Until last week I was under the impression that Exchange always uses local GCs (Global Catalog servers) and only uses out-of-site directory servers (GCs or DCs) if no local ones are available. I found out otherwise from working on the issue described below. One of our customers had a server outage...

EXOLEDB creates a number of system folders under the NON_IPM_SUBTREE during the Accept Clients phase of MDB initialization. Some of the folders remain for historic reasons, but most have real purposes and impact on the server should they be deleted. None of these folders should ever be replicated. The...

This August 2008, Microsoft has released an update to the Outlook Time Zone Update Tool. This new version (Version 3.0) offers, amongst others, better support for Israel and Brazil with regards to time zone handling and rebasing of calendars. The Exchange Calendar Update Configuration Tool utilizes...

The Exchange System Attendant is a multi-faceted and sometimes mysterious service. To remove some of the mystery & hopefully provide a bit of clarity to MAD here are the cliff notes version of what it actually does. Initialization and Tasks 1. Binds to Domain Controller upon startup a...

In Exchange Online and Exchange Server 2013, you can use In-Place Hold or Litigation Hold to preserve mailbox content for litigation or investigations. Many organizations also need to preserve mailbox data for users who are no longer in the organization. In on-premises Exchange deployments, this has...

A few days ago, we posted blog The new Exchange 2007 Management Console overview and Recipient Management in Exchange 2007 - Overview giving an overview of the completely updated GUI management console and recipient management in Exchange 2007. This blog post covers common recipient management scenarios...

It is common for Exchange organizations to include different versions of Exchange. Interoperability scenarios present challenges to administrators for maintaining the different tool sets required to manage different versions of recipient and configuration objects in the organization. It is important...

Read all about it on David's blog .

EDIT 12/7/2010: For additional help resolving those issues, please see our newer blog post Resolving WinRM errors and Exchange 2010 Management tools startup failures . In this blog post, we will be highlighting some of the most common errors that may be seen when attempting to open the Exchange Management...

We have received a lot of feedback recently about your need to better understand the usage of your Exchange 2003 ActiveSync (EAS) deployment. With all of the great features built into EAS, it’s important for you as an IT Professional to know the volume and usage patterns of your deployment. This information...

Lately, we've been getting a lot of questions related to Exchange 2007 memory consumption and why Exchange uses so much of the paging file. Well, there are some valid reasons why and some misconceptions that need to be corrected. Comparing memory usage between Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2003 First, let...

We are pleased to announce the availability of the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer v2.1. The new version can be downloaded from here . Starting next week, for those running ExBPA v2.0, you will be prompted to upgrade to v2.1 the next time the tool is started. List of enhancements included...

Introduction Note: for more comprehensive coverage of Exchange 2007 storage please see this blog post: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/15/432199.aspx This is the second of a four-part blog on the features in Exchange Server 2007 that are designed to increase availability, and the hardware...

When constructing Transport Rules, it is pretty straight forward to define a set of conditions and then specify the action to take when those conditions are met. It is easy to overlook an optional third component: Exceptions. Several customer questions that I have come across for how to enforce more...

As it was mentioned in the previous post on the subject , Exmon (Exchange User Monitor) tool can be very useful when trying to analyze the impact and ways that Exchange MAPI clients are using the server (Exchange 2000 or 2003). We had several questions that we wanted to address: 1. Where is the...

*But Were Afraid to Ask This is a part 1 of a 3 part blog series. Please see this for Part 2 and this for Part 3 . If you find the inner workings of Exchange data backups using Volume Shadown Copy (VSS) a bit mystifying take comfort in not being alone. Administrators may ask, “What’s...

The observant among you may have noticed that starting in Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1, Rollup 4, a new parameter debuted for Set-TransportConfig : DSNConversionMode . Those of you who like to experiment have probably already derived what it is that this does. Those of you who prefer a guide, read on...

Introduction With the release of SP2 for Exchange 2003 we have published the support policy for Exchange Server 2003 running on hardware virtualization software KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=320220 Exchange 2003 SP2 on MSVS 2005 R2 Test Summary The support policy...

This is a continuation and a final of our introduction of new EMC functionality in Exchange 2010. Part 1 of this series can be found here and Part 2 is here . Diagnostic Logging Management Diagnostic Logging Management is back in Exchange Server 2010. A new wizard based UI now enables administrators...

" I wish I could let my users create and manage their own groups - provided they all follow a consistent group naming scheme! " This is an oft-mentioned comment by Exchange administrators who are constantly bombarded with group update support requests from their users. Requests could be for creating...

An important factor in maintaining consistent spam protection over time is ensuring updates to the anti-spam filters are in place. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 leverages the proven Microsoft Update infrastructure for providing anti-spam filter updates and, by default, administrators can visit the...

One of the best utilities ever created for Exchange is EXMerge. You can get the latest version of this tool here, where it is listed as the Mailbox Merge Wizard: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/downloads/2003.asp What EXMerge does may sound simple and may not seem to be all that generally useful: It...

Recently, several articles have been written that Monad has been attacked by a virus and that Monad will be shipping with the next release of Exchange. I think there may have been a bit of confusion that I wanted to clear up. Monad was not attacked by a virus, but they were right that the administration...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=43F5CDF6-D1E6-4476-B5F2-E17371236C3C&displaylang=en If you already downloaded this update, get it again - it was re-released to correct a problem with the original. Update 6/1/2004: The patch was re-released due to a memory leak in...

NOTE: the updated, newer version of this article can be found here . Working with Active Directory directory service permissions related to Microsoft Exchange can be a complex task. This article has been written to aid Exchange architects in their understanding of how they may implement a split permissions...