Tony and I decided to do a special holiday edition of the podcast to celebrate a banner 2017. In 2018, we have some big things planned– but until then, enjoy this episode where you can learn what our favorite new Office 365 features were, hear Tony fulminate about the Teams PowerShell extension, and find out whether we actually believe that Teams will kill off email (spoiler: nope.)
Tag Archives: Exchange Online
Office 365 Hybrid Configuration Wizard won’t launch
I recently ran into a bizarre problem with the Office 365 Hybrid Configuration Wizard, and solved it after a bit of trial and error. Hopefully this article will be a useful breadcrumb for future hybridizers.
The HCW used to be a standalone Windows executable that you’d download. The Office 365 team (hi, Tim Heeney!) made the wise decision to turn it into a Click-To-Run (C2R) executable. The biggest benefit to using C2R is that whenever you click the link (which downloads the application’s manifest file) you get the latest version of the HCW, streamed directly to you from Microsoft’s servers. This ensures that everyone always gets the most up-to-date version, but it also introduces a few potential stumbling blocks.
C2R application manifests aren’t executable themselves; they’re just XML files that provide some metadata about the application. With that said, on a properly configured Windows box, as soon as you download the manifest, the C2R helper application does its thing; it reads the manifest, streams the application, and launches it.
In my Exchange 2016 lab, that’s not what was happening. When I clicked on the HCW link in Internet Explorer, the little “Scanning..” infobar would flash across the bottom of the window, but that was it. Same thing in Chrome. Downloading the HCW manually using the Start-BitsTransfer PowerShell cmdlet got me the manifest file, but it couldn’t be launched. Of course, since the C2R launcher itself wasn’t launching, there were no log files to use to troubleshoot the problem. By contrast, when I downloaded the HCW onto my Windows 10 desktop, it would fail because I didn’t have the right prerequisites installed, leaving me a log file full of juicy details. All of the machines in my lab had the same problem, perhaps not surprising since they were built from the same Amazon Web Services AMI.
I spent some time doing the usual things: trolling the TechNet forums, searching random posts by people who had problems with the HCW (all of which were problems with what it did after launch, not problems getting it launched), and asking my smart MVP friends. Nada.
Then I had a hunch and opened the Default Programs control panel. For the “.application” file type, this is what I saw:
Looks plausible, but it’s totally wrong
I changed the “.application” file type to be opened with Internet Explorer. Then I went back to the HCW link, clicked it, and was rewarded with a properly functioning copy of the HCW. Filed for future reference…
Filed under General Tech Stuff, UC&C
Happy day: Windows Outlook now supports Focused Inbox
A few weeks ago I complained about the Focused Inbox feature. A big part of my complaint was that Windows Outlook didn’t support it. This morning, I updated my Windows Office installation and found that the Focused tab magically appeared.. sort of.
First, how I got it: I was already signed up for the Office Insider program, and my tenant is enrolled in Office 365 First Release. My Office installation showed up with “Current” instead of “Office Insider Fast,” though (to check yours, click File | Office Account in any Windows Office application). For some reason, on my unmanaged, non-domain-joined Windows 10 machine, this setting periodically resets, so I launched regedit and changed the value of the UpdateBranch key under Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\common\officeupdate to “Insiderfast”, relaunched Word, and checked for updates. After a few minutes of coffee break, the updates had downloaded. When I launched Outlook, I got the pop-up telling me that Focused Inbox was active.
This leads me to my “sort of” comment. This installation of Outlook has 3 Exchange Online accounts, 1 IMAP account, and a dozen or so shared mailboxes in its default profile. My home robichaux.net account is default. All 3 Exchange Online accounts are on tenants where Focused Inbox is available, and all 3 show the appropriate UI in OWA and Mac Outlook. However, only my work account shows the Focused tab; the other two don’t. Relaunching Outlook didn’t fix this, nor did rebooting, nor did waiting a while. At this point it isn’t clear if having only a single Focused Inbox is by design, a bug, or a temporary limitation. However, I’m happy to see the feature appear at all.
This must be a very new change, as the Outlook 2016 update history doesn’t include it as I write this. Perhaps Microsoft will update it soon to explain more about Focused Inbox support.
Filed under General Stuff, Office 365
Focused Inbox in Office 365: making mail harder
About two and a half years ago, Microsoft rolled out a new mail-sorting feature called Clutter. It was intended to use machine learning to filter important mail from newsletters, shipping notifications, and other… well, clutter, leaving your inbox filled only with mail that required your attention. It was a great idea, and, although it had a few bumps in its implementation, soon evolved into a useful and dependable feature. Now Clutter is gone, and Focused Inbox has replaced it. How’s that working out so far?
First some history: in 2014, Acompli introduced what they called “Focused Inbox” in their mobile client. This represented a different take on inbox cleaning; machine learning would still be applied to sort important mail from clutter, but the important and unimportant mails wouldn’t be logically separated into different folders. This had the advantage of working across multiple email systems. Fast forward to today: Acompli was purchased by Microsoft in December 2014, the former Acompli team has been crushing it with their Outlook Mobile app, and key ex-Acompli folks have taken over some key positions on the Outlook team. Focused Inbox has become the new sheriff in town, and Microsoft is rolling it out to Office 365 tenants. One of my tenants was recently upgraded, so I wanted to write about my experience working with it as an end user. (Keep in mind that, as I write this, Microsoft’s January 26 announcement that they didn’t have a firm timeline for rolling out Focused support for Outlook for Windows is still in force.)
I use three primary clients: the Outlook Mobile client for iOS, Outlook 2016 for Windows, and Outlook 2016 for Mac OS X. I mostly use the mobile client to triage mail while away from my desk– I can quickly respond to important items and delete or file stuff I don’t need. In that role, I’ve been depending on Focused Inbox for a while, and I got used to the disparity between what I’d see on the Focused tab on my phone versus what showed up in my inbox– the desktop inbox showed all my messages, not just the Focused ones, but that wasn’t a big deal, as I was usually grooming my inbox by throwing away or otherwise dealing with the contents of the “Other” tab frequently enough to avoid ugly buildup.
When your tenant’s enabled for Focused Inbox, OWA and Outlook for Mac will display a prompt telling you so; when you click to acknowledge it, you’ll see the new Focused and Other tabs in the UI, just like in the mobile app. Here’s where the fun starts.
First up, Clutter is turned off when you accept that prompt, and it’s turned off permanently… so every message formerly filtered into the Clutter folder now goes straight to your inbox. That means you’ll get a notification (if that feature’s enabled) for each new message, much more frequently than you’re probably used to. I’ve long had mail notifications turned off on my phones, but now I have to turn them off on my Windows machine too.
Second, the mobile client doesn’t currently have a way to focus or unfocus a message– so now that Clutter isn’t filtering my inbox traffic, I get crap that I want to mark as “other” but I can’t until I get to a desktop. This is the exact opposite of what I want, and it breaks my normal triage-on-the-go workflow. Alert reader Dang Le Duy pointed out that you can focus or unfocus a message from the mobile client– tap the “overflow” icon (the three little dots) and you’ll see a popup that lets you change the message state, like this:
Yay! I didn’t know this feature existed but it makes me happy
Third, the Mac version of Outlook has long had a feature that combines the contents of the Inbox folder from each account into a single über-inbox (which the team calls the Unified Inbox). IMAP, POP, Exchange, gmail, whatever, all your messages appear in a single handy list. Unfortunately, you only get Focused Inbox in Exchange Online accounts that have the feature enabled– so when you switch back to the Unified Inbox view, all those messages that were neatly tucked away in the “Other” tab come back into your message list. When you select an individual account that has Focused Inbox enabled, you see what you’d expect to:
However, if you go to the Unified Inbox view at the top level, you get something completely different– 6 of the 20 displayed messages appear when they would normally be hidden in the “Other” tab of their parent account:
Focused Inbox doesn’t work in the Mac Outlook Unified Inbox
This to me is a significant loss of utility. It’s a complicated problem, to be sure; trying to figure out the right behavior for a mix of accounts (some with Focused Inbox, some without) is tricky. I hope the Mac Outlook team is working on a solution.
With these gripes, you may believe I’m down on Focused Inbox as a feature. I wouldn’t say that’s true. It is useful, and it has tremendous potential, especially when coupled with other machine-learning-driven filtering and prioritization capabilities. But the current client-side implementation takes away some of the utility we had with Clutter, and I want it back. Hopefully we’ll see not only a return to feature parity, so that all my unwanted messages stay tucked out of sight, but improvements that make Focused Inbox clearly superior.
(edited 2-8-17 to reflect that you can, indeed, focus or unfocus messages from the mobile app)
Filed under UC&C
Multi-factor authentication for Exchange Online PowerShell
Everything at the Microsoft MVP Summit is automatically under NDA, so rather than talk about all the secret stuff, I thought I’d share something I learned there that isn’t under NDA because it was already public. Somehow I missed this announcement before, but: there’s a public preview of a new Exchange Online PowerShell module that supports Azure multi-factor authentication (MFA). If you have turned on MFA for administrators in Office 365, you’ve probably found that they can’t use PowerShell to manage Exchange objects. Now you can: download and install this module and you’re all set. Here’s what it looks like in action:
I found out about this when I complained publicly in Tim Heeney‘s session that this doesn’t work. Thankfully Tim set me straight posthaste; after I got the link to the preview, a little searching turned up fellow MVP Vasil Michev’s article describing it, which I either forgot about or never saw.
Filed under Office 365, UC&C
Microsoft Exchange engineering and cloud-scale
The Exchange team (or at least Perry Clarke, its fearless leader) has been known to describe Exchange Online as “the gateway drug to the cloud.” But how did that come to pass?
This week at Ignite, I was lucky enough to have dinner with some folks from the Exchange product team and a very, very large customer where we discussed the various ways in which Exchange engineering has blazed a trail the rest of Microsoft’s server products have eventually followed. After a bracing Twitter discussion this afternoon with @swiftonsecurity and some of her other followers, I thought it would be fun to put together a partial list of some of the things we discussed to illustrate how the Exchange team has built a stairway to heaven, or an elevator to the cloud, or something like that.
Let’s start with PowerShell. Love it or hate it, it is here, so we all have to deal with it. In 2007, the idea that Exchange would be built on PS was both revolutionary and, to many, revolting, but it allowed Microsoft to do several important things (not all of which shipped in Exchange 2007, but all of which are critical to cloud operations):
- Greatly improve testability, both for the developers themselves but also for administrators, who now got a suite of protocol and endpoint-related tests they could run as part of troubleshooting– critically important when you have to troubleshoot in a global network of data centers hosting tens of millions of mailboxes
- Fully enable role-based access control, also critical for cloud deployments where customers want to control who can do what with their data
- Finally decouple the presentation layer of the UI (EMC, EAC, etc) from business logic
- Massively improve the tools for scripting, including enabling very large-scale bulk operations– an obvious requirement for a cloud-scale service
Requiring PowerShell was a bold move by the Exchange team but one which has both paid off hugely and one that’s been echoed by the Windows, SharePoint, SQL Server and Skype teams, all of whom depend on it for managing their own cloud services. (See also: the Microsoft Graph APIs.)
Then there’s storage performance. In ancient days, getting scale from Exchange pretty much required the use of SANs due to Exchange’s IO requirements. Now, thanks to the IOPS diet imposed by Exchange engineering, it doesn’t. Tony does his usual excellent job of summarizing the actual reductions. Summary: Exchange 2016 requires roughly 96% fewer IOPS than Exchange 2003 did. There have been a ton of storage performance improvements in Exchange’s sister products (notably SQL) but those have their own stories that I’m not competent to tell. The relentless drive to cut IOPS requirements was one of the biggest enablers for Exchange Online, since controlling storage provisioning costs is critical for any type of scaled cloud service.
Of course, data protection is critical too. Exchange moved from having a single monolithic database to one with separate property and MIME databases (Exchange 2000) then to having software-based database replication with clustering (Exchange 2007) to shared-nothing, fully-replicated active/passive database replication (Exchange 2010 and later). Keeping multiple separate database copies (including lagged copies) enables all sorts of DR and HA scenarios that previously had required SANs. The ability to reliably use cheap JBOD disks, which thanks to Moore’s Law have embiggened nicely during Exchange’s lifetime, has been a key enabler for Exchange Online.
Then there’s a bunch of other architectural changes and improvements that are really only interesting to Exchange nerds. For the latest example, I present “read from passive,” but there’s also all the stuff covered by the Preferred Architecture.
Oh, I almost forgot: managed availability gives ExO a fair degree of self-healing, although its behavior sometimes surprises on-prem admins who see it do things on their behalf unexpectedly.
Oh, and let’s not forget the conversion of all the Exchange codebase to managed code– that was an important accelerator for the move to the cloud, as well as serving as a lighthouse for other product groups with code of similar vintage.
There are more examples, I’m sure, but these should get the point across– there’s been a steady stream of architectural changes in the nearly 20 years since Exchange 4.0 shipped that have led directly to the capability, power, and reliability of Exchange Online– which really has been the gateway drug for getting Microsoft’s customers to Office 365.
Filed under UC&C
Microsoft rolls out Clutter admin improvements
Back in November, I wrote about my early experience with the Office 365 Clutter feature. I’ve been using it on and off– mostly off, due to a rare bug that surfaced because my mailbox is actually hosted on a portion of the Office 365 cloud that descends from the old Exchange Labs “friends and family” tenant. The bug kept Clutter from correctly moving clutter messages automatically; once it was fixed things returned to normal after I re-enabled the Clutter feature, and I’ve been happily using it since.
One of the big advantages of Office 365 is that the service team can develop and release new features much faster than they can for on-premises services. Sure enough, Microsoft today announced three new features for Clutter.
The biggest of these is the ability to create transport rules that flag messages, or senders, as exempt from Clutter processing. This is exactly the same thing as specifying safe senders for message hygiene filtering, although the implementation is a little different. You’ll create a transport rule that has the conditions and exceptions you want, but with an action that adds a header value of “ClutterBypassedByTransportRuleOverride: TRUE”, as described here. I have not personally had even a single false positive from Clutter since I’ve been testing it, and I haven’t seen any complaints about false positive problems from other users, MVPs, or customers. Having said that, Microsoft was smart to include a way to exempt certain messages from processing, as this will soothe some users and tenant administrators who are worried about the potential to have important messages be misdirected.
Second, the Clutter folder can now be managed by retention policies. This is an eminently logical thing to do, and it nicely highlights the flexibility of Exchange’s messaging records management system.
Rounding out the trio, you now have a very limited ability to customize the message that users see when they enable Clutter for their mailboxes: you can change the display name that the notification appears to be from, and you’ll soon be abe to change the logo. Frankly, this is weak sauce; there’s no way to customize the text of the notification, add custom URLs to it, or otherwise modify it in a useful way. Long-time Exchange administrators will recognize a familiar pattern exemplified by customizable delivery status notifications (DSNs), quota warning messages, and MailTips in previous versions of Exchange: first Microsoft delivered a useful feature with no customization capability, then they enabled limited customization, then (after prolonged complaining from customers) they broadened the range of things that could be customized. Let’s hope that pattern holds here.
There’s still one weak spot in the Clutter feature set: it still requires individual users to opt in (or out). While it’s true that users would likely be alarmed by the sudden forceful application or removal of the Clutter feature from their mailboxes, it’s also true that Office 365 as a whole needs to provide better controls for administrators to regulate which service features users have access to. I am hopeful that we’ll see better admin controls (and reporting) for this feature in the future.
While these improvements aren’t necessarily earth-shaking, they do add some welcome utility to what is already a valuable feature. Clutter is a great example of a feature that can make a measurable positive difference in users’ satisfaction with the service, and I look forward to more improvements in the feature.
Filed under Office 365, UC&C
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