Exchange Center

Outlook Web App (OWA) has been a mandatory requirement for every organization. When Exchange 2013 is introduced in an existing environment, it needs to be configured for OWA co-existence with legacy Exchange servers like Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2007. OWA co-existence configuration will provide a single namespace for users accessing OWA, regardless of where their mailbox is located. This document is for the administrator to configure OWA co-existence using single name space for both Exchange 2013 and legacy Exchange servers (Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2007)

In October of last year Microsoft released a new version of on-premises Exchange server. Here at the ENow's Solution Engine blog, we realized we had a lot we could cover. Normally I focus mostly on writing about Office 365 and Azure features and updates, but I think there is still room in the blog-o-sphere for a post about on-premises software too.

Over the past two weeks, Microsoft has made a range of announcements around updates and new releases of Office, Office 365 and Exchange. The fact that Microsoft announces updates is hardly surprising. By now you should be used to the never-ending cascade of new features that are constantly dropped onto the market. A good way to keep track of what’s to come is the Office 365 Roadmap website.

Earlier this week, Tony Redmond wrote about Jeffrey Snover – also known as the godfather of PowerShell – being promoted to Technical Fellow at Microsoft; one of the highest achievable ranks.

Given that Jeffrey is considered to be the founding father of PowerShell, that does not really come as a surprise, as PowerShell has changed the way we work and interact with systems. And this does not only apply to large-scale environments or cloud solutions like Office 365.

Many customers nowadays are running a virtualized Exchange environment, utilizing Database Availability Groups, load balanced Client Access Servers and the works. However, I also see environments where it is up to the Hypervisor of choice on the hosting of virtual machines after a (planned) fail-over. This goes for Exchange servers, but also for redundant infrastructure components like Domain Controllers or Lync Front-End servers for example.

As we are now in Part 7 of this series, let's recap the previous parts.

In Parts 1 and 2, we established our domain design, covered how to provision the Domain Controller for the LAB in Hyper-V and then how to install Windows Server 2012 on the Domain Controller, and we went through the process of installing Active Directory Domain Services on the LAB domain controller using PowerShell.

We last left off in Part 5 which covered the Directory, organization and Exchange preparation-and then went on to install the relevant Exchange servers using the unattended setup feature.

In this, Part 4 of this ENow blog series, I will take you through the provisioning of your Exchange Servers in Hyper-V, summarizing the install of Windows Server 2012 Data Centre (as we have covered the step by step install of Windows 2012 in the first part), and finally installing the prerequisites for Exchange 2013 on Windows Servers 2012.

Times change, people change – and as well all know, technology changes as well. The last part of that sentence could not be more true of Windows, Active Directory and Exchange Server recently.

When it comes to monitoring application administrators often disagree with system administrators on what to monitor and which thresholds to configure. By nature, system administrators focus on system related counters and objects to monitor. They do not care about application related monitoring as those information's are out of scope of their daily work. Vice versa the same is true for application administrators.