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There’s a moment many Exchange admins know well: a call from the helpdesk, an upset team in finance, and the first question is “How long has this been going on?” The answer is usually uncomfortable because the problem existed long before anyone noticed.
Exchange Hybrid environments have come of age. What was once considered a transitional, temporary solution on the path to Microsoft 365 just a few years ago has become a permanent configuration for many organizations. It offers flexibility, control, and a fair share of complexity. This very complexity often leads to a common issue: visibility gaps. In simple terms, it means you are unaware of what you don’t see.
Microsoft is changing how hybrid authentication works between on-premises Exchange servers and Exchange Online. The long-standing Shared Service Principal (“Office 365 Exchange Online”, App ID 00000002-0000-0ff1-ce00-000000000000) will no longer be supported. Each tenant must deploy a dedicated Entra enterprise application by October 31, 2025.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (MDO) is Microsoft’s response and feature set when it comes to e-mail security. Maybe some of you remember the previous name Advanced Threat Protection (ATP).
If you haven’t read part 1 and part 2 of this article series yet, we recommend you do. Reading parts 1 and 2 are essential for proceeding part 3.
Moving past parts 1 and 2, I now have all my clients using my new inventory classes I created. I’ve verified with a few clients that they are successfully sending this data to the site server. What’s next? The next piece of this process is to query the database, however this is an optional step. What we'll discuss next is setting up the SSRS report, but I always like to setup a SQL query in the SCCM console first. It’s a quick and easy way to figure out what’s in your database.
Microsoft SCCM (and MDT) are great tools that provide a robust system to lay down OS images onto many clients. Once setup, SCCM admins and technicians can easily image computers all day every day without thinking about how much time and money they’re saving the company. Rather than just telling your boss you’re making progress on something like the Windows XP replacement project you’ve got going on why not give her/him real, hard numbers of how many devices you’ve been knocking out over the past 6 months?
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.
With the work from home going on due to the COVID-19 crisis there’s an increasing demand for tools like Zoom, Skype for Business and Teams. While Zoom is doing a great job for personal use, I prefer Skype for Business or Microsoft Teams for business use.
