I’ve been spending quite a bit of time refreshing my technical knowledge of Microsoft Exchange recently and, aside from the detail of how the product works, I came across a couple of little nuggets that could be useful for admins working with the product.

Force a connection to the Exchange 2013 Admin Center (EAC)

If your organisation is has a combination of Exchange 2013 and previous releases (2007/2010) and your mailbox is on an older version of Exchange then accessing https://servername/ecp will result in the CAS proxying your connection to the mailbox role on a legacy server. Exchange 2007 users will be presented with an error, whilst those who have their mailbox on Exchange 2010 will see the old (yellow) Exchange Control Panel (ECP) rather than the new (blue) Exchange Admin Center (EAC).  To force a connection to an Exchange 2013 server and access the EAC, add ?ExchClientVer=15 to the URI.

Change the view in Outlook Web App (OWA)

Outlook Web App (OWA) will try to detect the device that you’re using and format the display to match; however this can be over-ridden with a few additions to the URL:

• ?layout=desktop is the standard 3 pane view.
• ?layout=twide can be used to force into Touch Wide (2 pane mode).
• ?layout=tnarrow will select Touch Narrow (single pane).