Recently, customers who use Outlook Web App (OWA) have been raising the topic of web app accessibility as a top priority. One reason for all the buzz about web application accessibility is due to a standard produced by the W3C called ARIA ( Accessible Rich Internet Applications ). While the standard has been around for a while now, ARIA support in the most commonly used web browsers has recently improved. We want to share our thoughts on this topic and let you know that ARIA support...

We're happy to announce that the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant (ExDeploy) now includes support for configuring hybrid deployments using Exchange 2010 SP2 and Exchange 2007 on-premises organizations. This newly added scenario is for Exchange 2007 organizations interested in maintaining some users on-premises and some users hosted in the cloud by Microsoft Office 365 for enterprises . Like the Exchange 2003 scenario released in March, this Exchange 2007 scenario uses the...

Properly calculating the SPECint 2006 rate value of your planned mailbox role processors is a critical step in the overall planning and design of your Exchange 2010 architecture. The SPECint 2006 rate value is used by the Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator to calculate the adjusted megacycles per processor core and the available per server megacycles of your planned mailbox role servers. This directly correlates to the required number of cores for mailbox, CAS, hub, and...

When we perform network bandwidth planning for Exchange deployments we always ask “what is the size of your OAB?” This is important since if you have a large OAB file it can severely affect the amount of network bandwidth that you require. One of the things that I noticed while creating and validating the Exchange Client Network Bandwidth Calculator was that many organizations did not know much about their OAB size or placement. This was tricky since I needed to...

This post describes an update to the Facebook provider for the Outlook Social Connector and the related policy settings that are available for Administrators. Outlook 2010 includes a feature called the Outlook Social Connector which can show social updates for the people your users email with, directly in Outlook. Earlier this year, the Outlook team made an update to enable continued access to Facebook information as Facebook has moved to a new authentication model called OAuth...

Earlier today the Exchange CXP team released Update Rollup 7 for Exchange Server 2007 SP3 to the Download Center. This update contains a number of customer-reported and internally found issues since the release of SP3 RU6. See KB2655203: Description of Update Rollup 7 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3 for more details. Note: Some of the following KB articles may not be available at the time of publishing this post. We would like to specifically call out the following...

Earlier today the Exchange CXP team released Update Rollup 2 for Exchange Server 2010 SP2 to the Download Center. This update contains a number of customer-reported and internally found issues since the release of SP2 RU1. See KB2661854: Description of Update Rollup 2 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2 for more details. Note: Some of the following KB articles may not be available at the time of publishing this post. We would like to specifically call out the following...

We've made several bug fixes based on community feedback. Please go to our Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator updates tracking page to see what is in this new version! A blog post explaining the calculator is here and or you can download the calculator directly. Comments welcome! Ross Smith IV Principal Program Manager Exchange Customer Experience

In Exchange 2010, we built the Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) integration functionality introduced in Exchange 2007 into a suite of information protection features known as Information Rights Management (IRM). IRM requires that you have an AD RMS server deployed in your on-premises organization. See Understanding Information Rights Management for more details, including functionality offered by the different IRM features and requirements for each. You can...

Moving mailboxes is an important part of managing an email service. Check out the latest Geek Out with Perry blog and video to gain some deep insights on our approach to moving mailboxes with Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) and get Perry’s take on this topic and how it works. This technology is also incredibly important if you want to move mailboxes to the cloud on your terms with a hybrid deployment. Want more details and info? Check out Ross’ past blog on mailbox moves and...