On November 1, Microsoft will limit auto-expanding archives to 1.5 TB and bring the era of "bottomless archiving" to an end. The new limit might not affect many Exchange Online tenants, but it's a wake-up call for administrators to check how archiving is used in their tenants. To help the process, we've written a PowerShell script to report the current set of user and shared mailboxes with archives.
It's often helpful when security researchers like Guardicore shed light on flaws in Microsoft Exchange - however, the Autodiscover protocol isn't flawed in the way they describe. Even though the issue is hard to replicate, it shouldn't distract from the work you need to do to protect your organization from the underlying reason why people want your credentials.
Lots of excitement was generated when Guardicore revealed a purported vulnerability with the Exchange Autodiscover service. However, the almost total lack of detail about the configuration used for testing and to generate the reported results makes it impossible for Exchange administrators to check the theory against their own deployment. I don't think a problem exists with Exchange Online, but it's possible that poor DNS practice or flawed third-party clients could cause an issue with on-premises servers. The case remains to be proved.
From November 1, 2021, Microsoft requires Outlook 2013 Service Pack 1 (with fixes) as the minimum client version to connect to Exchange Online. Given all the publicity about attacks against the on-premises version of Exchange earlier this year, it's a wonder why organizations continue to allow people to use outdated client software to connect to Exchange Online. In any case, the drop-dead date is November 1. If you have any old Outlook 2007, Outlook 2010, or Outlook 2013 (before SP1) clients, it's time to start upgrading.
Microsoft plans to retire the now-decrepit and very old EAC on September 1, 2022. The old console has hung on too long, perhaps because Microsoft hasn't progressed the development of its replacement as quickly as they could have since its 2019 debut. Although Microsoft claims that the new EAC reached feature parity with the old some time ago, any examination of the two consoles proves that this is not the case. With that in mind, it seems like Microsoft has some work to do to make everything ready for the big retirement date in 2022.
Microsoft would like Office 365 tenants to use Microsoft 365 retention policies instead of Exchange Online mailbox retention policies. Their stance is reasonable because Microsoft's engineering effort is focused on workload-agnostic retention across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. However, mailbox retention policies continue to offer some advantages that aren't available in the Microsoft 365 equivalent. And they're cheaper too because they don't need Office 365 E3 or E5 licenses.
So, you've completed your migration to Exchange Online. Email flows smoothly into and out of the cloud, and all your mailboxes are now online. What's next for your Exchange Servers, now that you've made the transition? After completion you will have several tasks to perform to remove Exchange Servers from your environment, but there is one important caveat you need to know about; if you run Azure AD Connect then you can't remove every Exchange Server from your environment. You will need to keep at least one around for management purposes. In this article, I'll walk through what you can do to minimise what you keep and need to maintain, and what you can consider planning for in the future. You can also join me at TEC this week, on September 2nd.
Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) and Microsoft Certified Solutions Master (MCSM) Ingo Gegenwarth provides a glimpse into his speaking session at TEC and how to manage ExO at scale with PowerShell.
If allowed by your organization, you can send email to a Teams channel. Teams uses the email to start a new conversation and this is a great way to get a debate going about something which first appears in email. Managing the Teams email integration features isn't hard. You can define domains to accept email from and enable or disable the feature. After that, it's up to team members to use the capability. Hopefully, they'll resist the temptation to remove email addresses from channels, which is something which should be limited to team owners.
From August 17, 2021, Microsoft 365 apps no longer support IE11 (the Teams browser client dropped support last year). IE11 fans need to move to a new browser. Microsoft would prefer if you choose the Edge browser, but anything but IE11 should do a better job in the future.
Microsoft has announced their intention to enable plus addressing across Exchange Online in January 2022. Plus addressing is a good capability, but it might cause some problems for tenants with mail-enabled recipients that have plus addresses in their set of proxy email addresses. Fortunately, we've written some PowerShell code to report those pesky addresses and to remove them if you want to do a big clean up before Microsoft makes the big switch in five months' time.
TEC 2021, The Experts Conference, takes place as a virtual event on September 1-2. In this article, Tony selects his favorite sessions from the event agenda. This isn't to say that the other sessions are no good. Everyone's got their own favorite topics and there are many other TEC 2021 sessions covering other topics which will make others very happy.
