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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
February 7, 2010 at 11:10 AM There are a few scenarios where you may want to use Outlook to access an Exchange Online mailbox but cannot use the Microsoft Online Services Sign-In client. This could be due to installation or operating requirements of the client (some OS versions are unsupported) or maybe users don’t have the required permissions to install software but can at least modify Outlook profiles. Take note that this is a completely unsupported approach and might not even work on some platforms. The intent is for
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
January 5, 2010 at 4:26 PM Although the new Voice Mail Preview feature in Exchange 2010 has (rightfully) grabbed most of the spotlight in terms of neat new features in the product, there is another change in 2010 that is equally as important to anyone who is using an iPhone with Exchange ActiveSync. Previously when my corporate mailbox was on an Exchange 2007 mailbox server I was not able to hear Unified Messaging Voice Mail messages directly on my phone, not at least without dialing into Outlook Voice Access to retrieve
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
December 28, 2009 at 11:35 PMThis is just a quick heads up on the Play-on-Phone feature in Exchange 2010. I was testing several of the new UM features in my lab and one that had me scratching my head was Play-on-Phone which allows a UM user to play messages at their internal extension or any number they choose, providing the dialing rules and policies are in place to allow that. This is a useful feature for connections that might not provide audio functions, such as a kiosk or corporate desktop. This is also useful when pri
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
December 17, 2009 at 10:11 AMFederation is certainly a welcome and interesting feature in Exchange 2010. Being able to share calendar information with other organizations will greatly improve collaboration efforts, especially with shops leveraging both on-premise and Exchange Online services for their information workers. There is a modest amount of information on this feature and how to set it up in the form of TechNet articles, blogs and even a webcast. I read through the available material and webcast set out to try and
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
December 15, 2009 at 4:36 PM
One of the improved features in Exchange 2010 is multi-mailbox searching. While you could do this to a degree in Exchange 2007 it usually required too many rights to delegate it to a compliance officer and the searches had to be run from PowerShell so it was often problematic for the user to perform these searches on their own and too burdensome for the administrator to do it on behalf of the user. The normal Exchange search you’re used to doing is still available in case of other requirements
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
November 21, 2009 at 9:26 AMFollowing on from mass BPOS account activations you can now perform mass password resets with the latest Microsoft Online Services Migration Tools. The PowerShell script below will read in a list of BPOS accounts and reset the password. The two fields you need in the CSV file are the email address and desired password. See the BPOS password requirements before establishing a new password. In the script below you can choose not to force the user to change the password you assign to them by changi
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
November 18, 2009 at 12:39 AM Bulk account activations are now available with the latest Microsoft Online Services Migration Tools. If you're like me performing this in the past was a pain since you had to activate the accounts through the web portal which allowed you to activate only a handful of accounts at a time and collecting the passwords for delivery to the users was excruciating too. We now have a solution! The PowerShell script below will read in a list of BPOS accounts and activate them in BPOS. The fields you ne
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
May 1, 2009 at 1:34 PMI work with ISA 2006 on a on and off basis. Its one of those products we don't necessarily focus on, but we often run into cases where customers need additional security and authentication functionality beyond that which can be (easily) provided in their applications. More often than not, we find that ISA 2006 turns out to be a great solution to meet these kinds of needs. That being said, I’ve come to learn in my conversations with customers that there is a general lack of knowledge of the cap
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
April 25, 2009 at 2:31 PM
The next release of Exchange will include e-mail moderation, whereby you can "ask" for approval to send messages to certain individuals or domains. I think this is pretty neat and beneficial for firms looking to apply compliance controls or build ethical firewalls to avoid any potential legal issues.
As in my earlier blog on e-mail disclaimers we're back again using Hub Transport rules to achieve this and once again, it's really easy to set this up. Probably the more difficult as
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
April 25, 2009 at 2:01 PM
Now that the Exchange 2010 Beta is here I thought I'd take a closer look into some of the new features. While the list of proposed improvements is vast and sorely needed, there are a few little ones that most will appreciate, like being able to add AD attributes to disclaimer messages. I know, it's not earth-shattering, but it's one of the many improvements that you might appreciate now or in the future. Some customers have had to purchase third party products to achieve the same goal, so this
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
March 24, 2009 at 6:04 PM
Disclaimer:
***Although the steps outlined in this blog will work, it is NOT supported by Quest. Use at your own risk and be prepared to recreate your database if something goes wrong.***
This article is intended for those familiar with Quest's migration products but will work in general for any SQL table in which you want to set a field back to NULL. Quest uses MSDE or SQL to store its migration database and there are many tables and relationships within the database to track and execute
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
March 24, 2009 at 4:19 PM
While I have never professed to be a SharePoint or web anything, I was able to help one of my peers get mail delivery between Exchange and SharePoint working in a lab. The SharePoint person was looking at a published article and wanted to see it in action in our lab. I was tasked with the Exchange pieces of the setup so I followed the doc and we were successful in getting mail flow to work.
However, a day later when they were testing in earnest, I was informed that they would receive the m
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
March 24, 2009 at 3:21 PMI do a lot of email migration work so I'm always looking for new ways (and hopefully better ways) to do some common tasks. For example, I regularly have to add new aliases from the old mail system to the new mailboxes. Normally I would use the migration tool to perform this task, but once in a while you might not be able to do this for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, you still need a way to quickly and safely do this.
I have used VBScripts to perform this task in the past but I wanted to
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
March 24, 2009 at 1:57 PM
While I am no Excel expert, I do have to use this application a lot for my job. My wife laughs when I suggest using technology to resolve her problems in her job as a journalist and insists on doing things longhand. Anyway, I'll keep trying. Most of my time is spent migrating various mail platforms to Exchange or BPOS so I'm constantly building migration databases to stay organized.
When I usually have several different data sources to deal with I use Access to tie them all together. Thi
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
December 17, 2008 at 6:02 PM
After working on various Exchange-related projects you start to accumulate some useful scripts and tools. For me, PowerShell has proven to be an invaluable tool and although I usually can't find enough time to develop ellaborate scripts, I do occassionally come across some common but useful one-liners in some situations.
Here's a few of these that you might find useful:
Show mailbox statistics (excluding system mailboxes)Get-MailboxStatistics -server mbxserver1 | where {$_.ObjectClass
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
December 10, 2008 at 2:49 PM
Hopefully this blog will help someone avoid spending time scratching their head wondering why their cert request is not working when submitting it to a CA. Some of you may have already figured this out but for some reason this problem never reared its head until recently. The problem and solution are pretty simple. The premise of the problem lies in generating a public certificate request for a CAS server with special or reserved characters in the company name or other field you need to popula
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
November 26, 2008 at 10:34 AM
The purpose of this post is to hopefully help someone who is experiencing difficulty connecting an Entourage 2008 client to Exchange 2007, more specifically, with Exchange hosted on Windows Server 2008.
When the platform was Windows Server 2003 connecting an Entourage client was as easy as enabling WebDAV in IIS 6.0. With 2008 and IIS 7.0 WebDAV is not integrated into IIS anymore so it's not as simple as setting the security to 'Allowed'. So I went through the new process of downloading, i
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 17, 2008 at 4:38 PMI've been using Exchange 2007 UM for quite a while now. It's been great. I have had one qualm though: it drives me nuts that when I receive a forwarded VM from a co-worker, I can only open it with Windows Media Player because it's like a regular e-mail with the WMA attached. It doesn't have the built in media player control and the "Play on Phone" option is missing. Until now! Here comes the science…
Here's what a message looks like when it's forwarded normally:
All I can do is click
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By: David Greve
Posted:
September 22, 2008 at 11:00 PM
One of the challenges I had more recently with a migration from GroupWise to Exchange was specifically with users existing in GroupWise and users that have been migrated from GroupWise to Exchange. The scenario is, when users still exist in GroupWise, how do they email users already migrated to Exchange? The best approach, with minimal impact to the users is to continue utilizing the GroupWise address book and to also not lose frequent contacts historical information.
The challenge with m
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By: David Greve
Posted:
September 22, 2008 at 10:59 PM
While implementing a couple SCR solutions, I noticed a common error I have seen while reviewing the copy status of a SCR source and target Exchange 2007 server. I noticed this problem while monitoring the health of a SCR configuration, as an example, run the following command:
Ø Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus –Identity <SourceServer\StorageGroup> –StandByMachine <TargetServer> | FL
If you see storage group copy status showing “Failed” instead of “Healthy”, and SCR was functioning
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By: David Greve
Posted:
September 22, 2008 at 10:59 PM
While implementing a couple SCR solutions, I noticed a common error I have seen while reviewing the copy status of a SCR source and target Exchange 2007 server. I noticed this problem while monitoring the health of a SCR configuration, as an example, run the following command:
Ø Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus –Identity <SourceServer\StorageGroup> –StandByMachine <TargetServer> | FL
If you see storage group copy status showing “Initializing” instead of “Healthy”, check to ensure all
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By: David Greve
Posted:
September 22, 2008 at 10:59 PM
We have been deploying Exchange 2007 for a while now, on Windows Server 2003. Most recently, I have deployed Exchange 2007 on Windows Server 2008 machines. The one noticeable problem, while setting up the Client Access Server role on server 2008 was that the Offline Address Book(OAB) URL was not functioning properly. You could access the OAB directory, only after IIS has been restarted or after the server restarts. However, after a couple minutes, the site becomes inaccessible, with a pe
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
August 19, 2008 at 4:37 PMIn a previous blog entry I covered how to use object filtering with the Microsoft Notes Connector. There was a reason I ran into that situation in the first place which was planning a migration from Notes to Exchange using the Notes Connector, but with a catch: I had already created new accounts in the target forest for the users in the migration scope. These accounts needed to be pre-deployed before any directory synchronization was configured so that employees in the newly acquired company c
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
August 6, 2008 at 6:52 PM
By now, most people are used to thinking of e-mail as "discoverable" material for audits; whether the audits are Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA, SEC, or any other type of regulatory audit. And most companies that are bound by such regulation, as well as many who choose to self-regulate, have a stated policy about e-mail retention.
But there is a new twist to auditing and compliance: Voicemail. Historically, voicemail has been a separate appliance with recorded messages stored on the applian
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
May 22, 2008 at 12:04 AM
Although I might be one of just a few currently working on the bleeding-edge technology of synchronizing Lotus Domino/Notes directories with Microsoft Active Directory via Exchange 2003, I figure I'd share this little tidbit of information. According to Microsoft Product Support this is not documented anywhere in TechNet and I had to open a ticket just to find this information out.
After successfully establishing Directory Synchronization with a Notes 6.5 directory, the default behavior of t
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
May 20, 2008 at 3:16 PM
I recently needed to create few thousand mail-enabled users in Active Directory for a project in which the original plan was to use a third-party mail migration product to later mailbox-enable and then migrate data in from another directory. But as plans changed I found that we were going to need to manually convert a good number of these objects into mailbox-enabled accounts. At the time I thought, "No problem, I'll just filter out the specific users and select the Exchange Task to Cre
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
May 8, 2008 at 3:14 PM
This blog is basically a heads up for those deciding to split up roles across many servers when upgrading from Exchange 2003. One of the processes you need to move over is the OAB generation. While this is pretty straightforward I ran into a minor quirk in the new 2007 environment.
The documentation for this process is pretty sparse and lacking detail but may end up taking some of your valuable time better spent doing other things. Anyway, we had a new 2007 environment with all the bells a
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
May 8, 2008 at 1:56 PM
The title of this blog sounds familiar, right? Maybe. Well, when I went searching for a way to do this I hit dead end after dead end. I searched everywhere (ISAServer.org, MSExchange.org, TechNet, blogs, forums, etc) and came up empty. It sounded like an obvious thing to want in order to minimize the impact on the users and eliminate getting prompted for a password each time they took their laptop offsite.
After all, these machines were joined to the domain and were under corporate control
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
May 8, 2008 at 1:19 PM
Recently I came across an issue that was new to me. I don't have a lot of experience working with Outlook forms because I've always been in the infrastructure world and frankly never had a need or admittedly a desire to design any forms.
Anyway, to my point, a user came to me and wanted to know why the nice form he created for the data stored in a public folder was not displaying properly. The content was based on the contacts message class and the user had created a nice form and assigned
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
April 25, 2008 at 3:39 PMOn a recent project I ran into a unique problem regarding replication of public folder information in an Exchange 2003 organization. The problem was recently discovered after the migration of an acquisition into the existing organization when users noticed that Free/Busy information for mailboxes was not displaying between mailboxes in the existing offices and the new office. After an exhaustive search and a few dead-ends I was able to finally resolve the issue, but the lack of information I f
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
March 19, 2008 at 1:39 PMThis is a common scenario: someone calls you, and wants to speak to a co-worker of yours. Since you know that the co-worker is not in, you would like to transfer the caller to your co-worker's VoiceMail. But you don't want to transfer, have it ring 4 times, then go to VM. You want to transfer directly into VM. It would be great to be able to do this:
Hit transfer
Dial * then the 4 digit extension of the user you are trying to transfer to
Hit transfer to put the caller through to the VM box
Here'
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
March 12, 2008 at 1:26 PMIn a recent migration project I needed to move nearly 2TB of mailbox data between Exchange 2003 servers in the same organization, to the tune of 100-200GB per day. The first couple days went fine, with excellent performance, but as more mailboxes were moved to the target server and mail delivery processes and user connections increased, move-performance began to degrade to the point that mailbox moves started to spit out generic MAPI errors and failed. After a quick check of the application log
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
February 18, 2008 at 8:46 PM
In keeping with the Windows Server 2008 theme, I'm posting my second PointCast, which covers some of the new features in failover clustering. It includes a demo in which I fail over an active node of a CCR cluster to a passive one located on a different IP subnet. This is something I wish we had years ago! All in all, I've been very impressed with clustering on Windows Server 2008. It's come a long way since the good 'ol days of Windows 2000.
NOTE: All demo material that you see has been per
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
February 8, 2008 at 9:50 AMI've had this pop up twice on me now, so I'm thinking that it's worth blogging about… When you create a dialplan in Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging, don't use a dot or space (e.g. "dialplan1.exum" or "Chicago
Dial Plan for UM Users") While spaces or dots will work just fine for normal UM usage, you will run into problems when you try to integrate with Office Communications Server 2007.
As most people know by now, you need to do a few things to be able to send missed OCS c
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
December 31, 2007 at 10:34 AM
Introduction
As you may already know Microsoft has released a great new feature in Exchange 2007 SP1 called Standby Continuous Replication to extend recoverability of Exchange and add site resiliency. While deploying the CCR cluster gives hardware and volume resiliency, SCR extends recoverability of Exchange by providing a third offsite copy of the Exchange mailbox databases. In this type of environment servers involved are generally referred to as ‘sources’ and ‘targets’, with the S
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By: David Greve
Posted:
December 7, 2007 at 4:39 PM
Why would you want to upgrade the Lotus Notes Connector in Exchange 2003 to the Microsoft Transporter Suite for Exchange 2007? Well, there are many reasons why you would want to take this approach. One reason would be, to change the transport method of messages between Exchange and Notes. You may also be migrating to Exchange 2007 and are not ready to remove coexistence with Notes. Either way, there are a few steps that need to be taken, before you can upgrade the connector for Notes.
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
November 18, 2007 at 11:27 AM
Here's something I've run across a couple times while helping clients configure Exchange 2007, as well getting it wrong the first time I set it up in my test lab. If you are trying unsuccessfully to use the new Managed Folder Mailbox Policy feature in Exchange 2007 to move items from default folders into a new Managed Custom Folder there are a couple important steps worth verifying.
As an example I performed the following steps:
Created a new Managed Custom Folder named System Clean
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By: David Greve
Posted:
November 11, 2007 at 10:28 PM
In Exchange 2003, only one Calendar Connector can exist for every one Administrative Group. So technically, you could have multiple Calendar Connectors in a single Exchange 2003 Organization, with multiple Administrative Groups. Exchange 2007 only supports one Administrative Group in a native Exchange 2007 Organization. Because of this, your capabilities to implement multiple Calendar Connectors are not possible, unless your Exchange 2007 implementation coexists with Exchange 2003. In this
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 22, 2007 at 2:04 PMShort version: you can't have non-alphanumeric characters in a user's display name if you want the user to be reachable by an Exchange AutoAttendant.
Long version:
Today I was configuring an Exchange 2007 UM Auto Attendant for a customer and came across something interesting. The Auto Attendant (AA) had speech recognition enabled, so I should have been able to say "Bob Smith" and have it direct me to Bob's phone number. Well, my AA worked for everyone except the mythical Bob Smith. All
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 2, 2007 at 11:23 AMHere's something to be aware of when installing Exchange 2007 into an existing Exchange 2003 environment: once you've run /prepareAD /prepareSchema etc., if you previously had no global message size limits,
Exchange 2007 will impose a 10MB size limit on all messages. Even before installing the first server role, the schema & AD updates do this.
Yes, it is documented in a KB http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310771.aspx but it took me by surprise because it's not mentioned in any
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
September 21, 2007 at 11:26 AM
Information is provided as is. Not intended for production use. Lab use only!
Introduction
With the latest incarnation of the VMWare Workstation product, I found myself scrambling to find another solution to represent a Windows 2003 cluster on my laptop. I did some research and tested different suggestions others had tried but with no success. Finally I decided to give iSCSI a try and here is one solution that worked for me. I know there are and will be other methods to accomplish the same
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
July 9, 2007 at 4:52 PM
I've been looking around for a feature comparison between Cisco Unity Unified Messaging and Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging. There doesn't seem to be one out there, so I put together an incomplete matrix comparing the two UM platforms. There are a lot of features to add to the list, but I figured I should at least start putting some of them down on the blog. Any comments with additional comparisons are welcome.
If I had to boil the comparison down to 1 tagline it would be this: "Microso
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
June 27, 2007 at 1:49 PMI was trying to integrate Exchange UM, OCS and an audio codes gateway today & stumbled across something kinda quirky.
If you are trying to get UM and OCS integrated, you need to enabled TLS on your UM dialplan. That's easy enough (set-umdialplan -identity MyDialplan -voipsecurity SIPSEcured)
What they don't tell you explicitly, though, is that when you enabled TLS for one gateway/diaplan, it forces all dialplans/gateways to use it (current and future).
I found this out the hard
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
June 26, 2007 at 10:37 PM
Have you ever received an email from somebody formatted with stationery of…well, questionable taste? Don't get me wrong, I love cowboys, swans, and Valentine's Day as much as the next guy, but in most corporate environments this practice is frowned upon, if not completely banned. Stationery is distracting and can often lead to a negative impression of the sender.
The issue is exasperated somewhat due to the fact that Outlook doesn't give the end-user much power over th
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
June 19, 2007 at 9:58 AM
There is a cool feature of Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging that allows you to click on a voicemail message in your outlook inbox and have it played to your cell phone /desk phone /home phone. This comes in handy if you want to listen to the message but you don't want to play it over your PC speakers (or if you don't have PC speakers).
If you click the "play on phone" button, you will normally get prompted for the phone number to dial:
Well, here is the bad part. Th
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
May 22, 2007 at 4:56 PM
The purpose of this doc is to give an example as to how to configure a AudioCodes IP gateway for use with an Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging demo. I've looked around the web and I've looked at AudioCodes' own documentation. It's all kinda fuzzy, so I thought I'd write my own How-To and save people the trouble. The docs on how to set up a UM server are pretty straightforward, but getting the gateway seemed like a bigger mystery.
My Environment
In my scenario, I have:
An Exchange 2007
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By: David Greve
Posted:
January 1, 2007 at 7:13 PM
On initial deployment of a single Client Access Server(CAS) without an Internet Security and Acceleration Server(ISA) while using Autodiscover, Service Availability, Outlook Web Access(OWA),Offline Address Book, and Outlook Anywhere, choosing the proper certificate became difficult to determine.
We considered going the Microsoft recommended route, using a certificate that handles Subject Alternative Names, but we had a difficult time finding a provider that supported this standard as well a
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By: Aaron Steele
Posted:
October 2, 2006 at 10:04 AM
Capacity Planning:
Capacity planning is very critical to the deployment of an Exchange server/ cluster. It is very important that we understand the capacity requirements of the business versus the capacity available to an Exchange server. Capacity planning affects many areas. For instance, positioning to many users on a server can create multiple risks. Those risks are poor performance, disk space limitations, longer recovery (DR) times, longer online maintenance intervals, longer off-l
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By: Aaron Steele
Posted:
October 2, 2006 at 10:04 AM
When you first install Microsoft Exchange Server, users have unlimited storage quotas by default. This presents several risks to the users on the same exchange server. To prevent these risks, consider setting a business policy on mailbox storage limits. Base this on user needs, departments, and position. Here are some of the identified risks:
Risks:
· Application errors and/or poor performance due to over utilized disk sub-system
· Application Failure as a result of lo
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By: Aaron Steele
Posted:
September 21, 2006 at 10:03 AM
Recently we implemented Exchange 2007 Beta 2. This environment consists of two Exchange 2007 in mixed mode that includes an Exchange 2003 FE and BE. The two Exchange 2007 server roles are a FE (CAS and HTS) and a BE (Mailbox.) I implemented a SSL cert, RPC over HTTP (Outlook Anywhere) and ActiveSync. After all of these changes, OWA randomly stopped working.
The error I received was "Outlook Web Access did not initialize. An Event has been logged so that the system administrator
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