Servus

In Office 365, the default password policy requires users to change their password every 90 days.  To some users this is a ridiculously short period of time, but to some administrators this is too long.  You can work it out between your users and your security team what the right time period is for password expiry, but here are some ways of changing this in Office 365. Read more »

There is a nice new feature in Exchange 2010 with Outlook 2007/2010/2013, called automapping.  Autodiscover automatically maps all mailboxes in Outlook to which a user has Full Access Permission.  This can also cause issues.

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This is from a comparison sheet I picked up at Microsoft Exchange Conference this year.

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Most of the projects I work include certificates in some form or fashion.  Often the Certificate Authority is something that someone set up once for a specific purpose and forgot about it.  When I ask, they can’t tell me which server is their CA.  There are a couple of ways to locate the Certificate Authority(ies) in your Active Directory environment.

• Check the members of the Cert Publishers group in AD.  This is a built in group in Active Directory.
   

• Use the certutil utility from a cmd prompt to determine the CA name and the server hosting the service.  This utility is available on newer Windows OSes (I’ve only tried on Windows 2008 R2).  This command is particularly useful because it tells you the CA name as well as the server hosting it.  The Cert Publishers group will only tell you the server hosting the service.  (Thanks to Greig in Sydney for this find.)
  
  

  certutil –config – -ping

   

This past week at the Microsoft Exchange Conference 2012 in Orlando, Microsoft Exchange Product Team, MVPs, MCMs, and community members gathered to discuss the impending release of Exchange 2013.  I say “discuss” because that’s how the conference was structured.  This wasn’t your typical death-by-PowerPoint with a few demos in between.  These were fully interactive sessions.  The first day laid the foundation for the conference by giving us an overview of the new Exchange 2013 and it’s cloud version.  The following days were really deep-dive discussions with product team members, and other experts with early knowledge of the product, on topics generated by the attendees.  Here is what I gathered from those sessions.

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Well, the Microsoft Exchange Conference 2012 is in the books and what a great conference it was.  With all of the Wave 15 products leasing in the next year, there was a lot of information to cover. The primary purpose of this conference was of course to talk about Exchange 2013, but there was quite a bit of information on how the other products integrate.

• Exchange 2013 – Download Server Preview
• Lync 2013 – Download Server Preview
• Office 2013 – Download Preview Software
• SharePoint 2013 – Download Server Preview
• Office 365 – Sign up for a Preview and test all the new products without installing them yourself.

Over the next few weeks I will be creating multiple blogs on various topics that were covered during MEC.  If there is a particular area of interest please let me know.

@ServusDave #IamMEC

When Exchange 2003 came out, it offered Outlook Anywhere, although it was called “RPC/HTTPS”. This was an all or nothing service. In other words, if you set up Outlook Anywhere on the server then every user was able to use it. This poses a data security risk because users could connect to their mailbox from any Outlook client and download a copy of their mailbox, without using VPN or any other security checks on the remote system.

In Exchange 2007 (after SP1) and 2010, Outlook Anywhere permissions and capabilities are more granular.  You can set up Outlook Anywhere within the environment and then limit the ability on a per user basis. 

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Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 includes a number of new improvements. For details on all of the features check out Technet. This post will walk through the steps to upgrade to SP2 from Exchange 2010 SP1.

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There is a bug in the creation process for Dynamic Distribution Groups (DDG) in Exchange 2010.  When you use the Exchange Management Shell to create a DDG and specify the Organizational Unit (OU) where the DDG should reside in Active Directory, you must also specify the –RecipientContainer to search for that DDG.  Otherwise the DDG Recipient Container defaults to the OU where the DDG was created.

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