We are pleased to announce the general availability of the modern Exchange admin center (EAC) in Microsoft 365 operated by 21Vianet by end of June 2023. We hope this will become the preferred portal for all customers using Microsoft 365 operated by 21Vianet. The modern EAC is a new, web-based admin portal for managing Exchange Online that provides a cohesive experience with the Microsoft 365 admin center. It is intuitive and easy to use, allowing you to efficiently manage your Exchange Online environment. Here are some highlights: Revamped left navigation menu that makes it easier to find feat ..read more

We’re about a month away from the deadline we communicated in our blog post and Message Center posts, and we want to remind our customers before we start blocking traffic. The preview program for REST API access to on-premises mailboxes in an Exchange hybrid configuration has ended. Beginning June 2023, we will return errors for requests made against on-premises mailboxes. Over the past few weeks, we have sent Message Center (MC) posts to the affected customers; we encourage you to check your Message Center for posts MC541164 and MC541165. If you have received those messages, you have som ..read more

On March 23, we announced that we would be enabling a transport enforcement system in Exchange Online to address the problem of email sent to Exchange Online from unsupported and unpatched Exchange servers. As we mentioned in our original announcement, we are starting with a very small subset of servers: Exchange 2007 servers that connect to Exchange Online over an inbound connector type of OnPremises. We have specifically chosen to start with Exchange 2007 because it is the oldest version of Exchange from which you can migrate in a hybrid configuration to Exchange Online, and because these se ..read more

Journaling in Exchange Server or Exchange Online can help your organization respond to legal, regulatory, and organizational compliance requirements by recording all or targeted email messages.  To know more about how to configure and manage journaling in Exchange Online, see Journaling in Exchange Online. For more information about journaling in Exchange Server, see Journaling in Exchange Server. What about hybrid? In Exchange hybrid, we often see mixed configurations where journaling is enabled on Exchange Server or in Exchange Online, or both. Our recommendation is to create the journa ..read more

Public folders provide a way to collect, organize, and share information with other people in your organization. They can help users organize content in a deep hierarchy that's easy to browse in Outlook and Outlook on the web (OWA). This blog post is here to help admins troubleshoot deletion issues with public folders, with a focus on the following scenarios: A user with sufficient permissions (for example, folder Owner) is unable to delete items within a public folder. After content is deleted using OWA or Outlook, it re-appears within a few seconds. A user with sufficient permissions (for e ..read more

Starting July 15, 2023, we will start deprecating the legacy RPS protocol in the Security and Compliance PowerShell module. RPS is enabled by default for Security and Compliance cmdlets. As part of our modernization efforts, the Security and Compliance admin experience is moving to REST-based cmdlets. The new REST API will have the same cmdlets available and will have feature parity with the RPS v1 cmdlets; thus, existing scripts and processes don’t need to be updated. Simply using the new PowerShell module version 3.2.0-Preview3 will ensure REST is used instead of RPS. You can switch to REST ..read more

Due to user error, the original version of this article published on March 23 was deleted. We are republishing the article below. Please join us for upcoming Ask Me anything (AMA) on this subject, starting on May 10, 2023 at 9am Pacific Time. As we continue to enhance the security of our cloud, we are going to address the problem of email sent to Exchange Online from unsupported and unpatched Exchange servers. There are many risks associated with running unsupported or unpatched software, but by far the biggest risk is security. Once a version of Exchange Server is no longer supporte ..read more

Today we are announcing the availability of the 2023 H1 Cumulative Update (CU) for Exchange Server 2019 (aka CU13). CU13 includes fixes for customer reported issues along with all previously released Security Updates (SUs), including updates in the March 2023 SU. A full list of fixes is contained in the KB article for the CU, but we also want to highlight two exciting new features in the CU. Modern authentication Historically, Exchange Server has used Basic authentication (also known as legacy authentication) for client/server and server/server connections. Basic authentication is an outdated ..read more

Microsoft 365 Defender is a unified enterprise defense suite that provides integrated protection against sophisticated attacks by coordinating detection, prevention, investigation, and response across endpoints, identities, email, and applications. It provides advanced protection against spam, malware, phishing, spoofing, and other malicious attacks. Did you know that as Exchange Online admin, you have access to the Microsoft 365 Defender portal? With Microsoft Defender for Office 365, you can help protect your organization from email threats, manage quarantined messages and files, create and ..read more

Last September, we announced the deprecation of Client Access Rules (CARs) in Exchange Online. CARs allow admins to control which devices can access their organization's mailboxes. It was introduced in 2017 as a way to provide granular access control based on client properties such as IP addresses, protocol, or application. In October 2022, we disabled CARs cmdlets for tenants that were not using CARs. This was done to reduce the complexity and confusion around CARs and to encourage the adoption of newer and more secure features like Azure Active Directory (AAD) Conditional Access and Continuo ..read more