Exchange Center

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.

Formerly known as “Cloud App Security”, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) that is part of the Microsoft 365 Defender suite of products. Defender for Cloud Apps (DCA) is built to help IT departments control the data that their organizations have hosted in multiple cloud services including but not limited to Office 365.

On-premises Exchange servers are still a thing, and with future versions of Exchange coming on-premises we can assume they still will be for some time to come and on-premises Exchange monitoring is recommended. If your organization still runs on-premises Exchange servers, then Datacenter Activation Coordination (DAC) is a feature you need to understand.

Securing Exchange Servers

Securing Exchange servers is hard. I mean it can be a giant pain sometimes. There are what, hundreds of millions or maybe billions of lines of code running on your Exchange servers, right? It doesn’t take much for a typo to get through and open a vulnerability that can then be exploited opening the most important and valuable data within your organization to all kinds of bad actors.

The current version of Exchange can, and in most cases should, be installed on Windows Server Core. Windows Server Core is a version of the Windows Server operating system that does not have a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Since “windows” are well ingrained into the administrative habits of most of us Windows Server administrators, it’s reasonable to expect that most Exchange administrators are going to be a bit hesitant to go down this route.

In October of last year Microsoft released a new version of on-premises Exchange server. Here at the ENow's Solution Engine blog, we realized we had a lot we could cover. Normally I focus mostly on writing about Office 365 and Azure features and updates, but I think there is still room in the blog-o-sphere for a post about on-premises software too.

Since Exchange 2019 came out almost 3 months ago, I don’t see a lot of point in doing another blog post that lists “What’s New in 2019.” I’m going to try a slightly different approach here and assume that you’ve had a chance to review the new features in Exchange 2019. If not, 

There are a few words Microsoft likes to use in several different situations. “Federated” is a great example of this. Federated can mean several different things in the Microsoft world, and it can sometimes be hard to tell what sort of “federation” you’re talking about.

“Supported” is another word Microsoft uses to mean different things in different situations, and what I’d like to talk about in this blog post.

This is a blog post I never thought I'd write, and just a short time ago, I couldn’t have imagined it would be something that you'd want to spend 10 minutes reading. Turns out “the cloud” really does keep us on our toes.

Recently I’ve seen some new features in Office Pro Plus, and they are pretty cool. I’m just as surprised as anyone to be interested in PowerPoint and Word updates, but stranger things have happened I guess. In this blog post, I will go into detail on recent Office Pro Plus updates. I’ll talk about some new features I discovered and how they're improving the Office product.

Microsoft recently announced a new DAG copy activation feature that will be available in Exchange 2016 CU2, but before we talk about that, I’d like to do a quick refresher on how database copy activation works currently and will continue to work for Exchange 2013 and 2010.

The whole point of a Database Availability Group (DAG) is to have multiple copies of a database that are ready to activate in the event of a problem with the server hosting the primary copy. The suggested number of copies for a database is 4, but that depends on your backup strategy and high availability requirements. For the purpose of this article, we’ll use an organization that has four databases each with four copies on four different servers located in two sites. For the sake of the illustration, our databases will be names 1 through 4, and the copies of each database will be designated with a -1 through -4. The primary copy of database 1 will be 1-1, the quaternary (that’s the fancy word for fourth) copy of database 4 will be 4-4. Our database layout is going to look like this

Office 365 is a collection of online services that allow organizations to use Exchange, Skype for Business, and SharePoint in the cloud. In the nearly five years that Office 365 has been available most of the organizations using Office 365 have used it just like that; for Exchange or Skype for Business or SharePoint in the cloud. Some organizations are using more than one of those services, but for the most part they are still using them separately.