Top 6 Challenges in Supporting a Hybrid Exchange & Office 365 Deployment

A number of our customers are looking at running an on-premise Exchange server alongside an Office 365 service.

Why?  Sometimes it makes sense to put ‘transient’ users into the cloud – a classic scenario being students at a University site, whilst keeping email belonging to permanent staff (e.g. lecturers and administrative staff) on premise.

You may run a hybrid setup to ensure a smooth transition into the cloud for a large site. Big-bang migrations just don’t exist for sites larger than 1,000 seats.

You might also have some key applications that aren’t supported on Office 365.

Running a hybrid environment can, however, be complex.  This article outlines some of the top challenges that have been fed back to us by customers that have embarked on this route so far. I'm sure there are many more- so please share your feedback!

Home-grown Room & Catering Booking for Outlook

The boot was on the other foot recently when a customer, a leading law firm, demonstrated our own software back to us.  Well, to say it was a demo of our software was a bit misleading.  The fact was that our customer had done some extensive tailoring of the Microsoft Exchange calendaring application, AgendaX.

AgendaX gives you a web-based, wall-planner-like view of Outlook calendar, making it easy to see the availability of key staff and resources at a glance.  You simply choose the people or resources whose diaries you want to show, and everyone in the company can view those diaries in a variety of ways:  Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly; etc.  A key benefit of AgendaX is that it makes it easy to view the availability of staff alongside rooms and then make bookings, either in Outlook or AgendaX.

Top 5 PST Elimination Challenges

Tony Redmond thinks PSTs are the 'Work of the Devil' and  we are inclined to agree.  

Apart from being massively out-of-control in most organisations (difficult to locate on users' hard disks and containing unknown evils), they are inherently difficult to grapple with.

Having worked on PST elimination projects for over a decade now, we have encountered quite a few challenges and gotchas.  Here's just a few to bear in mind if you are planning to get rid of your PSTs.

 

1. Users Get Attached to their PSTs

Tips to Avoid Double Bookings

If you use Microsoft Outlook Calendaring to book meetings and resources such as meeting rooms, double bookings can be a common and frustrating occurence. 

Here's 5 top tips to help you avoid it happening.

 

1. Don’t book meetings as All Day Events

‘All day events' are intended for things like anniversaries and birthdays and as such the default setting for this is ‘Show time as Free’ (as you wouldn’t want your aunt's birthday to show your calendar as blocked out for the day). 

You have probably seen all day events such as Public Holidays appear as banners in your Outlook Calendar, and that they don't block out your entire day.

This means that if you send an invitation to an event that will last all day to co-workers - or indeed a room - and mark it as an 'All day event' the default action will be to show the invitee’s calendar time as free. 

This is dangerous as it means the people and resources you’ve booked could still be booked by someone else.

The best solution is to create an appointment with the desired Start and End times, and check that you set Show time as ‘busy’.

A Nice Mug of Tea & a Biscuit

Every IT expert knows the importance of a nice cup of tea and a biscuit.  

Whether you're waiting for an installation to complete, or planning your next upgrade, the combination of a hot steaming brew and the right sort of biscuit to dunk is, well, essential.

Regular contributor to 'A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down' in their regular biscuit reviews, our very own messaging expert Jim Fussell, is also one of the UK's top biscuit dunking experts.

Get Your Own Dunking Kit

For anyone making a contribution* via our Blog, LinkedIn pages, Twitter feed, etc, we are sending the official Essential mug along with a pack of Jim's favourite dunking biscuit and instructions for optimum immersion. 

To claim your mug and biccies, simply send an email to info@essential.co.uk referencing your comment/contribution and providing your preferred delivery details.

*Limited to residents in the UK and Ireland only.

Archiving & Exchange Space Reclamation

By Janet Bagot, Technical Director

It seems that there has been an issue removing deleted messages and reclaiming Exchange database space if the message to be deleted was currently still open by something or someone else (e.g. when being content indexed).  This could be preventing you from reclaiming space after archiving.

Good news:  A fix included in SP2 RU1 corrects the problem by adding a cleanup retry mechanism. Now, if cleanup fails because something still has an open reference, the store will periodically retry until it succeeds.

The article from the Exchange Team Blog suggests you should contact your 3rd-party Exchange archive supplier to find out exactly how much space you would expect to save, with the comment that the database overheads for storing small items (stubs) is the same as for larger items.

Well the other good news is, you should still see great storage savings, especially if a high percentage of your emails have attachments cc'd to multiple recipients.  

Other key things that will keep your primary Exchange stores to the optimum size are:

- If your archive has the ability to policy-delete shortcuts (stubs) - e.g. stubs over 1 year old.

- If your archive allows you the option to create stubs in Text or HTML format (rather than RTF) as Text and HTML gets compressed by Exchange.

- The ability to leave a full length stub (you might as well have this in order to get the most out of Exchange search, given that a smaller stub will use the same database overheads).

- Also the fact that users will feel more comfortable deleting emails from Exchange in the knowledge that they can still search and retrieve them from the archive service.

 

Share your views and experiences and we'll send you an Essential Mug and recommended dunking biscuits from our very own dunking expert.

How not to manage your email archive

Whether your email archive is on-premise or in the cloud, here's just 5 sound pieces of advice from the Essential archiving team on what IT departments should not do when managing their email archives. 

 

1. Take on the full responsibility of defining and managing retention policies

Defining email records management policy should not be solely an IT function.  The setting of your email retention policy should involve the legal and records management department, HR, and other business stakeholders.  Policies should be appropriate, defensible and consistently applied.  The deletion of data should not be driven by ad-hoc requests that fall outside of the stated policy - even where requested by a senior member of staff.  Likewise the deletion of data should not be driven by ad-hoc ‘operational’ needs (e.g. having a spring-clean before migrating to a new version of Exchange or ‘the cloud’ to minimise the amount of data to be moved).  Having said this we frequently see retention policies that are devised to save costs on storage.  Even if you don't have a specific legislative or business remit to retain certain types of emails for a given time, it's always worth ensuring that your HR/legal teams are in agreement with such policies before executing an irreversible change.

 2. Err on the side of caution

In our experience many organisations either leave their retention dates ‘open ended’, or if they do set deletion dates, they don’t actually ‘press the button’ (many archiving solutions require manual confirmation by an administrator).

Top 5 Tips for Migrating to Office 365

By Anthony Ashcroft, Messaging Expert at Silversands

Thinking of migrating to Office 365?  Here's 5 pointers we recommend you consider:

1. Is a migration worth your while?

First up, do your research, understand what Office 365 gives you (and what it doesn’t), what the administration changes are, and how the change of service will impact your users.

For example, if you use a lot of applications that layer on top of Exchange, you might have to wave goodbye to these, unless you are prepared to maintain an Exchange server on-premise to support them - but even this might not work, for example, Office 365 does not support MAPI at all.

Also, a switch to a 1-off fee per year may be financially attractive in these times of economic uncertainty, but have the total costs of migration, potential for disruption to business and end user re-training been taken into consideration by the FD? 

Some of the other things to consider here that will contribute to costs are:

4 ways to save money preserving Leavers' mailboxes

Andy Knight, Essential

With nearly every migration workshop I attend now the same question comes up: “What do I do about my leavers”?

It’s inevitable people will leave your company, but the hard decision for a lot of companies comes when a migration is planned to a new version of Exchange or a new archive solution and whether those 'dead' archives/mailboxes should be moved.

For some it's a 'no brainer' - if there's a compliance need then all data needs to be retained but for others it's a 'nice to have', the problem comes then with cost: paying for a mailbox/archive licence in the new environment for staff that left a long time ago can be hard to swallow as most migrations are there to save money and improve working practices.  Over the years the number of leavers mailboxes you need to maintain can mount up too.

So what can you do? If you’re lucky enough the target archive won't charge you for inactive mailboxes.  However where there are licence costs associated with these mailboxes/archives (such as with Office 365 and Exchange 2010 personal archives) you may want to look at alternatives.  Here are just a few ideas:

Migration to Mimecast.....over a nice Cup of Tea and Biscuit

There’s a lot to think about when migrating archives so we caught up with Migration Consultant Jim Fussell over a cup of tea and a biscuit to pick his brains in on getting your data out of existing archives and into Mimecast…

So James, what’s the first step?  Well first you’ll need to define what you’re migrating. Often this will simply be a case of selecting messages within a time-frame that matches your retention policy. Lots of customers decide to migrate literally everything up until the point that their Mimecast Journal Capture service kicked in.

Of course you might want to filter what you’re migrating, or exclude email from leaver’s mailboxes.  It’s up to the customer, their email retention policies any legislation that applies to their industry.

Can you migrate directly to Mimecast?