So you've heard some folks saying large mailboxes are a good idea. Your users have been screaming for mailboxes with more than 1GB quotas. Your management wants you to be able to recover from outages in minutes, not days. Everyone is telling you to do more with less. Well, with Exchange 2007 you can...

For an administrator who manages public folders in their Exchange organization, the introduction of Exchange 2007 poses somewhat of a dilemma as to how to administer public folders that exist on Exchange 2007. There are however some easy ways to complete regular administrative tasks using the combination...

In Exchange 2010, you can place a mailbox on retention hold or legal hold. Both holds serve a different purpose. It's important to understand the functionality provided by both. Retention Hold: As the Messaging Records Management page in the EMC suggests (see Figure 1 ), retention hold is used to...

Starting with Exchange 2007, installation of the current version of Office Filter Packs is a prerequisite. For Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 RTM , the pre-req was 2007 Office System Converter: Microsoft Filter Pack . In Exchange 2010 SP1, this was updated to Office 2010 Filter Packs . The filters are...

EDIT 3/31/2008: We have posted the updated public folder guidance for versions of Exchange past Exchange 2007; you might want to read it . A frequent topic of discussion with customers is the future of Public Folders, thus I think it would be good to capture that discussion on our blog. In summary: Public...

You've been using Outlook for years now and you've probably established some delivery rules for yourself. Maybe mail from your manager is automatically routed to a subfolder of your inbox. If you're using Outlook 2003 or later, you've got an automatically maintained rule to handle junk mail. If you've...

Please go on our Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator updates tracking page to see what is in this new version! A blog post explaining the calculator (updated for this new version) is here . Comments welcome! - Ross Smith IV

If you've wanted to know more about why high item counts and restricted view requests can impact the performance of your Exchange environment, we've just released some detailed information about the behavior you may see as item counts in your critical path folders grow. Critical path folders include...

A user is out of office for some reason – on vacation, sick, on a sabbatical or extended leave of absence, or traveling to a remote location on business, and forgets to set an automatic reply , also known as an Out Of Office message or OOF in Exchange/Outlook lingo. As an Exchange administrator...

The Exchange team includes a bunch of incredible people who bring a unique perspective on where the industry is headed and how we should engineer the product and service. One of them is Perry Clarke, whom you all haven't heard from so much in the past. Perry is a General Manager on the Exchange team...

Note: Since authoring this blog, Microsoft Customer Support Services has identified a scenario in which moving a CMS using the cluster tools can leave databases in a dismounted or offline state. During regular operation, the Microsoft Exchange Replication service maintains a "mount allowed" value for...

EDIT 3/24/2009 : Added a link to WinSAT documentation based on reader feedback. Hopefully you have seen the news regarding the release of the Outlook 2007 SP1 February 2009 cumulative update. If you haven't, then you can read http://support.microsoft.com/?id=968009 for all the detail, but basically we...

Download Frequently in support, we encounter several backup related calls for Exchange 2010 databases. A sample of common issues we hear from our customers are: “My backup software is not able to take a successful snapshot of the databases” “My backups have been failing...

Update 07/03/2012 : Expanded the Workaround section to include more details. We wanted to bring to your attention an issue that we have been seeing recently in CSS where many mailboxes on the same mailbox database become quarantined seemingly for no reason. Upon inspecting the Application log, you will...

Earlier this month we announced a change on this blog related to licensing for Multi-Mailbox Search . Since then we’ve received questions about when it’ll go into effect. The change will go into effect starting October 1, which is when it’ll be reflected in the product use rights (PUR). The PUR contain...

EDIT: This post has been updated on 5/6/10 for the new version of storage calculator. For the list of latest major changes, please see THIS . In order to assist customers in designing their storage layout for Exchange 2007, we have put together a calculator that focuses on driving the storage requirements...

Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1 introduces several changes in the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE). Two of these are: Removal of page dependencies Disablement of partial merges But first, in order to understand what is discussed below, we should have a brief discussion on ESE. ESE Architecture As you are...

Background The Exchange Store Driver is a core transport component which lives both on the Mailbox server role (as the mail submission service) and the Hub server role. It is responsible for: Retrieving messages from the mailbox server that have been submitted by end-users and submitting those to the...

Mike Lagase wrote a great blog post on his blog talking about two issues (we have fixes for both) that can cause excessive paging on your Exchange 2007 servers. Those fixes are described in two KB articles: FIX: You may notice that the memory load is very high when you run an application that is...

We've made several bug fixes based on community feedback. Please go to our Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator updates tracking page to see what is in this new version! A blog post explaining the calculator is here and or you can download the calculator directly. Comments welcome...

Important: We’ve released version 14.4 to replace versions 14.1 and 14.2 of the calculators due to bugs found. Please download the latest version. Today we've released an update to the E2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator that addresses several usability issues identified in...

For a second part of the series, please go here . In Microsoft Exchange 2013, Public Folders were re-engineered using mailbox infrastructure to take advantage of the existing high availability and storage technologies of the mailbox database. Public folder architecture uses specially designed mailboxes...

Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1 introduces several changes in the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE). In my first blog article on the subject , I discussed the removal of page dependencies and the disabling of partial merges. In this blog, I discuss other changes we made to ESE which enhance Exchange. Passive...

Download Overview When designing a site resilient Exchange Server solution, one of the required planning tasks is to determine how many transaction logs are generated on an hourly basis. This helps figure out how much bandwidth will be required when replicating database copies between sites...

In this 9 minute video, Sherman Lovell introduces how to set up Messaging Records Management in Exchange Server 2007. Download the video to view it in higher resolution. - The Exchange Team