HVE and ECS Compete for Different Customers of Microsoft Cloud Email Services

I need to apologize to some of the subscribers to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been using you as the targets for emails sent using Exchange Online High-Volume Email (HVE) and the Azure Email Communication Service (ECS).

Both solutions focus on sending large quantities of email. HVE is more internal-focused but can handle external messages. HVE is part of Exchange Online and intended to help customers move off on-premises servers to handle traffic generated by multi-functional devices and applications. ECS is a standalone offering that can handle large volumes of external email such as newsletters, subject to thresholds set by Microsoft. According to Microsoft, ECS is very popular and handles large amounts of messages daily.

HVE is in preview and is free to use today. When it’s generally available, HVE will likely cost for some traffic. ECS is already a pay-as-you-go service that must be funded by an Azure subscription.

Seeking Test Email Targets for Microsoft Cloud Email Services

When setting out to test the effectiveness of emailing solutions, you need large numbers of target recipients. Little is to be learned by sending a couple of messages to a few internal recipients. To run a better trial, I decided to use HVE and ECS to send reminder messages to subscribers of the 2024 edition of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to ask if they wanted to take advantage of an offer to extend their subscription. Sending email to ask people to buy something or take out a subscription seemed like a pretty good scenario to test the useability of HVE and ECS.

Comparing HVE and ECS

Overall, HVE is easier to use. Less setup is required, and the PowerShell used to generate and submit messages is based on the old (deprecated) Send-MailMessage cmdlet. No shortage of articles can be found on the internet to tell you how to use Send-MailMessage. Because of the need to provide an email service for apps and devices, HVE uses a restricted form of basic authentication with the SMTP AUTH protocol. Support for modern authentication is coming, but using basic authentication for internal messages will make the switchover to HVE much easier.

HVE reporting (Figure 1) is basic. More comprehensive reporting is built into ECS. In both cases, feedback from sent messages is minimal, so figuring out what happened to messages is tough. ECS can tell you the number of messages it failed to send but HVE is silent on this point. However, HVE is in preview and Microsoft says that they will deliver better reporting when the solution is generally available.

The ECS setup is more complicated if you’re unaccustomed to dealing with Azure resources and billing. ECS uses an Entra ID app for authentication and to prove that an app (like a PowerShell script) has the right to submit messages to the service. Creating and submitting messages to ECS is similar to using Graph-based cmdlets like Send-MgUserMail. Some differences exist because a different API is used, but the basics of building a hash table of message parts and converting it to JSON before sending won’t be unfamiliar.

Throttling and thresholds were the biggest issue I encountered with both ECS and HVE. It took a little while to find where limits applied in practice and to investigate ways around them. Microsoft has a documented process for applying for higher limits for ECS but my ability to navigate the process failed and I never managed to achieve a higher threshold. Microsoft is careful with HVE while it is in preview and some limitations (like the 2,000 external recipients per tenant daily) are hardcoded and won’t change until the software reaches general availability.

Testing of both Microsoft Cloud Email Services Proves Valuable

As always, the opportunity to conduct realistic tests over a sustained period proved invaluable in gaining an understanding about how HVE and ECS work. In my case, sending thousands of reminder messages to Office 365 for IT Pros subscribers certainly taught me a lot. You can read more about my experiences in articles covering HVE and ECS in-depth. Other articles about HVE and ECS are available on the internet, but most are content to send just a few test messages and then declare success. That’s no way to exercise a high volume email system.

If you’re interested in one of these services, my advice is to spin up both and test using a sample of messages that your organization needs to send. Exchange Online tenants will, I think, select HVE, but I can see why ECS has its attractions especially if the focus is on sending large quantities of email to external recipients. Beauty is in the eye of the mail sender.

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First In-Person Event Since 2019

The last in-person event I spoke at was the European SharePoint Conference in Prague in December 2019. Much has happened since, but as society gradually recovers from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, conferences are beginning to cast off the constraints imposed by having to run as virtual gatherings. Don’t get me wrong. Virtual conferences filled a gap while travel was impossible or restricted, but the energy, vitality, and enthusiasm present when gathering to listen to a series of sessions delivered by Microsoft Teams or Zoom is very different to an in-person event.

All of which means that I am looking forward to being in Dusseldorf, Germany for the European Collaboration Summit (ECS) starting on November 29. ECS runs alongside its sister event, the European Cloud Summit. Both events are being run under strict Covid-19 protocols to protect all those involved.

ECS is a community event which isn’t run purely on a commercial basis (costs must be covered, so the event is sponsored). The result is that the ECS vibe is quite different. Because it’s a community event, ECS sessions deliver more independent and diverse thought about how technology works and how to extract value from deployments. Compared to the blandness of a Microsoft event like Ignite, the level of marketing hyperbole, overpromising, and under delivery is far less.

Although I enjoy seeing the range of expertise available in most ECS sessions, I consider it regrettable that all the ECS keynote sessions feature Microsoft employees. This is no criticism of the Microsoft speakers, most of whom I know well. Instead, it’s a desire for conferences to surface diverse leadership opinions instead of automatically assuming that the only source of inspiration and knowledge comes from those with a Microsoft badge. There’s surely some independent thinking available in the Microsoft collaboration community suitable for a keynote to replace and counterbalance the sameness of the messages delivered by Microsoft at conferences around the globe. Remember, if we all believed the marketing bluster received from Microsoft in the past, everyone would be communicating by Yammer instead of using email and Teams.

My Schedule

ECS begins with a day of workshops on Monday with sessions delivered over the following two days. I’ll cover All About Microsoft 365 Sensitivity Labels at 14:45 on Tuesday, 30 November in Room 1 (Aurum room) while fellow Office 365 for IT Pros author and MVP Paul Robichaux will present on Email is the Easy Part: 5 Pitfalls to Avoid in Tenant-to-Tenant Migrations at 15:00 on Wednesday, 1 December at the Teams Stage.

I’ve covered the development of sensitivity labels and their spreading influence within Microsoft 365 since the debut of the technology. Recent articles include:

• How Sensitivity Labels can control the external sharing capability for SharePoint Online Sites.
• How to Decrypt SharePoint Online Documents using PowerShell and the Graph API
• How to use Sensitivity Labels to protect Teams meeting recordings.
• Synchronizing Sensitivity Labels from Microsoft 365 Groups to Update SharePoint Online Sites.
• How to Report the Audit Events Generated by Sensitivity Labels.
• Power BI Support for Sensitivity Labels.
• Using Advanced Settings for Sensitivity Labels with Outlook.
• How to Monitor Changes in the Sensitivity Labels Applied to Sites, Teams, and Groups.

Hopefully, I will have some new information to share with attendees. That’s the plan, but like most plans, it will go out the window once the first slide hits the screen. We’ll see how things evolve based on audience participation, questions, and whatever comes into my head at the time.

Here’s a downloadable copy of my presentation (not protected by a sensitivity label)

Regretfully, I won’t be at ECS on Wednesday. Other commitments bring me back to Dublin on Wednesday morning. However, there’s a bunch of good sessions scheduled for day 2 of ECS, so I suspect I’ll be one of the few leaving early.

Learn about protecting Office 365 content by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Use our experience to understand what’s importance and how best to protect your tenant. We have a full chapter explaining all you need to know about Information protection.

The European Collaboration Summit 2019 takes place in Wiesbaden, Germany on May 27-29.

The event is unique in that it is user-organized, so attending the three days is very much cheaper than signing up for an event organized by companies, like Microsoft Ignite or IT/DEV Connections.

Great Value

Right now, you can buy a ticket for EUR160. If you leave it until May 2019, the same ticket will cost EUR350. The reason for the pricing difference is that the conference organizers try to have people sign up as quickly as possible so that they know what budget they have to play with, which makes sense when you don’t have the resources of a company backing the conference.

I attended and spoke at this year’s event and believe that ECS offers people real value, even if you have to pay full price because your company can’t make travel plans so far in advance. Where else will you get to attend a 3-day technology conference for so little?

The Need for Better Office 365 Coverage

ECS comes from a background of events organized by the SharePoint community and the agenda is still somewhat dominated by SharePoint, as are the technology exhibition and sponsors who support ECS. It would be nice to see a more balanced Office 365 agenda at the 2019 event that represents the full spectrum of technology that exists within and around Office 365, including Azure Active Directory and Microsoft 365.

In saying this, I understand that the event organizers are restricted by the session proposals they receive from speakers. However, they can take action to encourage submission from across the Office 365 technical community to build out a more balanced and comprehensive agenda.

Of course, the Office 365 for IT Pros team will try and help to expand the agenda… if our sessions are accepted. For the record, you can meet us at the UK Evolve conference on September 10 and at Microsoft Ignite from September 24-28.

Not Unusual for Conferences

ECS is not unusual in this respect. All conferences have histories and preferences that influence their session and speaker selection. I see other conferences proclaim that they cover Office 365 only to discover that the coverage is neither broad nor deep. Putting Office 365 on a slide and then focusing on a single aspect of a huge multi-dimensional cloud service was possibly acceptable in the early days of Office 365, when the only things that you could talk about were Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. It’s definitely unacceptable today.

Let’s hope that ECS 2019 has a great agenda and sets new records for user-driven Office 365 conferences. Knowing the folks involved in the organizing committee, I think they’ll do just that.

Of course, Office 365 for IT Pros takes a holistic view of the complete service. At least, we think we do.