Competition ends soon, take part now

The competition for the 5th anniversary ends on 5.11.2015, so if you would like to win one of the 5 books, you can still take part in the prize draw: https://www.frankysweb.de/frankysweb-hat-geburtstag-es-gibt-was-zu-gewinnen/ Exchange Reporter 3.0 is also in the starting blocks and will be published soon. There will also be a small prize draw to mark the release. I would like to take this opportunity to ... Read more

Quick and Dirty: Space Reclaimation using PowerCLI and VAAI Storage

Today we have another small script from the Quick and Dirty series. If you use VAAI-compatible storage and provision VMs thinly, you need to perform a space reclaim from time to time to be able to use the deleted VMFS blocks again. In the VMware Knowledge Base the procedure is described using "esxcli", I find the ... Read more

PowerShell script for testing a mail domain

At the weekend there is a PowerShell script that can be used to test a domain for mail problems: The script returns the MX, PTR, SPF and DMARC entries of a domain and checks whether one of the IPs is on a blacklist. It also checks whether port 25 (SMTP) is accessible. The script is simply executed with ... Read more

Outlook 2016: Switch off animations

I find the new Outlook 2016 quite successful so far, but the animations when switching to the different areas (calendar, mail, etc.) do bother me. With Office 2013, however, you can switch off the animations using a registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Graphics DWORD 32Bit: DisableAnimations Value: 1 For Office 2016 it is the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Graphics DWORD 32Bit: ... Read more

Microsoft Office 2016 has been released

As of today, Microsoft Office 2016 is available for purchase or download. This means that Outlook 2016 is now also available as a new client for Exchange Server. The package is also available for download from MSDN: The download is available as an ISO and comprises just under 2.3 GB. Information on the new features can be found on the Office blog: https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/22/thenewoffice/ A ... Read more

My favorites for error analysis of mail problems

In this article, I would like to focus less on the error analysis of mail problems and more on tools that provide a quick overview to determine the problem. First of all, there is the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer: https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com/ This service offered by Microsoft can be used to test ActiveSync, EWS, Autodiscover and Outlook Anywhere as well as SMTP. The website helps ... Read more

Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics

Microsoft has released its new tool "Advanced Threat Analytics" (ATA). Reason enough to try out the new tool. ATA can be downloaded here in a 90-day demo: https://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/evalcenter/mt228154 By the way, there is also a key in the MSDN subscription: I am testing the whole thing in my Hyper-V playground. The ATA VM requires 2 network cards, and ... Read more