14 DAY TRIAL // With the launch of the latest version of the Microsoft Exchange Remote Connectivity analyzer, the software giant has swapped the old label for a new one, Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer. The rebranding of the tool was necessary in order to reflect the expansion of support beyond Exchange.
Nicole Allen, Developer Exchange Server Analyzer Tools stressed that with version 1.3 the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer is designed to play nice with Office 365, the recently released Cloud productivity suite from the Redmond giant.
“The future direction for this tool is to incorporate more products as we have done with Office 365. Thus dropping "Exchange" from the name made sense. There are still lots of strings where you'll see ExRCA or Exchange; we're cleaning these up in a future release,” Allen explains.
Customers already familiar with the old Microsoft Exchange Remote Connectivity analyzer will still be able to leverage all of the tool’s standard set of connectivity tests, but at the same time, the new Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer now sports Office 365 tab and a Single Sign-On tests, as well.
Allen also enumerated some of the new and changed features of Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer 1.3:
“• Tabbed user-interface to support multiple products and Office 365.
• Office 365 Single sign-on validation. This test allows you to validate identity federated scenarios with Office 365. Specifically, this new test targets the "Basic Authentication" federated scenario where a client sends credentials to Office 365 which in turn validates them against the on-premises ADFS server.
• Fixed an issue where ExRCA wouldn't validate certain top-level domains such as .travel and .museum.
• Added code so if the Enter key is pressed in the wizard, the default action is "next" instead of "previous". Previously, this didn't work for browsers other than IE.
• Better cross-browser support, fully supporting IE8-IE9 standards mode as well as other major browsers.”