All things Exchange
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a fundamental component of modern e-mail authentication, designed to reduce the risk of spoofing and phishing attacks. By publishing a DNS record that specifies which mail servers are authorised to send messages on behalf of a domain, SPF allows receiving systems to validate whether an incoming message genuinely originates from the claimed sender. SPF alone does no… Read the rest “SPF Record Fun”
Transport Layer Security (TLS) has always been a critical component of securing communications in Microsoft Exchange Server, ensuring confidentiality and integrity of email traffic both internally and externally. With Exchange Server 2019, Microsoft has steadily evolved TLS support to align with modern security standards and deprecate older, weaker protocols. A notable shift came between Cumulativ… Read the rest “TLS Web Services Support On Exchange Server 2019 CU14 vs CU15”
Exchange 2019 CU15 has been released to the Microsoft Volume Licensing Center and the public Microsoft Download site! Exchange 2019 has a different servicing strategy than Exchange 2007/2010 and utilises Cumulative Updates (CUs) rather than the Rollup Updates (RU/UR) which were used previously. CUs are a complete installation of Exchange 2019 and can be used to install a fresh server or to upd… Read the rest “Exchange 2019 CU15 Released (2025 H1)”
Moving a deployed Exchange hybrid environment to a brand new tenant is not something that is typically done. In all of the years that I've worked with customers on hybrid, a second hand is not needed to count those instances. The biggest reason for customers doing it was they did not like the tenant name, and wanted to change it.
In this case it was becase the tenant was being forcibly removed du… Read the rest “Lab–Move Exchange Server To New Tenant”
The 14th of October 2025 marks another pivotal moment in Microsoft’s product lifecycle, as a large spectrum of very popular and widely deployed software reaches end-of-support. This includes Windows 10 and Windows 11 22H2. On the productivity front, the extended support for Office 2016 and 2019, along with Visio 2016/2019, Project 2016/2019, and server-side tools like Exchange Server 2016/2019, S… Read the rest “Save The Date 14th October 2025”
Almost 10 years ago I ran into a customer deployment where they were unable to run some of the Exchange PowerShell commands. Funnily enough, this bubbled up the other week.
As a recap, tenants are created in a dehydrated state to minimise resouce consumption. That means they can not be customised things like Role Based Access Control (RBAC) assignments are read-only and can not be customised. Th… Read the rest “Tenant Hydration – Still A Thing”
Exchange 2019 CU14 will enforce the use of Extended Protection (EP) by default. This is the desired security configuration as we need to harden the traffic to help prevent Attacker In the Middle (AiTM) style attacks. This is not a new thing, and the Exchange team added support for EP in the previous releases as an optional (but strongly recommended) feature. The intent was that customers would … Read the rest “Exchange 2019 CU14 – Extended Protection New Setup Command Line Options”
Want some updates to go with your updates? That’s pretty much what you are getting with the April 2024 Exchange updates. We can split the features which are part of the April 2024 release into two main areas:
The April 2024 HU is available for the following builds of Exchange Server:
You want to run the Exchange Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW) and after clicking the link to the HCW in the admin portal or manually browsing to the shortcut URL you are unable to either launch or install the HCW. Despite using Edge, the HCW application just does not install and/or launch. All you get is the initial prompt to open the file and nothing else.
For example, if we go to the shortcut … Read the rest “Unable To Install or Launch Exchange HCW”
With the release of Exchange 2019 CU14 today, a separate announcement was added to the release post to highlight that only CU23 is supported for Exchange 2016. Exchange Server 2016 is supported until the end of its support in 2025, however in order to receive support and to obtain Security Updates (SUs) you must be running CU23. CU22 and all older releases of Exchange 2016 are no longer supporte… Read the rest “Exchange 2016 – CU23 Now Required”