Slow Mailbox Move with Exchange 2010 SP1

If you are having trouble with the speed of moving mailboxes to Exchange 2010 SP1. This trick might help you speed up the move of mailboxes from Exchange 2003, 2007 to Exchange 2010 SP1

http://blogs.technet.com/b/nawar/archive/2010/10/06/slow-mailbox-move-with-exchange-2010-sp1.aspx

Installing Exchange 2007 SP2 Management Tools on Windows 7 SP1

We recently deployed Windows 7 SP1 64bit to all the IT staff and the user support team required Exchange Management Tools installed on their workstations.  I just asked them to go ahead and copy the installer on the local disk and fire up the installation as administrator and choose management tools in a custom installation. I was told that there was a compatibility  issue error while doing the installation.

Resolution

I installed the following features just to make sure that the perquisites are met.

• IIS 6 Management Console
• IIS 6 WMI Compatibility
• IIS Metabase and IIS 6 configuration Compatibility
• IIS Management Console

I tried the installation again as administrator and checked the compatibility mode to Vista SP2, got the following error.

So trusting in the good old restart trick I restarted and ran the same setup as administrator and compatibility mode (right click > Properties > Compatibility) Vista SP2. It worked like a charm!

Adding or Deleting Company Holidays to/from All Users’ Calendars–Exchange 2007

I was recently asked to figure out a silent method of adding our organization’s holiday’s to all users calendars. Following was my approach.
First I thought of looking for a client side solution. Everyone in our organization uses Outlook 2007 and outlook uses a file name outlook.hol for holiday configuration. Following is the format of file, it can be created using a simple text editor and can be distributed by an email or commandline (outlook.exe /hol holidayfilename)
[Country or Description] ###
Event or holiday description, yyyy/mm/dd
Event or holiday description, yyyy/mm/dd
read for more details
Above is not very clean for a large environment, so I was not too happy with this solution and started taking a different approach.
Definitely it would be so much easier doing it with Exchange Management Shell and finally I found my answer.
Here is what's needed for a great solution

• Exchange Management Tools and Outlook 2007 installed on a 32bit machine
• Outlook 2007 to create a PST file
• Export-mailbox
• Import-mailbox

Solution

1. First of all create all events for all holidays in a mailbox Calendar and export it to a PST file or Create a Calendar Item in a PST file with the name “Calendar” and create all events in it.
2. On 32bit a machine where outlook 2007 is installed login with an Exchange Enterprise Admin account and open Exchange Management Shell then run the following
   
   $users=Get-Mailbox –ResultSize Unlimited
   Import-Mailbox $users –PSTFolderPath c:\pstfolder/pstfile.pst –IncludeFolders ‘\Calendar’
   
3. Above will add all items from the PST File Calendar to all users’ calendars.

Now what happens if someone comes to you and says hey there is an event we need to delete from all users’ calendars, simple!!
Get-Mailbox –ResultSize Unlimited | Export-Mailbox –IncludeFolders ‘\Calendar’ –SubjectKeywords “Subject of the appointment” –DeleteContent
Hope this is useful!! Please comment.

Cannot See Disconnected Mailbox Exchange 2007

If disabled or removed mailboxes don’t appear in the console.

Run the following cmdlet from EMS

Clean-Database -Identity SGName\DBName

Public Folder Item Count report

This can help compare public folder replicas on two different servers

Get-PublicFolder –server server1 -Recurse |Get-PublicFolderStatistics |ft Name, ItemCount, FolderPath > pfreport-sever1.txt

Outlook Calendar and Daylight Saving Time

Reoccurring appointments with wrong time

After you have made sure that all your exchange servers have applied correct time settings, clients (workstations) are in sync too and you have a few users complaining about time being incorrect in some of their reoccurring calendar appointments then considering the following may help. Outlook 2010 users may not be effected by this issue but if they are then the following link refers to a Time Zone Data Update Tool for it.

According to the following article Microsoft recommends to use Time Zone Data Update Tool for pre Outlook 2010 clients. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931667

Here is the link to download 32bit tool for pre Outlook 2010 client http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931667

If you don't want to use the tool or if it doesn't fix the issue then manual edit of the appointment is required. This applies to reoccurring appointments.

Go to Outlook > Calendar and open the series of the reoccurring appointment which is not displaying time correctly.

Then click on reoccurrence button and here you will notice that the appointment time is displayed correctly. There are two ways to fix it.

1. Remove reoccurrence save the appointment and apply it again
2. Change the time zone to a different one and save the appointment then apply the correct time zone again and save the appointment.

Both of these options will generate updates and send it to all attendees, fixing the appointment time on their calendars are well.

Disable Send Out of Office auto-replies to External Senders in Exchange 2007

You don’t want users in your organization to send Out of Office Auto-replies to external recipients and also you don’t want the option to appear in Outlook 2007 like shown below

To disable/hide the option Outside My Organization in Out of Office Assistant in Outlook and in OWA use the following in Exchange Management Shell.

Set-Mailbox <mailboxid> -ExternalOofOptions InternalOnly

This can be changed per mailbox, if you want to be applied to all mailboxes there are many ways of approaching it. You can get mailboxes on a server and pipe it with Set-Mailbox with above settings Or the following will apply it on all mailboxes in an exchange organization.

Get-Mailbox –ResultSize Unlimited | Set-Mailbox -ExternalOofOptions InternalOnly

-ResultSize Unlimited is important otherwise it will change the setting for the first 1000 mailboxes.

For more details on Out of Office Assistant refer to the link below.
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/10/06/429115.aspx

Send as permissions disappear – Exchange 2007

You granted send as permissions to an account from Exchange Management Console in exchange 2007 environment and realize that after an hour later the permissions have disappeared, in fact any other explicit permissions that you granted through Active Directory have gone as well. This will also becomes an issue for organizations using BlackBerry.

Above is by design, read this for more details.

To fix the issue:

Remove the account from any of the following group

• Administrators
• Account Operators
• Server Operators
• Print Operators
• Backup Operators
• Domain Admins
• Schema Admins
• Enterprise Admins
• Cert Publishers

If that's not an option then see the work around in the following KB Article.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=907434 

This applies to any version of Microsoft Exchange.

Reset Mailbox Permissions

if a mailbox is being shared between multiple users and for some reason not all folders are visible to all the users. First thing you might want to do is to consider resetting the permissions of the mailbox.

The tool you would use for this purpose is PFDAVAdmin.

• Instead of connecting to public folder on a given exchange server, connect to all mailboxes of the server where the concerned mailbox is.
• Right click the mailbox name and select Propagate folder ACEs
• Check “NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON” and click on OK

even though the level of permission is none “Anonymous Logon” has to be listed in the ACL in order for the folder to be visible to everyone who has permission to the mailbox.

Unable to send emails to a mail enabled Public Folder

When trying to send emails to a mail enabled Public Folder your users receive the following NDR

Delivery has failed to these recipients or distribution lists:

emailaddress@domain.com
There's a problem with the recipient's mailbox. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please try resending this message, or provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator.
_____

Sent by Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
Diagnostic information for administrators:

Generating server: htserver.domain.com

emailaddress@domain.com
#550 5.2.0 STOREDRV.Deliver: The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service reported an error. The following information should help identify the cause of this error: "MapiExceptionNotAuthorized:16.18969:E70F0000……

Error: MapiExceptionNotAuthorized makes it apparent that the issue is with permissions.

Check the public folder permissions, use PFDAVAdmin or Microsoft Outlook for it. Make sure that Anonymous has Contributor permission level.

Auto Delete Old Items from a Public Folder

Open Public Folder Management Console from Exchange Management Console, open the properties of a public folder and go to Replication tab and entre the “Local replica age limit (days)” value.

Update all address lists in Exchange 2007

We are very close to getting the Last Exchange Server 2003 decommissioned. Long process, will write about it when I get some time.

I used the this link to get some info about upgrading the Address Lists to Exchange 2007, finally ended up using PowerGUI with Exchange PowerPack to perform the actual task. Anyways after the filters were corrected for each department by using

(Department –eq ‘Department Name’ -and RecipientType -eq 'UserMailbox')

Users were still seeing the old entries in the address lists in outlook because the lists had to be update or refreshed in Exchange 2007.  To update one address list only you can use the following cmdlet in EMS

Update-AddressList -identity ‘list name’

To update all address lists use the following

Get-AddressList | Update-AddressList

Love the power of Exchange Management Shell and PowerShell!!!

User with no mailbox appears in Global Address List (GAL)

 

This might happen when you copy a user account in Active Directory. If the template account had a mailbox and the newly created account doesn’t have a mailbox.

Active Directory still copies the Exchange Attributes and that is why the newly created account which doesn’t have a mailbox or email address appears in the Global Address List.

To fix it : -

• Open ADSI Edit
• Look for the account and open its properties
• In the Attribute Editor find showInAddressBook
• Click Edit and remove all entries.