Alfa BBT

It seems that Microsoft published the second Exchange 2010 exam today: Exam 70-663: Pro: Designing and Deploying Messaging Solutions with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

The contents at a glance:

Planning the Exchange Server 2010 Infrastructure
* Design the Exchange Server 2010 installation.
* Design message routing.
* Design the mailbox server role.
* Design client access.
* Plan for transition and coexistence.

Deploying the Exchange Server 2010 Infrastructure
* Prepare the infrastructure for Exchange Server 2010 deployment.
* Deploy Edge transport server role.
* Deploy client access server role.
* Deploy hub transport server role.
* Deploy mailbox server role.
* Deploy server roles for coexistence and migration.

Designing and Deploying Security for the Exchange Organization
* Design and deploy messaging security.
* Design and deploy Exchange permissions model.
* Design and deploy message hygiene.
* Design and deploy client access security.
* Design and deploy Exchange object permissions.

Designing and Deploying Exchange Server 2010 Availability and Recovery
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for Exchange dependencies.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for CAS role.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for mailbox server role.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for hub transport role.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for Edge transport server role.

Designing and Deploying Messaging Compliance, System Monitoring, and Reporting
* Design and deploy auditing and discovery.
* Design and deploy message archival.
* Design and deploy transport rules for message compliance.
* Design and deploy for monitoring and reporting.

The first exam Exam 70-662: TS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Configuring is already available for a month or 2. For some reason it seems to have slipped through my RSS feeds without me noticing it. Guess I’ll need to add another one.

Time to start preparing.

I wanted to quickly reblog (as opposed to retweet) a recent blog post from Ilse Van Criekinge as I did have a little “Aha!”-moment upon reading it:

One of the first warmly welcomed new features included with the next release of Microsoft Office Outlook, being 2010, is the ability to open up multiple mailboxes (up to 3 by default, and up to 15 using a registry entry) and the fact that when you send a message using one of the accounts the mail will be saved in the Sent Items folder of the sender’s mailbox. When opening a shared mailbox in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, it required you to create at least a rule to have the message moved from the primary mailbox its Sent Items folder, to the shared mailbox its Sent Items…

But…it seems that ever since June 2009, 30, this isn’t necessary anymore!

Read on…

Henrik Walther wrote a nice article on Exchange 2010 for the December edition of TechNet Magazine:

The recently released Microsoft Exchange 2010 Release to Manufacturing (RTM) version, like its predecessors, includes a wealth of new features and improvements over existing ones. As a matter of fact, with this release, Exchange now consists of approximately 21 million lines of code.

Exchange developers had five main goals in mind for Exchange 2010: to help organizations achieve new levels of reliability, better performance, simplified administration, improved protection of communications and greater business mobility for users. In short, and with the global economic crisis in mind, they aimed to create a more flexible and optimized product that would lower the costs of running an Exchange 2010 infrastructure.

Since April 2008, I have spent a good deal of time testing Exchange 2010 beta and release candidate builds in my labs, as well as in two enterprise customer environments. In this article, I will take you on a tour through the most exciting changes and improvements in this latest and—without doubt—greatest Exchange version we have seen so far.

Read on.

Microsoft announced the release of Exchange Server 2007 SP2 the day before yesterday. Interested people can find the release notes here, the corresponding Technet Page here and the actual bits here.

This morning in my mailbox:

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate is now available.

As a participant in the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta experience, we invite you to download the new Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate version. Now you can evaluate the release candidate product to simplify your IT environment and give you more control.

Resources delivered right when you need them.

You will have access to resources that will help you optimize your evaluation of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 RC. Get started now to take advantage of the wealth of resources. Download Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 RC today.

Sincerely,
Your TechNet Team

More details on E2K10 can be found on the Evaluation Center.

Got some questions from one of our customers about Exchange 2010 archiving. First of all its important to understand that the solution proposed by Microsoft is like having a second mailbox in the same database. I’m sure the technology will evolve later on but this seems kind of a drawback to me.

You can either read the details on the Exchange 2010 product home page or checkout this assessment (less Marketing!) from Ferris Research. Screenshot junkies on the other hand can check out this blog post from The Three UC Amigos. Last but not least there’s a TechNet webcast coming up (10th of June) which covers the new “Archiving & Retention” features.

Update 2009-06-26: Noticed an interesting discussion in the TechNet forums covering the “Personal Archive” feature.

Last couple of days I was trying to jumpstart an Exchange 2007 install that got hosed.

At a certain moment I couldn’t install because of an incomplete uninstall. Uninstalling exchange was also unsuccessful because some objects were missing from Active Directory. When I finally got out of that loop, I started getting complaints about MSI’s that could not be found/unpacked. I wanted to avoid reinstalling the OS so I tried removing exchange manually.

1. Run setup /m:uninstall
2. Stop and disable all the Exchange 2007 services
3. Use Registry Editor (Start->Run->Regedit) to remove these Exchange related registry keys:
   • HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange
   • HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchange* (all the keys starting with “MSExchange”)
   • HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Microsoft Exchange
4. Remove the entire Web Server role (don’t forget to reinstall afterwards as it’s a prerequisite for E2K7!)
5. Remove the Exchange 2007 server from Active Directory. I ended up deleting the entire “Microsoft Exchange” branch from ADSIEdit (Configuration Container > Services > Microsoft Exchange) as my Org only counts one server.
6. Use Windows Explorer to delete:
   • C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server
   • C:\ExchangeSetupLogs
7. Use Windows Installer CleanUp Utility to remove all the exchange related info from the installer database.
8. Remove the security groups created by Exchange setup from AD

Note: Manually removing Exchange 2007 is not supported by Microsoft! Official guidance for removing Exchange 2007 can be found in this TechNet article.

Last week I was called by a colleague who was experiencing some problems with a migration from Exchange 2000 Server to Exchange Server 2007. As a matter of fact the mailbox role refused to install correctly. (A public folder database was not being created.)

An extract of the ExchangeSetup.log:

   1: [24/10/2008 11:26:36] [2] Searching objects of type "PublicFolderDatabase" with filter "(FirstInstance Equal True)", scope "SubTree" under the root "$null".

   2: [24/10/2008 11:26:36] [2] Previous operation run on domain controller 'server.domain.tld'.

   3: [24/10/2008 11:26:36] [2] Searching objects of type "PublicFolderTree" with filter "(PublicFolderTreeType Equal Mapi)", scope "SubTree" under the root "$null".

   4: [24/10/2008 11:26:36] [2] Previous operation run on domain controller 'server.domain.tld'.

   5: [24/10/2008 11:26:36] [2] Calling Address List Service to stamp some properties related to mail recipient for configurable object "Server\Second Storage Group\Public Folder Database" of type "PublicFolderDatabase".

   6: [24/10/2008 11:26:36] [2] [ERROR] Unexpected Error

   7: [24/10/2008 11:26:36] [2] [ERROR] The Exchange server address list service failed to respond. This could be because of an address list or email address policy configuration error.

   8: [24/10/2008 11:26:36] [2] Ending processing.

   9: [24/10/2008 11:26:36] [1] The following 1 error(s) occurred during task execution:

  10: [24/10/2008 11:26:36] [1] 0.  ErrorRecord: The Exchange server address list service failed to respond. This could be because of an address list or email address policy configuration error.

  11: [24/10/2008 11:26:36] [1] 0.  ErrorRecord: Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Directory.RusServerUnavailableException: The Exchange server address list service failed to respond. This could be because of an address list or email address policy configuration error.

  12: at Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Directory.Recipient.RecipientUpdateService.LocateServer()

  13: at Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Directory.Recipient.RecipientUpdateService.Calculate(ADObject recipient, PolicyType[] policies, ADRecipientSession session)

  14: at Microsoft.Exchange.Management.SystemConfigurationTasks.NewPublicFolderDatabase.PrepareDataObject()

  15: at Microsoft.Exchange.Configuration.Tasks.SetTaskBase`1.InternalValidate()

  16: [24/10/2008 11:26:36] [1] [ERROR] The Exchange server address list service failed to respond. This could be because of an address list or email address policy configuration 

I was not able to come up with a solution just like that. However they did resolve the issue by removing the custom recipient policies. (Way to go CaSp!)

As you might know Exchange 2007 has only limited support for LDAP filters (OPATH is used instead) and is apparently very sensitive for the query syntax.

Some more potential causes can be found on Dave Goldman’s blog.

A colleague of mine was faced with this error while doing mailbox moves as part of an SBS2K3 migration.  Most of the mailboxes moved fine but a couple of them refused to move and and resulted in this error.

In the end we figured out that it was caused by the mailbox limit on the target system being lower than the one on the source (which had no limit set at all). It was only afterwards that I found this post from Neil Hobson confirming our findings.