Exchange 2013 Sp1

With the release of Exchange 2013 SP1 there are some bug fixes and features that have been longed for a long time. I’ll mention a couple of things that i have been waiting for. First of all the S/MIME support for OWA, this is something that really missed since i used it a lot before they took it away. It has some limitations that you might need to know about. It only support IE9 or later. If you use another browser then, sorry you can’t use this, at least not yet. I’ve heard talks about supporting other browsers later down the road but for now you’re stuck with using IE if you want to use this feature.

One of the other changes that i really like is the change for Outlook Anywhere. I never like the idea of running RCP/HTTP and now finally they’ve change it so that you can use MAPI/HTTP which in my opinion is much better. Again some limitations to look out for. You need to update your Office to 2013 sp1 to be able to run MAPI/HTTP also make sure all of your Exchange server are 2013 SP1 before enabling MAPI/HTTP

I enabled the MAPI/HTTP  the other day and it is easily done and pretty transparent for the users. The shot version is that you need to configure the Internal and External URL.

Set-MapiVirtualDirectory -Identity “exch01\mapi (Default Web Site)” -internalUrl https://mapi.gsec.se/mapi -IISAuthenticationMethods NTLM,Negotiate

And then you just need to enable it

Set-OrganizationConfig -MapiHttpEnabled $true

If your client are using Office 2013 sp1 they will pop a message after a while that the administrator has made changes and that outlook need to be restarted.  If you don’t get the popup directly and see that the client is still using RPC/HTTP then just restart and also make sure that the popup hasn’t gone in the background.

More information about the bugfixes for Sp1 is found here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2926248/en-us

Also here is a post from the Exchange team about the new features included in SP1 http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2013/11/20/exchange-server-2013-service-pack-1-coming-in-early-2014.aspx