EHLO Again!
Published Mar 14 2011 09:00 AM 10.4K Views

Earlier last month, the Exchange team blog turned seven. Our first post, creatively titled “First Post!!!” of the Microsoft Exchange team blog, was dated Feb 09, 2004.


From the squeaky lobster to the Exchange 2007 secret decoder ring, we’ve enjoyed sharing Exchange stories with you.

It has been an interesting journey, sharing technical tips and guidance, announcing product releases and updates, seeking community feedback, and sharing important moments in Exchange history and culture with you — the squeaky lobster stories, Exchange limerick contests, why an OOF's an OOF and not an OOO, the Autodiscover song and, from 'the edge of reason', the tale of the nuclear toaster man.

If you're missing Mercury, Platinum, and Ti, take a brief trip down the memory lane in A brief history of time - Exchange Server way.

In December 2004, we reached a million hits, a milestone for our new blog back then!

The EHLO Evolution

Over the years, we’ve received a lot of feedback about this blog. You’ve loved, liked, and appreciated our posts, and found them useful. Two common questions emerged from your feedback:

  1. Is this the official Exchange team blog? Is this really a Microsoft site?
  2. Is the content on this blog “authoritative”?

As we’ve said for years – we hear ya!

The Exchange team blog has moved to a new home on TechNet. The new url – blogs.technet.com/exchange, and the branding should answer the above two questions.

Exchange blog content is authoritative. Blog posts are written by Exchange product group members, including program managers, developers, testers, and experts from the support and field organizations. Technical posts go through a tech review by one or more subject matter experts. In some cases, the author himself/herself is the one with the most insight or knowledge of a component or feature that no additional tech review is required or possible. That is not to say that there can never be any mistakes. But we take quality of posts seriously and if there are problems - we work quickly to get them addressed.

Eventually, you’ll find a lot of the useful content published on the blog being incorporated in product documentation. The blog allows us to get important content to you quickly, share timely announcements and opinions, and more importantly, to continue the conversation with you and get your valuable feedback.

We’d like to draw your attention to some of the changes:

  • URLs: One of the requirements for the move to TechNet was a seamless user experience for you. You can continue to access the blog using the msexchangeteam.com domain (and be automatically redirected to the new blog). We’ve ensured you can access previous posts using their old msexchangeteam.com URLs, so you can continue to use any links to previous posts. Older RSS feeds will also continue to work. You can also subscribe to the feed in both Atom and RSS formats from the shortcuts in the right column.

    New posts, however, will not have an "old" URL associated with them, but can still be accessed through the old RSS feed.

  • Design: We’re happy to bring a clean new look to the blog, which highlights blog posts and does away with the distractions. The blog home page allows you, the reader to choose if you want to see all content or an excerpted view of the post contents on the home page. Community and other links have been moved to the footer section at the bottom of the page.

    We’re not quite done yet, so you’ll see incremental design changes and tweaks happen here.

    To help you feel "right at home" on this new site, we kept our "You had me at EHLO" bubbles graphic, but we might look to update that in the future too. The bubbles graphic has been updated too, to include a major theme from our blog’s history. Can you spot it?

  • Navigation: The navigation bar on top allows you to easily access the Library, which includes links to blog-related applications and downloads, scripts and files, videos and the Exchange Server TechNet Library, which is the home of Exchange documentation on TechNet. You can also easily access the Exchange wiki, which contains community-contributed content, and the Exchange TechCenter.

  • Browse by tags: As you may have noticed, we now have a tag cloud on the right.

  • Search: The search bar is a part of the navigation bar, always accessible. Since we’re now on TechNet, search results are served by TechNet, and offer rich search functionality, including the ability to subscribe to search results, and view search results sorted by relevance, ratings, time published, or alphabetically.

  • Comments: Now that we’re on the TechNet blog platform, you can use your TechNet login (LiveID) to comment. If you visit and post in Exchange or other forums on TechNet, you can use the same account to post comments.

    As always, we welcome your continuous feedback on blog posts, and blog ideas that you email us regularly via the "EHLO Idea"s alias. If you created an account with our previous blog site (something we never required) - you will still need to create one now, as we did not do any account/profile migration work.

    We request you to keep blog comments relevant to the post. Although the blog team and post authors from the Exchange team try to answer most questions, many times we can’t respond to questions of a support nature which require more details about your deployment and infrastructure. For such questions, we must direct you to Exchange forums. You can also contact Microsoft Support for assisted support by email or phone. Links to Exchange forums can be found in the new navigation bar on top of this blog and also in the footer, along with links to Support.

  • Sharing: On each post page, you will see links to share the post on Twitter, and the familiar Facebook Like button. At the bottom of the post, you’ll see a number of additional sharing options to share the post on social networking and sharing services such as Digg, Delicious, LinkedIn and more.

We hope you like the clean and simpler new look! It should also be quicker to load.

A Big Thank You From The Exchange Blog Team

To all contributors to the blog – thanks for sharing your knowledge, guidance, tips and opinions with the Exchange community. Keep the posts coming!

To fellow bloggers in the Exchange community – if you have an Exchange blog or web site, send us the details so we can add them to the Cool Community Links page.

To all our visitors - thanks for continuing to read, and above all – for the constant and relentless feedback. You help us continue to build the best messaging and collaboration platform in the world!

Tell us what you think about our new blog home!

The Exchange Blog Team

20 Comments
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Congratulations on the move, but I'll be honest. I'll miss the fact that the site sat just outside the corporate site and had its own attitude and personality. I really hope you don't get assimilated completely.

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Congrats and enjoy your new home!

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Looking spiffy.

However, now there seems to be a bit of a conflict with the email address I have registered with on the old site which wasn't Live based, and the Live account that you now use.  How do we merge... or purge the old account?

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@Scott: Thanks for the feedback! It's the same blog brought to you by the same blog team. We'll try not to lose any of the attitude and personality. :)

@Michel: Thank you!

@Korbyn: Thanks! The accounts can't be merged - accounts from the old blog haven't been migrated and are now gone forever.

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Keep up the good work team ! ^^

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@Bharat:  must be something with an old technet account that's now conflicting with my Live account, and now I can't log in with my old Kman account as it's the same email address.

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I'll be honest, though. You really did have me at EHLO. Real Exchange admins who have configured and administered an Exchange server aren't afraid of having to learn some slightly different names, or of knowing where the answers are/how to find 'em....

So congrats, though I don't think I am the only one who is just a little sad about all this.

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Congratulations...good work. I like your site and ... Microsoft Exchange ... what else?

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Love the new theme, one minor recommendation - alter the "tweet" button configuration. Currently the site name = "Exchange Team Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs" that’s 46 characters just on the site name!

Second best Microsoft blog to NextHop - sorry allegiance is Lync :)

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@Adam Jacobs: Thanks for the feedback. We've noticed that about the tweet button too and it's on our list of updates. For now, please delete any unwanted text populated in the Twitter form.

Hopefully we'll get you to switch allegiance from Lync - but we love the NextHop blog too! :)

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Breaks with the redesign:

I found some broken links on the 'Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator' post, and the comments are currently disabled. So I figured I'd mention them here. :)

The links below are broken on the page at:

blogs.technet.com/.../3408737.aspx

-"EDIT: This post has been updated on 1/19/2011 for the new version of calculator. For the list of latest major changes, please see THIS."

(blogs.technet.com/.../453859.aspx)

- "For the calculator itself, please see the following link:

Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator " (blogs.technet.com/.../entry453145.aspx)

Could be others, those are the only two I was actively checking today.

Thanks!

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The last three months I translate the blog into Russian and I would be useful to see the posts on a monthly basis. Thank you!

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@Todd: Sorry for the inconvenience - we're working on it! Meanwhile, please click the 'Library' link in the navigation bar on top and select 'Downloads'. You'll find the link to download the calculator for Exchange 2010 (and Exchange 2007).

@Ilya: Thanks for the feedback.

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Redirects to attachments doesn't work now. Ex.:

Post blogs.technet.com/.../3411397.aspx

Attachment msexchangeteam.com/.../entry456737.aspx (Exchange Processor Query Tool)

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@Ilya and others: Download links to the 2010 and 2007 calculators, the processor query tool, etc. have been fixed.

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Link to Exchange Processor Query Tool still doesn't work

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@Sazonov ILYA: Thanks for reporting this - it's been updated. Please refresh the post and check again.

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The link is Ok! Thanks!

And still...

Ehlo blog articles are often written in a "natural" English with slang.

This gives them the informal spirit, but makes difficult to understand them.

I want to ask the blog team  to post articles in a more normalized English.

I understand that this requires more efforts and time.

But I suppose the blog authors are interested in having their ideas correctly understood everywhere.

Thank you for your understanding.

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Thanks for all the good content you post on EHLO.    

Comments on the new blog format ----

a---  I see that some of the technet blogs have the  "Archive by month/year" in the right-hand column.   I used that a lot in your old format.   Can you add that back ?

b----  I see that some of the technet blogs have   "email subscribe to this blog".    I assume that will send an email when a new item is added to the blog.    Can EHLO add that option in the right-side menu ?

Thanks.

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@ M314159

We're working on a solution for your first question. The reason we pulled that nav from the old site was due to the fact it was getting to be an eye sore of sorts and not the most elegant manner to handle a search. So, with that being said, we're working on something new that should be cleaner and easier to use.

For question 2, we have a couple options right now.

You can subscribe via RSS that will ping you when a new blog is posted, and/or you can subscribe to a specific thread to be alerted to new comments (you have to be signed in to see this option).

We are working on additional features and widgets for the site, and I'll take these suggestions under advisement. :)

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