Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory Blog
I am currently receiving a lot of emails from people complaining about problems with Outlook 2016 in conjunction with Exchange 2010. With Outlook 2016, a crucial function has apparently been removed for many people: Exchange accounts can no longer be configured manually. To be honest, I didn't think that many people had configured their Exchange accounts manually. Outlook ... Read more
In the first part of this series of articles, I had already started to analyze the difference between ReFS and NTFS in connection with Exchange 2016. However, the test environment was not yet optimized, but now it looks a little different. As a reminder: a VM on vSphere 5.5, Windows Server 2012 R2, 8 vCPUs (Xeon E5-2690v3), 32 GB ... Read more
Jetstress is excellent for testing the storage for Exchange. I used it to see how NTFS and ReFS perform in terms of speed. There is no official version of Jetstress for Exchange 2016 yet, but the Jetstress version for Exchange 2013 also works with Exchange 2016. You can download Jetstress here. Read more
The preview was first released on July 22, but today the final version is already available for download: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49161 This means that Exchange 2016 and the new standard client Outlook 2016 are now available in the final version. Exchange 2016 is 1.68 GB in size, and is therefore a little slimmer than the preview with a good 1.69 ... Read more
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
Microsoft has released the Support and Recovery Assistant (SaRA) for download. SaRA is designed to help resolve problems with the connection to Office 365. SaRA asks the user about the problem and then performs a series of tests to diagnose the problem: Here is a list of the checks that are performed: https://community.office365.com/en-us/w/exchange/sara ... Read more
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
I really like the new search function in Outlook 2016. I can now find emails much more quickly; with Outlook 2013, it took noticeably longer to display the results. But whether Outlook 1013 or Outlook 2016, the search can be used much more effectively if you know what you can do. So here's a quick run-through. If ... Read more
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
Office 2016 was released today and with it the new Outlook 2016. Microsft is therefore sticking to its policy of first the clients, then the servers. The preview of Exchange 2016 is already available, the new standard client Outlook is now available in the final version. I have just downloaded Office 2016 and will describe my first impression ... Read more
