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I recently came across a need for setting “Send As” and “Send on Behalf” permissions for a group of users on  a Distribution Group(so called mailing list). While looking out for the procedure to do it in 2010 environment, I stumbled on two articles from “http://exchangeserverpro.com” which are very informative and up to the task.

Posting them here as I felt worth sharing with my blog readers.

• Exchange 2010: How to Grant Send on Behalf Permissions for a Distribution Group
• Exchange 2010: How to Grant Send As Permissions for a Distribution Group

Thanks to Paul Cunningham for these articles.

Thanks,
Sitaram

The author of exchangeserverpro.com announced a free Exchange 2010 training program. This is very useful to people who are willing to learn exchange 2010.

The training sessions contains mainly 4 modules which includes text, images, and videos.

• Module 1 – Get started by creating your own Exchange 2010 training lab environment
• Module 2 – Walk through the configuration of each of the Exchange 2010 server roles
• Module 3 – Become familiar with managing recipients with the Exchange 2010 management tools
• Module 4 – Learn how to backup and restore an Exchange 2010 server

This course is mainly targeted to the beginners who want to lean exchange and to people who has some moderate level of knowledge. Out of everything, this is a FREE course, so anyone can attend by just subscribing to the course online.

For more information and registration about this course, please visit the Paul’s website: http://exchangeserverpro.com/training/

Hope this helps.. and happy learning….

 

After installing MS Exchange 2010 in my test lab, I want to create new mailbox database in my server. While I can do it with GUI, I am more interested in exploring the powershell way…

The exchange management shell is having very large set of cmdlets to manage exchange. In fact the GUI also is a wrapper on top of Powershell commands. So learning these commands and using them in daily operations is really useful and you can go into granular details.

New-MailboxDatabase is the cmdlet that accomplished my task here.

New-MailboxDatabase -EdbFilePath C:\Database\MailboxDB1.edb -Server TIBDC1 -Name MailDB1

Here I am creating a new mailbox database with name MailboxDB1 and placing the EDB file C:\Database folder with MailboxDB1.EDB file name. You might ask what happens to log files and where they will be saved. By default logfiles go with EDB file unless the path is specified with -LogFolderPath parameter. The -Server parameter specifies the server name where this database is going to be created.

You won’t see the creation of EDB file or logfiles in the given folder unless you mount it. So we need to use Mount-Database cmdlet to mount the newly created database. You can use the below command for that purpose.

Get-MailboxDatabase -Identity MailDB1 | Mount-Database

Hope this helps… and you will see more exchange stuff in my upcoming posts.

 

Once MS Exchange was my favorite technology. I loved each and everything I did and learned in Exchange. I think the same kind of era has started again for me as I decided to get good knowledge on Exchange 2010.

As part of that, I enhanced my test lab to include Exchange 2010 servers. The installation of Exchange 2010 on Windows 2008 R2 is very straight forward. To be honest, it is matter of few clicks if you know exactly what needs to be done.

The further content of this article will give you the step-by-step procedure for installing Microsoft Exchange server 2010 with SP1 on Windows 2008 R2 Operating System. I am going to install mailbox, client access, and hub transport roles on a single server.

Before you start the installation, make sure that you met the following pre-requisites.

• Active Directory forest functional level should be Windows Server 2003 or above
• Active Directory schema master FSMO role is running on a DC with Windows 2003 SP1 or higher version of OS
• Exchange Server needs a set of windows features to be installed as pre-requisite. This list differs with the Exchange Role(s) you are trying to install. For the installation of mailbox, client access, and hub transport role on the same box, use the below powershell command.

Import-Module ServerManager
Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework,RSAT-ADDS,Web-Server,Web-Basic-Auth,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-Metabase,Web-Net-Ext,Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console,WAS-Process-Model,RSAT-Web-Server,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web-Digest-Auth,Web-Dyn-Compression,NET-HTTP-Activation,Web-Asp-Net,Web-Client-Auth,Web-Dir-Browsing,Web-Http-Errors,Web-Http-Logging,Web-Http-Redirect,Web-Http-Tracing,Web-ISAPI-Filter,Web-Request-Monitor,Web-Static-Content,Web-WMI,RPC-Over-HTTP-Proxy -Restart

• If your combination is different, then please refer to Exchange 2010 pre-requisites page http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb691354.aspx#WS08R2 where you can get the command that you need to execute.
• Install Microsoft Office 2010 Filter packs from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17062. Otherwise, the readiness checks might give you warnings when you run the setup wizard.

This completes the pre-requisites setup/installation. Now we can move on to actual installation.

Step-by-step installation instructions:

• Download Exchange Server 2010 SP1 x64 version from MS site and extract the contents to a folder — say c:\local\ExchangeInstallation on Windows 2008 R2 Server where you want to install Exchange Server.
• Now go to c:\local\ExchangeInstallation folder and click on setup.com file. This brings up the Exchange server installation wizard. Here, choose the language options as you need and click on “Step 4: Install Microsoft Exchange”
• Click Next on the introduction page

 

• Accept the license agreement and click Next– otherwise you can’t proceed

 

• Make your choice at the Error Reporting wizard and click Next

 

 

• Select the type of installation you want to do in the Installation Type wizard. You can either choose Typical Exchange Server installation which will install Maibox, Client access, and hub transport roles or choose the custom installation where you can install any combination of selected roles. In this page, you can one useful option Automatically install Windows Server roles and features required for Exchange Server. This means that setup will automatically install the required features and roles based on your choice of installation. If you miss to follow the feature and roles installation step in pre-requisites section, then you can select this check box.

 

• In the Exchange Organization wizard, enter a name for the new exchange organization that you are going to install. In my case, I named it as TechiBee.

 

• Click NO on the Client Settings wizard and proceed if you don’t have any outlook 2003 clients in your organization that need to talk to Exchange 2010 servers.

 

• Leave the defaults and click Next  at Configure Client access server external domain wizard. You can do this later if you want your client access server to act as external OWA server.

• Make your choice on Customer Experience Improvement Program and click Next

• Well, it is time of Readiness checks, all you need to do here is wait for the readiness checks to complete and review/fix the errors if it reports any. In my case it warned me to install Office 2010 Filter packs. Click Next to proceed to the actual installation stage where the setup will install required binaries for your exchange organization.

• This Completion wizard will take more time depending on the no. of roles you are installing. Be patient and wait for to complete. Once you see everything in green, click on Finish to complete the Exchange Installation.

• The setup might ask you to reboot your computer. I prefer you do it before you change any other settings on the server.

 

This completes quick setup of Mailbox, Client access server and hub transport server roles. Hope this helps and feel free to post any questions if you have.

 

Troubleshooting calendar issues is one of the pain areas in Exchange/Outlook. Always there will be ‘n’ no.of items we need to verify to identify why it went wrong. Bad thing about it is, there won’t be any logging in Exchange/MS Outlook to understand what went wrong. All you can do is enable debug logging and send the ETL files to MS support for analysis.

Well, that is a history now. MS has  a tool that can check and report problems with calendar in a given outlook profile. It can also run against mailboxes hosted on a given server. As mentioned, it is just a reporting tool, and will not fix any of the problems. Hmm, having something is better than nothing

The good things about this tool is it supports below Exchange/Outlook versions.

1. Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
2. Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
3. Microsoft Office Outlook 2010 (32-bit)
4. Microsoft Office Outlook 2010 (64-bit)
5. Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
6. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
7. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

 

What checks this tool does?

The Calendar Checking Tool for Outlook (CalCheck) is a command-line program that checks Microsoft Outlook Calendars for problems. The tool opens an Outlook profile to access the Outlook Calendar. It performs various checks, such as permissions, free/busy publishing, delegate configuration, and automatic booking. Then each item in the calendar folder is checked for known problems that can cause unexpected behavior, such as meetings that appear to be missing.

As CalCheck goes through this process, it generates a report that can be used to help diagnose problem items or identify trends.
Checks performed

The following Calendar-specific checks are performed and logged in the report:

•     Permissions on the Calendar
•     Delegates on the Calendar
•     Free/Busy publishing information
•     Direct Booking settings for the Mailbox or Calendar
•     Total number of items in the Calendar folder

The following item-level checks are performed and logged in the report:

•     No Organizer email address
•     No Sender email address
•     No dispidRecurring property (causes an item to not show in the Day/Week/Month view)
•     Time existence of the dispidApptStartWhole and dispidApptEndWhole properties
•     No Subject for meetings that occur in the the future or for recurring meetings (a warning is logged)
•     Message Class check (a warning is logged)
•     dispidApptRecur (recurrence blob) is checked for time on overall start and end times, not for exceptions
•     Check for Conflict items in the Calendar
•     Check for duplicate items, based on certain MAPI properties
•     Check if over 1250 recurring meetings (a warning is logged) and 1300 recurring meetings (an error is reported); 1300 is the limit
•     Check if you are an attendee and you became the Organizer of a meeting
•     Check meeting exception data to ensure it is the correct size

[Above content is grabbed from Exchange Team Blog]

Download and references:

Download Link : http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28786

Exchange Team Blog : http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/02/22/calcheck-the-outlook-calendar-checking-tool.aspx

Codeplex project: http://calcheck.codeplex.com/

 

 

As I mentioned in one of the recent posts, MS has released a PST capture tool that helps you migrate your users PST to Exchange 2010 archive mailboxes or Exchange online storage. Though I read some documentation of this tool to understand what it is and how it works, I could able to get clear idea only after reading below articles.

They covers the good amount of details in installing PST central service and deploying the agents for scanning the PST files on computers.

Part I – http://www.telnetport25.com/2012/02/installing-using-the-microsoft-pst-capture-toolpart-1/

Part II – http://www.telnetport25.com/2012/02/installing-using-the-microsoft-pst-capture-toolpart-2/

Happy reading…

 

MS has released a free tool that can help you search PSTs available in your network and export them to Exchange 2010 archive mailboxes of users. This product is originally developed by red gate and MS has acquired this and released as a free tool to encourage its customers to move from PST to exchange archives.

For more details and downloads, refer to below links.

Documentation: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh781036.aspx

Download : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f6006c4b-a6a9-4e83-81b3-e770d37f63ff

Video:

Hope this helps….

“The attempt to connect to http://ExchangeServer.domain.com/PowerShell using “Kerberos” authentication failed: connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client cannot complete the operation within the time specified.  Check if the machine name is valid and is reachable over the network and firewall exception for Windows Remote Management service is enabled.  For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.”

You might notice above error message after opening a Exchange Management Console. This error message indicates that connecting to given exchange server using WinRM has failed. Today I received the same error and verified that exchange is doing well on this box. I tried opening the console from different server and it worked file. So, it appeared some sort of profile problem to me.

I did the following to resolve the issue.

1. Close Exchange Management Console MMC
2. Go to %appdata%\Microsoft\MMC
3. Rename “Exchange Management Console” file to “Exchange Management Console.old”
4. Launch the console again.

Hope this helps…

Yesterday I got a requirement to verify if a given list of folders are replicated to new installed PF server or not. I added the new sever to replica list of required PF folders and now I need to verfiy if the replication is completed so that I can remove the old PF server from the replica list.

Either Exchange management console or the exfolder util(utility to manage PF replicas and permissions) is not having the option to verify the replication status. Exfolder.exe is helpful to some extent as it is showing the list of items in that PF so that I can compare and confirm that all mails are replicated. I can do this for folders which has less number of items, but if the folder has more number of emails, then it is not a ideal way of doing it.

After researching for time, I found the way that solves my problem. The “Get-PublicfolderStatistics” cmdlet is the right choice here. I used this and generated the email items count in a PF from a particular PF server. After that ran two queries (listed below) and directed the output to a file for comprison. I tried to assign the output of each command to a variable and tried to compare-object cmdlet to compare the contents of both the output variables, but it didn’t work as exepcted for some weird reason. Let me know if it works for you.

Get-PublicFolderStatistics -Server PFServer1
Get-PublicFolderStatistics -Server PFServer2

Hope this helps…

 

In exchange 2010 environment, if you don’t provide the database name to cmdlets like new-mailbox, enable-mailbox, and new-moverequest, exchange automatically chooses a database using a process called “Automatic mailbox distribution” feature.

It sounds little weird and scary, but this might be a handy feature for environment where exchange environment is large and mailbox creation process is delegated to multiple people.

Some of the highlights of this feature

1. You have options to exclude a few databases from automatic selection process
2. You can choose to exclude a database either permanently or temporarily
3. You can allow a mailbox creation process from a group administrators to choose mailbox database from a predefined list

You can read more details about this feature at TechNet site[http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff872148.aspx]