Microsoft Office does not respect "VMware" word. Bug or feature?

I'm tired to correct spelling the "VMware" word after autocorrection (to "Vmware") in some Office apps, e.g. while preparation of PowerPoint presentation regarding virtual environment.

Waiting for "Zoom and stick" feature in Microsoft Outlook 2016 (MSI)

Many times users asked me about a feature of saving Zoom in the email preview in Outlook. Instead of paid plugins and macros, I wanted a built-in option.

As it turned out that this wanted a hundred of people from the Globe.

30.11.2018 appeared information that the feature "Zoom and stick" was finally added to Outlook 2016.

But for 2,5 years (2018 - 2021) the feature doesn't yet appeared in my Microsoft Office Pro Plus 2016.

And now I want to figure it out.

Brief analysis of iCal structure

In my work, I occasionally have to deal with various issues with meeting invitations (encoding troubles, wrong time zone, etc.), so I wanted to understand the structure of iCal (iCalendar).

This is not a complete overview of iCalendar features (RFC2445, RFC2446 and RFC2447). You can get acquainted with the most complete functional overview on the following sites: https://www.w3.org/2000/01/foo & https://www.kanzaki.com/docs/ical/

The analysis involved 8 different iCal emails from Microsoft Exchange 2016 + Microsoft Outlook 2016 environment. Microsoft Exchange adds additional "X-MICROSOFT" and "X-MS-OLK" headers to increase Microsoft Outlook functionality. Fully description you can find there.

In the image below, I tried to clearly visualize links between the iCal file parameters and Outlook interface.

Powershell script: Outlook To Exchange connection test

Outlook can lose connection with Exchange for various reasons and even if it happened once, it still can impact the business. To help administrators identify the core of an issue I wrote this Powershell script.
The script is designed for Outlook 2013-2019 clients that connected to Exchange 2016-2019 by "MAPI over HTTP" protocol.
Before start the script change two variables:
$Exchange = "exchange.test.local"
$SMTPDomain = "test.local"
The result is presented as an HTML page.

Outlook 2013/2016: How Microsoft Outlook (MAPI over HTTP) works with network delays

A long time ago I read an article of Neil Johnson on TechNet about research on the effects of network latency and different Outlook operating modes (Online, RPC/HTTP, Cached).
Since then, it took 8 years, changed several generations of server client applications and most important is that Exchange now use newest "MAPI over HTTP" protocol. I propose to do several tests to check what has changed during this time.

As a generator of interference on the network, I used a simple, but very functional tool - http://jagt.github.io/clumsy/.

Exchange: How to reliably determine that a user is logged into mailbox?

Sometimes (for example while migration users are from another email system) there is a need for reliable determination that a user is logged into the mailbox (using Outlook or OWA).

The simplest answer is mailbox's lastlogontime (Get-MailboxStatistics). But it turnes out to be not quite true.
Attention! The attribute "LastLogonTime" of user's mailbox filled and updated when another user opens user's calendar.

Finally, I found 4 criterias which help to reliably determine that a user is logged into the mailbox.

1. "lastlogontime" (Get-MailboxStatistics) - necessary but not sufficient attribute.
2. "Languages" (Get-Mailbox) - this attribute filled when user entered into OWA and sometimes filled when entered into Outlook.
3. "WorkingHoursTimeZone" (Get-MailboxCalendarConfiguration) - this attribute filled when user entered into OWA and sometimes filled when entered into Outlook. Deffault value - "Pacific Standard Time", so you can use it only if users are in a different time zone.
4. "Quick Step Settings" (Get-MailboxFolderStatistics) - this is not an attribute, it is a checking for the presence of a folder "Quick Step Settings" in the mailbox, because it appears only when you open/configure Outlook.

Microsoft Office: How to fix double slash autocorrection in links

Some applications (web servers, etc.) support hyperlinks with double-slash (//) after specifying the protocol (http://, ftp://, etc.).
IBM Lotus Domino is such an application. A link "notes://server/1111111111//2222222222/" is correct.

During the migration from the IBM Lotus Domino mail system to Microsoft Exchange, it turned out that all Microsoft Office applications (Outlook in particular) correct links (even in incoming emails) with two empty slashes "//" for a single slash "/" automatically. We failed to find a solution in the Internet to change this behavior.