Exchange Server

You might be familiar with the DLP policies available in Exchange or SharePoint. These policies work, but they are workload-specific. Microsoft has embarked on a journey to replace them with Unified DLP policies, which provide protection across multiple Office 365 workloads. The new policies are not yet as functional as those available for Exchange, but they will get there.

Microsoft has fixed the IIS crash that caused problems for Windows 2016 DAG members in Exchange 2016 CU4. Exchange 2013 also gets its quarterly overhaul of fixes in CU15.

Microsoft set out to rename OWA as Outlook on the web last year. That effort never gained real acceptance in the Exchange community, but in fact the project isn’t to rebrand OWA. Instead, it’s all about preserving and building out the Outlook brand across multiple clients and different experiences. Microsoft is struggling against the weight of history here, so don’t expect any great success anytime soon.

Exchange 2016 CU3 is the first version to support Windows 2016 as a deployment platform. At least, it was. Microsoft has discovered a problem lurking deep in the bowels of Windows 2016 that causes Exchange 2016 CU3 to crash when deployed in a database availability group (DAG). IIS is tagged as the problem child, but it’s really not.

Some recent changes made by Microsoft in how an Exchange Online mailbox is treated when an Office 365 license is removed from their owner’s account caused chaos for the account provisioning system of a large U.S. university. The changes actually make a lot of sense, but it’s bad when Microsoft makes changes like this without warning anyone.

It’s frustrating when a promised feature isn’t available. Microsoft announced auto-expanding archive mailboxes for Exchange Online in June 2016, but Office 365 customers have reported that their storage quota is limited to 170GB. That’s a lot of space, but hardly the “truly bottomless archive” that Microsoft promised. What’s going on?

Ignite is two weeks gone, but there’s still lots of work to reveal all the sessions that I missed. The OneDrive roadmap was one such session, and it included some interesting figures for OneDrive usage. The Grand Exchange on-premises or cloud debate is also online and I also listened to how the dedicated team at Microsoft has lovingly assembled a profanity list for you to use. Finally, some reflections on transforming distribution groups to Office 365 Groups and what this means for mail contacts.

Find out how to enable Modern Authentication in Exchange Online so that 2FA-enabled Office 365 can use Outlook 2013 or later.

Microsoft has made a big thing about the one-click option in the Exchange Online Administration Center (EAC) to convert a traditional email distribution group to an Office 365 Group. However, the option only works for groups that consist of Exchange Online mailboxes.

An exhausting first day at Ignite brought lots of Office 365 news. Surprisingly, the number of Office 365 MAU hasn’t grown, at least not publicly, and confirmation arrived that the Outlook apps now run in the Microsoft Cloud. Lots of focus on using intelligence to repel threats. MyAnalytics arrived, and Exchange 2016 CU3 embraced the Outlook REST API.