Join us Sept 13-14 at the Microsoft Exchange Community (MEC) Technical Airlift

[Guest The_Exchange_Team]

Back in June, we announced the Microsoft Exchange Community (MEC) Virtual Technical Airlift, which will take place NEXT WEEK (Sept 13-14, 2022)!

 

 

 

Registration is open now at https://aka.ms/MECAirlift!

 

 

 

We’re excited to be bringing back our biggest Exchange gathering of the year. And we have a lot of great speakers and great content to share with you. During the live keynote, Perry Clarke and Jared Spataro will be answering questions related to Exchange Online and Exchange Server. Submit your questions now at Microsoft Forms.

 

 

 

The MEC Airlift web site is in the process of being updated, and will have the latest info on the day of the event. The schedule has changed slightly so be sure to check out the final schedule below and get ready to go deep with experts on Exchange.

 

 

 

September 13 Sessions

 

 

 

Session Time (PST)	Title	Description	Speaker(s)
7:05am - 7:50am	Welcome to MEC (Keynote)	This session kicks off MEC with a welcome message from Rajesh Jha and an opening keynote with Perry Clarke and Jared Spataro.	Rajesh Jha; Perry Clarke; Jared Spataro
8:00am - 8:50am	Get Ready for Basic Auth Deprecation in Exchange Online	Once upon a time, back in 2019 we said we would turn off Basic auth in Exchange Online. In 2021, we started doing it. By the start of 2022 we had already disabled it for millions of tenants, but we’re not done yet. This session will give you the inside story on how we are doing it, how it’s going, what we built to help us along the way, where we're going, and for the first time, we will share some details on our progress.	Greg Taylor
Moving from Exchange Web Services to OAuth and the Graph API	This session will detail the planning requirements and key factors to consider as you migrate from Exchange Web Services to OAuth and the Graph API.	Julian Stephan
Intro to Support Troubleshooting tools	The session covers the tools and scripts used by Microsoft Support engineers to collect troubleshooting information when resolving customer cases.	David Paulson; Thomas Meyer: Lukas Sassl
Best Practices for Insider Risk and Communication Compliance in Exchange Online	Exchange is one of the most important communication tools in organizations worldwide. Moreover it´s the foundtion for Microsoft 365 Groups, Microsoft Teams, and the most Compliance features. This session covers the how, what, and why of Insider Risk Management and Communication Compliance and Exchange. Come learn how to use these to tools to be more compliant.	Raphael Köllner
9:00am - 9:50am	Securing Mail Flow in Exchange Online	Email continues to be at the heart of business communications and workflow. Join this session for an update from the Exchange Online Transport team on how we’re improving email security through enabling SMTP DANE with DNSSEC and MTA-STS, what’s been released and what’s still to come!	Ian McDonald; Denis Signorelli
Messaging Security: Deep dive into Exchange Online Protection, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and other Messaging Security Features	Many messaging admins use the pre-configured settings of Exchange Online Protection to protect their users from mailware, viruses, and other threats. This session will show you how to improve your configuration and understand some settings that are not commonly known. We'll talk about the necessary tools and settings so your Exchange Online or Exchange Server environment will have maximum messaging protection.	Siegfried Jagott
Moving your Exchange Web Services Applications and App Registrations to an Application Access Policy Model	This session will detail the planning requirements and key factors to consider as you move your Exchange Web Services applications and app registrations to leverage application access policies.	Julian Stephan
Ask the Experts: Exchange Support Team	Come meet some of team responsible for Exchange Support.	Nasir Ali; Nino Bilic; Mike Brown
10:00am - 10:50am	Microsoft Purview and Exchange	Today, e-mail is still considered an important means of communication, and calendars and tasks are also indispensable. In this session, we look at using Microsoft Purview with Exchange Server and Exchange Online. What are the possibilities and where are the challenges? Step into the world of Microsoft Purview and learn about data lifecycles, classification, encryption and labeling.	Raphael Köllner; Friedhelm Peplowski
Admin's Guide to the Microsoft 365 Substrate	The substrate is an important but poorly understood part of Microsoft 365. It is critical to allowing services like Search to access information drawn from many different sources and workloads. In this session, we discuss the Microsoft 365 Substrate and its relationship to Exchange Online and other workloads. We’ll cover the role of Exchange Online in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, why online mailboxes store different content from their on-premises counterparts, the meaning of digital twins and how services like Search use digital twins, compliance records and their use inside Microsoft 365 compliance solutions, and cloud-only mailboxes for hybrid and guest users.	Tony Redmond
Delighting Exchange Online Admins	With 1.2 million users and constantly increasing, the new Exchange Admin Center (EAC) is the preferred home for Exchange Online admins. This session will share our plans for deprecating the legacy EAC and provide details on the features we have planned for the new EAC. We'll also talk about performance enhancements planned for the new Exchange Online v2 PowerShell module, which has ~800 REST-based cmdlets already available in preview.	Abhishek Kumar; Aditya Mukund
Deep Dive: Increasing mail flow security posture	Although Exchange Online Protection provides protection out of the box, large environments might have a very complex mail flow involving several challenges. Unfortunately, misconfigured mail flow is commonly leveraged by bad actors to deliver phishing and other threats to Exchange Online mailboxes. The session will go through Exchange Transport best practice to help you increase the security of Exchange Online and hybrid mail flow covering from simple to very complex mail routing scenarios.	Denis Signorelli; Arindam Thokder
11:00am - 11:50am	Exchange Online Onboarding Updates	Updates about the upcoming changes in customer facing onboarding features from the Exchange Online Migration team.	Tony Mathew
Securing Microsoft 365 data with service encryption	Microsoft 365 provides different options for securing sensitive data while in transit or at rest. Sensitivity label and storage endpoint support various solutions for encrypting data. This session helps you understand your encryption options for Exchange Online, including use-cases of Outlook Message Encryption, Customer Key, Hold Your Own Key, and Double Key Encryption.	Thomas Stensitzki
Recent and Upcoming Features from the Exchange Transport team	This session features members of the Exchange Online Transport team talking about what they are working on, including features that were recently released and those releasing in the near future.	Sean Stevenson
Ask the Experts: Basic Auth Deprecation in Exchange Online	Come meet some of the team responsible for deprecating Basic Auth in Exchange Online.	Greg Taylor
12:00pm - 12:50pm	Measure and Change User Phishing Behavior in Four Easy Steps	Your end users represent the biggest risk to your organization through one singular behavior: phish clicking. No amount of technology can protect them from exposure. But what you can do is set up a robust program of phish susceptibility measurement and differentiated behavior changing experiences, so your users click less and reduce the risk of a breach. Learn how to do this with the Attack Simulation Training built into Microsoft Defender for Office 365.	Brandon Koeller
Exchange Server Update Dashboard	This session covers a new Software Updates Dashboard for on-premises Exchange servers that is currently in development.	Patrice Melekian; John Kenerson; Akash Malhotra
Cross-tenant user data migration in Exchange Online	Come join us to hear about how Domain Sharing for Email and Cross-tenant mailbox migration features can be used in merger, acquisition and divesture scenarios in Exchange Online.	Georgia Huggins; Estelle Wang; Robert Lowe
Ask the Experts: Exchange Online Transport Team	Come meet some of the team responsible for Transport in Exchange Online.	Sean Stevenson; Ian McDonald; Kevin Shaughnessy
1:00pm - 1:50pm	Exchange Online Support for Continuous Access Evaluation	Attend this session if you’re running Exchange Online and want to understand more about Continuous Access Evaluation.	Nick Elder
Exchange Troubleshooting Tools and How to Use Them	This session provides an overview of existing tools for troubleshooting Exchange Server, Exchange Hybrid and Exchange Online and how they are used.	Thomas Meyer
Combat Business Email Compromise using Powerful Integrated Workflows with Microsoft Defender for Office 365	Business Email Compromise (BEC) is one of the most financially damaging online cybercrimes! It leverages spoofing & impersonation techniques for phishing. Learn about our multi-pronged approach to maximize the efficiency & effectiveness of security teams that keep customers safe against such attacks. We'll demonstrate a multi-stage BEC kill chain, walk through how to detect, investigate, hunt & respond to this attack using Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and Microsoft 365 Defender capabilities.	Urja Gandhi; Tommy Blizard; Daniel Mozes
Ask the Experts: Complex Org Team	Come meet some of the team responsible for cross-tenant user data migration and other complex org features.	Georgia Huggins; Robert Lowe; Estelle Wang, Mandy Ndoro, Anshul Dube
2:00pm - 2:50pm	Microsoft Exchange Tips & Tricks	We're continuing the long tradition of the Exchange Tips & Tricks series. This is the world premiere of the Tips & Tricks session for Exchange Online and Exchange Server, with all new tips, tricks, and other useful information!	Scott Schnoll
Developing Third-Party Applications with Exchange APIs	This session is a deep dive into the challenges associated with developing third-party applications that access Exchange data in Office 365, Hybrid, and on-premises Exchange organizations. Topics to be covered include authentication, discovery, and using Exchange Wev Services and Microsoft Graph to access and search Mailbox data. It also covers how you can enhance email applications by adding interoperability with Microsoft Teams.	Glen Scales
Running Up the Score: Using Secure Score to Quickly Harden Your Exchange & Azure AD Environment	You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and Microsoft has done their part by giving us a broad set of tools for measuring security and compliance implementation quality through the Secure Score and Compliance Score mechanisms. In this session, we’ll talk about what these scores mean, how they’re calculated, and how to use them to quickly find and fix the highest-value security configuration issues you may have in your tenant. Anyone with a Secure Score over 80% is excused from attending this session, but the rest of y’all should plan to attend. You know who you are.	Paul Robichaux

 

 

 

September 14 Sessions

 

 

 

Session Time (PST)	Title	Description	Speaker(s)
7:00am - 7:50am	Troubleshooting Slow Email Delivery in Outlook	Why does Outlook MapiHttp take so long for some calls? Can Exchange logging provide an answer? In this session, we'll talk about how to troubleshoot slow Outlook behavior, starting from the Outlook client, and going through IIS, HttpProxy, BE, Store, AD and disk. We'll focus on what to look for in the logs and what tools can be used.	Nourdin Boulassel
Upgrading to Exchange Server 2019	Are you still on Exchange 2013, Exchange 2016, or even an older, legacy version of Exchange Server? Following the Exchange Server 2019 prerequisites sounds easy. But upgrading to a new Exchange Server version is not only about the technical requirements. Thomas and Sigi will share in this session their experience and address best practices to make the upgrade process as smooth as possible. Learn how to upgrade your On-Premises Exchange environment to the latest Exchange Server version.	Siegfried Jagott; Thomas Stensitzki
Secure Exchange Online with Privileged Identity Management	Exchange Online security should start with securing your tenant using Privileged Identity Management (PIM). Follow the least privilege principle and don't have your administrative accounts granted persistent high permissions. In this session, we'll discuss how a large company implemented PIM for all Exchange admins and how to create custom roles to allow specific Exchange admins to grant admin consent for a subset of OAuth 2.0 permission scopes.	Ingo Gegenwarth
Round Table discussion - Exchange Admin Center and Manageability	This is a roundtable session with members of the Exchange Admin Center and Exchange Manageability Infra team. We'll talk about what we have done in the last 6-12 months, and we would like to get your feedback on this work and work we have planned in the future.	Aditya Mukund; Abhishek Kumar
How to secure Exchange in an interconnected world and a never-ending battle against evil	In a world that is plagued with zero-day vulnerabilities, and the potential of a data breach is constantly lurking around, properly securing your systems should be a top priority. Exchange is no different. In this session, Michael will explore the different elements that contribute to a secure Exchange environment, ranging from base OS hardening, Exchange Server permissions, patching strategies, how and what to properly monitor, and the sense and non-sense of anti-virus and EDR on an Exchange Server. If you're still running one or more servers on-premises, even if you've already migrated to Exchange Online, this session is for you!	Michael Van Horenbeeck
8:00am - 8:50am	Simplify your Exchange Admin Experience	Are you performing several tasks on a regular basis, e.g., daily, weekly, or monthly? Are you in charge of several Exchange on-premises and/or online environments? If you're interested in simplifying your daily admin experience, tweaking your own existing toolset for free, and leveraging LDAP, Microsoft Graph or Azure AD, you should attend this session! You will learn how you can customize your own toolbox based on your own needs.	Ingo Gegenwarth
Exchange Server & Hybrid Feature Review	This session covers some of the new security and manageability capabilities being added to Exchange Server and Exchange Hybrid deployments.	Srividya Varanasi; Mukesh Kumar
Use Outlook Actionable Messages and Take Action in Outlook	Outlook Actionable Messages is a simple and powerful declarative layout format with adaptive cards that offer a lot of flexibility and allow for visually rich cards. Adaptive cards and the fluid framework create a new experience in Outlook and Outlook on the web. In this session you will learn about the different options and capabilities of adaptive cards and how they can enhance your daily routines to speed up business processes. You will also see that the same experience is true for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva.	Martina Grom; Toni Pohl
Exchange Online: Security Inspired by Law	Here in the Czech Republic, there are Cyber Security Laws that instruct some government and critical infrastructure organizations to implement specific e-mail security measures. With the help of Exchange Online, Defender for Office 365, and Microsoft 365, we deploy the needed security requirements and comply with the law. Even if you are not governed by these laws, implementing these security measures is the best practice. Come learn what they are and how to implement them in your organization.	Peter Vlk
End User Security and Exchange Server	In this talk we will look at how you can secure your end users authentication to Exchange Server using Modern Authentication. Given the changes in the business and personal landscape over the past two years you almost certainly have lots of users working remotely or even still working remotely and you might have enabled that quite quickly. We will look at how you can easily turn on a secure authentication service for your on-premises Exchange Servers using Azure AD or, if you have no cloud technology at all in use, how you can do it completely on-premises. We will look at tips and tricks from doing this in large organizations and how you can safely role this out with a minimal impact.	Brian Reid
9:00am - 9:50am	Use Advanced Message Tracking to identify Junk-Mail or Spoofing	Discover the SMTP header as a rich basis to start an investigation into why a message was sent to the Junk-Mail folder or Quarantine. Learn how to use a combination of Message Tracking and Defender Explorer to investigate your messages in depth, so you can decide on appropriate responses in your Exchange Online Protection and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 policies.	Siegfried Jagott
Protecting Mail Flow: A Practical Approach	This session discusses the fundamental issues with SMTP that enable malicious behaviors, such as spoofing. It also discusses the available solutions to mitigate those issues, and how to increase your protection with minimal effort.	Dave Stork
Automate Exchange Online at Scale – Lessons Learned from Large Environments	Enhance the typical management and governance tasks for Exchange Online with PowerShell scripts in a secure and automated way. In this session, we present lessons learned from a large SaaS app implementation and how to manage Exchange Online at scale with Exchange Online PowerShell and the Graph API.	Martina Grom; Toni Pohl
Bringing your Exchange Scripts into the Modern Age	In this session, I will walk you through the challenges of upgrading your existing scripts to use modern authentication and provide guidance on how you can analyze your scripts and make the necessary changes to upgrade them for the modern age.	Michel de Rooij
Round Table discussion - Exchange Server & Hybrid	This is a roundtable session for a discussion between the Exchange Server engineering team and customers. We'll talk about our future plans for Exchange Server and solicit ideas from you for additional features and investments in Exchange Server. Is there something you'd like to see us add or change? Come to this session and let us know!	Srividya Varanasi; Mukesh Kumar
10:00am - 10:50am	Amplify Exchange Online with Power Automate	As an Exchange Online admin, your daily routines can include repetitive and time-consuming processes. With Power Automate, you can automate your processes and save time and money, and best of all, you don't need to have budget to pay a software developer. Power Automate can turn you into a citizen developer with no-code solutions. This session will be a primer to help you understand the basic components of Power Automate and walk you through creating automation for Exchange Online and orchestrating the use of other Microsoft 365 technologies.	Joel Ricketts
Ask the Experts: Exchange Online Admin Team	Come meet some of the team responsible for the Exchange Admin Center, Exchange PowerShell, and Manageability for Exchange Online.	Aditya Mukund; Abhishek Kumar
Ask the Experts: Basic Auth Deprecation in Exchange Online (Repeat)	Come meet some of the team responsible for deprecating Basic Auth in Exchange Online.	Greg Taylor
Ask the Experts: Exchange Server Team	Come meet some of the team responsible for developing Exchange Server.	Srividya Varanasi; Mukesh Kumar
11:00am - 11:50am	Hybrid Identity Management	In this session we will explore how administrators manage hybrid identities between the on-premises Active Directory, Azure Active Directory, and Exchange Online. We will review the synchronization options that are available for implementation and tools available for managing recipient objects.	Timothy McMichael
Customer Key in Exchange Online	With Customer Key in Microsoft 365, customers are in control of the encryption keys for protecting their Data-At-Rest in Microsoft Cloud. Customer Key enables organizations from regulated industries to meet their own regulatory requirement of encrypting data using customer managed keys. Customers now have even more flexibility than ever before. Not only can tenant admins assign data encryption policies to individual Exchange Online mailboxes, but admins can also assign a single policy that encrypts data for all tenant users across multiple workloads.	Christopher Warren
Modernize your Exchange Web Services apps with Microsoft Graph	Many organizations developed custom apps and solutions using Microsoft’s popular Exchange Web Services (EWS) for accessing data as emails, calendar items, contacts and more. EWS is based on SOAP and provides a Managed API interface for developing .NET client applications against Exchange. Today, EWS is superseded by Microsoft Graph. Graph is the new unified REST-endpoint for accessing Microsoft 365 services and the key to the modern Microsoft 365 services. If you have existing solutions based on EWS, now's the time to learn how to use Modern Authentication and how to replace EWS with the new cloud endpoints, and how to use all the new functionalities and benefits. We demonstrate how to upgrade an existing EWS based .NET App to Microsoft Graph and extend it with new features. You learn the keys of using the Microsoft Graph Services, about security and authorization and real-world experiences with the Graph. This is a session for developers and decision makers to see how to develop their Microsoft 365 apps with modern technologies.	Martina Grom; Toni Pohl
Deep Dive into Microsoft Defender for Office 365	Taking a deep look at the comprehensive email security capabilities Microsoft Defender for Office 365 provides on top of Exchange Online. We'll look at a broad set of capabilities from protection and detection to hunting, investigation and response workflows that help your organization achieve better email security posture and incident response readiness.	David Fantham
Master the Graph for Exchange PowerShell	This session will delve into the mystery of using the Microsoft Graph APIs to manage Exchange Online with PowerShell.	Tony Redmond
12:00pm - 12:50pm	Troubleshooting Exchange Server Performance Issues	This session provides insights for troubleshooting Exchange Server performance issues and provides guidance on what data to collect and how to analyze performance issues.	David Paulson
What's new in Outlook Calendar	This session covers new features and improvements we have made in Outlook calendar in the last one year. 1. Compliant Meetings: Make your meetings secure and compliant by applying sensitivity labels 2. GSuite Migrator: Is your organization migrating from GSuite to Microsoft 365? Calendar migration through Google workspace migrator now supports migrating online meeting links. More enhancements are planned to be released this year. 3. Shared Calendars: Are you an IT admin wanting to find out more about the new shared calendars platform? We made improvements to the way shared calendars in Microsoft 365 and rolled it out to delegates.	Mouli Gopalakrishnan; Harini Palaniswamy; Kiran Rajarathna
Ask the Experts: Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Team	Come meet some of the team responsible for deprecating Basic Auth in Exchange Online.	Brandon Koeller; David Fantham
An Insider’s View of Exchange Online Connectivity	Learn about how one of the world's largest SaaS products is delivered with high availability and low latency via globally distributed network infrastructure and discover ways to ensure your on-premises network is configured optimally to ensure world-class end-user experience.	Jeff Mealiffe
1:00pm - 1:50pm	Deep Dive on Hybrid Mail Flow	Dive into the guts of hybrid mail delivery and learn about the inner workings of internal/external mail, the effects of certain configuration on connectors, and best practices for securing hybrid mail.	Hien Nguyen
A Day in Exchange Support Engineering	The session provides insight into what happens when you open a case with Microsoft Support. We'll talk about the lifecycle of cases, including scenarios where cases are escalated within to the product team for resolution.	Nasir Ali; Akash Bhargava
Exchange Server and Teams Integration	This session provides insights, capabilities, and architectural understanding when using Microsoft Teams in combination with Exchange Server mailboxes.	Ralf Leistner
Ask the Experts: What's new in Outlook Calendar	Come meet some of the members of the Outlook Calendar team.	Allison O’Mahony; Shiraz Cupala; Julia Foran; Harini Palaniswamy

 

 

 

Hope to see you at MEC!

 

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