At the end of 2014, Microsoft released a cool new feature in Office 365 called Clutter.

Clutter learns from your actions to determine the messages you are likely to ignore. As less important messages arrive, they are automatically moved to the Clutter folder. Clutter does this by leveraging Office Graph’s sophisticated machine learning techniques to determine which messages are Clutter. It gets smarter over time, learning from your prior actions with similar messages, and assessing things like the type of content and even how you are addressed in the message. The Clutter experience is personalized to each individual and reflects an email experience that adapts to your actions and preferences without you having to do anything. The information Clutter learns from each user’s actions are only applied to that user’s experience and are not shared with anyone else.

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Microsoft has recently launch a new tool, Azure AD Connect, to synchronize your on-premises Active Directory with Azure Active Directory.  This new tool will become a one-stop shop for all on-premises and Azure synchronization.  This new tool will replace DirSync and AADSync.  It’s touted as a simple, fast & lightweight solution.

This article will step through the installation of Azure AD Connect.  As you will see below, it is quick and easy.

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Microsoft has recently launch a new tool, Azure AD Connect, to synchronize your on-premises Active Directory with Azure Active Directory.  This new tool will become a one-stop shop for all on-premises and Azure synchronization.  This new tool will replace DirSync and AADSync.  It’s touted as a simple, fast & lightweight solution.

This article will step through the installation of Azure AD Connect.  As you will see below, it is quick and easy.

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Well, I’ve been pretty lazy in my lab environment for the last couple of months.  I’ve finally decided it is time to migrate to a Windows 2012 R2 domain.  Currently, I am running a Windows 2008 R2 domain with Exchange 2010 and Lync 2010.  This article is the first in a couple of articles that are loosely related.  This article will focus on:

  • Creating a new VM in Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V (I know, I know, I need to update that too)
  • Installing a new Windows 2012 R2 server
  • Preparing the server to be a Domain Controller
  • Installing the Active Directory Domain Services role
  • Promoting the server to a Domain Controller.

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In my previous post on Upgrading from Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 on Windows 2012 (Part 1), we covered the prerequisites to installing Exchange 2013 in your Exchange 2010 environment.  In this article we will cover installing Exchange 2013 and configuring it for coexistence.  For simplicity’s sake, I will show screenshots from a single “all-in-one” server installation, since they do not vary much.

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Microsoft announced the release of Exchange 2013 last fall, but this was not very useful to most of us, because there was no support for previous versions of Exchange until new Service Packs and Hotfixes were available. In other words, you could not install Exchange 2013 into your current Exchange organization. In February Microsoft finally released Exchange 2007 SP3 RU10 and Exchange 2010 SP3, to enable coexistence between the platforms. As is typical of Microsoft, they support an N-2 upgrade path. This means you can upgrade to 2013 from two versions back. Exchange 2003 (and prior) version will not allow upgrade to Exchange 2013. In-place upgrades of Exchange 2007 and 2010 versions are not supported either. This is typical and even if it was supported I would never recommend it. It’s nice to start from scratch and deploy a new Exchange environment and apply the things you’ve learned from previous installs.

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Well, I’ve run into multiple issues with this task, so I might as well write a post on how to successfully update your Exchange 2010 Edge server to Service Pack 3.  In my scenario, I’m running a single server with the following services:

  • Exchange 2010 SP1 Edge server
  • Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010
  • Forefront Protection for Exchange on the same server

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Well, now that the Forefront line of products is being discontinued by Microsoft, I thought I would publish a Versions table for the Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010.  Microsoft’s lack of guidance on a replacement for TMG has lead many customers to continue using and installing new TMG 2010 servers, so it’s worthwhile to know the latest versions. 

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