Office 365 & Exchange
Admin's Blog
Office 365, Exchange, Windows Server and more - a spam-free diet of tested tips and solutions.
Posted on Out of office messages in Office 365 (let’s assume Office 365 = Microsoft 365, to make things easier) are an extremely useful thing. Not everyone knows though that this simple automatic reply is more than just an email. In this article, I’ll quickly go over the basics: what out of office message in Office 365 is and how to set it up for your account. For the real treat, I’ll show the easiest way to set up an out of office reply for another user (or all users).
Posted on End of Mainstream Support for Exchange 2016 is planned for October 13, 2020. It means that 5 years after its release, this on-premises server enters the Extended Support period. The end of extended support (or end of life) for Exchange Server 2016 is planned for October 14, 2025. Read on to learn how this affects you, what to do next and what will be the last on-premises Exchange version.
Posted on The support for basic authentication in Microsoft 365 (for connections to Exchange Online) is soon to be discontinued. The complete shutdown has been postponed to the second half of 2021. While it gives organizations more time to prepare, it’s a good idea to get tenants ready before the deadline. Continue reading this article to learn more about basic authentication in Microsoft 365, how to block it on your own and when exactly it will be disabled.
Posted on In one of my previous articles, I’ve shown how to create simple email signatures in Outlook using VBScript. In this article, I will show you how to take your email signatures to a higher level. I will use VBScript to create an HTML email signature for every Outlook (for Windows) installation in your organization. The script will create a professional email signature with data taken from Active Directory. Next, I will explain how to use GPO to distribute the script to every user in your organization.
Posted on As the digital transformation increasingly affects education, IT administrators in schools all over the world have their hands busier than ever. With limited time available to get everything ready for online classes and modern communication between teachers, students and parents, every second matters.
One of the challenges IT administrators have to face when working with schools is managing student and teacher photos that show up across various platforms and communicators, such as Microsoft Teams. Even though this task seems trivial, it might surprise you just how long it takes to set up photos for everyone. With very limited time and resources that are devoted to IT in most schools, it is crucial to make things as easy as possible. I’ll show you the simplest and a completely free way to manage profile pictures for school staff and students in Active Directory and Microsoft 365, to make remote teaching more personal.
Posted on Client Access Rules in Exchange Online are rules that you can use to control which client connections are allowed and not allowed to access your Exchange Online organization. They let you define the conditions based on various properties of a client. These can be, for example, the protocol they use to connect, their IP address or an Active Directory attribute. Thanks to that, you have an option to block (or allow) certain client connections to better protect your Office 365 organization.
Posted on If you are a Microsoft 365 administrator, it’s only a matter of time before you are tasked with restoring deleted emails (or other mailbox items). While you can use eDiscovery to recover deleted items, there is an easier way which lets you restore deleted items straight back to where they originated from. Below, I’ll describe how to recover deleted Microsoft 365 users’ mailbox items with PowerShell and with the Modern Exchange Admin Center.
Posted on Update: This post was updated on July 22, 2020.
When you set up user photos in Microsoft 365 (Office 365), they propagate through the whole Microsoft 365 tenant and apps integrated with Azure AD. This means that they are displayed in Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and more. By default, any user can change their photo to anything they like. This might be a problem for admins who want to keep everything in order. In this article, I’ll show you why and how to block users from changing their photos in Microsoft 365.
Posted on SBS (Small Business Server) 2011 is basically Windows Server 2008 R2 packed together with Exchange 2010 into a single suite. As such, you would expect migrating SBS 2011 to Microsoft 365 (Office 365) to be similar to migrating Exchange 2010 to Office 365. As it turns out, there are some differences that impact the migration process. Read on to learn why it’s a good idea to migrate from SBS 2011 and what options you have for migrating data to Microsoft 365, which is the most popular migration destination.
Posted on Exporting Microsoft 365 mailbox content to PST is usually used for litigation purposes. However, it also works as a workaround for backup, archiving and migration. In a previous article, I’ve shown you how to use this mechanism with the eDiscovery tool. This article demonstrates how to produce similar results using PowerShell and New-ComplianceSearch cmdlet (with some follow-up cmdlets as well).
