Category Archives: Exchange Online

BPOS Tools site launched

A new website called BPOS Tools has been launched aimed at providing BPOS partners and customers with tools to improve their Microsoft Online Services experience.
A variety of software is currently available that ranges from file migration, monitoring, user management & maintenance, as well as end user usability functionality.
A couple of the key solutions that are beneficial to almost every full BPOS solution are:
- Password synchronisation
- Turning document libraries into email-enabled document libraries
- Migrating file systems to SharePoint Online
- Exchange Online monitoring (above and beyond the Microsoft Online Services Health Dashboard)

Have a look! More products and SharePoint web parts and templates coming soon.

Emails with missing bodies during migration

An interesting quirk we have seen while migrating customers across to Exchange Online – results in an email with no body being received by the recipient.
The customer situation:
- domain is added and validated to Exchange Online
- Type is set to ‘Authoritative’
- Inbound is not yet enabled
- customer has user accounts set up in Exchange Online, but is not yet using them

If anyone outside the organisation is using Exchange Online as well, they will find that when sending an the said customer – the body of the message disappears.

We find this to occur when we (using Exchange Online) send emails to customers when we are performing staged migrations.
If you’re trying to send an email to the customer, a workaround can be to attach your original email as an item to a new email to the customer – as attachments still come through.

Hopefully if you’ve seen these emails without bodies – it’s not a ghost but a common issue. :-)

New capabilities of Exchange Online 2010

There’s a few links around the net listing some of the features coming in Exchange Online with 2010 but they are few and far betwee, so I thought it would be good to summarise them here.
The key components are:

  • Voicemail with Unified Messaging
  • Integrated archiving
  • Retention policies and legal hold
  • Transport rules
  • Multi-mailbox search
  • Conversation View
  • MailTips
  • Enhanced web-based administration
  • Role-based access control
  • Remote PowerShell
  • Free/busy between cloud & on-premise
  • Cross-premises management
  • Native migration tools

Let’s have a look at these in a bit more detail.

Client Access

  • IMAP
  • Customise ActiveSync security policies
  • Full OWA support in Firefox & Safari
  • IM and presence in OWA
  • OWA side-by-side calendar view
  • Mobile free/busy lookup
  • Mobile reply status
  • Mobile SMS sync
  • Over-the-air update for Outlook mobile

Email & Calendaring

  • Conversation view
  • Ingore/move conversation
  • MailTips
  • Mailk aggregation
  • Shared nickname cache across OWA & mobile
  • Message tracking (user self-service)
  • Free/busy interoperability with on-premise
  • Free/busy & calendar sharing with other organisations (ie. Exchange federation)
  • Publish calendar for anonymous access

Contacts & Directory

  • Dynamic distribution groups
  • Restricted distribution groups
  • Moderated distribution groups
  • Share personal contacts
  • Contact information update (user self-service)

Unified Messaging & Fax

  • Hosted voicemail (integrationon with PABX)
  • Outlook Voice Access
  • ‘Play on phone’ button
  • Missed call notifications
  • Caller ID
  • Company auto-attendant
  • Self-service PIN reset
  • Message waiting indicator
  • Voicemail preview
  • Call answering rules
  • Protected voicemail

Security

  • Sign in using AD credentials
  • Route outbound mail via on-premise for filtering
  • Multi-factor authentication (smartcard, soft certificate)
  • Integration with on-premise RMS (for search, pre-licensing)
  • RMS transport rules
  • Journal decryption of RMS messages
  • Outlook Protection Rules

Administration

  • Remote PowerShell
  • Role Based Access Controls
  • Exchange Management Console
  • Enhanced migration tools
  • No OST re-synchronisation after migration
  • Offboarding tools
  • Support for organisations greater than 30,000 users

Compliance & Archiving

  • Exchange Personal Archive
  • E-Discovery (Multi-mailbox search)
  • Message Retention (Archive & Delete policies)
  • Message Retention (Legal Hold poliy)
  • Compliance auditing
  • Transport rules
  • Custom disclaimers

Service Requests possible / not-possible with BPOS

Standard Change Requests

A Standard Change Request is one that does not require approval. A Service Request can be submitted and will be acted upon without requiring further approval or escalation.

BPOS (Suite)

Change Windows Live ID Associated with BPOS Subscription

Exchange Online

Enable Exchange Online journaling
Enable external (server-side) mail forwarding
Enable POP connectivity
Reconnect disconnected mailbox
Enable multi-tenant BES service
Add/Remove/Reset Blackberry device
Wipe Blackberry device
Add or modify standard BES policy
Add custom footer or disclaimer to outbound emails
Increase conference room mailbox size
Convert universal distribution list (DG) to universal security group (SG)
Grant “Send-As” Permissions
Hide Specific Distribution Lists and/or Contacts
Customize Active Sync Policy (Enforce PIN)
Disable ActiveSync

Forefront:

Deploy x-header to bypass FOPE/BPOS spam quarantine
Add or modify FOPE policy
Grant limited access to FOSE Admin Center

Microsoft Online Platform

Populate companyname attribute
Increase AD sync object limit
Set password to never expire

SharePoint Online

Recover deleted SharePoint site collection

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Non-Standard Change Requests

A Non-Standard Change Request will require some type of escalation and approval. Generally, approval will be based on:

* 500 seats purchased
* OR a late stage Comphot Case
* OR Siebel Stage 60% or higher

If a customer does not meet these criteria, or if the requested change is not in the Non-Standard Change Request list there will be an escalation process (TBD).

BPOS Technical Product Management (TPM) and Service Management meet twice weekly (currently Tuesday and Thursday) to triage all change requests.

BPOS (Suite)

Manual Domain Verification (Without creating CNAMEs) VERY COSTLY – EASE OF USE IS NOT A JUSTIFICATION

Exchange Online

Add or modify custom BES policy
Disable Outlook Web Access (OWA)
Retention Policies
Enable IMAP connectivity

Forefront:

Request FOPE report

SharePoint Online

Offboard SharePoint Online data

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Change Requests Currently Not Allowed

These requests are frequently asked and currently not allowed..

Grant full access to FOSE Admin Center

Request audit log detail

A breakdown of the iPhone 4.0 issue with Exchange Online

Over at the TechNet Forums some discussion has been going on about the inconsistent connectivity for iPhones since OS 4.0 was released – and why it was so important to upgrade to 4.0.1. To quote Daniel Trautman:
“iOS 4.0.0 has a very low timout variable, forget what specifically, but it is available on the Internet. What occurs is that the phone attempts to connect via EAS, but, when the timeout is hit, it starts up a new session without tearing down the previous attempt. This causes what is known as an “open-connection attack” on the servers, which, in basic terms, is that the number of connections per CAS (default of 500) can be taken up by one device. This prevents other devices from connecting as well as ties up server resources waiting for a response on the previous connections. Both the patch available, as well as the 4.0.1 upgrade resolve this issue by increasing the timeout variable (though I haven’t heard whether they’ve improved the connection management, however).
The patch does not change the DeviceUserAgent which Exchange uses to identify the device/OS version, but the upgrade (4.0.1) does. To prevent unpatched devices from connecting we are blocking devices with that OS. Since the DeviceUserAgent is only synced to the CAS (Exchange) upon initial sync, we are applying the block in IIS, which identifies the DeviceUserAgent on EVERY connect, so don’t have to worry about older devices that have upgraded (such as iPhone 3G/3GS).”

July 2010 Service Update – new features

Over at the Microsoft Online Services Team blog they posted what new features and functionality are being released to Microsoft Online Services this month:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/2010/07/12/service-update-july-2010-release-availability-features-announced.aspx

FYI for partners – I am waiting for confirmation on how partners can utilise the BlackBerry functionality. What I’ve been told so far is that you must have a paid license of BPOS in order to access it, which is a bit concerning given that partners utilise the 250 internal use licenses for free.

FYI for Australian customers who purchase via T-Suite (Telstra) – you can find more specific information about the Hosted Blackberry for Microsoft Online Services here: http://www.telstrabusiness.com/business/portal/online/site/productsservices/hostedblackberry.206007?tc=td_tc-tsuite-tbus-0_hostedblackberry

What’s coming in the next version of BPOS

A blog post from the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/2010/07/12/next-generation-bpos.aspx
Some of the exciting features are:

  • Office Web Apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote)
  • Exchange 2010 features (unified messaging, archiving, retention policies, transport rules, multi-mailbox search, free/busy between cloud & on-prem, native migration tools, remote PowerShell, etc.)
  • SharePoint 2010 features (portal site templates, extranet & anonymous access, Office 2010 integration, tagging and social networking, better search, improved features & functionality, Visio & Excel Services, sandboxed solutions, improved workflows, SharePoint Designer 2010 access, better control of FQDNs, etc.)
  • OCS 2010 features (P2P audio/video & file transfer across firewalls, presence with pictures, federation, IM with Windows Live)
  • General updates (single sign-on, identity federation, redesigned admin interface, more administration and access control)

Issues with iPhone4/iOS4 and ActiveSync with Exchange Online

The MS Online Team blog has an article about what you need to do if you are running an iPhone4 or iOS4 and are having difficulties with synchronising to Exchange Online:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/2010/07/06/iphone4-and-devices-running-ios4-require-configuration-patch-to-run-activesync-with-exchange-online.aspx
I am running an iPhone 3GS with iOS4 and not experiencing this issue, however have seen it written about on several forum and blog sites.
Hopefully if you are feeling the pain this will fix it for you.