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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/

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….

I came across a nice service which makes the task of following up with other parties very easy. The advantage with this service is it works through email; that means you can create/read follow-ups anytime anywhere. Visit http://www.followupthen.com/ to know more about it. Btw, I started using this

See this video to get a sense of what it is…

“How to audit local administrator password on list of servers using a script” – this is the question I have seen in one of the forums I participate. The requester asked for a way to read local administrator password on a server and compare it with the standard password and report deviations if any. While this sounds like a good algorithm to audit, I wonder how one can “READ” passwords of any account in Windows Operating System. But still requirements are requirements and we need a way to address them.

After thinking for sometime, I recollected one of the old tricks I have used during my initial days of system administration. “Accessing of other systems resources(like C$) works if the source(from where you are trying to access) and target systems are running with same local administrator password”. That means you should login to system with local administrator password and then you should be able to manage remote systems if they have same password with which you logged into the current one. I felt why can’t I use this to audit the administrator password.

I quickly wrote a powershell script(code below) of few lines and tested. It worked like a champ. So, what I am trying to do here is, accessing the c$ share of remote computer. This works if the remote computer password is same as the one with which I logged into current computer; otherwise it fails. Is n’t it enough to audit the admin rights and identify the computers which are not having the correct password? I feel this should be good and quick.

$servers = Get-Content c:tempserverslist.txt$servers | % {

if(Test-Path “\$_c`$windows”) {

Write-Host “Local administrator account on $_ has same password”

}  else  {

Write-Host “Local administrator account on $_ has different password”

}

}

 

 

 

 

I would be more happy if you can suggest a more efficient way of doing this.

I came across a couple of RAID disk space calculators day before yesterday and thought of sharing them. They basically helps you to figure out the usable space you get out of your available disks when configured under a particular RAID level(say RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, etc). It also gives sufficient information about each RAID level like no. of disks it should have etc. Another good thing is, they are available online. So you can connect and calculate anytime. Below are the links.

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/art-raid-estimator.htm

http://www.icc-usa.com/raid-calculator.asp

Let me know have comes across any such interesting tools.

Generally co-workers in office stop by your desk to seek some help or to throw some questions. That time you might be busy in middle of something and don’t want the person to see what is going on your screen. The general thing we do in such instances is, minimize all windows; but if you have some items on desktop, they are still visible to your visitor. So, now what should one do to blank the screen without disturbing the work?

I came across a nice utility (blacktop) which can be of some help here. This makes the screen blank with ctrl+alt+b key combination. Though using the key combination is bit difficult, I felt is useful.

The Microsoft Download Manager enables you to download files from the Internet in a more reliable and faster way than using a browser alone. Using the Download Manager makes it easier to download large files such as an application or multimedia files. The Download Manager has been specifically designed to manage file downloads from supporting Microsoft Web sites in a secure and reliable way. Once started, the Download Manager displays an easy¬-to-use interface that shows the status of downloads and enables you to resume downloads if they have failed. The Microsoft Download Manager currently supports downloads from Web addresses starting with http://.

System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems: Windows 7; Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows XP Service Pack 2

The Microsoft Download Manager requires one of the following operating systems: • Windows© XP with SP2 • Windows Vista© • Windows 7 • Windows Server© 2003 • Windows Server© 2008 The Microsoft Download Manager supports the following Web browsers: • Windows© Internet Explorer© 6 • Internet Explorer 7 • Internet Explorer 8 • Mozilla© Firefox©2 • Mozilla Firefox 3 

Download Link:

Download from here

A Software to easily swich between two physical computer consoles

As part of one of my project, I have to work on two physical systems. So, I don’t have any option than connecting both of them at my desk maintain two keyboards and mouses. When ever I want to switch between computers, I have to swing my chair to reach other keyboard and mouse. This is really painful and I have to switch like this for more than 100 times a day. Initially I thought of of using a KVM. But I am afraid after looking at it’s cost. That too, I have multi monitors connected for one of my system, that means I have three monitors now. If I use a KVM, I can not make use of multi monitor.

That time, I dreamed about a application which easily takes your mouse control from monitor of one machine to monitor of other machine, when it reaches end of first one. My friends said, it is out of scope. I too felt that and days are rolling….and I have no option than to swing my chair every time.

But today I have seen something great which really helped me. I was reading Technet Magazine and in IT tool box section, they talked about Input Redirector. After reading it’s overview, I felt very happy and immediately tried on my machine.  It worked like a champ and I am able to change my KB and mouse control to second machine with just a mouse move. Amazing right?. I read completely about this tool and they have some more exciting features like, clipboard transfer between computers, Simultaneously locking all computers, and has hotkey option for faster switching between computers …many more…

Visit Product Site, if you want to give a try.

Let me know if you know any other tools which perform like this.

I generally use Scriptomatic Tool for samples of WMI queries using VBscripts. It is useful and servers the purpose in many conditions. But I decided to stop using it…because, I am impressed with Microsofts new Tool “WMI Code Generator” — yay..

It is really a rich version of Scriptomatic tool. Using WMI code generator, you can generate scripts for specific property, work with wmi events, and many more along with wmi code samples.

It helps you to,

• Get samples codes for all WMI classes
• Has the capability to generate code for selected properties
• Supports and WMI methods execution
• Supports WMI events code generation
• Browsing WMI made easy
• More importently, you can run this with normal user account and no installation is required. In case of scriptomatic, you should use administrator account to run it.

So, don’t miss it…

Download:

Download link is here..

Reference :

http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2010/02/02/two-minute-drill-wmi-code-creator.aspx

Happy Learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi

“I have a GPO GUID and want to know to which GPO this belongs to?”. If that is your question, you can happily use the below method.  For this you need to have “support tools” of Windows 2003.  You can get it from Microsoft Web Site as well. Alternatively, you can copy search.vbs from any machine where support tools package is installed.

cscript /nologo search.vbs “LDAP://dc=mydomain,dc=com” /C:”&(objectClass=groupPolicyContainer)(name={31B2F340-016D-11D2-945F-00C04FB984F9})” /P:displayName /S:SubTree

tags:how to find GPO name, GPO GUID to name resolution