And since it’s not 1st April, you can rest assured it’s not a joke. Leaving Microsoft isn’t a decision you can make easily. Working for such a company is a privilege. Working with such an amazing talent everyday is something to die for. Working to produce, deploy and support such amazing products is something to be proud of. So, why am I leaving? I have been working on design/deploy/manage/support numerous technologies since I started my career about 17 years ago. While in different...

Off the Exchange/Lync topic train but interesting enough this was for me to pass it on without writing about it. After a long period of laziness and ignorance of my home network, I finally got tired of buffering issues when I stream HD videos I took on vacation and decided to do something about it. I setup Linksys WRVS400N knowing all my devices do support Wireless N including my XBOX360 where I will be watching those videos. Since I can do Wireless N on all my devices, I...

Get-Help has always been my favorite cmdlet. Anytime I am stuck, I was able to find lot more information about any given cmdlet when I need. Until today, my favorite feature was Get-Help's –online parameter. For the cmdlet that have specified online uri of help topic, get-help cmdlet –online takes you straight to cmdlet help page in your browser, given you have internet connectivity on the machine you are running the cmdlet. That was until today. Today, I was...

UPDATE: Please read updated guidance due to changes introduced in SP2 RU4 here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/08/14/calendar-and-tasks-retention-tag-support-in-exchange-2010-sp2-ru4.aspx . It specifically addresses Calendar items and tasks. I wouldn’t be talking about it today! When the topic came up with my colleague, it quickly became a confusing discussion of what’s what, what works, what doesn’t and why TechNet seems to say something...

I have come across this issue enough times that even if it is documented on TechNet it deserves mention here. When you launch Exchange Management Shell or try to connect to an Exchange 2010 Server remotely using PowerShell, you get error “500 – Internal Server Error. There is a problem with the resource you are looking for, and it cannot be displayed.” Error details also show the following: For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic. + CategoryInfo...

Recently I came across a CAS server that was rebuilt. Think of it as a new server you are introducing in your environment.   Everything looked good except certificate that we imported. The certificate looked good when looking at validity, issuing authority certificate and other dependencies. However, Exchange Management Console complained: “The certificate status could not be determined because the revocation checked failed.” Since the error seemed clear enough, we checked...

Exchange 2010 introduced RBAC as a mechanism to manage access to administrative tasks at granular level which was not possible in previous versions of Exchange. While you may know how to use RBAC to create custom roles that maps to job functions in your environment, one particular feature tends to get easily overlooked, mostly because it is least understood I believe. It is Unscoped Top Level Management Roles. So, I wrote a blog post on it detailing what it is, and how to configure...

This article was originally posted on my personal blog here . Since I don't actively maintain it anymore, I am publishing it here. When you run Exchange Setup to prepare schema, usually the very next question is, how do I verify schema was updated successfully? Verifying only the values of attributes as mentioned below is not a good verification of Exchange setup completion. This article is intended to only provide reference to attributes and their values. Let’s start...

With release of Service Pack 2 for Exchange Server 2010, you gain few new features such as Cross-Site Silent Redirection for OWA , Address Book Policies , Mailbox Auto-Mapping and few other additions ( What’s new in Exchange 2010 SP2 ). With it, comes new pre-requisites if you are installing/updating Client Access Server (CAS) role. You will need to install the following components on the server that will be running CAS role (or existing CAS you are planning to update...

There is nothing new about this. If you have been reading about Exchange Server 2010 or have it deployed with hardware load balancer, chances are, you have read how to configure static ports on Exchange Server 2010 on TechNet Social wiki for Exchange 2010 . Chances are that you have also used my script (referenced in the post above) to set static ports on your servers. Lastly, chances are that you have read all about it on my previous post here . If so, why am I even talking about...