More in Exchange Server 2010

At last, the chocks have been released and the runway is almost clear for Exchange 2013 deployment. The missing places that have stopped existing customers introducing Exchange 2013 into their environment have been provided with the release of: Exchange 2010 SP3 Exchange 2007 SP3 RU10 Basically, these are the versions of Exchange that understand how to play together nicely with Exchange 2013 so that, for instance, an incoming client connection can be proxied by an Exchange 2013 CAS to an Exchange 2010 mailbox server. However, the final piece of the puzzle will slot into place when Microsoft releases Exchange 2013 CU1 (cumulative update #1) in Q1 2013, in line with their new servicing strategy for Exchange 2013 announced last week. Given that we are mid-way through Q1, you can assume that CU1 is on the way very soon. Exchange 2010 SP3 also supports Windows Server 2012, which I think will be the most popular operating system for Exchange 2013 deployment, and it is required to co-exist in a hybrid environment alongside the upcoming Wave 15 refresh for Office 365, when “the service” gets to run datacenter versions of Exchange 2013, Lync 2013, and SharePoint 2013....More

When I wrote about how the Exchange 2013 Administration Center (EAC) simplifies the management of Database Availability Groups (DAGs), Scott Schnoll, that well-known and much-travelled evangelist of Exchange high availability, pointed out quite correctly that none of Exchange’s management tools include any business logic whatsoever as all depend on calling whatever Exchange Management Shell (EMS) cmdlet is appropriate to manipulate information an object. This has been the case since Exchange 2007 embraced PowerShell and launched Exchange on the path that it has since followed. Not being picky at all, my sources within the EAC team tell me that they run EMS in a slightly different manner than an administrator does through an EMS window. It’s all to do with the way that browsers send commands to servers. At least, that’s what I remember from a lunch-time conversation at MEC in Orlando. Or maybe I was too concerned with eating to remember accurately. In any case, Scott’s point is well made....More

It might have escaped your attention or maybe you aren’t concerned, but Microsoft’s formal support for Exchange 2010 SP1 expires today. Ongoing support activities were proceeding until quite recently, with Exchange 2010 SP1 RU8 released on December 11, 2012. But now it’s time to move on and get servers upgraded to Exchange 2010 SP2, preferably applying the latest roll-up update (RU5) for that service pack, making sure that you test everything thoroughly first. Exchange 2010 SP1 completed the development process for Exchange 2010. I know that’s not the official story because Microsoft always holds that development is complete when they ship the RTM version for a product, but in reality this isn’t so as there’s invariably a rush to get software out the door to meet arbitrary dates and usually there are some gaps remaining that have to be close post-RTM, usually delivered in the first service pack. Exchange 2010 SP1 appeared with a completely rewritten version of Outlook Web App, for instance, and it included lots of new UI in the Exchange Management Console to help administrators cope with retention policies and tags. It also introduced some very interesting technology in the Store, including block-mode replication. Of course, we’re still waiting for news about Exchange 2010 SP3, a release announced by Microsoft in October 2012 with a delivery date in “early 2013”. This is an important release because SP3 is needed to allow Exchange 2010 to co-exist alongside the brand-new Exchange 2013. The word is that work is progressing and that SP3 will appear soon. I hope so as its lack is preventing any sort of activity around Exchange 2013. Another item that we’re still awaiting news of is what Microsoft intends to do to address the issue that they caused when the decision was made to move Exchange 2013 into prime position for TechNet searches. I don’t think anyone would quibble with the notion that it is a good idea to keep TechNet refreshed in such a way that the lates...More

It’s always good to get questions and comments after an article appears, if only to prove that someone’s reading the material out there on the InterWeb. I was happy to receive some comments after my “Search and Destroy” article that covers the basics of Exchange 2010’s ability to search for and (optionally) remove messages in user mailboxes. Hopefully you won’t have to remove messages too often because users don’t typically respond too well to this kind of administrative intervention. That is, of course, if they notice that anything has been deleted! But if you do, it’s good to have solid tools to interrogate mailboxes for offending content and then purge it from the server. I presume the content to be offending in some respect as otherwise it would seem strange to search Exchange for it. One question that came up is about the AQS syntax used by Exchange to frame search queries. Microsoft documents the AQS syntax in MSDN and a couple of examples to help start the ball rolling can be found in the help for the Search-Mailbox cmdlet. The examples are intended to get your creative juices going and it will probably take some trial and error before you settle on the best query for your purposes. But sometimes you run into a limitation that isn’t covered too well in product documentation. Reading about Search-Mailbox, we find that “The SearchQuery parameter specifies a search string or a query formatted using Advanced Query Syntax (AQS).”...More

Oh dear… Problems do seem to have a habit of reoccurring, especially when it comes to software. Or maybe it’s just that repeated problems seem more obvious when seen in software. Or just that those who work in IT are narky people who complain a lot (I definitely fall into this category). Last August, I wrote about the way that the Exchange team had included a security update into Exchange 2010 SP2 RU4. The issue was simple. Because the update was marked as having fixed a security issue, it became much more of a pressing matter to install RU4 quickly. And because RU4 was deployed quickly, people did not have the chance to analyze the contents of the update and then test it thoroughly as they normally would before putting the new software into production. AS it turned out, RU4 included a change to the way that the Managed Folder Assistant processed calendar items that could have caused some difficulties for deployments. Coming right up to date, a problem was quickly found in Exchange 2010 SP2 RU5 when it was released in November. Microsoft pulled RU5 back and the fixed version (now dubbed RU5 V2) was released along with Exchange 2010 SP1 RU8 and Exchange 2007 SP3 RU9 on December 11. The initial feeling of well-being was quickly dispelled when people realized that RU5 V2 includes a security fix, making it a more pressing update to deploy. I think it’s fair to say that the decision to include the security fix in RU5 V2 did not impress the Exchange community. At least, that’s what the comments on the EHLO blog indicates. To be fair to the Exchange Customer Experience (CXP) team who put out updates, their hand might have been forced on the issue by internal Microsoft guidelines that dictate how security fixes are released to customers. The jury is still out as to whether RU5 V2 is any better than its predecessor. The DAG bug seems to have gone away, which is good, but some have reported installing the update, which isn’t so good. And curiously, KB288870 has been remove...More

Even with Apple’s best attempts to fix its malfunctioning email client in iOS 6.0.1 so that meetings scheduled in Exchange calendars aren’t “hijacked” and cancelled, the word I hear coming out of Redmond is that the folks in Cupertino still can’t quite understand that ActiveSync clients should not update the organizer field for a meeting. Evidence of strong feelings from Microsoft employees who have been affected by the bug come from a number of meetings involving literally hundreds of people that have been cancelled, simply because one of the potential attendees received a meeting request and then decided not to go, not realizing that iOS6 would go ahead and cancel the entire event. This resulted in everyone on a very large attendance list being spammed with a cancellation notice, which then led to the meeting being removed from their devices, in turn generating a further flood of cancellation notices. Clearly this kind of behaviour does not create a good user experience. Of course, you might wonder why quite so many Microsoft employees roam the Redmond campus equipped with Apple devices rather than showing allegiance to the wonders of Windows Phone, but let’s say that they’re doing in-depth hands-on competitive analysis for now. What’s clear though is that the problems created by the iOS bugs have affected Microsoft and that this has now gotten the attention of some relatively senior individuals, who have made their feelings clear to the Exchange development group that enough is enough and that steps should be put in place to stop badly-written ActiveSync clients screwing up user calendars, which is essentially what iOS is doing. I’ve been looking for Microsoft to take a more assertive role in dealing with ActiveSync licensees for a while now, so I’m happy that “something will be done” to stop clients messing with data when they should not. The problem Microsoft faces is that the profusion of ActiveSync clients means that cannot realistically ask ActiveSync l...More

A recent discussion amongst some Exchange MVPs asked whether it was a good idea to implement a Database Availability Group (DAG) using the standard edition of Exchange 2010. Although this is obviously possible because Exchange 2010 does not require the enterprise edition to form a DAG, I’m not sure that this is a good route to take. In passing, you do need the enterprise edition of Windows 2008 R2 to be able to use Windows Failover Clustering, the fundamental underpinning of the DAG. Companies do need to keep an eye on cash spent on IT and a natural tendency exists to restrict spending whenever it’s not absolutely necessary. A DAG built on the standard edition of Exchange 2010 can support five mounted databases on each server (mailbox and public folder databases count against the limit). Given sufficient DAG members to support three copies of each database (two copies deliver reasonable redundancy; three provide a warm feeling), it’s therefore reasonable to avoid the higher software license fees required for Exchange 2010 enterprise edition and go ahead with the standard edition. I agree with this stance up to a point. A small DAG (say, three mailbox servers) can certainly deliver good redundancy at an excellent price point, especially if you deploy JBOD-style storage. But then I start to think about why the DAG exists. A DAG is there to deliver highly available mailboxes, pure and simple....More

A reasonable amount of confusion appears to have arisen after Microsoft re-released the latest roll-up updates for Exchange 2007 SP3 and Exchange 2010 SP1 and SP2 on October 9. Only one piece of additional functionality is included in the new software (KB2756987, a fix that ensures the correct search results are provided to Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 clients), so it’s not the case that Microsoft suddenly discovered some lingering bug or horrible problem that they had distributed in error in the original releases. Instead, as we find out in the Microsoft Security and Defense blog, the root cause that forced the rerelease is a “clerical error made in code-signing” that  meant that the digital signatures applied to the software will expire prematurely. Once a digital signature expires, the software is no longer trusted by the WinVerifyTrust function used by Windows to validate software. The blog isn’t explicit as to exactly when the signature expires, preferring to say that “it occurs in the next few months”. The recommendation from Microsoft’s security team is as follows: “We encourage all customers to apply the re-released, re-signed security updates as they become available.  As an additional defense-in-depth measure, we recommend that customers also apply the updated WinVerifyTrust package which serves as an effective way for Windows and Microsoft applications to extend the validity period of these packages beyond the premature expiration date. ...More

Online forums have many reports about ActiveSync problems encountered by Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 users after upgrading their Apple devices to iOS6. One issue is when a user “hijacks” a meeting by being made its organizer after they open a meeting request, sometimes associated with delegate access to the organizer’s mailbox. A related issue might be when a user edits a meeting on their device only to send a cancellation message to all involved, even when the meeting request isn’t sent by a delegate. Some reports indicate a connection with devices that synchronize with the Apple iCloud, others say that this isn’t a factor. What’s confusing the issue is that, aside from working with meeting requests on an iOS6 device (and potentially only devices that have been upgraded to iOS6 rather than coming fresh from the factory with iOS6 preinstalled), there doesn’t seem to be great commonality across the reported concerns. Microsoft Support and Apple are involved to drive to a solution but there’s no word yet whether the problem lies in the ActiveSync protocol or in Apple’s implementation of ActiveSync in their email client. Remember, Microsoft licenses ActiveSync to other companies such as Apple; Microsoft does not test, measure, approve, or qualify the implementation of ActiveSync thereafter. Sure, they work with partners to resolve issues when they arise, but there’s no big ActiveSync control organization testing partner code before clients are provided to end users. The openness of ActiveSync is one of its charms as it encourages innovation from partners to build really good email clients. The downside is that sometimes bugs creep through the development process and are only exposed in production. Meeting and other calendar data have always been an issue for mobile clients, mostly because the code that manipulated calendar data was scattered throughout different parts of Exchange. One set of business logic was used when an Outlook client updated a meeting; quite...More

This week in Orlando, Microsoft brought together a mass of Exchange Server engineers, MVPs, and admins, representing businesses of all sizes and with widely varying years of experience in the field. The event, of course, was the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC), making its return after a 10-year absence. And while the C in MEC ostensibly stands for conference, this event made clear that the C also stands for Exchange Server's thriving community.In fact, during the opening keynote, Microsoft's Michael Atalla announced the launch of a new website dedicated to promoting community within the Exchange world, aptly found at www.iammec.com. This site is all about sharing knowledge among this dynamic group....More

When I wrote about my initial experiences of Outlook 2013 Preview on July 24, I remarked that the installation of Outlook 2013 forced a recreation of my Offline Storage file (OST). The new OST was much smaller than the older version used by Outlook 2010, a fact that seemed to be a good thing at the time even if the creation of OSTs en masse might generate a resource consumption problem for servers if you deployed Outlook 2013 to multiple users at one time. The smaller OST has persisted since and, as I write, it’s about 600KB smaller than the Outlook 2010 version. Such a wonderful reduction warranted further investigation, so off I went to find out. Slipstick.com has long been a good source of information about Outlook. Its piece on “All you need to know about Outlook 2013 Preview” said that Outlook 2013 uses a new compressed format for the OST which results in files up to 40% smaller than before. HowTo-Outlook.com states that the reduction is gained because “Outlook now compresses several data fields/values in the ost-file which results in a much smaller ost-file”. These reports certainly match with my experience, so I was even more impressed at Microsoft’s achievement. Then I went to Microsoft’s own “What’s new in Outlook 2013 Preview” page, where I discovered the same comment about new OST files being 40% smaller. But then I read all about “Cached Exchange Mode Improvements” to find that: “By default, if Cached Exchange Mode is enabled, Outlook 2013 caches 1 year"...More