Are you getting the most out of Outlook Calendar?

Have you spent time investigating all the facilities in Outlook 2010 calendaring? Microsoft has been very busy indeed.

It's got virtually every feature you could want of a corporate and indeed a personal diary, but herein lies 'the rub.' 

Although Outlook 2010 (and Exchange 2010) has more failsafes built-in to prevent common issues like double bookings for meeting rooms, there's still a lot of pitfalls - especially where handheld devices and OWA come into the mix.

Over the coming weeks we're going to be publishing some top tips for working with Outlook calendar - we're aiming them at IT staff, but in a format that makes it easy for you to pass them onto end users.

We've also asked Dr Monica Seeley, the best selling expert on email etiquette to do a session on best practices for Outlook calendar at our forthcoming event at Microsoft on the 4th of July (http://bit.ly/Jy0Pct).  

Watch this space!

Dreading Olympic chaos?

At our Microsoft event last week we spoke to several folk at London-based firms dreading their commute into work.  The Olympics could in fact herald a new era of remote and flexible working that needs to be supported technically. 

If you're concerned about supporting increasing numbers of Outlook users on smartphones and laptops, or even physically getting IT support staff into the office to trouble-shoot email systems, then look out for our Mailscape webinar on the 10th May. 

Although we're not an official supplier to the Olympics (the application form was an event in itself), we think you'll be impressed by Mailscape's Exchange monitoring and reporting capabilities for the Olympic season and beyond.

Fallacy: An archive does not allow you to permanently delete an email

I read with interest a recent Mimecast blog which refers to a TechCrunch article on the News Corporation phone hacking scandal. The archiving vendor  alludes to the concept of an email archive making it possible to permanently delete an email from circulation. 

Beware – your personal life could go into the annals of your company archives

I've often posted a status on Facebook and thought nothing of it, but the new changes made me think twice about my profile on there and the prospect of leaving a trail of my personal life brought me to the decision to delete my account, but it also made me think about what I may also be leaving in the archives of my current and past employers(s) that will be virtually impossible for me to delete. 

"Let's keep it anyway - just to be safe."

So we’ve all rejoiced at the prospect of being able to migrate our PST files into Exchange 2010, even for free! But does anyone really relish the thought of migrating ALL of their PST files into Exchange? Probably not because;

Moving Email? What about that dusty box in the corner labelled “FRAGILE: PUBLIC FOLDERS!”

Still using Exchange Public Folders (PFs)?  Given Microsoft’s original intent to drop PFs from 2010 and their exclusion from Exchange 2010 online, should we accept their demise and switch to SharePoint?

The truth is, moving can be painful.  The Top 5 blocks to a smooth SharePoint move we’ve encountered to date are:

Longest Ever LinkedIn Debate?

Does MS exchange 2010 really have an email archiving feature?

Add your vote to a debate that’s been raging for some time now; clearly a subject of interest within the messaging community.

This LinkedIn discussion on the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Group is really hotting up.  If you’ve migrated an existing archive to Exchange 2010 or are thinking about it, make sure you read this for some interesting feedback:

http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=1910476&type=member&item=88086844&commentID=-1#lastComment

The perfect gift for 'nightmare' email users

Is there a special deserving someone in your organisation? The person that is always going over quota or cc'ing the entire company with a 5MB PPT?

We have 10 signed copies of Dr Monica Seeley's best-seller 'Brilliant Email' to give away. Simply drop us a quick email to info@essential.co.uk with the subject 'Email Nightmare' explaining why you think a 'special someone' deserves a copy (don't name names), and if we think it's deserving, we'll post a book for you to give secret-Santa style (last date – 20th Dec - UK only entrants).

Read Monica's latest email tips> http://blog.mesmo.co.uk/

Top Tips for Email Storage Management During (and after) Migration

It’s always a good idea to be diligent in how copies of digital records are maintained throughout their lifecycle. For example re-cycling backup tapes and deleting copies of old databases following a server move are both good practice.

Here are our 7 top tips on how to manage your data both during and after an email archive migration or indeed an email server upgrade:

Bring Your Own Device - hype or ‘sign of the times’?

There’s been a lot of blog posts flying around recently around the growing trend towards BYOD. Deloitte and Citrix are some of the big names to announce recently that they are rolling out BYOD internally.

Given that  CDH research confirms 1 in 10 employees already use their own devices to access work email, and other surveys cite even higher figures, is this trend an inevitability?  Systems Professional (HP’s go-to partner for VDI solutions) tell us they are already seeing an increase in businesses looking to deploy VDI in part to help manage increased usage of user-owned devices.

With almost a third of the execs polled in Deloitte’s recent survey believing that there are likely ‘rogue’ devices connected to the network- how do they intend to know for sure?