EHLO Again! The Exchange Team Blog Defined
Published Feb 10 2014 07:00 AM 29.4K Views
Microsoft

Update 3/5/2014: Added a note about anonymous comment moderation.

It’s been a while since we posted something related to intent and operation of this blog. Since our first post in 2004, we have worked hard to give you the latest news and upcoming details about various versions of Exchange that were “new” and “in-market” at the time. Yup, some of us have been with the blog from day one.

First and foremost, this blog is the official blog of the Exchange Product Group (the “Exchange Team”). This is the same team of program managers, developers, testers, and other engineers at Microsoft that build Exchange for both on-premises releases and for Exchange Online/Office 365. In many respects, one could think of this scenario as us creating one product and then shipping different product SKUs. While this is a bit of an oversimplification, think of it as a single code base that gets shipped to different customers in different ways. We went into some detail around explaining how this process works in our Servicing Exchange 2013 post(one of the crucial points being that the speed of innovation/engineering).

Please note that this post is not about the benefits or challenges of choosing one approach to deploying Exchange over the other. Suffice it to say that there are many different considerations organizations go through when deciding what the right approach is for them. We understand this diversity is here to stay, hence our recent post about The Road Ahead.

We Listen and Respond to Your Feedback

As always, we listen to and consider all customer feedback. It’s clear from the comments from readers of this blog that some of you feel that we are trying to deliberately push more Service-related content, with the ultimate motive being “to get everyone to Exchange Online.” And you’ve said that you want more “Exchange Team” and fewer “Office 365 Team” blog posts.

Since from engineering viewpoint, there is no difference, we plan to continue sharing engineering advancements with you about it all on this blog. Restricting this blog to on-premises content simply does not make sense, given the diversity of our customer base (on-premises, Exchange Online, hybrid mode, etc.).

Thus, in response to your feedback, we've created an On premises tag for all posts that are related to on-premises subjects, allowing you to readily view only on-premises content. Please know that if you only follow on-premises content, you might miss out on early views of product features delivered to Exchange Online first, and include those features in future on-premises releases or updates as appropriate (Rajesh’s post Development cadence in a cloud world reflects this). We believe this approach is the best way to provide a single location for all things Exchange while providing you the choice to select the types of content you feel is appropriate to your current situation. To be really clear: if a specific post applies to both on-premises as well as Exchange Online, it would be tagged as both.

A note about post comments

For a while now, we've been considering turning off anonymous comments. It has become a bit of a necessity to go through comments posted over a typical weekend and clean off the inevitable (and creative!) comment spam. While already making tweaks to the blog, we've decided we will turn off anonymous commenting on March 1st. That will give you a bit of time to register with TechNet and keep giving us feedback, and will give us a way to keep the blog comments free of those “special offers” much easier.

Note: We have turned on anonymous comment moderation starting today (3/5/14). If you're not signed in, you will still see the comment form but comments will go into the moderation queue automatically. We do not plan to actively monitor this queue. Please register, and let us know if any issues!

We commit to keep sharing relevant content with all of you, no matter which combination of our products you are using (and even if you’re not using them <g>).

Nino Bilic

60 Comments
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I'm trying to get some assistance with the remove direct booking script referenced on

http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Remove-DirectBookingps1-4c54ec74#content

but I can't submit any comments on the pages that describe the script's functions.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2013/05/09/use-exchange-web-services-and-powershell-to-d...


Any suggestions about how to get a couple of questions answered?

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ROFLOL. I see a HUGE wave of new subscribers coming on in the next month. That's pretty much going to be the result of not allowing anonymous comments. People will just create bogus e-mails (Outlook.com allows 5), and then just post anyway. So kudos for

effort, but...I suspect we'll continue to see people wanting more information about the NSA and security problems with the cloud, On-Premises people getting their panties in a bunch over Exchange Online being promoted first, and more complaints than you can

shake a stick at over the poor quality and bugs in the product.


Oh, wait. Those are all my complaints as well too. At least you are tagging the articles for On-Premises versus On-Cloud after more than a year of people asking for that feature.



Anyway, good luck with your stopping anonymous comments....and congratulations on all your new subscribers you will get out of this effort.



ROFLOL...

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Good to know we have a tag for the upcoming Exchange 2013 SP1 post. :)
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@Dear Microsoft: As indicated in the post and comment responses, only anonymous comments will be disabled. You'll still be able to follow comments (and post comments after signing in to TechNet). As comments on this and other posts show, we don't remove, edit or moderate comments, including any negative ones, unless they're spam or use inappropriate/abusive language.

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EHLO Again! The Exchange Team Blog Defined
thank you
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You're making me hungry, Ron J. Can I come to the party too? Mmmm ice cream.
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Re: anon comments as long as the login is easy and consistent (MS/Live ID), who the hell cares about needing to log in? it takes all of about 10 seconds (since I *just* did so, to make the point). Also, I agree w/ your decisions about content and on-prem

vs hosted... though I'd probably have tags for more than just On-Prem (you may already... I notice "Exchange Online" in this article's tags)... it's probably also be good to check whether the RSS feeds can include tag filters.

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In the moment many customers are think about, that the product Microsoft Exchange "On-Premisiss" will have no future for a long time. Could you may told something about that to show them that everything is all right? (Yes I kwow you have sent a out a route

plan in the last weeks)

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@pesos - thanks for mentioning this... do you mind emailing me with case details? I was actually involved in some discussions around this and want to follow up with the team involved. Ninob AT Microsoft DOT com
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@Joe, Patel, Adam... I want to make sure this is understood: we are absolutely not "killing comments". We are, however, planning to turn off Anonymous commenting, which today does get abused quite a bit by people running scripts etc. against our blog.

We want to have the conversation, and commenting is here to stay. *Personally* speaking, I was never deterred from registering with a blog site or a forum if I really wanted to comment or participate in. I'd like to understand if there is a deficiency in the

platform or some other platform issue that people might be worried about and would opt to not register? I do not believe that TechNet requires huge amount of personal information. Is there something else? You can use the same ID as on our TechNet forums. Thank

you!

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@Rhys: Ah yes, thanks for bringing that up... I believe that - during close to 10 years now that we have been running this blog - it is clear that we are not afraid of leaving what could be perceived as "negative comments" on our blog posts. In fact, it

is all still out there. Also, I can assure you that not all negative comments are posted anonymously. Either way, we have been quite consistent to take the feedback received where it needs to go and do not remove any "negative" comments UNLESS they were explicitly

offensive or personally insulting to our writers (there were just a few over the years that I personally nuked). That being said - registration with TechNet does not apply any sort of filter to comments, and if you feel that we deserve bad feedback, you will

be at liberty to post it still. You could try it right now if you wanted. :)

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@Spammer use Technet profiles - well, truth is that there is no perfect solution to this problem, you are correct. It raises the bar just a little higher though and allows us a way to block obvious spamming accounts. While it will not be perfect, it sure

will be an improvement over today's situation. Life is full of those situations: I know that locking my front door will not stop someone who REALLY wants to get in, but I'll still lock it.

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@Bill: You'll need a TechNet profile.

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@pesos - can you please email me the name of your TechNet account? I'll have someone look into this. ninobATmicrosoft DOT com
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@Dear Microsoft: the forums in question are here (look for deployment forums for your version). However, as Bharat mentioned, you are welcome to post comments here still. In fact the same account should work for both places. :) That being said - if things need investigation and back and forth communication, blog comments are not the most ideal way to do that so depending on what it is, our forums might be a better place for the discussion anyway.

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That's all great but it would be good if you could stop making promises you can't keep... "SP1 will be released early 2014". Yes we want to know if possible in advance when a release might be happening, but make sure you over estimate a date and define

what 'early 2014' means to you.

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Thank you for listening. I look forward to more on-prem articles being able to filter out the cloud-only ones.
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"Exchange On-Premises" tag is a good idea., but Please give us deep dive Exchange On-Premises articles. What you mean "we've decided we will turn off anonymous commenting on March 1st."?? Does that mean I have to write my name such as now?? or I must have

TechNet account??

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Yes! I am so happy I do not have to read about Office 365 anymore. I'm going to buy cake and iccd cream and throw myself a party for our IT staff. Thank you! Thank you! THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS CHANGE!
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@Bharat Suneja [MSFT - Why?? feels like you guys do NOT want comments. These Comments were they ONLY Communication Bridge we had & now we all MUST have TechNet profile, Bad idea.........
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This is the best site for the Exchange Server that I have seen, Exchange Team & Exchange Admins freely comments.........DO NOT KILL COMMNETS........
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I agree, DO NOT KILL COMMENTS.
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Do NOT kill Comments.
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Do NOT kill Comments. Comments are a good way to talk to you (Exchange Team).
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"We've got a problem, theres hundreds of negative comments regarding Exchange 2013 being an unusable rush job" "Turn off comments, that'll fix the problem" You need to answer questions, not ignore more of them.
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@Nino Bilic - DO NOT KILL anonymous COMMENTS.
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Yep, DO NOT KILL anonymous COMMENTS.
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YES...........PLEASE DO NOT KILL anonymous COMMENTS......
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@Nino Bilic - It is VERY clear that you guys are Killing "anonymous COMMENTS", Because you DO NOT like negative comments. But these Negative Comments made MS improve Windows 8 > Windows 8.1 with Start Button. Also the Negative comments here, made you guys

create the "On-Premises" tags. So Please do NOT kill anonymous COMMENTS.

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Please DO NOT KILL anonymous COMMENTS......Keep the democracy here :)
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HATE Office 365. HATE it being pushed down my throat. HATE how you guys are now obviously prioritizing features for 365 vs on-premise. HATE how it's become about the bottom line rather than what your customers want (service revenue>>on-premise revenue),

and HATE the fact that us dedicated, experienced Exchange admins that have worked with the product since 5.5 are slowly being given the middle finger as we are coaxed into 365 cloud and it's Fisher Price interface..

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Tim what part of "SP1 will be released early 2014" don't you understand:) we just started 2014 for f sake:) if u eager for sp1 just install sp3 for ex2010:)
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Don't kill cake!
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Dictatorship = No More Anonymous Comments VS. Democracy = All comments are welcome + Anonymous comments
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Ironically these comments prove why anonymous commenting needs to go away...
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Wow Exchange team, if you had to deal with this kinds of comments (does that pass for discussion?) then yes... Go ahead and turn off anonymous comments so we can have a discussion.
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Be aware that many times we patching admins can follow release issues because of the posting of the comments. There isn't a place clearly designated as a follow up location for post release issues. Instead people post here. Perhaps ensuring that there

is a dedicated forum with truly dedicated eyeballs watching for issues might be a middle ground?

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Happy to register and look forward to increased interaction between registered users and the team. Maybe then someone will provide a proper answer as I am very concerned that we are being pushed into an unsupported state. We were just told by PSS that

"The product team is aware of with this DCR request for Exchange 2013 CU3. However, they won't fix it since the business impact is very minimum with acceptable work around (using adsiedit.msc) and cost/risk of fix is high" Seeing as how the change in the gui

to restrict the number of auto attendant transfer digits to the number of digits in the dial plan extensions was JUST INTRODUCED in CU3, I fail to see how the cost/risk of the fix is high. If it was, the team would not have introduced this useless and aesthetic

change in the first place! We have been told that the team has suggested using ADSIEDIT to directly edit the XML file that controls the auto attendant settings. If the team and PSS expect us to accept the adsiedit workaround as a legitimate, long-term solution

to this issue, then we would appreciate an official statement from both PSS and the Exchange team explicitly stating that the adsiedit method is the recommend AND SUPPORTED method to deal with this issue. Thank you, Wes

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Will be pretty quiet here. Mission accomplished.
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Sorry guys but Exchange 2013 has been a massive flop from my perspective. I have worked with Exchange as an integrator/consultant for 10+ years and I have had 1 customer that is serious abut upgrading to 2013. The rest dont see any reason to move from

2010 as they see 2013 as an absolute mess. I think that focusing LESS on O365 development of Exchange and more on on-prem for the next release. Please start releasing things when they are ready not when you have to, that is the perception from my clients,

they would rather wait for a release (CU, SP, full version) than to have a rushed buggy release. The only time I see Exchange servers at the moment is when I deploy a 2010 UM server for Lync and 60% of my work load was Exchange consulting and deployment.

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I don't disagree that blog comments are not the way to track issues, but face it that's the reality because the forums do not feel like they get the eyeballs and attention they deserve. Post here and you get attention. Post there and you may not get, nor

is it as organized so that the common issues bubble up.

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I do not agree with you Matt. We have migrated from Exchange 2007 to 2013 on-prem. last year. Everything is running flawlessly while it was a complex deployment (2 CAS, 4MBS, 48DB and huge public folders)
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When is the SP1 of Exchange 2013 released? early 2014=before 2015?
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When is the SP1 of Exchange 2013 released? early 2014=before 2015?
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Democracy.........
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As expected, several people are unhappy with a much overdue change to the comments. Ridiculous comparisons of eliminating anonymous posts to "dictatorship" and "keep democracy". Yeah, that's it. This is a professional blog about a professional product,

not a chat room for kiddies. Grow up. Register for an account (you're an IT pro, right? Why are you not already registered?) and post away. What you're really annoyed with is that you won't have anonymity to post unprofessional bashing that is blown out of

proportion to reality. I'm off to register for my account now. Oh, the inconvenience and horror! Thank you, MS Exchange Team for improving this forum.

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༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ Give Ex2013 SP1
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On a constant basis spammers will sign up for technet accounts and spam the forums. How will this help to cut down on spammers on your blog when they are gaming the system now and signing up for Technet profiles?
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If not having to clean up "spam" gets your asses in gear with SP1 go for it already. heck dont even wait til march 1, release sp1 march 1
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For everyone complaining about not being able to post anonymously, let me ask you a question. Don't you already have a free TechNet account now that you use to log on to the forums to post questions (and hopefully answers)? If not then you should be ashamed

of yourselves and not be able to call yourself Exchange server admins. The forums should be the first place you go to post questions or get assistance with issues, not on the Exchange team blog site where the posts are about specific issues. If you do comment

topically on the posts then creating a TechNet logon, assuming you don't have one already, shouldn't be an issue because again that's what you are required to do for the TechNet forums. I.E. Commenting on this blog will have the same requirement as using the

forums which is more than fair. Those of you who just want to use anonymous comments to take pot shots at Microsoft or the Exchange team because you are either unhappy with them or the direction they are taking, man (or woman) up and at least be willing to

let people know who you are if you are going to make negative comments. Otherwise then you are just displaying "keyboard courage" which is just sad. Thank you Exchange team for taking an action to help clean these conversations up and to keep the comments

hopefully more topical to the posts!

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