Brian Reid – Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Certified Master
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Domain Redirection and BPOS to Office 365 Migration
With Microsoft Exchange Online via BPOS (the precursor to Office 365) you were able to configure a simple CNAME redirection to make access to OWA easier for your users. For example, you could create a CNAME in DNS for mail.fabrikam.com (where fabrikam.com is your domain in BPOS) which pointed to go.domains.live.com and then when users…
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Restricting Message Sizes in Exchange Server to Low Bandwidth Sites
Exchange Server has a series of different settings for controlling the maximum message size into and around an Exchange organization, but what about when parts of your organization have a considerably lower bandwidth than other parts, for example offices with servers in rural or hard to reach locations and require satellite WAN links or ships…
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Fix Federation Trust Issues After Exchange Server Recovery
I had a need to recover an Exchange Server following a blue screen after patching that I could not undo. I had the databases intact, and of course Active Directory was installed on a different server so I installed a new server and ran setup /m:recoverserver (after installing all the updates and hotfixes that is).…
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Hosting Exchange 2010 and Issues With Duplicate Contacts
When you are creating a hosted Exchange system using the Exchange 2010 On Premises product (not the /hosting version of the product) it is likely that if two or more of your customers create a mail contact in the global address list (GAL) for the same external email recipient they will see some issues with…
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Running Offline Web Applications from IIS Server
A feature of HTML 5 based applications is the ability to ensure that applications can still run even if internet connectivity is not present. How to do this is covered on the W3.org website. A requirement of offline access is the creation of the offline cache manifest file. This manifest file is listed in the…
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HTTPS Load Balancer Issues with Exchange 2010 SP2
When you install Service Pack 2 (and maybe SP1 too) on Exchange 2010 it resets the SSL flag on the root directory of the IIS website. You might have removed this setting for a number of reasons, mainly to do with having a HTTP to HTTPS redirect, but it can also be removed if you…
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Shadow Redundancy Promotion Disabled After Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2
One of the new features added in Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 was called Shadow Redundancy Promotion. Service Pack 1 creates a setting in EdgeTransport.exe.config to control the behaviour of this setting, and it defaults to a value of “False”, so that the feature is turned off. Enabling Shadow Redundancy Promotion is done by…
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Exchange 2010 SP2 Prerequisites
To upgrade Exchange 2010 SP1 to SP2 requires the addition of an additional Windows server role that was not listed on the RTM and SP1 requirements. Therefore if you try an upgrade you will get errors about “IIS 6 WMI Compatibility” not being installed. To install this feature quickly on Windows Server 2008 R2, bring…
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Exchange Log Truncation Failure in a DAG
Today I visited a client who had noticed that no log files had ever been removed after any backup within Exchange 2010 SP1. It was fortuitous that they had enough log disk space for about eight months of log generations. The disadvantage was that we were four months into this time period, so it was…
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Office 365 Hybrid Coexistence and Edge Server
One of the delights in my job is when Microsoft give me a call and ask me how something works in one of their products! Such a call came today and it involved get Office 365 hybrid coexistence working with an Edge Server. Exchange Server Deployment Assistant does not have the answer to this issue;…
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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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How to Clear Password Policy on workstation after removing it from domain
I needed to set up a few machines for a client in an internet cafe type scenario, but the client provided me with computers that had been added to the domain. The domain had a password requirement which meant I could not configure the default login on the cafe machines to have no password. To…
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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…