Michel de Rooij, with over 25 years of mixed consulting and automation experience with Exchange and related technologies, is a consultant for Rapid Circle. He assists organizations in their journey to and using Microsoft 365, primarily focusing on Exchange and associated technologies and automating processes using PowerShell or Graph. Michel's authorship of several Exchange books and role in the Office 365 for IT Pros author team are a testament to his knowledge. Besides writing for Practical365.com, he maintains a blog on eightwone.com with supporting scripts on GitHub. Michel has been a Microsoft MVP since 2013.
Happy new year to all my dear readers and followers. And what a crazy year 2020 has been, where the pandemic forced the hand of those delaying digital transformation. The uptake of work from home and supporting technologies and adoption was phenomenal, and professionally it has been an extremely busy year. As you can spend your time only once, the year again proved to be a challenge for those busy working on customer projects while tending to the community as well. In the end, it is all about finding a balance, especially if you are working from home and the rest of the household is as well. And then there’s this cat.
That said, I thought it would be nice to kick 2021 off with reinstating the annual report. I’d like to share with you some of blog’s statistics of 2020, the blog’s 10th year running. The statistics come directly from the site and without additional observations, apart from that for some reason looking things up related to Exchange 2010 still remains to be very popular.
General 2020 Stats
Number of views: 300,370 (2,811,923 all-time)
Unique visitors: 129,905 (1,457,892 all-time)
Number of posts: 20 (629 total)
Followers: 450
Busiest day: November 18th (3,496 views – Teams Custom Background referrals)
Apart from the Versions, Builds and Dates, Schema Versions and Toolkit pages, the newly introduced Teams Custom Backgrounds page stood out this year with 13,117 in just a few months. When it comes to blogs published in 2020, the most viewed posts are:
Update: Per request, added SharePoint and OneDrive, and did some manual corrections.
A really short post on a Ugly Sweater background with Exchange, Teams and Outlook theme to use during those conference calls end of December. Enjoy!
Like it or not, leave feedback in the comments. Also, suggestions are welcomed. In case you are not aware, I keep a set of custom background for you to enjoy here.
The Exchange Team released the quarterly Cumulative Updates for Exchange Server 2019 as well as Exchange 2016. Be advised that Exchange 2016 will receive its final CU in March, 2021.
Links to the updates as well as a description of changes and fixes are described below.
4588297 Attachments can’t be downloaded or previewed from Outlook Web App
4583531 Design change about inline images will be forced to download but not open in a new tab of OWA in Exchange Server 2019
4583532 ELC MRM archiving fails due to DomainName in AuthServer in Exchange Server 2019
4583533 Exchange Server 2019 installation fails with error “The user has insufficient access rights”
4583534 Event ID 65535 System.Runtime.Serialization errors in Application log in Exchange Server 2019
4583535 New-Moverequest, Resume-Moverequest, and Remove-Moverequest not logged in Audit logs in Exchange Server 2019
4583536 Set-MailboxFolderPermission is included in Mail Recipient Creation in Exchange Server 2019
4583537 Update Korean word breaker in Exchange Server 2019
4583538 Microsoft Teams REST calls exceed the default value of maxQueryStringLength in Exchange Server 2019
4583539 Non-breaking space is visible in message body in Outlook in Exchange Server 2019
4583542 Server assisted search in Outlook doesn’t return more than 175 items in Exchange Server 2019
4583544 Lots of LDAP requests for FE MAPI w3wp lead to DDoS on DCs in Exchange Server 2019
4583545 Make DomainName in Authserver a multivalued parameter in Exchange Server 2019
4593465 Description of the security update for Microsoft Exchange Server 2019 and 2016: December 8, 2020
Exchange 2016 CU19 fixes:
4588297 Attachments can’t be downloaded or previewed from Outlook Web App
4583531 Design change about inline images will be forced to download but not open in a new tab of OWA in Exchange Server 2016
4583532 ELC MRM archiving fails due to DomainName in AuthServer in Exchange Server 2016
4583533 Exchange Server 2016 installation fails with error “The user has insufficient access rights”
4583534 Event ID 65535 System.Runtime.Serialization errors in Application log in Exchange Server 2016
4583535 New-Moverequest, Resume-Moverequest, and Remove-Moverequest not logged in Audit logs in Exchange Server 2016
4583536 Set-MailboxFolderPermission is included in Mail Recipient Creation in Exchange Server 2016
4583537 Update Korean word breaker in Exchange Server 2016
4583538 Microsoft Teams REST calls exceed the default value of maxQueryStringLength in Exchange Server 2016
4583539 Non-breaking space is visible in message body in Outlook in Exchange Server 2016
4583545 Make DomainName in Authserver a multivalued parameter in Exchange Server 2016
4593465 Description of the security update for Microsoft Exchange Server 2019 and 2016: December 8, 2020
Notes:
These Cumulative Updates contain schema changes compared to the previous Cumulative Update. This requires you to run /PrepareSchema. Also, Active Directory changes require you to run PrepareAD (which also can perform the schema update, depending permissions). Consult the Exchange schema versions page for object version numbers.
When upgrading from an n-2 or earlier version of Exchange, or an early version of the .NET Framework, consult Upgrade Paths for CU’s & .NET.
Don’t forget to put the Exchange server in maintenance mode prior to updating. Regardless, setup will put the server in server-wide offline mode post-analysis, before making actual changes.
When using Exchange hybrid deployments or Exchange Online Archiving (EOA), you are allowed to trail at most one version (n-1).
If you want to speed up the update process for systems without internet access, you can follow the procedure described here to disable publisher’s certificate revocation checking.
Cumulative Updates can be installed directly; no need to install RTM prior to installing Cumulative Updates.
Once installed, you can’t uninstall a Cumulative Update nor any of the installed Exchange server roles.
The order of installation shouldn’t matter with the “every server is an island” concept, yet recommended is to upgrade internet-facing, non-internet-facing servers first, followed by Edge Transports.
Caution:
As for any update, I recommend to thoroughly test updates in a test environment prior to implementing them in production. When you lack such facilities, hold out a few days and monitor the comments on the original publication or forums for any issues.
In the past, using outdated clients with Microsoft 365 services was a matter of being in an unsupported state with all the risks that go with it. This meant, that things might not work or you could experience reduced functionality. Overall, things usually kept working with a few consequences or glitches here and there.
A change in this stance was announced today per Message Center bulletin MC229143:
To ensure that we meet performance expectations, we are updating the supported versions of Outlook for Windows that can connect to Microsoft 365 services. Effective November 1, 2021, the following versions of Outlook for Windows, as part of Office and Microsoft 365 Apps, will not be able to connect with Office 365 and Microsoft 365 services.
This means, running old unsupported Outlook versions will go from “possible performance and reliability issues” to becoming actively blocked. This block will apply to these versions in the table below; as indicated, these builds were surpassed somewhere in 2017:
While it is true that many customers are stretching the lifetime of their on-premises products beyond their support dates, I’m sure – apart from functionality and management options – performance and reliability is becoming more and more of an issue.
Finally, when this notice concerns you, it means you have not been updating your clients for at least 3 years. So, get planning, as you have around 11 months to update your clients. It also may affect any existing plans of moving to Exchange Online in the future, as getting your client-base in a supported state will become a requirement, and will no longer be a serious recommendation.
Be advised that these security updates are Cumulative Update level specific. You cannot apply the update for Exchange 2016 CU17 to Exchange 2016 CU16. Also, the security update download has the same name for different Cumulative Updates, and I would suggest tagging the file name with the CU level, e.g. Exchange2019-CU6-KB4588741-x64-en.msp.
Also, run the Security Update from an elevated command prompt, to prevent issues during installation. And on a final note, as with any patch or update, I’d recommend to apply this in a acceptance environment first, prior to implementing it in production.
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