Exchange Center

Android OS – Changing from basic auth to modern auth connectivity on your Android mobile device. (To learn more about changing on iPhone, click here)

In earlier post on this blog we discussed Microsoft turning off basic authentication and what you must do on an iPhone or Android to change to modern authentication. The last blog about clients is this one, where we discuss how to reconfigure Outlook for Mac to use Modern Authentication.

MacOS comes with a native mail client which is not very different compared to the native mail client in iOS for example. For use with Exchange Online, the Outlook for Mac client is strongly recommended (and most used).

If your Outlook for Mac stops working somewhere in October because of Microsoft turning off basic authentication, it is just a matter of recreating the profile in Outlook. Multi-Factor Authentication is not enforced when Microsoft is moving from basic authentication to modern authentication, but it is strongly recommended to start using multi-factor authentication because it reduces the risk of being hacked dramatically. This is discussed in a future blog (soon).

To ensure that you continue to receive emails on Outlook for Mac, we need perform the following steps:

iOS – Changing from basic auth to modern auth connectivity on your Apple device. (To learn more about changing on Android, click here)

Microsoft will stop support for basic authentication in Office 365 starting October 1, 2022. Uhm, that’s a week from the time of writing. That sounds scary, but Microsoft is already stopping basic authentication for tenants for quite some time, so chances are that it is already turned off for your organization.

As an Exchange admin you could not have missed it – The Microsoft Exchange Conference 2022. I have always been a big fan of the smaller, dedicated Microsoft conferences since it gives you the ability to learn more in-depth about the product and interact with peers and the Microsoft product group. Because of the pandemic all in-person events were cancelled, but it seems in-person events are getting back slowly. Unfortunately, MEC was still a virtual event.

Microsoft Exchange Server has been around for more than 25 years. To promote Exchange and to help Exchange admins Microsoft organized the Microsoft Exchange Conference or MEC for a long time.

Microsoft has released Security Updates (SUs) for Exchange 2013, Exchange 2016 and Exchange 2019 that address security vulnerabilities rated ‘Critical’ (Elevation of Privileges) and ‘Important’ (Information Disclosure).

Yesterday, the Exchange Product made several announcements related to Exchange Server. The overall message throughout these announcements can be interpreted as that Microsoft is publicly declaring to be committed to developing and supporting the Exchange Server product. This is especially of interest to those customers running it as part of their on-premises infrastructure and assuring those that believe the road ahead was a dead end, eventually forcing them to move to Exchange Online, or look for alternatives.

By now you must be aware that Microsoft will turn off basic authentication in Office 365 later this year and that will hit Exchange Online severely. It’s not a big deal when it comes to mail clients or the administrator console (EAC), but automation using PowerShell scripts will be impacted and I recently ran into such an issue.

The value proposition for the services in the EM+S E5 suite does not seem like it has been convincing to customers for a while now. Over the last year or so, Microsoft has been putting a lot of work into the Defender services to improve that value proposition, and to provide a better technical security solution for Microsoft 365 customers.