Category: exchange
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Shadow Redundancy and Server Outages
Exchange Server 2010 has a feature that tries to ensure that emails in transport cannot be lost. This feature is called Shadow Redundancy and lots of information on how it works can be found on the Internet. But what happens if a mailbox server or site is unavailable? Items will queue in a single location,…
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How to Speed Up Hub Transport Server Selection
Install Exchange 2010 SP1! Installing the service pack fixes the round-robin selection process for remote hub transport servers in other sites (see Hub Transport Load Balancing) so that only the IP addresses of operational servers are used. Exchange 2010 runs on Windows 2008 (or 2008 R2) and this operating system supports IPv4 and IPv6. In…
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Formatting Get-ExchangeDiagnosticInfo
For the last blog post for today, this one looks at formatting the output of Get-ExchangeDiagnosticInfo as the XML that this cmdlet returns can be quite long. For example if you want to see if your server is in backpressure then you need to view the output of the ResourceMonitor component, but as this contains…
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Getting Exchange 2010 SP1 Diagnostics
New with Exchange Server 2010 SP1 is the Get-ExchangeDiagnosticInfo PowerShell cmdlet. This is not documented anywhere online, so I thought I would start a trend! Get-ExchangeDiagnosticInfo reports information on the information and status of Exchange Server as seen by individual processes. The information returned is in the form of a blob of XML data and…
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Hub Transport Load Balancing
In Exchange 2010 (not SP1) and Exchange 2007 there was no memory of unavailable transport servers and so the round robin method of load balancing across the hubs in the target delivery site or smarthosts used by connectors sourced to your current server was just that – round robin. Though if a server was unavailable…
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OWA and Moving Mailboxes to Office 365
Lets imagine a scenario where you are using an on-premises Exchange Server and users’ use Outlook Web App, and then you move some mailboxes to the Office 365 cloud with Hybrid Coexistence enabled. The user might not know their mailbox has been moved and so yesterday they went to https://mail.company.com/owa, but today they need to visit…
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Assign Specific Licences in Office 365 Via PowerShell
To add specific licences to users in Office 365 without using the portal, and to assign subsets of the licences available requires two things. First you need to enumerate the licences and licence service plans, then you need to assign the new plan you have created to your users. This can be performed in…
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Office 365 and Dynamic Distribution Groups
Updated Dec 8th 2011 to remove reference to LegacyExchangeDN In Office 365 with Hybrid Deployment, if you create Dynamic Distribution Groups on the on-premises Exchange organization, these objects are not replicated to Office 365 via DirSync. Therefore for mailboxes in the Office 365 cloud they will not see the Dynamic Distribution Group in their Global…
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Migrate to Office 365 Using the Command Line
Cutover Migrations and Staged Simple Exchange Migrations from on-premise and hosted email systems can be done by the remote PowerShell command line (Powershell to Exchange Online). The help for New-MigrationBatch claims that migrations from Hotmail are possible, but the actual commands are not working at this time. Doing a migration via the command line is…
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Fixing Exchange Online Hydration Issues With Enable-OrganizationCustomization
“Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation” is an error you can see in Office 365 Rich Coexistence when you are first configuring the settings. There are other errors that can occur which also are the result of the same issue, for example I have seen “Error when getting bip rule” and…
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Adding Servers to ADFS 2.0 Farms – Subject Alternative Name Issues
When you add additional servers to an ADFS 2.0 farm and you have used a subject alternative name from your certificate to create the first server in the farm the additional servers will not be able to join the farm. If you have used the subject name on the certificate all works fine. You get the…
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Mismatched Archive GUID for Moving Archive to Office 365
If you create an archive in Office 365 for a mailbox on-premise you might find that it does not work – the actual archive is not (as of time of writing) created correctly. What’s the way around it? The way around it is to create the archive on-premise and then move the archive to the…
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Office 365 DirSync Schedule
The DirSync process sync’s every three hours by default, with a random number between 1 and 10 minutes is added to the SyncTimeInterval to provide an additional time buffer to this three hour period. This schedule can be changed by editing Microsoft.Online.DirSync.Scheduler.exe.Config in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Online Directory Sync. Change to read a different value for hours:minutes:seconds…
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Free/Busy Cross-Forest Working One Way Only
Or indeed, not working at all! I had the issue of it working one way only (On-Premise Exchange organization > Office 365) but the other way (cloud to on-premise) did not work at all. The answer is shown in this video http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/us/details/a16a9d39-416a-4b01-a88f-5ff511580424 This covers the reasons why Free/Busy (and the other federation features of MailTips,…
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CRM Router and Exchange 2010
To configure the CRM Email Router with Exchange 2010 you need to do the following. Not all of these points are clearly documented on the internet. Create a mailbox (CRM_Router@domain.com) Set password never to expire Ensure that the mailbox is not hidden from the address list Login to above mailbox Enable impersonation with the following…
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Publishing ADFS Through ISA or TMG Server
To enable single sign-on in Office 365 and a variety of other applications you need to provide a federated authentication system. Microsoft’s free server software for this is currently Active Directory Federation Server 2.0 (ADFS), which is downloaded from Microsoft’s website. ADFS is installed on a server within your organisation, and a trust (utilising trusted…
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PowerShell Script To Update All UPN’s
This quick script will process all your user accounts in the domain and change the UPN for each of them to a new one, which you need to specify in the script in advance of running it. This script is useful for Office 365 Rich Coexistence (Hybrid) scenarios which require that the UPN (User Principal Name)…
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Changing ADFS 2.0 Endpoint URL for Office 365
If you are configuring single sign-on for Office 365 then you will need a server running Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 (ADFS 2.0). When you install this you are asked for a URL that acts as an endpoint for the ADFS service, which if you are publishing that endpoint through a firewall such as TMG…
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Delegate Approval for Meeting Requests Failing
If you require delegates to approval all room bookings in Exchange 2010 and you have the following two settings set to True then rooms will automatically be approved AllRequestOutOfPolicy: True AllRequestInPolicy: True To require that rooms are approved by the delegate regardless of when the room is booked set AllRequestOutOfPolicy to False. These settings require…
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Exchange 2010 Update Rollups and Error 1603
You download and begin to install an Exchange Rollup Update only to find after waiting ages for it do the NGen stuff it fails, and on watching it closely you notice it fails on stopping services. In the event log you are pointed at a website with information on verbose logging for MSI installations. But…
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.DLL Errors and Blackberry Enterprise Server
During a configuration of Blackberry Enterprise Server today I found that I was getting .DLL errors when trying to create a MAPI profile on the BES Server (v5.0.2) when running IEMSTest. Well it was not the usual stuff – it ended up being the alias that had been assigned to the BESAdmin account. The policy…