I’ll be speaking at GWAVACon 2015 and the UC Day

I’m happy to report that I will be speaking in two upcoming events: the two day event GWAVACon 2015 in Berlin (Germany) on the 22nd and 23rd of September and the one-day Unified Communications Day event in Birmingham (UK) on the 28th September. On GWAVACon my sessions will be the English versions of: What’s new in Exchange 2016 Exchange Architecture and Sizing Exchange Server Migrations...

Test it yourselves: Exchange Server 2016 Preview is now available!

Today the Microsoft Exchange Product Team released the public Preview of Exchange Server 2016! See the announcement on the EHLO blog. Now everybody can install, investigate and test the latest iteration of Exchange Server, which is part of the Wave 16 of all Office applications (such as Office 2016, Skype for Business, SharePoint 2016 etc.). Some of these features are already...

Cheat Sheet: Setting Exchange Mailbox User Permissions via PowerShell

One of the things I get asked about quite a lot, is how you can set specific permissions in Exchange Server and Exchange Online. Most cases the Management Console (in 2010) or the Exchange Admin Center (EAC, Exchange 2013 & 2016 and Online) provide most basic permissions like Full Access, Send As and Send On Behalf. However, sometimes an admin...

Checking security protocols and ciphers on your Exchange servers

Microsoft states that Exchange 2010 and 2013 are secure out of the box. With this they mean that every traffic coming in and out of Exchange is one way or another encrypted with security protocols. Whether this is web traffic or specific for SMTP. Even IMAP and POP are enabled with mandatory encryption (although the services are disabled by default). However...

IIS Exploit can reboot your Windows Server; install patch KB3042553 ASAP

This week Microsoft release a patch for Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2 and up that fixed a critical remote execution bug, see MS15-034 and CVE-2015-1635 for more info. Unfortunately the patch was reversed engineered and now an exploit is available. This was detected and described by ISC SANS. They added Denial of Service (DoS) as possible impact, next to Remote Code Execution....

Azure Active Directory Synchronization: Object Matching

This post is the fifth in a series about Azure Active Directory Synchronization and will cover Object Matching. Other posts have covered and will cover: Introduction, Part 1 Introduction, Part 2 Filtering, Part 1 Filtering, Part 2 Alternate Logon ID Object Matching and Joining Object matching or joining is relevant if you have multiple Active Directory (AD) forests you want to...

Azure Active Directory Synchronization: An Introduction, Part 2

This post is the second in a series about Azure Active Directory Synchronization, covering part 2 of an introduction. Previous and follow up posts have covered and will cover: Introduction, Part 1 Filtering, Part 1 Filtering, Part 2 Object Matching Alternate Logon ID As most organizations will not require FIM, I will focus my attention mostly on AADSync. Although DirSync...

Azure Active Directory Synchronization: An Introduction, Part 1

This post is a first in a series about Azure Active Directory Synchronization, covering part 1 of the introduction. Follow up posts will cover: Introduction Part 2 Filtering Part 1 Filtering Part 2 Object Matching Alternate Logon ID   Why you want have synchronization For those who don’t work regularly with Office 365 or other Microsoft cloud services (like Azure, Exchange Online Protection), it...

Using your browser to check Exchange 2013 protocol health

Sometimes you’re not at work and you suspect there is something wrong with your Exchange 2013 servers and you can’t access your environment remotely for whatever reason. Well, in some cases you can check this with just a browser. For each Exchange protocol, there is an URL you can use to check the health. The format would be: https://<External FQDN>/<protocol>/healthcheck.htm If...

A quick look at the Sunrise Calendar app

Now that Microsoft has purchased the Sunrise Calendar app, it’s probably a good idea to take a closer look to that app and see what we are or will be dealing with before everyone panics (again). The Acompli Outlook app for iOS and Android (from now on referenced as just the Outlook app) has received praise regarding it’s functionality and usability,...