Exchange Online

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Old Versions of Outlook for Windows Stop Connecting to Exchange Online November 1

Old Versions of Outlook for Windows Stop Connecting to Exchange Online November 1

From November 1, 2021, Microsoft requires Outlook 2013 Service Pack 1 (with fixes) as the minimum client version to connect to Exchange Online. Given all the publicity about attacks against the on-premises version of Exchange earlier this year, it's a wonder why organizations continue to allow people to use outdated client software to connect to Exchange Online. In any case, the drop-dead date is November 1. If you have any old Outlook 2007, Outlook 2010, or Outlook 2013 (before SP1) clients, it's time to start upgrading.

September 20, 2021
Microsoft to Retire Old Exchange Admin Center in Office 365 Next Year 3 Comments

Microsoft to Retire Old Exchange Admin Center in Office 365 Next Year

Microsoft plans to retire the now-decrepit and very old EAC on September 1, 2022. The old console has hung on too long, perhaps because Microsoft hasn't progressed the development of its replacement as quickly as they could have since its 2019 debut. Although Microsoft claims that the new EAC reached feature parity with the old some time ago, any examination of the two consoles proves that this is not the case. With that in mind, it seems like Microsoft has some work to do to make everything ready for the big retirement date in 2022.

September 14, 2021
Why Microsoft’s Workload-Agnostic Retention Strategy Sometimes Comes Up Short for Email 7 Comments

Why Microsoft’s Workload-Agnostic Retention Strategy Sometimes Comes Up Short for Email

Microsoft would like Office 365 tenants to use Microsoft 365 retention policies instead of Exchange Online mailbox retention policies. Their stance is reasonable because Microsoft's engineering effort is focused on workload-agnostic retention across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. However, mailbox retention policies continue to offer some advantages that aren't available in the Microsoft 365 equivalent. And they're cheaper too because they don't need Office 365 E3 or E5 licenses.

September 7, 2021
Why can’t you remove the last Exchange Server? 12 Comments

Why can’t you remove the last Exchange Server?

So, you've completed your migration to Exchange Online. Email flows smoothly into and out of the cloud, and all your mailboxes are now online. What's next for your Exchange Servers, now that you've made the transition? After completion you will have several tasks to perform to remove Exchange Servers from your environment, but there is one important caveat you need to know about; if you run Azure AD Connect then you can't remove every Exchange Server from your environment. You will need to keep at least one around for management purposes. In this article, I'll walk through what you can do to minimise what you keep and need to maintain, and what you can consider planning for in the future. You can also join me at TEC this week, on September 2nd.

August 30, 2021
Manage Exchange Online at Scale

Manage Exchange Online at Scale

Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) and Microsoft Certified Solutions Master (MCSM) Ingo Gegenwarth provides a glimpse into his speaking session at TEC and how to manage ExO at scale with PowerShell.

August 23, 2021
How to Control Sending Email to Teams Channels 39 Comments

How to Control Sending Email to Teams Channels

If allowed by your organization, you can send email to a Teams channel. Teams uses the email to start a new conversation and this is a great way to get a debate going about something which first appears in email. Managing the Teams email integration features isn't hard. You can define domains to accept email from and enable or disable the feature. After that, it's up to team members to use the capability. Hopefully, they'll resist the temptation to remove email addresses from channels, which is something which should be limited to team owners.

August 18, 2021
Microsoft 365 Support for IE11 Stops Today 2 Comments

Microsoft 365 Support for IE11 Stops Today

From August 17, 2021, Microsoft 365 apps no longer support IE11 (the Teams browser client dropped support last year). IE11 fans need to move to a new browser. Microsoft would prefer if you choose the Edge browser, but anything but IE11 should do a better job in the future.

August 17, 2021
Exchange Online to Enable Plus Addressing Everywhere in January 2022 13 Comments

Exchange Online to Enable Plus Addressing Everywhere in January 2022

Microsoft has announced their intention to enable plus addressing across Exchange Online in January 2022. Plus addressing is a good capability, but it might cause some problems for tenants with mail-enabled recipients that have plus addresses in their set of proxy email addresses. Fortunately, we've written some PowerShell code to report those pesky addresses and to remove them if you want to do a big clean up before Microsoft makes the big switch in five months' time.

August 16, 2021
Attend TEC 2021 and Learn from the Very Best

Attend TEC 2021 and Learn from the Very Best

TEC 2021, The Experts Conference, takes place as a virtual event on September 1-2. In this article, Tony selects his favorite sessions from the event agenda. This isn't to say that the other sessions are no good. Everyone's got their own favorite topics and there are many other TEC 2021 sessions covering other topics which will make others very happy.

August 4, 2021
Upgrading PowerShell Scripts with Azure AD Cmdlets to Use Graph API Calls
PowerShell Microsoft Graph

Upgrading PowerShell Scripts with Azure AD Cmdlets to Use Graph API Calls

Microsoft has announced that they won't support the Azure AD Graph after June 30, 2022. This means that the Azure AD PowerShell module won't be supported either. With that in mind, it's probably a good idea to think about how to upgrade scripts to use Graph API calls instead of Azure AD cmdlets. In this article, we take a script created to count members in distribution lists and convert it to use the Graph. As it turns out, the Graph bit is easy. It's all the housekeeping beforehand that takes the time.

July 7, 2021