Tuesday, 26 November 2013

Safe and Blocked Senders list in OWA 2013 and Office 365

It is very straightforward for end user to configure their Safe Senders and Blocked Senders list in OWA both for Exchange 2013 and in Exchange Online.

On the main page of OWA, select the gear icon at the top right of the page and select Options:


From the left hand pane of the Options panel, select block or allow:


In this page, users can add the desired sender(s) or domain(s) to the Safe Senders or Blocked Senders list by typing the e-mail address or domain name and selecting the add icon. Once all of the entries are added, scroll down to the bottom of the page and select save.

Tuesday, 19 November 2013

Exchange Legacy API Scanner for Mail-Enabled Apps

Microsoft Exchange Server has a long history of creating APIs that administrators can use to extend and integrate applications with Exchange. Some Exchange programming technologies that are available in versions of Exchange earlier than Exchange 2010 are now obsolete and have been replaced with other technologies. However, it is not always clear which API is used in an application to communicate with Exchange. Under certain circumstances, it might not even be clear which application in a company network interact with Exchange, which makes a transition to Exchange 2010/2013 difficult.

The Exchange Legacy API Scanner project aims to help administrators identify applications which interact with Exchange using API which are deemphasized or obsolete in Exchange 2010.

Currently, the scanner finds these types of dependencies:
  • Organization wide: Exchange store Event sinks on public and private folders as well as globally registered event sinks;
  • Server wide: Event bindings on a locally installed SMTP Server (i.e. ISMTP_OnArrival) and DLL dependencies for ExOleDB, CDO, CDOEx and MAPI.

Friday, 1 November 2013

Last Logon Information in Exchange 2013

If we want to check when a user last logged on to their mailbox in Exchange 2007 and 2010 we have to use the Exchange Management Shell [EMS] and the following cmdlet:
Get-MailboxStatistics <<User>> | Select LastLoggedOnUserAccount, LastLogonTime

Note that the LastLoggedOnUserAccount property indicates the account last used to log on to the mailbox. This could be a user with FullAccess permissions to the mailbox, a delegate or even someone simply checking the user’s Calendar!

With Exchange 2013 part of this information is now available through the Exchange Administration Centre as well. If you:
  • Navigate to Recipients and then Mailboxes;
  • Double-click on the user you want to check this information for;
  • Select the Mailbox Usage tab and in there you will see the Last Logon date and time.

 However, to check who actually logged on, we still need to use the EMS...

Outlook and OWA Versions and Features

 Ever wondered what the different features available on each of these clients are?
  •          Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010
  •          Outlook Web App 2010, 2010 SP1
  •          Outlook Web Access 2007, 2007 SP1


The following Wiki will tell you exactly that: Outlook and Outlook Web Access Versions and Features.

Azure Resource Support for Availability Zone

Over the years, an increasing number of services are consumed in the cloud and as architects one of the key considerations is designing the ...