15 years!
Published Feb 09 2019 07:00 AM 10.6K Views

Believe it or not – as of today, this blog has been around for 15 years! That’s right… the very First post was published on February 9, 2004, with How the M: Drive came about hot on its heels. Not too shabby for something people said would never work! On this blog, we have something about every version of Exchange since Exchange 5.5; we headed off to the cloud with Exchange Online and we came back to earth recently announcing Exchange Server 2019. We dove into history with posts like A brief history of time – Exchange Server way as well as explained The story of Squeaky Lobster. Oh, and we also covered a bunch of technical stuff too, from time to time. Have you ever wondered what the top 5 posts that people viewed on the blog have been (each of them with over 300,000 page views)? Well, here they are:

And did you know that we have had over 40M page views for content on our blog? 40M! Truth is, we suspect this number to be higher but over the years, as blog home has changed, different platforms tracked this differently so it’s a bit of a mystery. Did you know that we had our blog officially translated into 10 languages for a few years (though sadly most of those are now gone (translated blog posts, not the languages))? All of this would not have been possible if it was not for people writing stuff for the blog. The process that we go through when posting has not changed very much over the years but it always starts with an idea and someone willing to write about it. They are not always the same person. We don’t have an exact number but we have had 300+ people contribute to the blog by authoring blog posts. We’ve had Support Engineers, engineering PMs and Devs, the Marketing team, Consultants, Escalation Engineers and we probably missed about 10 more titles – all of whom have dedicated time to research and write stuff to share it with Exchange community. We also had many more people commenting and providing feedback, both from inside Microsoft and from our loyal readers and fans. Blogging was never really anyone’s job, so having ideas and finding people willing to write about them is what made this possible. We realize that over the years (because we are now old and wise, in a Santa Claus kind of way), the way people consume information (and where they do it) have changed, but as we still seem to have a good sized following, we plan to keep this thing going. As mentioned, over the years we have moved our blog between different platforms (the current platform is platform #4) and we are considering moving again, which will help us be more plugged into overall Microsoft blogging / community efforts. Don’t you worry, if we do something, we plan to bring our content with us and work on redirection of old URLs to their new home. But more on that later; let’s spend our time today celebrating the past, why care about the future, we say. For today, anyway! We have been doing a bit of cleanup, though. You might notice that bios (that we used to post for post authors) have been deleted. Honestly – over the years this stuff became so hopelessly out of date that it just needed to go. Trying to update someone’s bio from 10 years ago is just not all that interesting. Anyway – as we remember the past and muse about the future – we wanted to ask a few questions, hoping to get a bit more insight into how you would like us to continue with this blog of ours: Do you still find information in the form of a blog post something that you use? Why would you prefer something to be a blog post vs. let’s say a documentation article? Any other tips you have for us? The Exchange Team Blog Team

18 Comments
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Congratulations guys! This Blog has been the most trustful source in the last 15 Years when it came to Exchange. It has also grown to the primary information portal for upcoming architectual changes which allowed the attentive reader to adjust planning accordingly.

Your Blog is like a weekly newspaper - so you track things sometimes that you wouldn't pick up in a documentation article. The new documentation platform you use is a huge improvement from what it has been before, but a Blog is always an extra - class, also from a detail level. - so if we have the choice please keep this going!

Last but not least you allowed sometimes a view behind the scenes - the people behind Exchange who make this community special. Happy celebrations and keep dancing!

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Thanks for the kind words Martin. And you keep on dancing too!
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I find the blog useful. I do feel that it's 95% Exchange online though, which is hard if you're still living in on-prem land. I feel the blog is a good source of truth for Exchange and I'd like to see it continue on as it does now - with a little more on-prem stuff please :)
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We still love our on-prem customers don't worry. We always try and write about things that work for both on-prem and cloud, but it's tough sometimes. But we'll try harder, and thanks for the feedback and support!
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Congratulations and thank you for all the blog content!

In contrast to the documentation, where we go to find help on the next task we have, your blog is always a good place to follow on your findings of how we might have misunderstood the documentation or where really relevant information is missing or a big change is coming up. Such topics with some deeper background explanation in your blog help to spread the news more quickly and increase our knowledge how to do the right thing.

Like Kristy I would like more On-Prem content.

E.g. how will Office-Addins, especially Mail-Apps for Exchange, evolve On-Prem vs. Online. Will you invest in keeping the APIs and the authentication methods on par?

If I understood correctly, we cannot have Outlook for Android and iOS use an On-Prem Mail-App. Could that change in the future?

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Thanks! We've got some stuff about on-prem auth coming up fairly soon... so don't go too far...

Outlook for iOS and Android can connect to an on-prem Exchange mailbox, so not sure what you mean there. Can you explain?

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Thank you for answering and sorry, I was not clear enough: I would like to use Office-Add-ins (Mail-Apps, which we develop) in Outlook for Android and iOS, when those are connected to an On-Prem mailbox. The documentation of "Add-ins for Outlook Mobile" (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/add-ins/outlook-mobile-addins) states that Add-Ins can only be used when connection to O365 mailboxes. One technical reason could be that Add-ins for Outlook Mobile need to use REST and cannot use EWS, especially makeEwsRequestAsync. The documentation is from mid 2017, so maybe something changed already for later CUs of Exchange 2016 or Exchange 2019? We have mixed On-Prem and O365 customers and would like our Mail-Apps (which work fine in Outlook PC/Mac and OWA in all cases) to work in Outlook Mobile for On-Prem mailboxes as well. Would be so great!
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Ah, got it. Correct, that's O365 mailboxes only - we have no plans to add this to on-prem currently. Sorry.
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Too bad. Maybe some day when some one of your team members has a bit of spare time... ;)

Anyway, thanks for listening and answering.

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Blog posts from MS, especially this one, is my favourite type of information source. I feel it puts much of the information into better context than a documentation article would. Keep up the good work!
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Well we're glad you like it. Really. Thanks!
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I think the blog posts do a great job of telling us admins out there where the Exchange team's head is or was at when whatever was developed and why. I certainly hope the blog sticks around.

I will say I have been disappointed that the content here has gone pretty much 90+% Exchange Online/cloud centric. It seems like we got a lot of quality content here for Exchange 2013, then not too much for Exchange 2016, and practically nothing at all for Exchange 2019. I get it, Microsoft wants everyone paying monthly subscriptions and wants Exchange to be a SaaS, but we're staying on prem (not because we can't migrate to "the cloud" but because we don't want to) and it would be nice to see some content geared toward us. Its ok to talk to us about Exchange 2019, I promise :)

Just my $0.02.

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We definitely do not want to leave on-prem behind so you can expect that on-prem content will continue. Note though that the focus on EXO is really more practical; EXO simply gets features a lot more often, therefore there is a lot more to write about there. It's more of a reflection of what the product is doing vs. some deliberate direction to specifically not write about on-prem... I'd be curious to hear if you have ideas on what you would want us to cover for on-prem, though!
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How about adding more features to On-Prem more often, to get more opportunities for blogging about On-Prem? :)

E.g. with the shift from EWS to REST (or Graph in the long term?) as the preferred API it would be nice to see transparent access with REST (Graph) clients to EXO and EXOP. On-Prem only, not hybrid, please: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2016/09/26/on-premises-architectural-requirements-for-the-rest-api/#comment-295105

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Looking at some of the other comments it seems I'm not alone in yearning for more on-prem content.

As for what, I don't know. I'd love more in depth discussions about any improvements or changes in the managed availability stuff. There have to be many things that are different/better in Exchange 2019 than its predecessors. Exchange is just such a great product, I've loved it since I deployed my first one back with Exchange 2000 (skipped over 2007), just doesn't feel like it gets the limelight it still deserves these days.

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I always search in this blog first for trusted information on Exchange. Sometimes also enjoying the great sense of humor of some of the authors.

Would like to read more about, how EOP is working in detail and what e.g. the logic is to calculate Spam Confidence Level of an email.

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I really need some help to save one of my team members.

We got our Exchange admin accusing the Service Desk person of running a script “Set-ActiveSyncOrganizationSettings -DefaultAccessLevel Allow” , but this Service Desk person does not do anything on Powershell and all his tasks are done via the Exchange GUI.

There was a request on that day to authorize a Mobile Phone to access emails.

Is there any way where we can find out what exactly happened ?

Can working on the GUI cause the script to execute in error ?

Copper Contributor

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Really helped me I many ways,

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