Office 365 Exposed Episode 14 Now Available

Vulnerabilities in Exchange, Why People Need to Upgrade, and SharePoint Storage

Last week, Microsoft held the annual MVP Summit at their Redmond HQ. Paul Robichaux and I took the chance to sit down with Greg Taylor, Director of Marketing for Exchange, and Brent Alinger, who has the onerous responsibility for shipping the on-premises versions of Exchange, to tape episode 14 of our Office 365 Exposed podcast. The tape is available online or via iTunes.

This episode was taped in building 27 on the Redmond campus, home of the “Microsoft Garage“. We cover the following topics:

Fixing the Recent Exchange Vulnerability

With Brent in the room, it was a chance to discuss some of the issues surrounding the recent attack on Exchange that forced Microsoft to make some architectural changes to the product in its relationship with Active Directory and the nature of EWS push notifications. Attacks happen all the time, but this one developed over a period combining a number of techniques. The discussion was a great insight into how Microsoft reacts to threat.

Exchange 2010 and The Need to Upgrade

One of the reasons why people who still run Exchange 2010 need to upgrade soon is that they’ll lose support for security fixes in early 2020. In our chat with Greg Taylor, we debate whether these companies should move to a newer version of Exchange on-premises or embrace the cloud and run Exchange Online. Greg feels that Exchange 2016 is a good choice. See if you agree.

Teams Announcements at Enterprise Connect

Moving back to the cloud, we discussed the set of Teams announcements Microsoft made at the Enterprise Connect show last week. Anything from the advent of shared (private) channels to whiteboard to new devices was fair game for us. We also chatted about the success of Teams now that 500,000 organizations use the app.

Storage and the Base Office 365 Workloads

In the last section of the podcast, we discussed how the two base Office 365 workloads (Exchange and SharePoint) handle the effect of retention policies. In a nutshell, Exchange provides storage in individual mailboxes (the recoverable items structure) to hold retained items and doesn’t charge this storage against a user’s regular mailbox quota. SharePoint takes a different approach and assigns a storage quota to the tenant as a whole and it’s up to the tenant to decide how to use that quota. The deployment of retention policies to SharePoint comes with a consequence for storage usage, so tune in to hear more.

Next Podcast

Paul and I are separated by the Atlantic, which makes it a little difficult to organize these podcasts. One of these days we will figure out how to use technology to make the task easier. Until then, stay tuned for the next podcast.

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Podcasts are great, but they are a point in time view of a subject. A book that updates its content is another way to keep informed about what’s happening, and that’s what we do with Office 365 for IT Pros.