Exchange Server EMail Routing – Accepted Domains and Send Connectors

Exchange Server (And Exchange Online) can be a little confusing at times, particularly when we're dealing with mail routing. Internal mail routes are handled almost automatically (especially if you keep all your Exchange servers in the same AD Site, which I recommend), but how do you get it to route email to mail servers *outside* your organization? This post answers all the questions you might have about how to handle Special Mail Routing cases for Exchange.

Continue Reading →

Office 365 Message Encryption Setup

Office 365 Encryption with Azure Information Protection

As I mentioned in an earlier post, email encryption is a sticky thing. In a perfect world, everyone would have Opportunistic TLS enabled and all mail traffic would be automatically encrypted with STARTTLS encryption, which is a fantastic method of ensuring security of messages “in transit”. But some messages need to be encrypted “at rest” due to security policies or regulations.…

Continue Reading →

ADFS or Password Sync: Which one do you use?

I’ve run into a number of people who get confused about this subject when trying to determine how to get their On-Prem accounts and Office 365 synced and working properly. Most often, people are making a comment somewhere that says, “Just use Password sync, it’s just as good and doesn’t require a server,” or something similar.…

Continue Reading →

How Does Autodiscover Work?

Autodiscover is one of the more annoying features of Exchange since Microsoft reworked the way their Email solution worked in Exchange 2007. All versions since have implemented it and Microsoft may eventually require its use in versions following Exchange 2016. So how does Autodiscover work?

Some Background

Prior to Exchange 2007, Outlook clients had to be configured manually.…

Continue Reading →

How Will the Cloud Affect My Career as an IT Professional?

Well, after a year’s hiatus due to some particularly difficult personal trials, I’ve decided to come back to the block and weigh in on one of the big hot-button subjects in the IT industry – How the cloud will affect the job market.

The Push to Cloud

In the modern world, as the Internet has developed and increased in prominence in our lives, the increased infrastructure, security technology, and bandwidth is beginning to allow businesses and individuals to forgo the traditional need to pay big bucks for things like processing power and storage.…

Continue Reading →

Office 365, ADFS, and SQL

He’s an issue I’ve just run into that there doesn’t seem to be a good answer to on the Internet. When you are building a highly available ADFS farm to enable Single Sign On for Office 365, should you use the Windows Integrated Database (WID) that comes with Windows Server or store the ADFS Configuration on a SQL server?…

Continue Reading →

Should I Switch to Office 365? A Frank Examination

The Cloud – An Explanation

As time moves on, technology moves with it, and times they are a’changin’! There have been many drastic changes in the world of IT over the years, but the most recent change, the move toward cloud computing, is probably one of the most drastic and industry redefining change to occur since the release of HTTP in the early 1990s.…

Continue Reading →

Office 365 Hybrid Configuration Failures

This is just a quick post that is meant to help people out who are having some issues with creating a Hybrid Configuration with Office 365 and Exchange 2010 SP3. There are some serious bumps in the road that you can come across when setting this up that may cause you to spend countless hours troubleshooting without any real success.…

Continue Reading →