A very thourough review by Paul Cunningham on the benefits of deploying Mailscape in the Microsoft Exchange world

The Mailscape Dashboard

I recently reviewed Mailscape 365, which is ENow’s monitoring product for cloud and hybrid environments. If you read that review along with this one, then you’ll notice that Mailscape and Mailscape 365 are very similar looking products. The two products share many design elements, and in some areas the two products work the same way. If you have both products deployed, they even integrate into the same unified dashboard. But they are two separate products. Mailscape was developed before Mailscape 365, and has matured over several years based on input from several Microsoft MVPs, as well as customer

Steve Goodman looks ahead to Office365 in 2018

Beginning of a big push to move from Exchange Server 2010 - Exchange Server 2010 reaches the end of extended support in January 2020, and most Exchange 2010 implementations  are approaching the end of their serviceable life – Don't wait until until 2019.

Teams projects will surpass Skype projects, with some cloud PBX projects put on hold - Microsoft launched calling capabilities into Microsoft Teams. Organizations will hold back their cloud PBX rollout for a while and wait for Teams to catch up.

AI hits mainstream in Office 365 - you will find it in Teams integration of connectors and bots, Delve,  Bing for Business and Cortana integrated deeply with Office 365. 

Greater security focus

What's new in Resource Central 4.0 Service R3

New features now available in Resource Central

It is now possible to book a meeting in a colleague’s or manager’s calendar, and set yourself up as ‘Assistant Organizer’. This will enable the ‘Assistant Organizer’ to receive the emails from Resource Central and to make orders on behalf of the colleague/manager.  The feature's purpose is to support the work process of roles like secretaries and personal assistants.

In this example, only the ‘Assistant Organizer’ will receive the emails from RC.

In My Meetings you can see your own meetings and the meetings where you are the ‘Assistant Organizer’.

Resource location details

You can now add extra information about the

New Mailscape version improves reporting on Office 365 and Exchange on-prem

The Mailscape develpment team work on four key product principles :

• Help customers cut the mean time to resolution (MTTR) for Office365 and Exchange problems
• Provide actionable insights, not just collections of data—we need to process and display the monitoring and reporting data we collect, and filter and prioritize it so that…
• Trim the troubleshooting tree to eliminate wasted time (such as RDPing into a server and looking at its event log as a first step)
• Accelerate migrations both to the cloud and between on-prem systems. We do this not by providing tools to migrate data but by applying #1 and #2 to migration operations.

Microsoft's cloud business is expecting to be a $4.5 billion business.  But a Business Insider article suggests this $4.5 billion number isn't as straightforward as it would seem.

One source says "What Microsoft is doing is claiming a certain percentage of their Enterprise Agreements — these are renewals of their big licensing agreements — as cloud revenue. They bundle the rights to use Azure or Office 365 as part of their overall agreement. The  secret is that very few customers are actually taking Microsoft up on using Azure in any meaningful way."

So, when an enterprise signs a new contract to buy software such as Windows, SQL and Microsoft Office, the salesperson may include for free (or almost free) access to Microsoft's cloud