AC Brown’s Cloud Guide – Part 4 – Cloud Service Providers

What are Cloud Service Providers

Moving from a traditional IT infrastructure to a cloud-based or hybrid infrastructure is a complicated undertaking. Cloud systems will reduce the level of control an organization has over their application, and getting the right setup is sometimes difficult. This is where Cloud Service Providers (CSP) come in. I should first point out that CSP is a Microsoft term for organizations that partner with them to provide migration, administration, architectural, security, and development services to their customers.…

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Office 365 Hybrid Agent – An Overview

If you have set up a new Hybrid configuration with Office 365 lately, you will notice a new option in the Hybrid Config Wizard, the Hybrid Agent. Before I go into my personal views on this new option and whether you should use it, let me first explain what this agent does. Note: Before I start, I should state that I have not had an opportunity to test the Hybrid agent’s features yet, so there are still a few questions I have about it.…

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Fixing Outlook Certificate Errors

How to solve problems with Exchange Autodiscover. Certificate Error issues in particular.

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Office 365 Migration – When Do I Need to Use Third Party Tools?

This post may be late in coming, given that most smaller companies have already moved away from on-prem solutions to cloud based services for things like email and file sharing, but I feel like it’s important to stress some of the realities involved in migrating from on-prem to cloud systems. Particularly when migrating to Office 365.…

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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.

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DNS – An Introduction

Though you may not know it, DNS (Or Domain Name System) is probably the most used things on the Internet. In fact, you’re using it right now. For those who don’t know what DNS is or does, it is the system we use to translate Domain Names to IP Addresses.

What is DNS?

DNS was created to allow easy creation, distribution, and update of “Internet Names.”…

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Resolving the Internal and External DNS zone Dilemma with Pinpoint DNS

Here’s an interesting trick that might help you resolve some of your DNS management woes, particularly if you have a different Public and Private DNS zone in your environment. For instance, you have a domain name of whatever.com externally, but use whatever.local internally. When your DNS is set up like that, all attempts to access systems using the whatever.com…

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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.…

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Configure Exchange Autodiscover

As of the release of Outlook 2016, Microsoft has chosen to begin requiring the use of Autodiscover for setting up Outlook clients to communicate with the server. This means that, moving forward, you will need to configure Exchange Autodiscover to get Outlook working properly.

This page contains some information and some links to other posts I’ve written on the subject of Autodiscover.…

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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?…

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