Since Exchange 2007 was released and carrying on with Exchange 2010 part of the installation process is running setup commands /pl, /p, /ps, and /pd (more information here). Even during service pack upgrades some of the setup commands are needed. During each setup command an ExBPA pre-check is ran before making any changes to the infrastructure to ensure the environment is ready for the new version of Exchange. A common problem that I have noticed over the years is that when pre-check fail, for ... [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]

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]

The more I work with PowerShell the more impressed I am with how useful of a tool it is to manage Exchange. In this blog I want to illustrate how easy it is to pull Public Folder data from your Exchange environment and export that data into a HTML format.  I think in every environment I have ever worked in or supported, Public Folders have grown out of control. This causes organizations to have to back up and replicate old and irrelevant data. Most administrators ignore cleaning up Public F... [More]