Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Kerio Calendar Data Weirdness

 One of those things we always worry about is data integrity.

We've seen weird stuff.

And now it's Kerio's turn to provide us with weird.

Take a look at this raw ICS file from some recent field data:


I'll cut to the chase.  The END date (line 14) of this recurring appointment is later than the UNTIL date in the RRULE (line 15).  So trying to insert this Microsoft Exchange Web Services called us very bad do-bees.   

Not hard to generate odd situations with a variety of clients on a technologically moribund server.


Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Block Mail to Recipients Outside of your Organization

We recently announced that we've started work on a  Kerio Server Migration to Office 365.  One of our clients gave us test data from a few departed/terminated users to test our code.  It's easy to test in our Exchange on-prem sandbox to ensure no "external" email gets sent to their users -- we unplug the Ethernet connection to the Router. It's a little more complicated in Office 365, but not all that difficult.  Here are the steps:

In the Exchange Admin Center, under Mail Flow, Rules, click the "+" sign to create a new rule.

  • Name the rule.  We called it "Block Mail sent to External Email"
  • Select the option from Apply this rule pulldown: "The Recipient is Located...."
  • Select the option "Outside The Organization" from the subsequent pulldown that the recipient is located 
  • Select "Reject the message with the explanation" from the pulldown "Do the Following..."
  • Enter a message (optional):  We entered "The message was not sent. The Recipient is located outside the company."
  • We chose to Enforce the rule, and finally
  • Saved it

  Here is a screen shot:



So now let's say a user tries to send email outside your domain.  They will be informed that is an unsanctioned action with this message:


Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Kerio Connect Migration to Office 365

So we got a request for a Kerio Connect to Office 365 calendar migration from someone who we discovered was an old pal from the early days of group scheduling.

How could we say no?

So we've got that under development now -- anyone else interested in testing it out please drop us a line.

We've got full-state calendar migrations going, as well as contacts and tasks.  

Notes become tasks (because Microsoft's EWS API does not allow us to create Notes). 

A few of the recurrence patterns do not transfer to Office 365 so we insert them and flag them as problem children.  Biggest example: Last weekday or weekend day of the month is supported on Kerio but not in Office 365.  

Of course we include our UNDO functionality for testing and remediation.