About Michel de Rooij

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.

Why Exchange Admins should learn PowerShell

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Michel de Rooij

As some of you may or may not be aware of, recently I have joined the ranks of Exchange and The UC Architects fellows Michael van Horenbeeck and Steve Goodman and started writing for the Exchange section at TechTarget.

The first two articles are a call to action for Exchange admins to start working on their PowerShell skills if they have not already done so. Learning can take the more academic approach, starting from scratch and learning the basics topic by topic, or a more practical one by reading and getting to understand existing scripts which may suit the more time-constrained admin.

Read the full articles here and the follow-up article here.

If you got topic suggestions, use the contact form or send me an e-mail.

MEC Recordings on Channel9

Posted on April 28, 2014 by Michel de Rooij

A small heads-up as not everyone seems to be aware, but the recordings of the Microsoft Exchange Conference 2014 keynote and breakout sessions are up on Channel 9. A total of 74 recordings have been made available to public and they can be accessed here.

You can also download all presentation videos and – where available – slide decks for offline viewing using a script by Exchange fellow Peter Schmidt’s. The script is available here.

Exchange MVPs around the World (Updated)

Posted on April 25, 2014 by Michel de Rooij

After checking the heat map of current Lync MVPs by Fabrizio Voipe, I was curious about the current geographical distribution of the Exchange MVPs. MVP awards are given to individuals by Microsoft in recognition of their contributions to the technical community.

There are little public statistics available, so I had to resort to information from the MVP site. Note that MVPs may decide not to be visible here, but looking at why people get an MVP award, I figured going in hiding isn’t one of their characteristics, thus expecting the number of non-listed MVPs to be negligible.

A little playing around with Excel and Power Map gave me the following geographical map. Not surprisingly, the major suppliers of Exchange MVPs are the United States and China.

For reference, I have included the mapped numbers in the table below. Please let me know if you want to share corrections or have any updates.

Country	Number	Country	Number	Country	Number
Australia	3	Indonesia	1	South Africa	1
Belgium	1	Ireland	1	Sri Lanka	1
Bermuda	1	Israel	1	Sweden	3
Brazil	2	Italy	2	Switzerland	1
Canada	6	Japan	1	Taiwan	2
Chile	1	Korea	3	Thailand	1
China	12	Macedonia	1	Netherlands	2
Czech Republic	1	Poland	2	Turkey	1
Denmark	1	Portugal	1	United Arab Emirates	2
France	3	Qatar	1	United Kingdom	5
Germany	5	Russia	1	United States	18
Greece	1	Singapore	1	Vietnam	1
India	2	Slovenia	1
TOTAL					97

Update (26apr): Corrected 1 entry (UK -> Ireland)

The UC Architects Podcast Ep37

Posted on April 25, 2014 by Michel de Rooij

We’re glad to announce the availability of episode 37 of The UC Architects podcast.

This episode is hosted by Steve Goodman, who is joined by Michael van Horenbeeck, John Cook, Ståle Hansen and Michel de Rooij. Editing was done by Andrew Price.

Min topics discussed in this episode are:

MEC wrap-up
Azure AD sync preview
IIS Log File cleanup
Heartbleed and HLBs
Exchange Online Protection enhancements
Digicert Heartbleed vulnerability scan and detection
Using Lync like a Lync pro
Monitoring peak call capacity
SIPFED address change
Windows Phone 8.1
Lync for Mac 2011 14.0.7 hotfix
BYOD in a WiFi infrastructure
Lync April 2014 Cumulative Update
Office of iPad
eNow’s Hybrid monitoring product.

More information on the podcast including references and a link to download the podcast here or you can subscribe to the podcasts using iTunes, Zune or use the RSS feed.

About
The UC Architects is a bi-weekly community podcast by people with a passion for Unified Communications; our main focus is on Exchange, Lync or related subjects.

The UC Architects Podcast Ep36

Posted on April 18, 2014 by Michel de Rooij

We’re glad to announce the availability of episode 36 of The UC Architects podcast, recorded live at the Microsoft Exchange Conference 2014 in Austin, Texas.

This episode is hosted by Michael Van Horenbeeck who is joined by Dave Stork, John Cook, Paul Cunningham, Serkan Varoglu and Michel de Rooij. Special guests are Greg Taylor, Brian Day and Jeff Guillet. Editing was done by Andrew Price.

Topic discussed in this episode are taken from sessions held at the Microsoft Exchange Conference as well as well as input from the audience. They are:

Favorite moments at MEC
Yammer
Exchange and Office social interaction features
OWA for Android
OneDrive for Business and Exchange
Sizing Guidance
Multi-Factor Authentication
On-premises vs. Hybrid vs. Cloud
Managed Availability
NFS Support
Questions from the audience

We are extremely proud the session made it to the Top 15 of the sessions held at MEC.

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More information on the podcast including references and a link to download the podcast here or you can subscribe to the podcasts using iTunes, Zune or use the RSS feed.

About
The UC Architects is a bi-weekly community podcast by people with a passion for Unified Communications; our main focus is on Exchange, Lync or related subjects.