Hi! This is my first post to the Exchange Team Blog - hope this is of use! My name is Robert Gillies, and I'm a Senior Consultant in the Federal Civilian Practice of Microsoft Consulting Services. One of my recent projects for one of my customers had to do with automating the install of Exchange 2007...

EDIT: This post has been updated on 10/9/2007 to address comments and questions that we got from you on original post. The Exchange Calendar Update Configuration Tool was not designed to work in a report only mode through the tool's UI. However, there is a technical work around that will allow you to...

With Exchange 2003, if you wanted to create Active Directory accounts based on the list of disconnected mailboxes in the mailbox database, you could use the Mailbox Export Wizard which was a part of the Mailbox Recovery Center . Before that, you could have used MBCONN , a tool we had for that purpose...

(or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love /etc/inetd.conf) 1. Background I registered my own domain name ten years ago and have been running my own email and web server for over half that time. Until December of 2004, I was doing this on an OpenBSD machine running Sendmail. It was solid and worked...

Wanted to talk about a subject that is very often a source of questions, especially in our Support Services. That subject is the “Replication Status” node in ESM under the public folder store object. The question is – does this really show you what the status of your public folder replication is? Customers...

Overview The Autodiscover service for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 provides automatic profile configuration for Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 clients that are connected to your Exchange messaging environment. When you install the Client Access server (CAS) role on a computer running Exchange...

Pre-Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 Behavior Prior to Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2, Outlook MAPI clients would receive either a referral to a global catalog server or use the Exchange server to proxy directory related requests; specifically, Outlook 2000 clients and above support and utilize...

One question I see asked a lot is if there is a way to publish Free/Busy information for all users from the server-side. In Outlook the default is to publish 2 months of Free/Busy information per user. So is there a way to extend the default other than changing it from the client? The short answer to...

In Exchange 2010, when a database availability group (DAG) member needs service, it can be placed into maintenance mode. Exchange 2010 includes scripts the StartDagServerMaintenance.ps1 and StopDagServerMaintenace.ps1 scripts to place/remove a DAG member from maintenance mode. For a summary of what these...

Following our announcement of the Configuring Virtual Organizations and Address List Segregation in Exchange 2007 whitepaper, we have heard some questions around applicability of this whitepaper to Exchange 2003. I have written about this subject on my blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/dgoldman...

As a followup to Elizabeth's previous post I wanted to let you know that the "Preparing for daylight saving time changes in 2007" page has been updated with more information related to Exchange, Outlook, Windows and other products. Please keep checking that page for more information: http://www.microsoft...

We received lots of great feedback on my first blog post . With that, I think it is time to clear up the second largest area of confusion with Exchange SMTP transport: SMTP virtual servers. The short of it is, with the exception of the gateway server scenario , I generally recommend staying away from...

If you do any work with migration/coexistence from 5.5 to 2000/2003 you may have noticed that when configuring a recipient connection agreement in the Active Directory Connector (ADC) console that on the From Windows tab there are two somewhat mysterious checkboxes at the bottom of the tab. Replicate...

Administrators have always needed a flexible way to search for content simultaneously across multiple mailboxes. Here are a few scenarios requiring cross-mailbox search, and how the 'export-mailbox' command can be used to get the desired results. Scenario 1: LEGAL DISCOVERY: The administrator needs...

The ability to continue to provide a full service to your user community in the unlikely event of the loss of a datacentre is an increasingly common requirement. Continuous Replication (CCR and SCR) with Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1 can be used to provide both data availability and site resilience. ...

In the past, if you wished to use S/MIME for e-mail encryption with an external recipient, you would add the recipient to your Contacts folder. This was typically done by having the recipient send you a digitally signed item and then right click on the recipient in the From field and click "Save...

We're all pretty familiar with the common SMTP address - spam@make.it.go.away.com . And a lot of folks are happy with just one or two of these. But if you've migrated any users lately, setup cross-forest with MIIS, or if you've just tried to reply to someone who's “left the building”, you've  probably...

For various reasons, there are times when an administrator does not want a part of the ECP to be accessible by some users and they desire a features' tab or entry point to not be visible at all. The web.config file for the Exchange Control Panel (ECP) contains the requirements a logged in user must meet...

A while ago I posted something on this subject, but - I wanted to let everyone know that Mike Lagase has just posted a very detailed troubleshooting guide for those problems on his blog . This is the most comprehensive collection of information on how to troubleshot those issues that I have seen, internally...

If there's one thing that's true of all busy Exchange servers, it's that they generate massive amounts of disk I/O. There's a joke around here that Exchange is the world's biggest hard disk diagnostics program. Typically, your disks will be the first component of your Exchange server that starts groaning...

The Active Directory Connector is a utility that is used to replicate recipient and configuration data between the Exchange Directory and Active Directory. It was first shipped with Windows 2000, then later shipped with Exchange 2000 Server and again with Exchange Server 2003. It has proven to be a valuable...

Recently I came across a situation where it was reported that Connection Filtering stopped working (IPs on the Blocklist and RBLs were no longer being blocked). The solution led me to write this blog to clarify some confusion about "when" connection filtering is applied and how configuration settings...

Here is something out of Exchange tester's toolbox: Before testing or using GB18030, you must configure your client and server as below for correct display of GB18030 characters. Client machine Set the system locale to Chinese 1) Go to Control Panels -> Regional and Language Settings -> Languages...

In my previous article we saw that how easy it was to implement IIS ARR as a Reverse Proxy and Load Balancing solution for Exchange 2013. However that option is not the best if you are looking to achieve true high availability for your client connectivity. Read on and it’ll Arrrr! become clear...

A solution is now available for a problem which might be encountered when moving a large number of mailboxes between Exchange servers ( Knowledge Base article 899328 ). When you move several mailboxes from one Exchange server to another there may be a delay in synching the rules on the new mailbox...