If there is one area of Exchange 2010 that was poorly documented and poorly understood it has to be database maintenance.  The problem stemmed from the significant changes that we made in the store for Exchange 2010 and a confusion of terms. This has led many people in the field to get confused...

Last week when the internal announcement was made to say that SP2 had been completed and was scheduled for release, I added a few blog articles onto my “to do” list.  Imagine my surprise this morning when I woke up to find that the internets were crammed full of SP2 news and that most of the articles...

I recently authored a post over at the Exchange Team Blog about Exchange ESE and Windows Disk Timeout values. http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/11/17/windows-disk-timeouts-and-exchange-server-2010.aspx Whilst writing that article and especially researching how ESE timeouts have evolved...

This has been irritating me more and more recently – I am generally quite a tolerant person, but sometimes its the smallest things that irritate you the most!.  Anyway, it looks like there is a fix available.. I am out for most of this week without lab access so I cant test this, however I wanted...

MCM Rotation 10 has just completed and was the first rotation that I have been involved as an instructor (albeit remotely on this occasion!).  I noticed that Jeff Guillet had posted his experience here so I thought I would share it to give some more insight into what the program entails… http:/...

So, this is something I wanted to blog about a few months ago but it got pushed to the bottom of the list of things to do (As usual!).  Anyway… during the early adopter testing of the Office 365 service we had a number of customers who had deployed what was termed “Exchange Rich Coexistence” or...

I recently wrote about configuring Office 365 hybrid to get cross premises availability working, since that article a number of people have asked me about certificate planning. This is pretty well understood for an Exchange deployment, but what names are required for an Office 365 Hybrid configuration...

The Microsoft Office Services Diagnostics and Logging (MOSDAL) tool has been around for a while, certainly most BPOS customers will have come across it before… however it has now been updated to provide AD FS authentication diagnostic information so its now useful for Office 365 deployments as well!...

All the way back in May 2009 I had just completed my Exchange 2007 Microsoft Certified Master rotation in Redmond, on my return I decided that I would write up my experience… it was actually quite emotional re-reading this post, many of the people I went through this experience with are now good friends...

I have been working with a number of customers and consultants recently who have been keen to explain to me just how difficult they are finding the configuration of Exchange Rich Coexistence or Hybrid Deployment as its now known with Office 365, and to be fair I agree, its definitely not as simple as...

I recently wrote about gathering user profile data for Exchange Server 2003 and 2007 by using the Exchange Server Profile Analyzer tool.  As a re-cap the EPA tool uses WebDAV to interrogate the mailboxes and generates user profile data, including.. messages sent per mailbox per day messages received...

Since Exchange 2010 launched I have had many discussions with customers over the use of archiving technology that removes data from Exchange and replaces it with a message stub.  This type of technology is fairly common throughout the messaging world and used to be pretty much mandatory back with...

One thing that I often waffle on about is gathering good quality user profile data before beginning an Exchange design.  I was out in Redmond recently and a new Exchange consultant asked me a great question.. “OK, so we know that gathering good quality user profile data is important… but where is...

I have been involved with a number of Office 365 deployments over the last 12 months, one thing that they have all had in common was struggling to find good sources of information.  Things are generally documented… somewhere.. its just a matter of finding what you need! I spotted that the deployment...

Last Updated : 21/06/2011 The field guide is released at major intervals on the Exchange Team Blog, however I have decided to keep dot release updates here to ensure that the very latest information is available to those that do a lot of Jetstress testing (yes, there are some of us that do a lot of stress...

Over the past 18 months I have been dealing with more and more cloud engagements.  One thing that crops up during the planning phase of all of these engagements is network link latency and bandwidth requirements. Bandwidth prediction is something I am working on in the background, but network link...

Recently one of our partner has highlighted an issue in the current version of Jetstress that means the test may run in performance mode when in fact it should be running in stress mode. What's the difference between performance and stress mode? Put simply, performance mode validates the storage performance...

I have been involved with a few escalations recently (I don't even work in support!), the cases have been mostly due to Jetstress tests failing – typically then the relationship between customer and storage vendor becomes more hostile and eventually someone points the finger at Jetstress or Exchange...

I often see customers struggle to make use of the export mailbox features in Exchange Server 2010.  I suspect this is because it is an area that has changed in the last few years and there is a lot of conflicting information online that doesn't clearly state which version of Exchange the information...

Last week a colleague from the MCM Exchange 2010 community asked some questions about disabling Exchange Server 2010 Background Database Maintenance.  Essentially they wanted to know if they disabled  the checkbox for BDM, what would happen on the passive database copies? A response came back...