Exchange Center

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.

Recently, one of my customers reached out to me stating they were having trouble delivering emails due to SPF failures. While it’s not uncommon for SPF checks to fail (you don’t want to know how many organizations struggle implementing SPF records correctly!), I was a little surprised. After all, the customer had successfully implemented SPF records for quite some time now, and rarely ran into issues with it.

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.

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.

Office 365 is a collection of online services that allow organizations to use Exchange, Skype for Business, and SharePoint in the cloud. In the nearly five years that Office 365 has been available most of the organizations using Office 365 have used it just like that; for Exchange or Skype for Business or SharePoint in the cloud. Some organizations are using more than one of those services, but for the most part they are still using them separately.

Preservation policies were introduced almost a year ago as part of the Compliance Center in Office 365 (which you might also know as the Protection center, or as Security & Compliance Center after the latest rebranding). In a nutshell, they allow you to preserve content across (almost) all Office 365 workloads. They also provide support for true immutability of the data, such that even the company administrators cannot override.

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.

Exchange Online running on Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud platform operates more than 100,000 servers to support some 60 million mailboxes. At least, that’s the best-guess estimate based on information provided by Microsoft at the Exchange Conference 2014, data in their most recent financial reports, and consultant analysis.

After some recent Exchange troubleshooting I decided to do a small write-up on an attribute most people working with Exchange know about, the infamous exchangeLegacyDN.