Outlook Live Blog

Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) rollout to Outlook Live tenants

2010-02-25T21:46:00Z

Over the next several months Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) will become the default filtering service for Outlook Live. FOPE will provide the following benefits:

Enterprise class filtering and actively helps protect your inbound and outbound e-mail from spam, viruses and phishing scams
Simpler configuration of IP safelisting to bypass spam filtering for on-premise to cloud mail; safelisting can now be done in just minutes via the Outlook Live Web Management interface
You will also be able to leverage TLS (transport layer security) for any mail flow between your on-premise domain and Outlook Live

Do I need to do anything?

This change will be made seamlessly behind the scenes, with no interruption to the service and requires no action on your part. You will receive an e-mail from Live@edu when FOPE is available for your school.

Where can I learn more?

You should read the following articles to understand how this migration may affect your management experience:

FOPE - Spam Filtering with Outlook Live: provides an overview of how the FOPE infrastructure integrates into the Outlook Live spam filtering process (read more)
FOPE - Manage IP Safelists: explains how to use the Outlook Live Web management interface to add, edit, and remove IP addresses for your organization's FOPE safelist (read more)
FOPE - IP Safelisting for Mail Delivery and Relay: explains how to deploy mail routing and relay with the FOPE infrastructure (read more)

Thanks!

Outlook Live Admin Private Forum: Update #2

2010-02-23T17:35:00Z

A while back, we posted that there is a private admin forum area to discuss your experiences with Outlook Live. Previously, this forum area could only accessed by invite only. Well, today we're pleased to announce that if you sign in with your LiveID that is associated to your admin account, we can now automatically provide access to the private forum. If you do not see the private forum and you are signed in with your admin account, this could be caused by your cached credentials being used. In this case, make sure to simply sign out and then sign back in using your liveID. If you still have problems, email us at ola AT microsoft DOT com.

Thanks!
The Outlook Live Answers team

Administrator Forums ...

2009-11-19T01:39:00Z

Some of you might be wondering where the administrator forums went. We had locked this forum area back in July to provide a secured location to have conversations about Outlook live. The forum area is now officially locked down. If you are an administrator for outlook live, please send mail to me, joeym AT microsoft DOT com to request access to this forum.

Thanks!
Joey

Heads-Up: Managing Your Domain During the R3 to R4 Upgrade

2009-10-08T20:33:00Z

<edit: This post has been completely re-written to include all the information you need to know for the R3 to R4 upgrade>

Help Topics for the R3 to R4 Upgrade are Live!

As you've heard, in the fourth quarter 2009, the Microsoft Exchange data center will upgrade servers to the latest software and start to upgrade customer domains from the R3 version to the latest version (R4). After your upgrade has started, the mailboxes in your domain will start to move to the latest version. It doesn't happen all at once, so for a while, some of your users may have R3 mailboxes and others will have R4 mailboxes. We call this state "coexistence."

When the upgrade is complete, you and your users will all get some new features, and some functionality will change for the features that you already have.

Check out the latest help at Heads-Up: Managing Your Domain During the R3 to R4 Upgrade.

Here's a quick look at what you should keep an eye on during the upgrade.

How do I know we've been upgraded to R4?

· Sign in to Outlook Web App and check the color scheme. It's blue in R3 and yellow in R4. The first administrator account (the one created during enrollment) is always upgraded first. After that, end users can verify their upgrade by the change to yellow in Outlook Web App. Administrators currently can't track what percentage of their users have been upgraded, but users can easily tell by the change in color.

· Sign in to http://outlook.com/ecp. Do you see the new Administrator Roles tab? If so, you're on R4! Learn more about the new management functionality at What's New for Organizations.

What do I have to do during the upgrade?

You have to update some of the tools you use to manage Outlook Live. All domains have to update the version of Windows PowerShell that they're using, and schools that automate account management have to upgrade the Exchange Labs Management Agent (ELMA).

After you've verified that your upgrade is under way, perform the following required steps:

· Download Windows PowerShell v2 and start to use it to manage your domain. The Windows Management Framework contains the correct versions of Windows PowerShell v2 and WinRM 2.0. Although an immediate switch to this version isn't required, Windows PowerShell v2 provides the following advantages:

· During coexistence, you can use it to manage all mailboxes. It doesn't matter whether the mailbox is running R3 or R4.

· New mailboxes created by using Windows PowerShell v2 are created as version R4. If you use earlier versions of Windows PowerShell after the upgrade for your organization is initiated, they'll be R3 mailboxes and will be added to the queue for pending mailbox upgrades.

You have to upgrade your version of Windows PowerShell before the end of January 2010. After January 2010, older versions will be blocked from connecting. For more information, see Install and Configure Windows PowerShell.

Thanks!

The Outlook Live Team

Connect to Outlook Live with Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition!

2009-09-19T03:31:00Z

If you’re a Mac Office/Entourage 2008 user, you can connect to your Outlook Live account using Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition instead of the POP3 or IMAP4. When you connect using Entourage 2008 Web Services Edition, you can synchronize Notes, Tasks, Calendar items and Categories. The Entourage 2008,Web Services Edition is available as an update to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac from the Entourage, Meet Exchange Web Services Web page. After you install the update, follow these instructions to connect to your Outlook Live account using Entourage 2008 Web Services edition: Set Up Entourage for Mac OS X for Your E-Mail Account.

For general information about how to connect your Mac to Outlook Live, see Access Your Account Using a Mac.
For information about Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition and how to download it, see the Entourage. Meet Exchange Web Services Web page.

-- Jon Hoerlien, Technical Writer - Outlook Live

What a week!

2009-09-05T00:07:00Z

We know that Outlook Live service has had instability this week, and we understand what a mission-critical service Outlook Live is for your organization.

As the school year has resumed in most places, we planned for extra capacity to handle the incoming student population. However, we have seen our number of active users and concurrent connections rise much faster than we expected (and much faster than in the past). To address this, our operations team has been working non-stop to deploy additional service capacity within our datacenters to meet the increased demand. Some of this additional capacity is online now, and we are beginning to balance some of the load to these servers.

We are totally committed to continually improving the service by deploying further improvements to increase the stability, performance and feature set of the Outlook Live Beta service.

You can check the latest announcements on issues that may be affecting the service by logging into Outlook Live Answers - we will work to provide you up-to date status there.

Thanks for your continued support

-- The Outlook Live Team

Help us make it faster!

2009-08-18T03:01:00Z

Hi, Do you feel Outlook Live is too slow? Does it take too long to preview a message in the reading pane? Is scrolling through messages sluggish?

We are working hard to improve Outlook Live performance in future releases and wanted to solicit end user feedback to decide which particular issues to tackle. If you could reply with specific actions which you find slow (e.g. previewing a message, search, ect.) it would be much appreciated.

Additionally, any other comments/concerns regarding your general perception of speed in the product would be helpful.

Thanks!
-Kartik.

FEEDBACK NEEDED!!! Message Delivery Reports from SMTP Clients

2009-07-24T23:08:00Z

Hi all,

We are investigating options if we should enable the retrieval of message delivery reports from authenticated users that send from SMTP clients, such as POP/IMAP applications (think Thunderbird).

We'd look at our options for doing this in an upcoming release. Would be great to get some feedback from the community if you think it's a compelling enough feature, i.e. do a significant enough users opt to send e-mail from POP/IMAP clients vs. Outlook or OWA? and do you expect to get delivery reports from those clients?

See http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/ms.exch.ecp.trackmessagesent.aspx for more info.

Thoughts?

Please respond using the comments below or visit the following forum thread to discuss!

-Erik (Microsoft Exchange)

Conversation view in Outlook Live ... thumbs up!?

2009-07-20T22:14:00Z

We here working on Outlook for the web are always looking for a way to make the email experience better, more efficient and simple. Conversation view is one of our favorite new features that gives an attempt at doing all three. We have received some great feedback from those of you who like this feature. However, we understand that some people do not like this view. The thing about conversation view is that it introduces the notion of a group to the email thread. You can expand a "group" to see all of the reply's in one place. So, instead of looking in another folder for someone's specific reply, you can reply to any part within the group. Well, I could go on and on about why I like this feature, but instead we really want to hear from you! Let us know what you think!

Tip of the week: Keeping up with Outlook Live Answers!

2009-06-27T04:23:00Z

We're really proud of Outlook Live Answers and there's alot that this site can do. So, I figured I would give you all a few tips, once a week, on using this site and all the little hidden tricks and capabilities for Outlook Live Answers. This week, I will focus on keeping up with information on Outlook Live Answers.

After being live now for a couple of months, things are starting to get busy. I have to admit, I sometimes find it hard to keep up with all of your great questions! So, Im sure I am not alone when I say that it can be hard to keep up with information on all of the sites and forums that I visit. Do you have something that you want to watch for on Outlook Live Answers? There's a few ways to do this!

When you create a post, you are presented with an option to have all responces from that thread emailed to you. Simply check the checkbox next to "Email me replies to this post."
At the bottom of every page on a forum area, there is a "RSS" link. Click this link to subscribe and watch this forum area. Also, check out: http://outlookliveanswers.com/forums/ForumSubscriptions.aspx
At the top of every forum thread, there is a "More" link. Click this link and select "Add this post as a favorite." From there on out, this thread will show up on the "My Content" tab on the main page for Outlook Live Answers.

Here's a another way to subscribe to a particular type of post based on tagging...(This creative tip came from one of my coworkers here at Exchange)

From Shawn:

I found that you can get search results as RSS feeds:

http://outlookliveanswers.com/search/Searchrss.aspx?q=mail+tips&o=Relevance

Just change the highlighted text to your query.If you use IE as your RSS reader, remember that by default it only updates feeds every 24 hours. You can choose a more frequent interval in the feed properties.

Do you have any questions, tips and tricks you want to share? Send them to me at joeym AT microsoft DOT com

Another Update (June 24): Admin forum is going private

2009-06-18T22:43:00Z

We've discovered a bug in our forums that is preventing the Outlook live for administrators private forum from being locked as private. Please be patient as we hope to have this resolved within the week.

Just a heads up to all of our admins here at Outlook Live answers that our Outlook Live Administrators forum area will go private beginning monday June 19th. If you are an admin here at Outlook Live Answers, please send me mail at joeym AT Microsoft DOT com and let me know what your username (only) is here on Outlook Live such that I can identify you as an admin on the site. Once we lock the the Outlook Live Administrator forum area, only people who have been added to this forum group will be able to see, read posts and ask questions in this forum area. All other areas will remain public and can be accessed by your users.

We will also be closely monitoring this forum area over other areas, so please use this one forum are for your admin related questions.

Thanks!
The Outlook Live Answers Team

The Reading Pane ... we're listening ... and we want more!

2009-06-11T15:52:00Z

One of our users here at Outlook Live Answers has brought up the fact that there is currently no way to turn off the reading pane. We know that a few people have voiced frustration and we are looking into our options for this decision. However, we're also curious to hear why this is distracting as well as other feedback on the reading pane. I have set up a poll here. Please go vote as we take your feedback very serious.

thanks!

Outlook Live Answers - How to use this site

2009-06-02T07:18:00Z

We're so excited to see so much activity on the site during these past two weeks. We've registered over 300 users and its great to see the activity!

When we sat down and designed this site, we specifically targeted two audiences: the administrator for the Outlook Live service and all of the end-users for the service! Outlook live provides email, calendar and contact management.

Outlook Live is offered through the Live@Edu program and together with the Live services, this program provides many features outside of email. However a key component to any online service is how the service is supported.

Outlook Live Answers is meant to support both you and your users. We invite you to provide this site to your users to get the answers they need when using Outlook live. In addition, we ask that you work to provide answers to the common questions about the Outlook application for the web as well as the many other ways in which the Outlook Live service can be accessed. Provide this URL to your users when they subscribe to the service and come help out!

Now, if you have questions on how to manage the Outlook Live service, we ask that you use the "Outlook Live Administrators" forum sub-category. In this location, we will do our best to support you with your questions on Outlook Live administration.

Again, thanks for all the support and feedback - please let us know how we are doing by posting question every day and checking back frequently for answers!

-- The Outlook Live Answers Team