Why are my Exchange backups so slow?

One of my day jobs has me managing a large hybrid Exchange 2010 organization, that currently hosts almost 10TB of mailbox databases on SATA drives. As it has grown to this size, full database backups have started to exceed 2 days to complete. I've been scratching my head trying to figure out what I can do to speed it up, after all Microsoft recommends using SATA right?

What they don't tell you is that performance improvements in Exchange 2010 come at the expense of larger and slower backups. This is well explained here. The Exchange team does skirt around the issue on their blog by saying, use lagged copies or System Center DPM express backups, but they really should be more transparent on this.

So if you're planning to use traditional daily backups with your preferred 3rd party backup vendor, you may want to rethink using slower SATA storage for Exchange deployments with larger databases.

Office 365 and Yammer SSO

Some time ago Microsoft announced that Yammer integration will ultimately replace the news feed section in SharePoint. (If you haven't seen Yammer think Facebook for the office) Before this can happen the Yammer service needs to authenticate with your Office 365 credentials, or the user ends up having to sign in every time they click the Yammer tab. Today I discovered that Yammer publishes their progress on features like this on a release page found here.

They did promise single login integration with Office 365 feature in the fall, but obviously missed that deadline. They are however claiming 80% complete, so hopefully we'll see this soon.

SkyDrive Pro client for Windows is now free!

The SkyDrive Pro client is now freely available to all users, even without a Microsoft Office license. This gives a dropbox like experience to Office 365 users with their SharePoint document libraries.

See info and download here.
http://blogs.office.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2013/05/21/skydrive-pro-client-for-windows-now-available.aspx

Skydrive pro 7GB limit

Office 365 boasts a new feature titled Skydrive pro. It's really just Sharepoint workspace libraries re-branded and modified but it is more user friendly, and somewhat resembles Dropbox. One catch is users are given a 7GB limit on their individual Skydrives which cannot be increased, so a document is provided to offer workarounds. This might also be a good reason to keep those file servers going at your on-premise locations.

http://community.office365.com/en-us/blogs/office_365_technical_blog/archive/2013/02/25/skydrive-pro-library-limits-and-workarounds.aspx

Office 365 (wave 15) begins today

Starting today, new users of Office 365 will get the new Exchange/Lync/Sharepoint 2013 components in their tenants. It will take a few months for existing customer tenants to be upgraded.

You can already see that they have updated the sign-in page.

GAL segmentation coming to Office 365

The ability to provide separate GAL views to users in Exchange Online tenants will be available in Wave 15 of Office 365!

Why is this a big deal?
This means that hosting different groups of users in a single tenant, however keeping them separated is possible. Let's say for example you have single organization but 2 departments that operate independently from each other. In this scenario, you may not want them to see each other in the GAL. With the new address book policies feature you can maintain this segmentation without needing to create a separate Office 365 tenant for each department.

See the ExchangeTeamBlog for more details.

Import PST's in O365 (New PST capture tool from Microsoft)

Ever have a need to import PST files in to Exchange Online and discovered that the New-MailboxImportRequest cmdlet is not an option like it is in Exchange On-Premise? This is because you cannot access file shares from the cloud, so the cmdlet is useless in Exchange Online. The good news is the Exchange team has released  an updated version of the PST capture tool. With it, you can do batch or single files uploads of PST files into Exchange Online mailboxes.

See the Exchange team blog for the download, details and documentation.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2013/02/22/time-to-go-pst-hunting-with-the-new-pst-capture-2-0.aspx