Category Archives: Microsoft Exchange Server

Cloud & IT Management, Guest Post, Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office 365, Office 365

Think Office 365 is a Maintenance-Free Environment? Not So Fast …

Guest Post by Chris Pyle, Champion Solutions Group

So you’ve made the move to Office 365. Great!

You think you’ve gone from worrying about procuring exchange hardware and storage capacity, being concerned about email recovery plans, and having to keep up with the constant maintenance of your exchange server farm and the backing up your data, to relying on Office 365 to provide virtually anywhere-access to Microsoft tools.

Sounds pretty good, and we won’t blame you if you’re thinking that your move to the cloud has just afforded you a maintenance-free environment, but not so fast.

While the cost-savings and convenience it may seem like a no-brainer, what many administrators often forget is that the cloud itself doesn’t make email management any easier – there are still a ton of tasks that need to be done to ensure usability and security.

Indeed while moving mailboxes to the cloud may be efficient and provide cost savings, it doesn’t mean administration ends there. Not by any means.

Not to worry, for starters Office 365 admins looking for a faster and easier way to handle mail administration tasks have a number of tools at their disposal, such as our 365 Command by MessageOps. 365Command replaces the command line interface of Windows® PowerShell with a rich, HTML5 graphical user interface that is easy to navigate and makes quick work of changing mailbox settings, monitoring usage and reporting (and did we say you don’t need to know PowerShell?).

From our users who manage about 1 million mail boxes we see the most effective 365 administrators break down maintenance and tasks into daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly buckets. Breaking down tasks this way simplifies work-flow, and the best part is that this can be easily implemented into your routine and should heighten the value and success utilizing Office 365.

Here are best practices for getting started:

Daily: Mailbox Administrators are constantly responding to any addition, change, and removal requests for their Office365 accounts. The most common are daily tasks that are quickly resolved, for example “forgot my password”, “need access to folder X”, “executive Y is on maternity leave, can you forward her files”, and so on:

  1. Modifying Passwords

  2. Modifying Folder Permissions

  3. Mailbox Forwarding

  4. Creating Single and Shared Mailboxes

Weekly: Weekly task groupings are geared toward helping Administrators keep a watchful eye on growth and scalability, security, speed and access. For example, checking for new devices that are being added to mailboxes, comparing them from previous weeks, and verifying that the user did indeed add a new device, and not incurring a potential risk of theft or fraud:

  1. Review Top Mailbox Growth by Size

  2. Review Office 365 Audit Logs

  3. Review Mobile Security

  4. Review Shared Mailbox Growth- (shared mailboxes only have 10GB limit!)

  5. Review the exact location of their servers and their mailboxes within the Microsoft data centers

Monthly: OK, now you’re cooking with gasoline — with those annoying daily tasks and cumbersome weekly tasks out of the way, top-level Administrators turn their full attention to security and access, which we can never have a lapse in attention:

  1. They run reports and lists of all users last login date. They are checking for people who may no longer be employed with the company, thus eliminating the need for that mailbox and its associated cost from Microsoft. Or if there is limited use, they could move the end user to a less expensive Office 365 SKU, again reducing their overall O365 costs.

  2. From a security standpoint, they are running reports to see who is forwarding their mailboxes to external mailboxes, such as sending their email to their home email account (Gmail/Yahoo/ Hotmail, etc.)

  3. Review password strength and the passwords that are set to expire on a monthly basis, ensuring their mailboxes are safe and secure.

  4. Review mailbox permissions, and review who has Send As privileges in their organization. They are confirming with the end user that they allowed these people to have the ability to send email as them.

  5. Review which employees have Full Mailbox access privileges. They confirm with the end user that they do want those additional users to have full access to their mail and calendar.

Quarterly: See how easy this is now? You’ve cleared out the clutter, and made sure every box on the system is secure. You’ve taken the steps to keep the system running fast and true, with consistent access and performance across the enterprise. Now kick back, light a fat stogie and do some light clean up and maintenance:

  1. Group Clean Up, review all email groups to ensure they have active members, as well as review which groups have people in them that are no longer employed, or contractors that are no longer involved, which groups aren’t being utilized, etc.

  2. Review the Edit Permissions list.

  3. Review Non Password changes in 90 days.

Conclusion

Just because you’ve moved to the cloud it doesn’t mean management and maintenance of your mail boxes stops there. Many of these best-practices would require the knowledge of PowerShell, but who wants to deal with that? Save yourself lots of trouble and find a tool that will manage these activities, streamline your work-flow and jump-start your productivity.

Chris Pyle headshot

Christopher Pyle is President & CEO for Champion Solutions Group. He is also an active member of Vistage International, an executive leadership organization, and is a Distinguished Guest Lecturer at Florida Atlantic University’s Executive Forum Lecture Series.

Archiving & Regulatory Retention, compliance, E-mail archiving, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office 365, Mimecast, Research

Mimecast: Email Regulation Issues Leaving Businesses Confused

Corporate email archiving and retention policies are muddled and unclear, with many businesses leaving themselves exposed to potential litigation or compliance issues, according to new research launched today by Mimecast®, the leading supplier of cloud-based email archiving, security and continuity for Microsoft Exchange and Office 365.

The research, which surveyed IT managers on their organizations’ email policies and archiving practices, found that just 20 percent of businesses (23 percent globally) retain archived email for three years or more, with one in four businesses (25 percent U.S.; 26 percent globally) admitting that they do not have a clear policy on retaining email at all.

Key findings:

  • Email retention policies are often ad hoc or based on guesswork – Just
    one in four IT departments (30 percent U.S.; 26 percent globally) have
    an email retention policy designed to comply with industry regulations:
  • Forty-one percent of businesses surveyed (43 percent globally) say
    their archiving policies are based on ‘internal best practice’
    with no consideration given to industry or country specific
    regulations
  • Six percent of U.S. and global businesses admit to deciding their
    email retention policy around a ‘random future date’ with ‘no
    basis’
  • eDiscovery for email is a major area of concern – Many
    businesses are not confident that they would be able to identify all
    emails relating to a specific customer in a timely manner:

    • On average, it would take a U.S. business 15 working days to
      identify all emails relating to a potential litigation
    • Eighteen percent of U.S. businesses do not think they would be
      able to comply with this kind of email eDiscovery request within a
      month
  • Forty-one percent of businesses surveyed (43 percent globally) say
    their archiving policies are based on ‘internal best practice’
    with no consideration given to industry or country specific
    regulations
  • Six percent of U.S. and global businesses admit to deciding their
    email retention policy around a ‘random future date’ with ‘no
    basis’
  • On average, it would take a U.S. business 15 working days to
    identify all emails relating to a potential litigation
  • Eighteen percent of U.S. businesses do not think they would be
    able to comply with this kind of email eDiscovery request within a
    month
  • Concern around email compliance – IT departments are concerned
    that they are leaving their businesses exposed:

    • Just one in four (24 percent U.S.; 27 percent globally) IT teams
      are ‘completely confident’ that their email policies comply with
      all relevant regulations
    • Forty-eight percent (46 percent globally) are ‘mostly confident’
      with 34 percent (23 percent globally) ‘minimally confident’ or
      ‘not at all confident’
  • Just one in four (24 percent U.S.; 27 percent globally) IT teams
    are ‘completely confident’ that their email policies comply with
    all relevant regulations
  • Forty-eight percent (46 percent globally) are ‘mostly confident’
    with 34 percent (23 percent globally) ‘minimally confident’ or
    ‘not at all confident’

“Taking fifteen days to identify all relevant emails sent and received by a client is a massive and unnecessary resource drain,” said Jim Darsigny, CIO, Brown Rudnick LLP. “For IT departments, managing and enforcing email policies can no longer be an ad-hoc approach as the risk potential and time wasted is too high to ignore. In our organization, the cloud enables our business to significantly reduce the pain, costs and resources normally dedicated to sourcing archived email data. With a solid email eDiscovery strategy in place, we are not only able to better serve our clients, but we can also more accurately assess their level of risk.”

“IT departments can and should be doing more to protect their organizations by adopting a more rigorous approach to email archiving,” Eliza Hedegaard, Account Director Legal, Mimecast. “However, the businesses I speak to are not being helped by a regulatory system that is incredibly confusing and difficult to navigate. Regulators should be helping businesses by simplifying the regulatory framework and putting greater emphasis on clearly communicating what organizations need to do to in order to comply instead of adopting scare tactics that focus on what will happen if organizations fall foul of the rules.”

 


Dawn Capital, E-mail archiving, Insight Venture Partners, Messaging, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office 365, Mimecast, Venture Funding

Mimecast Gets $62 Million for Email Archiving

Mimecast, a provider of cloud-based email archiving, security and continuity for Microsoft Exchange and Office 365, has today announced that it has secured $62.15 million in Series C funding led by Global Private Equity Firm Insight Venture Partners, with existing investors Dawn Capital also participating. Mimecast plans to use the funding to accelerate the development and deployment of new technology, and to support plans for rapid expansion in the U.S. market.

Founded in the U.K. in 2003 by Peter Bauer (CEO) and Neil Murray (CTO), Mimecast has grown rapidly, with over 50 percent year on year revenue growth recorded in six of the past nine years. Today, the Company has over 6,000 customers globally – including 70 percent of the U.K.’s top 100 law firms – and over 1.5 million users worldwide.

In addition to growing its existing business within the European, American and South African markets, Mimecast intends to use the investment to drive innovations in corporate email. The Company’s technology has already played an instrumental role in changing the way businesses deploy email; leading the transition from fragmented LAN-based infrastructures to a single platform cloud solution, Unified Email Management (UEM). Mimecast will now focus on continuing this evolution, using its Software-as-a-Service technology to create an Information Banking platform that allows businesses to unlock the inherent value stored within corporate email.

“Today’s businesses are as dependent on email as ever but, increasingly, email struggles to keep up as the way we create, store and share information changes,” Peter Bauer, CEO and co-founder, Mimecast. “At Mimecast, we believe email needs to be rewired if it is to continue to deliver real value to businesses. Building on our history of innovation, we are working to make email more collaborative and more interactive to realize the true value of the vast amount of unstructured data in email stores. We believe that the future is a more interactive archiving model, where IT folk and end users alike can derive more value in real time, on a day-to-day basis on any technology platform they choose to use. The cloud has the potential to democratize information management and deliver these kinds of powerful productivity tools to businesses of all sizes, rather than just being the preserve of the largest enterprises.”

“Email is the most important means of business communication and, better than anyone else, Mimecast delivers a true integrated solution for secure and accessible email,” said Jeff Lieberman, managing director, Insight Venture Partners. “Mimecast has already achieved strong success and with their product superiority, the industry’s move towards cloud solutions and a very large market opportunity, we believe that Mimecast is poised to achieve high growth and become the global leader in unified email management. Insight is delighted to share in this journey with management and existing shareholders.”