As described in the Office 365 CON 2014 Virtual Conference sessions, “Stairway to heaven – Best practices for Hybrid Deployments”, it is very important that you validate your on-premises environment before getting started with the hybrid bits.
The reason why this is so important has to do with the many interactions between Office 365 [the cloud] and your on-premises environment. Let’s take a look at what components are at stake here.
Previously, we discussed keeping three things in mind when you're trying to find the most cost-effective option for deploying on-premises Exchange: using just a bunch of disks (JBOD) for your deployment, letting Exchange handle its own availability, and automating as much as you can. We went into detail about JBOD deployments, default configurations and approaches to consider for your deployment.
Exchange 2010 Public Folders allow your administrators the ability to grant specific users the ability to send mail on behalf of a mail-enabled public folder.
Before we look at the Manage Send As issue, let’s take a look at how an Exchange or Security administrator would adjust the mail-enabled Public Folder Send As Permissions.
Understanding the details of user mailbox access is very important to knowing what is going on within an Exchange environment. Being able to proactively audit mailbox access has become critical to the technology world we live in today due to the constant threat of security vulnerabilities. Environmental threats can come from inside or outside of our organizations.
So, what kind of information can you obtain if you are auditing user mailboxes?
Have you ever needed to change your Default Role Assignment Policy in Exchange 2010 through Exchange Management Shell? An example of when you might want to do this is to prevent users from creating organizationally visible distribution lists through Outlook Web App. Recently I realized that there may be a problem with the Set-RoleAssignmentPolicy command that can be used to set your users default role assignment policy. Here is what was experienced.
As an Exchange administrator, backup and recovery of your databases is an important aspect of your environment. There should be defined and streamlined processes in place for your environment as it relates to this topic. Why is this important? You may have an end-user that cannot find that very important message they received a couple of weeks ago or the data may be important for that legal investigation that unexpectedly came up.
Have you encountered an instance where Exchange cannot deliver mail to a destination on the Internet? This is becoming more and more common. You may question why this is happening in the first place and why it’s becoming more common.
So, you have server-side applications that are internal to your environment and require a mechanism in order to send email, but the system itself cannot use a mailbox account due to application limitations. What do you do? In this case you will likely setup relay connectors on your Exchange servers. Before you set these up however, there is one key question to ask.
Will I allow my users to relay internally, externally, or both?
One of the largest challenges many organizations face is how to secure email. Industries such as healthcare and financial have government regulated policy to adhere to such as HIPPA and Sarbanes Oxley. So how do we ensure that our users are not sending out information they shouldn’t be from their desks or mobile devices? Also with the emergence of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) securing company data is become even more important than it has in the past.
ExFolders is a Microsoft tool that can connect to Exchange 2010 public folders through a GUI and is separate from the Exchange Management Console. This tool has replaced the old PFDavAdmin public folder administration tool that was used with older versions of Exchange. Microsoft has added some backward compatibility within ExFolders and has configured it to work with Exchange 2007, but it must be run from an Exchange 2010 server.