Useful Guided Walkthroughs for Calendaring in Office 365

Since one of our most popular posts ever is Shared Calendars in Exchange 2007 sp1, largely to show folks how to create shared calendars, I'm really happy that Microsoft is finally doing its own tutorials on some things that are just darned hard in Exchange.  Well, in this case Office 365.

Check out the new Guided Walkthroughs Microsoft has put up.

Of special interest to those followers of our blog are:

• Sharing calendar and contacts in Office 365

and

• Creating and managing resource mailboxes (conference rooms/equipment) in Office 365

Of course the other walkthroughs on email and mailbox access will be useful to you as well.

MDaemon Calendar Migration to Exchange

We got a wild request for migrating calendar data from MDaemon to Exchange and, seeing as how we're always looking for both an interesting challenge and a profitable business extension we brought up a server and created our traditional users and conference rooms.

Short answer: oh yeah, we can migrate the calendar, tasks, and contacts into Exchange. There are a few obvious issues and some amount of work to be done but there is no doubt about it.

Now the hard part: Is there anyone else out there who wants this?  

We're not sure that this is used outside of small and medium businesses, and they are not our traditional client base.

Opting out of Anyone on Google+ Sending you Email

Google has decided it does not have enough exploitable data traffic already and has made it a default for ANYONE on Google+ to send you email.

If you do not want this to happen to you (or your users) the Wall Street Journal published an easy-to-follow tutorial about changing this in your Settings.

Go here.

My two cents:  Google’s really pushing to be relevant in social networking.  But let us face it, this is a stretch.  They changed the whole YouTube comment system to Google+, and even the folks I know on YouTube all the time don’t give a damn.

Exchange Database Size Growth Post Undo -- LitigationHoldEnabled

Customers ask us how much space will Exchange require post-migration if they have to rollback (aka our UNDO.)  We typically suggest it's somewhere around 4x the size of the interim Access database,  and double the size of the Oracle Beehive tablespace.  This has been an inexact science, particularly since email continues to flow in (and out) of the organization during the UNDO process. 


One contributing factor to the space bloat is the "LitigationHoldEnabled" feature:  post-undo Exchange continues to hold onto deleted items (as it should!) Microsoft's Exchange team released an article and script that shows how to calculate the database Exchange 2010 and 2013 Database Growth Reporting Script.  It is certainly not needed for during testing --  you can always delete and re-create the exchange stores.  Rather, it's something to bookmark just in case you need to figure out why your DB storage requirements jump significantly.