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By: David Greve
Posted:
January 29, 2012 at 11:31 PM
I was recently asked this question by a customer, as we were starting to build out a migration process. My immediate thought was no, we need to migrate the mailbox first then assign an Exchange Online license to mailbox. The reason why this was first reaction was primarily due to BPOS. (BPOS was the version of Exchange Online prior to Office 365.) In BPOS, once you assign a license to user, their mailbox becomes active. This can be problematic when you are piloting some mailboxes and you are
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By: David Greve
Posted:
January 6, 2012 at 2:24 PM
During part two of this 2-part blog series, Microsoft MVP and PointBridge Professional Services Manager Dave Greve talks about the importance of communications and training within an organization migrating to Office 365. He suggests tips to minimize help desk tickets, maximize adoption early on, provide better ground support during go-live and getting users ready and excited to ensure a successful implementation.
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By: David Greve
Posted:
December 21, 2011 at 3:16 PM
During part one this 2-part blog series, I talk about the importance of user experience during migration to Office 365. Microsoft offers many capabilities that ensure an optimal user experience such as Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), Directory Sync and Exchange hybrid services. Additionally, I point out options for organizations with external messaging systems to provide a rich co-existence experience using third party tools.
Keep an eye out for part 2 in the coming weeks.
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
November 30, 2011 at 3:24 PM
I have written several posts providing insight into some technical challenges that I have encountered while helping my customers upgrade to Exchange 2010. Upgrading any technology within a computing environment requires time and effort, and with some of the technical challenges I've already documented, some of you may be wondering if upgrading your Exchange environment is worth the effort. For this post, I thought I'd provide some insight into why my customers have been upgrading to Exchange 2
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By: Shalini Pasupneti
Posted:
November 21, 2011 at 12:59 AM
One of my clients running Exchange 2003 was using over 400 email domains and was trying to setup coexistence with Office 365. One of the requirements for this is to create remote domains both on-premises and in office 365 for each primary SMTP domain and currently there is not a way to automate this (Exchange 2010 SP2 due to be released shortly will do this automatically). Until then here is a small script to automate this process on premises.
$file="c:\scripts\transcript.txt"
If
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By: Shalini Pasupneti
Posted:
November 21, 2011 at 12:29 AM
Recently I had completed setup of Office 365 coexistence for a client using Exchange 2007 and verified mail flow to/from Office 365 and free busy lookups. Abruptly one day mail flow stopped to Office 365 and Exchange console was showing the message "The certificate status could not be determined because the revocation check failed."
After a quick search on the web, I found this article on Exchange team blog here but none of the scenarios applied in my case. Mail flow stopped to
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
October 17, 2011 at 9:23 PM
I have a lot of customers who have deployed Enterprise Vault within their email environments. In many cases, these customers have deployed Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007 and have been using ISA Server to publish OWA and Outlook Anywhere to the Internet. These customers have then upgraded to Exchange 2010 and replaced ISA with TMG. This type of upgrade presents some challenges simply based on how Enterprise Vault works. Specifically, when an end user accesses an item stored in Enterprise Vault,
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By: David Greve
Posted:
September 6, 2011 at 10:50 AM
Office 365 supports the ability to create Shared Mailboxes, right through the UI or through PowerShell commands. The Shared Mailbox is essentially an unlicensed mailbox with no direct logon capabilities. This means you cannot open the mailbox directly, within the Outlook client. What you can do is open the mailbox with an existing licensed mailbox, as long as you have permissions to the Shared Mailbox and at the right levels.
What this leaves you with is the inability to create specific O
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By: Rene Strawser
Posted:
June 30, 2011 at 2:44 PM
I am sure most administrators have received a request to create several AD accounts due to acquisitions, mergers, or for other reasons. I had one of those requests which consisted of populating an AD environment that was to be used for Directory Synchronization with BPOS/Office 365. There are a lot of Bulk AD scripts out in this little world wide web of ours and there are also third party applications that you could use too (for a price); however, in the pursuit of scripting, the following cam
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
June 29, 2011 at 10:28 AM
Background
Brien Posey has an excellent post explaining the steps required to mount a recovery database in Exchange 2010. His post can be found here. While assisting one of my customers restore email data using a recovery database, I learned some lessons that I thought I'd share. In this instance, my customer needed to restore data from a backup created using NetBackup. The customer initially tried to use NetBackup's granular restore technology to recover the data in question but they were u
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
June 18, 2011 at 10:19 AM
During a recent Exchange 2010 Deployment, my customer was experiencing 3 different Exchange 2010 issues that were all solved with the same fix.
Issue #1:
Customer was unable to move mailboxes from one database to another on the same Mailbox Server or between Mailbox Servers. The following error was returned when attempting to move mailboxes:
MapiExceptionNetworkError: Unable to make connection to the server. (hr=0x800004005, ec=2423)
A screen shot of the error follows:
Issue #2
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
June 15, 2011 at 11:34 PM
Background
I recently struggled with the inability to move mailboxes from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 while helping one of my customers. The environment consisted of a Single Exchange Organization residing in a Single Forest with Multiple Domains within the Forest. The Exchange 2003 Servers and the Exchange 2010 Servers resided in the same Forest, but Different Domains.
The challenging part about this issue was the fact that 80% of my mailbox moves completed successfully while 20% were
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
June 14, 2011 at 1:25 PM
Nearly all organizations that have deployed any version of Exchange now recognize and understand that allowing Port 80 access from the Internet directly into any Exchange Server is not exceptionally secure, and is therefore not desirable. I personally will not deploy Exchange for any of my customers unless they publish Exchange to the Internet using a hardware appliance or software application such as Microsoft's TMG Server. In addition to pre-authenticating end user credentials, TMG can also
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By: David Greve
Posted:
May 16, 2011 at 7:19 PM
While planning your migration to Office 365, you have a couple options when provisioning Shared Mailboxes in Office 365. Microsoft does not charge you to create Shared Mailboxes in Office 365, if you do it right. Here are your options to create Shared mailboxes.
Typically, when planning a migration from a Lotus Notes or GroupWise messaging system, we will create/update all of our accounts in Active Directory and allow directory sync to populate them in Office 365. After doing so, you the
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
May 13, 2011 at 3:03 PMExchange 2010 Unified Messaging is a great voicemail solution, especially for anyone with SIP-compliant PBX like Cisco or Avaya. At PointBridge we've had good success migrating people off Cisco Unity in particular. In fact, we recently migrated a 2000-user customer from Unity to Exchange UM, cutting everyone over in a single night. The project was a huge success, but along the way we ran into something interesting with Exchange UM and the G729 codec: Microsoft doesn't support it.
Background
Exch
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By: Rene Strawser
Posted:
March 31, 2011 at 2:26 PM
Prior to any migration, proper planning and testing should always be performed. Such is the case if you have voicemail integrated into Lotus Notes using non-standard forms and want to include voicemail as part of your migration plan.
Using Quest's Notes Migrator for Exchange (NME), which the latest version 4.4.x includes the capability of migrating from Lotus Notes directly to BPOS and Office 365, you can easily modify the tool to include any non-standard forms.
In this migration to BPOS s
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By: Steve Mierop
Posted:
March 31, 2011 at 9:53 AM
We've all experienced it before, those "Wow, I can't believe it's that easy" moments. Exchange Web Services Managed API makes sending emails, creating appointments, querying folders/calendars, and generating meeting requests extremely simple. When it comes to programmatically duplicating Outlook functionality (given Exchange is running the show), the Exchange Web Services Managed API is definitely worth looking into.
There's some good documentation online, but the object mo
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
March 31, 2011 at 9:37 AM
Background
When I help my customers upgrade their Exchange environments from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010, a key element that I focus on is end user impact. If the upgrade is executed correctly, most end users should never know that an upgrade occurred. In fact, in most instances, the only difference end users will notice is that the OWA interface is greatly enhanced. With this in mind, something I always strive for is to make Exchange 2010 upgrades transparent to end users who use the Out
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By: Trent Weiler
Posted:
March 30, 2011 at 10:01 PM
As many people may already know Managed Folders in Exchange 2010 SP1 have been removed from the GUI and now need to be managed via PowerShell, as stated here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998911.aspx. While they are still supported, the process to create them and assign a Managed Folder Policy is a little confusing, which I found out testing for a customer recently. In this particular situation it would be much easier to manage the users Inbox via custom retention policies and h
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By: Trent Weiler
Posted:
March 29, 2011 at 10:47 PM
On a recent Microsoft Exchange Installation for one of my customers, I encountered the following error message when trying to setup a Database Availability Group in Exchange 2010 SP1: WriteError! Exception = Microsoft.Exchange.Cluster.Replay.DagTaskOperationFailedException: A server-side database availability group administrative operation failed. Error: The operation failed. CreateCluster errors may result from incorrectly configured static addresses. Error: An error occurred while attempting
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
February 27, 2011 at 9:34 PM
Background
Brien Posey has an excellent post explaining the steps required to mount a recovery database in Exchange 2010. His post can be found here. While assisting one of my customers restore email data using a recovery database, I learned some lessons that I thought I'd share. In this instance, my customer needed to restore data from a backup created using NetBackup. The customer initially tried to use NetBackup's granular restore technology to recover the data in question but they were u
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
February 21, 2011 at 11:08 AM
Most people know that Exchange 2010 gives you the ability to configure different rules based on caller ID (e.g. when my wife calls, play a certain greeting with different options to reach me). But the rules engine is actually even more flexible than that; it can actually be used to mimic functionality in other voicemail systems that give users have the option to set standard, off-hours, or alternate greetings. Or even route to different departments. But what isn't as obvious is how to do it. I
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
December 16, 2010 at 4:28 PM
Background
Jaap Wesselius has an excellent post explaining how to use PowerShell to import and export PST files using the new functionality built into Exchange 2010 SP1. Jaap's post can be found here: http://www.simple-talk.com/sysadmin/exchange/importing-psts-with-powershell-in-exchange-2010-sp1/. While testing this functionality for one of my customers, I discovered that importing a PST file into the root of a mailbox resets permissions within the target mailbox. For example, let's say tha
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
December 9, 2010 at 1:01 AM
Background:
After adding Exchange 2010 SP1 Servers to an Exchange 2003 environment, I noticed some strange behavior when using the Exchange Management Console to review and modify Distribution Groups. Specifically, I noticed that the settings on the Membership Approval tab of all Distribution Groups were grayed out as in the following example:
In order to activate the settings on the Membership Approval tab, I performed the following tasks:
Clicked the General tab
Removed the last
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
December 8, 2010 at 11:49 PM
Background:
After upgrading your Exchange 2003 environment to Exchange 2010 SP1, you enter the following command using the Exchange Management Shell on your Exchange 2010 Server:
Get-DistributionGroup
And you receive the following error on several Distribution Groups:
WARNING: The object DistributionListName has been corrupted, and it's in an inconsistent state. The following validation errors happened: WARNING: Property expression "DistributionListName" isn't valid…
In add
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
October 3, 2010 at 4:51 PM
I recently ran into the following issue while deploying Exchange 2010 for one of my customers:
Background:
Multi-server, multi-site Exchange environment consisting of the following:
3 Mailbox Servers
Server 2008 R2
Exchange 2010 SP1
3 HUB/CAS/UM Servers
Server 2008 R2
Exchange 2010 SP1
In order to install the UM Role for Exchange 2010 the following two prerequisites must first be downloaded and installed on your Exchange 2010 Server:
Unified Communications Manag
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
September 26, 2010 at 4:20 PM
I recently wrote a blog about installing Exchange 2010 SP1 and the prerequisites that must be installed on each Exchange 2010 Server before SP1 will install correctly. In that article I also mentioned that I had not experienced any issues with Exchange 2010 SP1. I now have one issue with Exchange 2010 SP1 to report.
I am currently assisting one of my customers with an 8-Server Exchange 2010 deployment. This environment consists of 4 HUB/CAS Servers and 4 Mailbox Servers. Since this was a new
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
September 20, 2010 at 11:33 PM
I recently ran into the following scenario while deploying Exchange 2010 for one of my customers:
After installing the first HUB/CAS Server in the environment, I received the following error when launching the Exchange 2010 Management Console:
The following error occurred when searching for On-Premises Exchange server: Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message: The WinRM client cannot process the request because the server name cannot be resolved.
After much tro
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
September 10, 2010 at 9:22 AM
I have had several customers ask me about Exchange 2010 SP1 and whether I have had any issues with the installation. In response to several such requests, I thought I'd share my experience installing Exchange 2010 SP1 in my test lab. In this article, my lab consists of a single server running the following:
Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
Multi-Role Exchange 2010 Server (HUB, CAS, MB)
I ran into issues immediately when the installation Readiness Checks returned the following hotfixes must be
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By: David Greve
Posted:
September 8, 2010 at 7:15 PM
Many organizations today have multiple offices throughout the country and sometimes extend globally. Often times, these offices will have groups of individuals that collaborate with one another based on teams, departments, or even project areas. The demands of collaboration across distributed environments can be challenging and it’s not uncommon for organizations to fly people cross country or around the world to improve productivity across these groups of individuals.
The cost of trave
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
August 4, 2010 at 3:10 PM
Background
Let me explain what this means first and set some criteria for a statement like this. In the majority of cases this would involve moving little to no data which is usually the recommended approach for such a large cutover (a.k.a. flash cutover). Coexistence between on-premise mail systems and BPOS can be problematic and confusing for users as well as administrators. Shortening or eliminating this coexistence period is usually a pretty high priority goal for any mail migration proj
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
June 25, 2010 at 2:08 PMWe've recently assisted a number of clients in Exchange 2007 à 2010 upgrades. In each case, they've been using ISA or TMG to publish external Exchange services. For the most part, it's been easy to find information on the subject: the MS Exchange team has a really nice write up on the ISA configurations for 2010 upgrade; ISAserver.org has a good write-up in general on ISA and Exchange; Elan Shudnow has a post or two on the subject; and there's always technet. All the info is helpful, however my
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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 7:04 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 5:19 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 4:21 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 2:57 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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