New Exchange Online migration options →

December 28, 2016 Nathan OBryan

Microsoft is constantly updating and improving services; it’s a hallmark of Office 365. The constant Office 365 updates are great for me, providing new content and tips to share with you on a regular basis.

The Microsoft Exchange team recently made significant improvements in moving on-premises email from Exchange to Exchange Online. Here’s a breakdown of the new Exchange migration options for Office 365.

New DAG Activation Feature in Exchange 2016 CU2 →

June 21, 2016 Nathan OBryan

Microsoft recently announced a new DAG copy activation feature that will be available in Exchange 2016 CU2, but before we talk about that, I’d like to do a quick refresher on how database copy activation works currently and will continue to work for Exchange 2013 and 2010.

Azure AD Connect 1.1 Filtering – Part 2

March 7, 2016 Nathan OBryan

In Part 1 of this series, we covered the basis of setting up filtering for AAD Connect and the details of setting up domain filtering. In this part of the series we’ll get into setting up OU based filtering.

Mailbox Anchoring in Exchange

December 17, 2015 Nathan OBryan

With the latest Cumulative Updates for Exchange server 2013 and 2016 Microsoft has made a change to “Mailbox Anchoring”. What does this mean? Why did they do it? How will it affect me? Read on, and I shall attempt to explain.

What does “the end of mainstream support” mean?

January 26, 2015 Nathan OBryan

Recently Exchange 2010 reached the end of mainstream support. Depending on how much you like click bait websites, you may have heard (or imagined as most certainly happened with some bloggers) all kinds of different things that might mean. Well never fear citizen. I am here to explain what that means for you, and just what you should do about it.

Exchange 2013 processor sizing: virtual server edition

December 15, 2014 Nathan OBryan

In a recent article I explained the process of sizing your processors for Exchange 2013. Hopefully I explained that process is a clear and understandable way, but there is something I left out. How do virtual servers affect this process? The answer, as always, is “it depends”.

PowerShell script: Activate-SyncedPasswords

December 9, 2014 Nathan OBryan

In June of 2013, Microsoft released an update to the DirSync appliance that allowed it to sync passwords from an on-premises Active Directory into Azure Active Directory for use in authentication. Since then, Microsoft has also released AADSync, which is a more advance version of DirSync that allows for more complex on-premises Active Directory configurations to be connected to Azure Active Directory. Recently AADSync was updated to include the password sync feature.

Exchange 2013 processor sizing

December 8, 2014 Nathan OBryan

One component of properly sizing Exchange deployments that I do not think is well understood is the process of sizing processors. In this post, I am going to walk you through the process of sizing the processor for your new Exchange 2013 server deployment.

PowerShell script: Get-UsersPerDB

December 1, 2014 Nathan OBryan

I’m working on an Exchange migration project. I did a green field Exchange 2013 deployment to migrate users to from a hosted solution. During the process I created about 3200 new mailboxes, and I must have done something wrong because those mailboxes ended up all clumped up in a couple of the databases. The problem I ran into is there is no good way to see your mailbox distribution across a number of databases in the Exchange Admin Console.

Quickly Get the Data You Need for Troubleshooting Exchange Server 2013 Problems →

October 24, 2014 Nathan OBryan

Historically, gathering performance data when troubleshooting Microsoft Exchange Server wasn't much fun. You had to figure out what performance counters you wanted to use, then set up Performance Monitor to gather data for several days before you could do any troubleshooting. Thanks to a new diagnostic feature in Exchange Server 2013, that's no longer the case.