Exchange - where email goes to die - The Something Awful Forums

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Exchange - where email goes to die

Briantist: Dec 5, 2003; The Professor does not approve of your post.; Lipstick Apathy

LmaoTheKid posted:

Everything I'm seeing on a few youtube tutorials shows when they go to the site portal and log in, they get redirected to a proxy and then have to log in again.

Maybe they're just showing it wrong.

I guess I should pick up a wildcard cert if the boss approves.

You definitely do not want to be using a self-signed cert for SSO/ADFS. Save yourself the hassle and get a cheap wildcard or at least a SAN cert.

The double login may be a result of the browser not sending the Windows credentials. Internet Explorer might do it by default, but I think Firefox and Chrome can do it if you enable it.

Other than that, how is the hosted exchange with o365? I've been looking into moving mail there for my small business clients, but comments in this thread have been scaring the poo poo out of me. I really want to ditch the on-premises Exchange for these clients. One of them already has ADFS (for the on-premises Dynamics CRM they insisted upon :shudder:

# ¿ Jan 7, 2013 19:39

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 11:40

Briantist: Dec 5, 2003; The Professor does not approve of your post.; Lipstick Apathy

LmaoTheKid posted:

Ok, just a quick question...

So we have multiple email domains like domain2.com, domain3.com, and domain4.com.

Is there anything preventing me from doing a cutover on those MX/SPF records first before I cutover our main domain domain1.com (which is also our internal domain name, I didn't set it up!)? All domains are set up as federated.

This would be great for me because I can bring our smaller companies onto office 365 first, reconfigure their blackberries, iphones, and outlook, and then move over our main company. Will this effect our daily sync that goes on from O365 to my on premises server?

I don't know enough about the O365 process to say whether it would affect its intricacies (especially the daily sync and all that), but in general you shouldn't have a problem cutting over one of the domains, as long as the 365 side is ready to receive e-mails from the outside world. I've done that type of cutover moving between many different types of mail systems, but never exchange to hosted exchange (and never a system where the two were "aware" of each other like this).

# ¿ Jan 29, 2013 18:06

Briantist: Dec 5, 2003; The Professor does not approve of your post.; Lipstick Apathy

LmaoTheKid posted:

They're not really aware of each other besides O365 pulls nonsynced email from our onsite Exchange 2010 server, as far as I know, this isn't bidirectional.

O365 is ready to receive emails for these accounts, I licensed them up and they have some downtime next week so I'm going to do it for them and see how it goes (only 2 users). They both have blackberries which will need to be wiped and then reactivated, which is probably going to be a bigger pain in the rear end than doing the actual cutover, but hey, here we go.

I set the TTL for their MX records to an hour so when the cutover happens it should be pretty quick.

Sounds pretty good. I'm really interested in your progress so thanks for all these updates.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2013 23:33

Briantist: Dec 5, 2003; The Professor does not approve of your post.; Lipstick Apathy

Any of you doing hosted exchange at appriver? Someone I know just moved a client to them recently, and the service is now down indefinitely. Appriver claims it was a bad update and their recommendation was to move to another hosted exchange provider. :psyduck:

# ¿ Mar 27, 2013 16:14

Briantist: Dec 5, 2003; The Professor does not approve of your post.; Lipstick Apathy

Well I spoke to my friend and he said that they're back up now but I'm pretty sure he's still looking for another provider. I don't have a whole lot of detail on what the problem was though.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2013 14:46

Briantist: Dec 5, 2003; The Professor does not approve of your post.; Lipstick Apathy

bull3964 posted:

As an aside, I would consider going straight to Windows 2012 if you can if you are rebuilding anyways. The license isn't all that expensive and Microsoft did away with feature lockout of different editions altogether. There's only Standard and Datacenter now (ignoring Essentials and Foundation) and the only difference between those two is virtualiztion rights. Standard has all features now.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff728623%28v=exchg.141%29.aspx

Just make sure you're on Exchange 2010 SP3. But yeah the licensing for Windows 2012 is pretty nice.

LmaoTheKid, what were the problems you had migrating to o365? Were they more related to your environment or the process in general?

# ¿ May 7, 2013 21:13

Briantist: Dec 5, 2003; The Professor does not approve of your post.; Lipstick Apathy

NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:

This isn't true as of the latest update. I signed up a client to o365 a few months ago and you can easily create shared mailboxes in the admin interface.

Came here to post about the shared mailboxes. Here's a link in case anyone's wondering:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj966275(v=exchg.150).aspx

And in this one they show you the limits:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/exchange-online-storage-and-recipient-limits.aspx

# ¿ Jul 19, 2013 19:47

Briantist: Dec 5, 2003; The Professor does not approve of your post.; Lipstick Apathy

carlcarlson posted:

This is what I did, and sure enough the email showed back up. What I found odd was her OST was >4GB despite there being a 3GB limit on exchange mailboxes. I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this point. I wish Outlook wasn't so terrible at managing email.

There are options to cache shared mailboxes and public folders; that can definitely increase the size of the OST, but in my experience the OST grows way beyond what it should sometimes and I don't know why yet. I just had a user with a ~30 GB OST and his mailbox way smaller than that. The private information store for the whole company is only 50 GB or so.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2013 14:16

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NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:

I'm sure everyone here will disagree with me but if you only have 14 accounts that easiest way for you to do this without screwing up is to simply export all the mailboxes to PST, then log in to outlook pointing to o365, and import the PST. Done. You can do it manually over a weekend. Staging and upgrading to exchange 2010 will take more time and is more complicated.

For the public folders: not available. You can create a "resource mailbox" and share that mailbox's tasks folder out.

I think I would agree this, somewhat. Definitely don't set up a whole 2010 environment for 14 mailboxes. But the cutover migration is pretty easy. The RPC part is RPC over HTTPS (or Outlook Anywhere). If you already have it set up, great! If not, then focus on getting that part working (you can test it with Outlook, or even better the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer).

Once you've got that working, you can initiate the cutover migration in Exchange Online.

One important thing I didn't realize: you cannot choose which accounts/objects get moved over. Don't pre-create the logins and mailboxed. If you did already, delete them. I went and created a temporary admin account then deleted my own and all the others so that the migration could bring them over. It brings over mailboxes, exchange contacts (the kind you create in the directory), and distribution groups.

Public Folders are available in Exchange Online; you don't need to use a Shared Mailbox for that stuff now (though you can and in some instances it may make more sense).

Cutover migration doesn't bring over public folders though. They have a migration path for that, but only from 2007/2010, and it's kind of complex .

You can connect Outlook 2010+ to both Exchange instances at once, and copy public folder items that way, but if you try to drag and drop more than a few thousand items at once it will fail. The organization I'm currently migrating has a single public folder that's too big to do with Outlook (280,000+ items), so I'm looking for a better way. I'm thinking or trying this tool, and you can pay them by setting them as a partner in Exchange Online, so no out-of-pocket possibly? Haven't tried it yet, I'll post my results if I go with this tool.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2013 15:29

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Will Styles posted:

Yes and yes. As mentioned above deploying Exchange 2007/2010 just to migrate to O365 doesn't make a lot of sense with the number of mailboxes you're using. If your public folders are not super huge this method of moving data should be fine as well.

Outlook 2007 should be able to connect to both versions of Exchange server. I don't think the latest version of Outlook 2013 will be able to connect to your 2003 Exchange server unless you've configured and enabled RPC over HTTPS, so if that feature isn't enabled I wouldn't use that version of Outlook. For other users, as long as they're using Outlook 2007 or newer they should be able to connect to O365 (note: for Outlook 2007 there's a service pack level you need to be at so just make sure the client is up to date).

If you do a cutover migration then you won't need to copy user mailbox data over since the migration did that for you. Here's a pretty handy guide for doing an Exchange 2003 to O365 cutover migration.

For public folder data I'd still recommend copying the data from public folders into a .pst file and then dragging them into the O365 public folders as long as the size of the folder is manageable. Other options for migrating a quite a bit more complicated.

This all looks right to me, except that I don't think Outlook 2007 can connect to multiple exchange instances. Outlook 2013 I didn't think was capable of connecting to Exchange 2003 even with RPCoHTTPS but I might be wrong about that. Outlook 2010 would be your best bet, but seriously it can only do a few thousand (like 2000-3000) items in a drag and drop, and it will be slow.

As Will Styles said, the cutover brings over all mailbox data (all email items, all tasks, calendar items, contacts, etc.). It also brings over Distribution Groups and contacts and sets membership int he groups (if you have mail-enabled public folders that are members of a DL you will lose those memberships). You can run the migration seemingly as many times as you want, so you can do an initial sync, then top it up over the next 30 days or so as you finish up other aspects of the migration.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2013 21:32

Briantist: Dec 5, 2003; The Professor does not approve of your post.; Lipstick Apathy

Bob Morales posted:

Any suggestions on hosted spam filtering companies?

We've used MailMax and WebSense mail filtering. But the problem is that they silently drop false positives. That means we don't get a chance to whitelist or allow senders and usually don't know we are missing their messages for days or even weeks and this causes a bunch of problems.

What we'd really like it something with a feature that lets us see every single message blocked by the server and search through them, cases like these keep happening and it's biting us in the rear end when it's an important email.

Office 365 has filtering only for $1 per user per month:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/e...X103763969.aspx

# ¿ Sep 20, 2013 19:25

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Linux Nazi posted:

Being on hosted doesn't make any difference. As long as you manage the DNS zones you can set your MX records to whatever 3rd party you like.

If you wanted to use forefront (or postini or mxlogic or mimecast or whatever), you would point your MX records to there, and then have your 3rd party forward the mail to your hosted exchange. Your hosted exchange isn't going to know any different.

If your hosted provider doesn't have a way to turn off their own anti-spam/security measures then you probably won't like the results. All of a sudden your provider sees all of your email (including false negatives) coming from the same IP (or set of IPs), SPF will fail on all incoming messages too. You stand a good chance of blocking your 3rd party provider.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2013 21:44

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 11:40

Briantist: Dec 5, 2003; The Professor does not approve of your post.; Lipstick Apathy

Linux Nazi posted:

More specifically, whitelist the 3rd party's IPs, or turn off the hosted spam filtering entirely.

I can't think of any provider I've seen that forces you to use their anti-spam, and asking for mailflow control isn't exactly an exotic request.

Agreed, as long as the provider supports it. My point is that is that if you're trying to browbeat a provider who doesn't by threatening to cancel or whatever, it's likely to blow up in your face even if they agree. This goes for any hosted mail, not just exchange.

FWIW, it seems to be possible/supported in Office 365 with an inbound connector (I haven't tried this):
http://community.office365.com/en-us/forums/148/t/167096.aspx

# ¿ Sep 24, 2013 19:44

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Exchange - where email goes to die