Exchange Online

Microsoft’s no-limit archive mailboxes were supposed to be available throughout Office 365 by now. As previously reported, the feature is available in some Office 365 datacenter regions but not others. Now word comes that Microsoft has paused the roll-out of the feature until sometime in the first quarter of 2017. What’s going on?

Microsoft has announced the demise of RPC over HTTP (“Outlook Anywhere”) connections, which will be blocked for connections to Exchange Online from Outlook desktop clients from October 31, 2017. The year’s notice is intended to allow tenants to upgrade clients to the necessary versions.

Lots of news about moving things around in Office 365 this week — how to move items that have been archived by Exchange Online back to primary mailboxes, how to move tenants between data center regions, and finally, Microsoft plans to help public folders transform themselves into Office 365 Groups.

Some recent changes made by Microsoft in how an Exchange Online mailbox is treated when an Office 365 license is removed from their owner’s account caused chaos for the account provisioning system of a large U.S. university. The changes actually make a lot of sense, but it’s bad when Microsoft makes changes like this without warning anyone.

It’s frustrating when a promised feature isn’t available. Microsoft announced auto-expanding archive mailboxes for Exchange Online in June 2016, but Office 365 customers have reported that their storage quota is limited to 170GB. That’s a lot of space, but hardly the “truly bottomless archive” that Microsoft promised. What’s going on?

Ignite is two weeks gone, but there’s still lots of work to reveal all the sessions that I missed. The OneDrive roadmap was one such session, and it included some interesting figures for OneDrive usage. The Grand Exchange on-premises or cloud debate is also online and I also listened to how the dedicated team at Microsoft has lovingly assembled a profanity list for you to use. Finally, some reflections on transforming distribution groups to Office 365 Groups and what this means for mail contacts.

Find out how to enable Modern Authentication in Exchange Online so that 2FA-enabled Office 365 can use Outlook 2013 or later.

A relaxed week between the bedlam of Ignite and the calmness of the IT/DEV Connections conference in Las Vegas gives me a chance to catch up with some of the less-important but still worthy things I learned about recently. The Exchange team celebrated the 20th anniversary of the product, another of its leaders joined the Microsoft SLT, email from Paul Robichaux caused some problems, and the new Office 365 Admin Center finally reached general availability.

Microsoft has made a big thing about the one-click option in the Exchange Online Administration Center (EAC) to convert a traditional email distribution group to an Office 365 Group. However, the option only works for groups that consist of Exchange Online mailboxes.

There’s lots to hear and learn about with regard to Office 365 at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta this week. All of the product groups are putting their best face forward to impress and amaze customers with what has happened or what will happen inside the service. Here’s some of what I have been hearing.