exchange Online PowerShell module at the Ignite 2019 conference. The big change was the introduction of nine cmdlets built on REST APIs to replace older cmdlets like Get-Mailbox and Get-MailboxStatistics. These cmdlets have been part of Exchange PowerShell since its introduction…

Office 365 tenants often want to journal email from Exchange Online mailboxes. Things become a little more complicated when protected email is involved, but Exchange can decrypt protected messages and create journal reports with attachments containing the original encrypted message and a decrypted copy. That should be enough for journaling systems to process the journal reports and import messages into their repositories.

Publicity for Exchange for a Change I’ve been impressed by the amount of coverage given by mainstream IT reporters to Thursday’s announcement by the Exchange development group that they are rolling out a feature to suppress Reply-All storms. Few of the recent announcements by the Exchange group have received such attention, possibly because Teams hoovers…

Autoforwarding is Badness Allowing users to forward their email outside Exchange Online is bad, especially if they don’t keep a copy of the forwarded messages in their mailbox. Apart from removing email from the controls imposed by data governance policies, it creates a risk that confidential information travels outside the organization, including when an attacker…

Microsoft will remove the Search-Mailbox cmdlet from Exchange Online on July 1, but that doesn’t mean you can’t purge bad messages from user mailboxes. Office 365 content searches and content search actions can hard- or soft-delete messages. Some limitations exist, but not enough to be worried. And we include a PowerShell script to show how to get the job done.

The revelations that Exchange Server has had a vulnerability in the Exchange Control Panel since Exchange 2010 shocked some. Microsoft has patched CVE-2020-0688, but the problem gives on-premises administrators something to think about as they look to the long-term future of their email service. Staying on-premises is an option, but going to the cloud might be more secure.

A Microsoft employee commented that Exchange 2019 is the last on-premises version, something that would bring the era of Exchange to a close after 25 or so years. Perhaps that’s the case, and certainly there’s been a huge transition of email workload to Exchange Online. But is an opinion expressed by a single Microsoft employee enough to tell us what will happen over the next few years?