Exchange Center

At a recent Exchange MVP panel discussion at Ignite 2017, a question came up that I’ve been asked at previous panels. The spirit of these questions were around the future of Exchange Server On-Premises in relation to Office 365. Will there be another on-premises Exchange Server version? If so, how will its features stack up against Exchange Online? What role will Exchange Administrators play in the coming years? I wanted to share my thoughts and experiences on this topic, as it appears to be one keeping many Exchange Server Administrators and Consultants up at night.

In my previous article in this series, we discussed Exchange “Alternative Architecture” options for medium-to-large businesses. We specifically covered common storage design options and which were ideal to design the best solution for a customer that has decided to remain on-premises and chosen to not follow the Preferred Architecture. To reiterate, I’m a big fan of Office 365 and the Preferred Architecture but I understand many customers will not follow either of these two routes. Therefore, if they deviate from either of these options they should at least follow the recommended guidance that can increase the uptime and better the performance of their solution.

In my first article in this series, I discussed Alternative Architecture options for Small Businesses who choose to stay on-premises. My intent was to ensure that if a business chose to remain on-premises but did not wish to implement Microsoft’s Preferred Architecture for Exchange, they would at least deploy in a way that will reduce complexity and increase uptime of the solution. While the first article focused on options for small businesses, this article will begin to discuss common deployment options seen in medium to large environments. We’ll focus on popular storage technologies found in this space; RAID and advanced storage solutions (SAN/NAS/Hyper converged). As the type of architecture found in this space is so varied, we’ll focus more on sound design principles and best practices.

About a year ago, we published an article on how to manage preservation policies in the new Security and Compliance Center in Office 365 via PowerShell. Over the course of the last year, a great number of new features have been added to the SCC, which is now the central place for data governance in Office 365. With some minor exceptions, all of the functionalities exposed in the SCC are very sensitive and controlling access to them is vital. In this article, we will cover some methods to restrict access to the SCC features. By using PowerShell, of course!

This post is about a recent migration of legacy public folders hosted on Exchange Server 2007 to modern public folders hosted on Exchange Server 2013.

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.

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.