Joe Palarchio

As part of planning for your identity with Office 365, it’s important to understand the concept of the “ImmutableID”. By definition, “immutable” means “unable to be changed” which should be sufficient warning that this is something you need to take time to plan properly. In spite of your planning, your organization could become involved in […]

                        In a previous article, I extracted the changes made by the Exchange 2010 Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW) to get a better idea of what is going on behind the scenes when you run the HCW. The same questions apply to Exchange 2013: So […]

Just a quick post today on something that should be more simple than it is… AD FS on Windows Server 2012 R2 (often referred to as “AD FS 3.0”) no longer has a dependency on IIS. One of the common methods used to generate a “Certificate Signing Request” (CSR) is to use IIS on the […]

Configuring Exchange hybrid prior to the Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW) is just a distant memory at this point. The process that was a painfully long configuration was greatly simplified with the release of the HCW with SP2 for Exchange 2010 back in May 2011. As much as the HCW has made my job easier, I’m […]

For the past year, we’ve heard Satya Nadella’s “cloud-first, mobile-first” vision from Microsoft. Some joke that they both can’t be “first” but let’s just call it priority “1A” and “1B”. I see it every day in Office 365. Exchange Online has nearly a bi-weekly addition of features while the on-premises version lags behind. It makes […]

It’s been about six months since “Azure AD Sync” (often called “AADSync”) was made generally available with the intended purpose to replace the previous DirSync tool. In addition to an overhaul under the hood, AADSync brought with it new features such as support for multiple Active Directory forests. If you’re configuring Directory Synchronization for the […]

Back in April of 2014, Microsoft announced a feature called “Alternate Login ID” (sometimes referred to as “Alternative Login ID”). The idea was that instead of changing the UPNs in your on-premises Active Directory, you could use a different value to authenticate to Office 365 and sync that value to the cloud as your login. […]

Address Lists are a way to create an additional “view” within the Global Address List (GAL) based on a set of mailboxes attributes. As an example, perhaps you want to create a view for everyone with the “Office” of “Headquarters”. This new Address List would appear as an additional dropdown in both Outlook and OWA. […]

Exchange Hybrid, when configured properly, can provide almost seamless coexistence between Exchange Online and your on-premises Exchange environment. Part of this concept is that while you technically have two separate Exchange organizations, the mail flow between these organizations appears “internal” so that a message from a cloud user looks no different than a message from […]

The Office 365 Roadmap can be a bit of a treasure hunt at times. It’s great that Microsoft provides transparency into what is planned or in progress but figuring out when the roadmap has changed or what has changed on it can be a bit of a challenge. I noticed that the roadmap was updated […]

You would think that after working in technology for around 20 years, the “awe factor” would start to wear down. The fact is, I’m still amazed by some of the features that companies like Microsoft develop and how they manage to continuously push out great new functionality to their clients. With Office 365, it’s a […]

In my post “How to Stay Informed of Changes“, I covered some of the different information sources I use to keep track of changes in Office 365. Something I’ve since added to that list is the version release history page for the Azure Active Directory PowerShell Module. The page has an RSS feed which you […]