Not too long ago, through the InitialAssist program, I had the opportunity to spend some time assisting an organization in the recovery of directory data and resource access.  The organization had put out a request for assistance from the Microsoft newsgroups and had received some excellent suggestions but unfortunately they didn’t resolve the issue. On Saturday afternoon, after a half day session at the Microsoft Directory Services Masters program, I became involved through the requ... [More]

This is post 3 in a series of 3 Exchange mini health assessment posts. The CAS role mini heath check post can be found here. The HUB mini health assessment post can be found here. The third PS1 script is a limited health assessment for the Mailbox role. The script runs through 4 functional areas:  core Exchange service status, Test mail flow, MAPI connectivity, and ExBPA (errors are exported to the report and warnings are displayed on screen). Once the data is collected, the results are ex... [More]

This is post 2 in a series of 3 Exchange mini health assessment posts. The CAS role mini heath check post can be found here. The Mailbox mini health assessment post can be found here. This script provides a limited health assessment for the HUB Transport role. The script runs through 3 functional areas:  core Exchange service status, Edge Sync Heath, and ExBPA (errors are exported to the report and warnings are displayed on screen). Once the data is collected, the results are exported to a... [More]

Part 2 of a 2 part post. Part 1 provides a background for Virtual List View (VLV) and the impact on Exchange of disabling this functionality. In this part we’re going to look at some examples of error messages which will be returned from ExBPA and OWA when VLV is disabled. Test Environment 2 – 2003R2 SP2 dcs 2 – Exchange 2003 – Windows 2003 1 – CCR Windows 2008 2 – HUB\CAS Windows 2008 Outlook 2003 SP2 Outlook 2007 All Outlook clients are in online mode The environme... [More]

Working with Exchange, you often come across settings that are good for one technology but can have a negative impact on Exchange – or vice versa. I bring this topic up because I was talking to a Microsoft Platforms PFE friend of mine that recommended enabling Virtual List View (VLV) to his customer to improve Active Directory performance. After discussing with him about some of the downfalls with VLV and Exchange, I wanted to write a blog that covers some of the advantages and disadvantages of ... [More]

A few weeks back I was onsite with a customer that was experiencing some issues with their Exchange servers after applying the latest rollup the night before. After we resolved the problem, the customer asked for a solution to validate all core Exchange services were online after patching their Exchange servers. Since the customer has hundreds of Exchange servers, we knew the only good solution would be to automate the task so I decided to build a PowerShell script. What I have done is broken ... [More]

For those of you that have taken the time to contribute your valuable comments in the past, we want to sincerely thank you.  As you may have noticed, a short time ago, all comments on the site were reset including the comments of valid contributors like Dinesh, Florian, Mike, Eric, and others.  That was an unintentional action of the site administrator that occurred while trying to clean up a larger problem – comment spam.  Each day, as we search through for the rare, legit... [More]