The authentication vs authorization dichotomy is something every IT person should learn. The two concepts are often confused with one another, likely because they both start with “Auth.” Also because, from an end user perspective, the two work together so seamlessly that it’s hard to tell where one starts and the other stops. The difference is important, though.…
There are a lot of different ways to take a career in IT. A lot of the time, people fall into a path in their career without really realizing. I personally fell into a focus on email because I kept getting assigned to work on email systems as a primary assignment. The more I learned about email, the more my employers began to rely on me to work with Exchange server.…
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.…
Shared Mailboxes make it possible to centralize email for a specific group of employees. If you don’t know what a shared mailbox is, think about the “Contact Us” address most web pages have. Or your company’s “Support” mailbox. Exchange implements these very easily through mailbox delegation. Grant users full access to the mailbox in the Admin Portal and the mailbox will appear in Outlook.…
A few quick tips to help admins working with Office 365 make things easier on themselves or save time and money.
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.”…
IT people, for some reason, seem to have an affinity towards designing solutions that use “cool” features, even when those features aren’t really necessary. This tendency sometimes leads to good solutions, but a lot of times it ends up creating solutions that fall short of requirements or leave IT infrastructure with significant short-comings in any number of areas.…
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.…
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.…