Peter Van Eeckhoutte's Blog

Archive for the ‘MS Exchange’ Category

From the MSExchangeTeam Blog : It is my distinct pleasure to announce today the global availability of Exchange Server 2010. This has been an amazing journey from conception to launch, and the team has delivered an unprecedented line up of innovations in this release. I am incredibly proud of the team and our product. The dedication of the Exchange community working side by side with us to deliver Exchange 2010 has been inspiring for me. I want to thank you for your commitment over the past 3 years helping us develop new ideas, make product enhancements and test pre-release bits to ensure our final product is rock solid. I believe Exchange has the most impressive IT Pro and Developer community in the world today. We could not have shipped this product …

In an older blog post on Certificate Authorities, I have provided some information about the process to generate Exchange 2007 certificates.  This process has slightly changed in Exchange 2010, and Johan Delimon (pro-exchange.be) has written an excellent article about this : Generating Exchange 2010 Certificates (Exchange Management Shell)

The 2 most important changes are :

the new-exchangecertificate cmd-let no longer supports the -path variable (so requests cannot be written directly to disk)
the 2007 GUI at Digicert still uses the -path parameter, so a new GUI was created to support 2010 certificate requests

In short, the updated procedure is :

generate the powershell command using an updated gui at Digicert : https://www.digicert.com/easy-csr/exchange2010.htm
Save the exchange certificate request into a $Data variable
Write the contents of the $Data variable to a file  (Set-Content -path “c:\request.req” -Value $Data)

Then, …

Hi,

I just want to share with you that, as reported on the Microsoft Readiness and training blog, Microsoft has released a new free, one-hour e-Learning clinic, providing an introduction to Exchange 2010.

If you have a Microsoft Live ID, you can access the Clinic at https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/courseDetail.aspx?courseId=117959&offerPriceId=249673&tab=details Read more »

It may sound a bit extraordinary, but I needed to have the ability to change attachment filenames while they were being processed by the transport service on Exchange. I can’t really tell you why I needed this functionality, but I guess there could be many reasons to do so. (e.g. zip files should be renamed to .zip.renamed  so they need to be saved to disk first, renamed and then opened, and so on).  Anyways, I could not find a way to do this with the Exchange built-in features, so I had to write my own custom transport agent to do this.

The agent is written in C#, uses .Net Framework 3.5, uses the native MS Exchange API’s and works fine with Exchange 2007 (I’ve only tested SP1) and 2010 (beta 1). The dll has been compiled for x64 (64bit) systems only.

Putting …

Today, I’m going to share some ‘notes from the field’ about fixing oab issues in Exchange 2007 In order to fully understand the oab generation and distribution process, I will assume that you are running the Mailbox server role and HUB/CAS server roles on different servers. Of course, this is not a requirement to run a successfull Exchange installation at all, but it will help understanding the various processes. Furthermore, I will sometimes refer to clustered mailbox servers (CCR) and how this setup may influence the oalgen process. Symptoms When you have discovered that the Offline Address Book is not updating anymore, you may see the following event log entries in the log on your mailbox server : Event 9334, MSExchange SA OALGen encountered error ffffffff while initializing the offline …

The 2 most important resources I’m using to stay up-to-date with Exchange are the MS Exchange team blog and the Pro-Exchange website.

The Pro-Exchange website has been entirely revamped a little while ago, and after sitting back & observing the new website for a couple of days, and even though the content is still growing, I concluded that it’s worth while mentioning this excellent website on my blog.  I would strongly suggest to take a look for yourself, register on the website, and subscribe to the RSS feeds. Although the domain name ends at .be, The pro-exchange community is really a global community with members all across the world…

Check it out, register, subscribe to the feeds…     http://www.proexchange.be/

In the past, I have received a good number of hits originating from the previous version of pro-exchange website, referring to my free …

One of the challenges that result from operating a messaging environment is making sure the company’s internal Distribution Lists stay up to date.  In most corporate environments, this is a task that is typically assigned to IT staff, however it does not have to be like this.  At least, not for regular Distribution Lists.  (It may be a bit complicated for Dynamic Distribution Lists, but hey – they are dynamic so there should be no reason to delegate management access to a Dynamic Distribution List) There may be good reasons to delegate this task to end users, and ideally these users should be able to use their Outlook client to manage the company Distribution Lists.  Imagine that you can ask Marketing people to keep the Marketing distribution list up to date… or ask Sales support people to do the …