How to check the retention policy in Exchange Server
The retention policy in Exchange specifies the deletion and archive rules that are applied to every mailbox. In Exchange, a default retention policy is created and applied automatically to all mailboxes. If you want to customize the deletion and archiving rules, you need to create a new retention policy under the Compliance Management option in Exchange Server or Exchange Online. In Exchange Online, you also have options to create retention tags that are used to apply retention policies to folders
[ManageEngine] Your free PST migration tool is here!
Introducing PST Migration Tool! This free tool allows you to export your Exchange and Office 365 mailbox contents to PST files, and import PST files in bulk to Office 365 mailboxes. Learn more. Download Free Tool Suite 5.5.2 By downloading the free tool suite 5.5.2, you get access to the PST Migration Tool along with 19 other free tools that help in efficient Active Directory administration. If you are using the free tool suite version 5.5.1 or earlier, please download the latest version (5.5.2) to
[KB] How do I check users' permissions over Exchange shared mailboxes?
Shared mailboxes help teams collaborate with each other, but they also come with certain security issues. If yours is a growing business, your organization may be hiring more employees. A new hire could inadvertently inherit access to an important shared mailbox carrying business-critical information. To avoid problems caused by unintentionally inherited access rights, you need to keep an eye on shared mailbox permissions. Solution: Exchange Reporter Plus provides two reports that allow you to
Get your questions answered through our brand new Community Learning Series!
Hey there! As you may have noticed, every Wednesday for the past few months, we've posted Tips and Tricks on how Exchange Reporter Plus helps you address common Exchange problems. Now, we're going to continue doing that, but in a new series of posts called the Community Learning Series You get to choose the topics. It all rests on you! We want to tailor our how-to posts to suit your needs. So if you have any question about your Exchange environment or Exchange Reporter Plus, ask away! You can even
[KB] How do I audit connector changes in my Exchange Online environment?
In Exchange organizations with multiple administrators, it is sometimes difficult to keep track of server configuration changes. A send or receive connector could be reconfigured by one of the administrators and not documented. If there are message routing issues, you need to review all the changes that recently took place. But, the lack of documentation and the cumbersome nature of native tools can make this difficult. Solution: Exchange Reporter Plus lets you audit connector changes effortlessly.
[KB] How do I audit Exchange Online mailbox activity?
Mailboxes contain a lot of classified and business-critical information. You need to enable mailbox audit logging to collect the data that would be needed for investigations in the case of data leaks. During internal audits, you will be asked to find out: Who has access to important mailboxes. Who recently accessed those mailboxes. What activity did they perform on these mailboxes. Depending on native tools for this information can be time-consuming. As this is a matter of data security, you need
[KB] How do I track permission changes to Exchange Online mailboxes?
Emails contain business-critical information and as an Exchange admin, you need to ensure that there are no data leaks in your organization. Unauthorized users can misuse mailbox content if they gain access to an important mailbox with no business justification. You need to keep an eye on mailbox permissions to ensure no unauthorized permission change has occurred. Solution: Exchange Reporter Plus helps you audit changes to your Exchange Online mailbox permissions. The Mailbox Permission Changes
[KB] How do I track Exchange Online emails that have been deleted and moved?
Emails are still the trusted medium to transfer business-critical information that aid in making important decisions. It is therefore vital to know when important emails are deleted or moved within mailboxes, to ensure business continuity. Solution: Exchange Reporter Plus provides a comprehensive report on mails moved and deleted which shows details about: The user who moved or deleted an email. When the action was carried out. Mailbox User Principal Name Result of movement or deletion (success
[KB] How do I pass compliance audits in my Exchange environment?
Compliance audits are always a tough affair, especially since you need to manually collate the data required to pass compliance audits. Some of the more common mandates you need to adhere to as an Exchange admin are PCI DSS, SOX, HIPPA, FISMA, and GLBA. Solution: Exchange Reporter Plus provides in-depth reports that help you comply with: SOX: Safeguard financial data exchanged through emails. HIPAA: Email patient information securely. PCI DSS: Control access to payment card information. GLBA: Prevent
[KB] How do I monitor my Office 365 shared mailboxes?
Shared mailboxes are excellent for collaboration within organizations and allow multiple users to send and receive emails through them. However, they can cause security issues because of the ease of access. You need to audit your organization's shared mailboxes to know which user accessed a shared mailbox and when. Solution: Exchange Reporter Plus gives you granular reports on: Shared mailboxes Shared mailbox permissions Send as activities in shared mailboxes Shared mailbox activities Inactive shared
[KB] How do I identify details about emails that were not delivered?
A previous tips and tricks post discussed how you can check on emails that were not delivered in an Exchange on-premises organization. Keeping an eye on email delivery is important for any business. Your organization could be embroiled in a situation where a user claims they never received an important email. To verify this, you, as an IT admin, will be asked to identify emails that were not delivered with a particular time period. Just like in the on-premise servers, identifying undelivered emails
[KB] How do I monitor messages based on their content in my Exchange Online environment?
There are several reasons for which you, as an Exchange admin, need to identify emails with certain words in their content. You need to monitor your users' email content to: Identify the source of a data leak during internal investigations. Detect spam emails. Locate emails with malicious attachments. However, using the native tools to locate emails based on content keywords is no simple task. Solution: Exchange Reporter Plus provides the following three Exchange Online content reports that help
[KB] How do I monitor Exchange Online mailbox sizes?
These days, every organization depends on emails for communication. As an IT admin, you need to monitor Exchange Online mailbox sizes to keep an eye on space consumption and mailboxes reaching their size limits. Depending on the native tools for such varied information would eat into more than half of your average work day. PowerShell can help, but writing scripts can be a bit complex and time-consuming. Solution: Exchange Reporter Plus, a reporting, change auditing, and monitoring solution for
KB] How do I secure my Exchange Online environment?
Organizations which previously had just on-premises Exchange Servers have now adopted hybrid environments. This mix of on-premises and Exchange Online environments, however, doesn't erase any security concerns you may have about Exchange Online. After all, emails are an easy entry point for cyberattacks. While there are native Office 365 reports that help you audit Exchange Online, they're not detailed and easy to understand. To avoid security attacks, you need quick and in-depth insight into
[KB] How much time does it take to audit permission changes?
In an ideal world, every employee in an organization would have access only to their own mailbox and not anyone else's. In reality, however, users other than mailbox owners also have access to other mailboxes. These users could be trusted delegates or rogue users. While the former is benign, the latter could wreak havoc on your network. A rogue user with full access permissions over your CEO's mailbox could result in a lot of negative consequences for your business. To avoid this, you need to be
[KB] How do I keep an eye on room mailbox usage in my organization?
Organizations—especially large or growing businesses—tend to have a lot of meetings to get work done. This increases the need for conference rooms. Scheduling and conducting meetings, however, is no simple task as meeting rooms could already be occupied because of: ●A meeting that's running a little late. ●Unscheduled or impromptu meetings. You need to use PowerShell to get insight on your organization's room mailboxes. This can be time-consuming and pretty complex. Solution: Exchange Reporter
[KB] How do I monitor the status of client connectivity in my organization?
As an IT admin, you need to keep an eye on client connectivity health to avoid potential problems for your end users. The Client access server (CAS) role is important to ensure availability of your mailbox servers. It supports Outlook Web Access (OWA), ActiveSync, POP3, IMAP4, and other components and protocols, making it essential to monitor client connectivity. While PowerShell can be used to monitor connectivity, it increases the time consumed and complexity involved. Solution: Exchange
[KB] How do I monitor email queue health in my organization?
Email delivery takes just a matter of seconds these days. Your Exchange Servers make sure that the delivery time is miniscule for any email. However, when your marketing team runs email campaigns, a huge number of emails are going to be sent. A lot of these emails end up in email queues because of not being delivered. Your service provider could blacklist you, when all you were doing was targeting your customers for a campaign. You need to be vigilant about your email queues to avoid problems with
[KB] How do I monitor DAGs in my organization?
Database Availability Groups (DAGs) help you ensure high availability. Your organization—irrespective of size—needs to have a proper recovery mechanism for its servers. You need to constantly monitor replication health and the status of your database copies to ensure that your end users don't run into problems such as inability to access their mailboxes and mismatches in their mailbox data. Solution: Exchange Reporter Plus' monitoring functionality helps you keep an eye on your server's recovery
[KB] How do I check if all the required Exchange Services have started running?
To ensure Exchange Server health and avoid issues arising for your end users you need to constantly check if all the services required by your organization's Exchange Servers have started running. Using PowerShell to check if all the required services are running, however, is no simple task. Solution: Exchange Reporter Plus helps you check the running status of all the services required by your servers quickly and efficiently through the following methods. 1. Intuitive dashboard Get a quick look
[KB] How do I monitor CPU and memory utilization by servers in my organization?
Monitoring the performance of your Exchange Servers is essential to ensure proper functioning of your Exchange environment. You need to keep an eye on the utilization of CPU and memory by your servers. If CPU and memory usage are high, your end users could run into potential problems such as slow logons and email flow issues. Solution: Exchange Reporter Plus allows you to monitor CPU and memory utilization through its intuitive dashboard and granular reports. The 2 reports in question—CPU Utilization
Exchange mailbox and storage reporting and analysis
Week 3 of ManageEngine's free training -Register now August 9, 2017 2pm PDT The previous 2 workshops of this workshop series involved the auditing and monitoring of your Exchange Servers. This Wednesday, you will learn how to generate granular reports on various storage components in your Exchange environment. Note: This week has no continuation whatsoever with the previous sessions. You can still attend even if you missed the earlier sessions. In this session, you will learn how to: ●Fetch
[KB] How do I identify emails that have been deleted and moved in my organization?
Emails are the primary means of communication in any organization, large or small. It's therefore important to be vigilant about the deletion and movement of emails across folders in mailboxes in your organization. You need to know when someone other than the owner of the mailbox gains access and deletes or moves the messages within it. This is all the more important if the mailbox in question contains business-critical information that shouldn't fall into the hands of the wrong sort. Solution:
[KB] How do I immediately find out when a database is dismounted in my organization?
Exchange databases are the storehouse of all your information. You need to monitor them continuously to avoid any problems that can have huge consequences. One such problem is the dismounting of databases. Unexpected dismounting of databases can deny your end users access to their own mailboxes. This leads to endless calls to your technical support team. You need to be in the know about the databases in your organization and when they get dismounted, so that you don't inconvenience your end users.
Real-time change auditing of mailbox logons, properties, and databases
Calling all Exchange admins! ManageEngine is starting its next workshop series on Exchange administration best practices and how Exchange Reporter Plus can help you. Free training from ManageEngine July 26, 2017 Wednesday | 2pm PDT Register now! The recent bout of security attacks have made admins extra vigilant about continuously auditing their Exchange components. Keeping your Exchange environment secure must be your number 1 priority, and by
[KB] How do I keep track of changes to server configuration?
Your organization may have a number of administrators. While it does help having a huge IT admin team in an organization, there are other problems that could crop up. Troubleshooting becomes difficult as you don't know if one of the other administrators made any particular change, leading to the problem at hand. Documentation is another difficulty that has to be addressed in a multiple administrator environment. Some of the common tasks required of you in an environment with multiple administrators
[KB] How do I keep an eye on server usage in my organization?
You, as an IT admin, need to be proactive about your Exchange servers' performance. You need to be vigilant about server traffic in order to: Identify possible service outages. Discover under- or over-performance of servers. Ensure that all servers are being utilized in your organization. Optimize resources by finding alternative uses for servers not being utilized. Balance server loads, when one server is handling more load than the other(s).While there are several other reasons to monitor server
[KB] How do I identify the unused distribution lists in my organization?
Distribution groups are important for communication in any organization. Over time, some distribution groups tend to become defunct, either due to employees no longer working in your organization, or plain inactivity due to the ending of a particular project. Having these unused distribution groups lying around could lead to stray emails landing in unintended recipient mailboxes. The problem, however, lies in clearing these distribution groups. Clean up can only happen when you're able to identify
[KB] How do I view details about emails sent during non-business hours?
France recently passed the Right to Disconnect law which allows employees to be shut off from their work email after business hours. This law aims to reduce burnout. While it doesn't call for a total shutdown of after work hours emails, it does suggest that companies should provide some personal time to employees after working hours. While the law maybe specific to France, several other companies such as Volkswagen and Daimler have their own email policies that aim to re-establish proper work-life
[KB] How do I keep track of OWA logons?
Outlook Web Access (OWA) has made it so much easier for our employees to access their mailboxes with just an internet connection. While accessibility has improved tremendously with OWA, there are new problems that administrators face. Identify logons based on IP addresses Sometimes, there may be logons from unknown IP addresses. If there are several logon attempts from an unfamiliar IP address, it's a probable sign of malicious activity. You need information about these logons in order to determine
[KB] How do I detect emails that are possible carriers of the Fireball adware?
In recent days, all cyber security analysts have been warning us about the newest threat to security, an adware that has been named Fireball. This adware is a browser hijacker--it has the capability to take control of your browsers, track your web usage, and wreak havoc in many other ways. It makes use of tracking pixels to get victims' personal information. How does it get into my system? Fireball is bundled with other legitimate software the victim has already agreed to download. It appears as
[KB] How to identify unused Exchange mailboxes?
Administrators routinely identify all the unused and inactive mailboxes in their organization. The two main scenarios where you would be asked to discover inactive mailboxes are as follows: Storage issues: You may be asked to discover all the inactive mailboxes for space optimization. Licensing: Licenses do not exactly come cheap. In order to cut costs, your organization may launch an audit to see if any dormant mailboxes are using licenses that could be better used elsewhere. Solution: Exchange
[KB] How do I ensure efficient capacity and migration planning?
You need to constantly monitor the storage components such as mailboxes, public folders, databases, servers, and more in your organization. This comes in handy during capacity and migration planning. It also helps ensure efficient resource management. For e.g., you do not need more servers than absolutely necessary in order to host all the mailboxes in your organization. Track the free and used server space to ensure that company resources are not being wasted. Exchange Reporter Plus helps you keep
[KB] How to check on emails that were not delivered in your organization?
In organizations, it occasionally becomes necessary to find out details about all emails that were not delivered to their intended recipients. This need occurs based on the line of work, as explained below. Finance: A patron could be claiming they did not receive their financial statement as an email. When customers bring this up as a reason for not paying their dues, you need to verify if the email was delivered or not. Education: Course schedules and exam time tables could be emailed to students,
[KB] How do I identify users communicating with external email domains?
All organizations have plans and policies in place about internet usage. After all, these policies ensure that an additional layer of security exists over critical business information, and help keep a check on the type of data that gets in and out of the organization. You, as an administrator, need to monitor traffic within your organization to avoid possible data loss. One common policy organizations have is about misuse of office resources. You may need to: Discover users who are communicating with external email domains the most: There are chances
[KB] How to keep an eye on mailbox traffic?
Administrators need to be vigilant about mailbox traffic for reasons including the following: Identifying spamming activity: Sometimes, an abnormal number of emails may be sent to or received from users. This could be an indication of spamming activity and needs to be checked immediately. Balancing server load: Admins need to keep an eye on server loads. One server may be handling more load than the others, which leads to problems such as email delays, slow logons, and other performance issues. Analyzing
[KB] How to adhere to email response SLAs?
Problem:Your organization may have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) about email response and it is highly necessary for your customer-facing teams to stick to it. Customer service executives now have to respond to customers in a prompt manner in order to adhere to this SLA. For this reason, managers and administrators try to be extra vigilant about the response time of mailbox users. However, using the native tools to check response time is a daunting task. Solution: Adhering to email response SLAs can be done using the Email Response Time report. This report
[KB] Locate emails in your organization's mailboxes based on keywords in their content.
Problem Administrators are occasionally asked to locate messages that were exchanged in their organization containing certain keywords. You may be asked to do so to: Find out which employees in your organization are receiving malicious messages. Identify offenders as part of an ongoing internal investigation about a data leak in your organization. Follow organizational policies about attaching media files in emails. Adhere to compliance mandates such as HIPAA and PCI DSS. Solution: Exchange Reporter
[KB]Take back control over your Exchange server and Exchange Online mailboxes.
Problem: All businesses, small or large, use emails for communication. Messages sometimes accumulate in mailboxes due to using emails as the primary means of communication. This causes several problems. Your server storage usage becomes off the charts. Mailboxes could reach their storage limits and prevent sending or receiving of emails. The second scenario is especially troublesome if it involves the top brass of your organization; you don't want them to miss out on an important email. Solution: