Exchange FAQs
Does Microsoft provide an in-place
upgrade solution for Exchange Server 2003
to Exchange Server 2007?
Exchange 2007 is supported only in
production environments running on 64-bit
(x64, no Itanium); Exchange 2003 is supported only in production environments
running on 32-bit platforms. There's no
direct in-place server upgrade possible.
Instead, you'll need to take a swing
approach, in which you'll bring a new 64-bit
Exchange 2007 server into the existing
Exchange organization and migrate mailboxes and services to the new server. You
can migrate mailboxes by using the Move
Mailbox Wizard or the Exchange Management Shell move-mailbox command. (Look
for an upcoming article that explains how to use move-mailbox and other
Exchange Management Shell commands in the January 2007 Exchange
& Outlook Pro VIP.) You should use
the Exchange 2007 functionality for
mailbox migrations; you can't use the
Exchange 2003/Exchange 2000
Server mailbox migration wizard to
move mailboxes between Exchange
2000 or Exchange 2003 and
Exchange 2007 servers.
Depending on the number of
mailboxes, if you already have a 64-bit–capable Exchange server, you
could migrate mailboxes to a temporary
server, rebuild the existing server with
a 64-bit OS and Exchange 2007, then
migrate the mailboxes back. However,
this approach might be difficult if you
have a large amount of data to migrate.
All Exchange 2007 server roles
can coexist with Exchange 2003
servers. To migrate, you should install
server roles in this order: Client
Access, Hub Transport, Mailbox, and
Unified Messaging. You can install
Edge Transport separately from the
migration planning—before, during,
or after the other Exchange 2007
server roles.
After you replace the Exchange
2003 front-end server with the
Exchange 2007 Client Access server,
an Exchange 2003 mailbox user still
can use Microsoft Outlook Web
Access (OWA) to access his or her
mailbox through the Exchange 2007
Client Access Server's /Exchange virtual directory (for example, http://
<server FQDN>/Exchange). You can't
use an Exchange 2003 or Exchange
2000 front-end server to connect to
an Exchange 2007 mailbox server. To
get the Exchange 2007 OWA experience, you need Exchange 2007 Client
Access and Mailbox servers.
—John Savill
How can I enable circular logging for an Exchange Server storage
group (SG)?
By default, Exchange writes
5MB transaction logs that are kept
until you perform a full backup. If
the database becomes corrupted,
Exchange restores the last full
backup, then applies all the transaction logs. However, you can turn on
circular logging, which instead reuses
transaction logs when the 5MB is full,
but doing so means that in the event
of a database loss, data could be
restored only to the point of the last
backup. To enable circular logging,
perform these steps:
- Start Exchange System Manager
(ESM—Start, Programs, Microsoft
Exchange, System Manager).
- Expand Administrative Groups,
Servers, then expand the server.
- Right-click the SG for which you
want to enable circular logging and
select Properties (remember, transaction logs are per SG and not per
database), as Figure 1 shows.
- Select the Enable circular logging
check box and click OK, as Figure 2 shows.
- Click Yes to the warning.
- Restart the Information Store (IS)
by using the following command:
net stop msexchangeis
net start msexchangeis
—John Savill
What's Centro?
Centro is the codename for
Microsoft's new infrastructure solution aimed at midsized businesses.
This solution combines Windows
Longhorn Server, Exchange 2007,
and security and management technologies. Centro is very much a
Microsoft Small Business Server
(SBS)–type solution for bigger
companies. You can find additional
information about Centro at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/sep05/09-06Infrastructure.mspx.
—John Savill
We're concerned about the
security of data on mobile devices if
those devices are lost. More and more
employees are using smart phones
and other mobile devices that have
copies of our users' mailboxes as well
as whatever company data (e.g., customer lists) that they copy to their
devices. What can we do to protect
that data?
You're right to be concerned, not
only about the information on the
devices but the passwords as well
because most of your users probably
have configured their devices to save
their password for synchronizing with
Exchange Server. That Active Directory (AD) username and password is
often also their main account for
accessing the rest of the Windows
network. Windows Mobile protection
of saved passwords has come under
fire for being easy to break. Therefore,
loss of a device could potentially
result in that user's entire account
being compromised, including all
applications that depend on AD for
authentication.
Asking users to configure mobile
devices with a PIN is likely to meet with little compliance because
of the inconvenience, especially because some poorly
designed Windows mobile
phone devices require you to
enter the PIN just to answer
an incoming call.
To reduce the risks associated with mobile devices,
you should consider implementing the Windows Mobile 5.0 Mobility and Security
Feature Pack and insist that
all devices in your fleet either run Windows Mobile 2005 or fully support the client-side features of the Mobility
and Security Feature Pack. In
addition to the Mobility and
Security Feature Pack's
DirectPush technology that
enables mobile devices to
immediately receive new email messages and other
mailbox updates as the occur,
the feature pack introduces two crucial features for
secure management of your mobile device fleet. Mobility
and Security Feature Pack lets you remotely wipe lost or
stolen devices and also lets you set a policy that enforces
the use of PINs. If a user
reports a lost or stolen device, you simply log on to
the Mobility and Security
Feature Pack's administration Web page on your Exchange
server and issue a remote wipe command for that device. If the radio in the device is
turned on, it will immediately wipe the
device's memory and report back to
the Exchange server so that you get
positive confirmation. Otherwise, as
soon as the device is turned on, the
device will see the wipe request when
it tries to connect to Exchange.
I recently left my Palm Treo 700w
in a cab and immediately logged on to
Exchange and issued a wipe command. As it turned out, the battery had already died, and I later retrieved
the device from the cab driver. I was
able to log on to Exchange and cancel the wipe command before bringing
the phone back up, thus eliminating
the need to reconfigure all my phone
settings. The key to making remote
wipe work to mitigate risk is to train
users to notify the Help desk immediately when their phone is lost or
stolen.
—Randy Franklin Smith
How can I increase the limit on
rules storage in Exchange 2007 from
the 32KB default?
RulesQuota is one of the many
parameters available for the SetMailbox cmdlet, which configures
dozens of parameters on an individual
mailbox. The syntax to increase the
rules capacity to the maximum
256KB for a mailbox with the
alias MyMailbox would look like
this: set-mailbox -identity MyMailbox
-RulesQuota 256KB.
—Sue Mosher
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