Exchange Center

In part 1 of this series, I discussed how to connect to the Exchange database cache and the importance of transaction logs in database transactions. In this next part, you'll learn how transaction logging and recovery work in Exchange.

The following blog post is a trimmed-down excerpt from the e-book "Exchange Server Troubleshooting Companion."

Exchange database internals might seem to be a complicated topic, but we’re going to briefly discuss database internals from a very practical perspective.

Despite the recent surge in popularity of the cloud, moving to Office 365 isn't a viable option for every modern-day business. For this reason, enterprise-based Exchange will continue to be a mission-critical platform for many companies, and Microsoft has shown no sign of abandoning the platform anytime soon.

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.

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.

The nice people at SurveyMonkey sent me a note about their blog post of 20 April titled “Office 365 vs. Google Apps: Microsoft struggles to compete on mobile” to outline the case that Google has outpaced Microsoft in every (mobile application) category. However, I’m not sure that the arguments they advance are on the mark.

Spoofing has long been one of the biggest issues with email, and with the move to cloud services in the last few years it has become an ever hotter topic. Although a number of features designed to combat spoofing exist, many of which have been discussed on the blog, no perfect solution is available.

Preservation policies were introduced almost a year ago as part of the Compliance Center in Office 365 (which you might also know as the Protection center, or as Security & Compliance Center after the latest rebranding). In a nutshell, they allow you to preserve content across (almost) all Office 365 workloads. They also provide support for true immutability of the data, such that even the company administrators cannot override.

With the release of Exchange Server 2016 it’s time for on-premises customers to consider their upgrade options. Which means that it’s also a good time to review their Exchange storage strategy.

The best way to learn about Exchange Server is to get hands-on with the product. And the best way to get hands-on without risking a production environment is to build your own test lab.