I attended the Microsoft Certified Master : Exchange 2007,  rotation 2; prior to attending I had the good fortune to be able to talk to previous Ranger/MCM candidates within Microsoft, who helped prepare me for the program. I thought it would be...

Working with customers I have come across a number of scenarios where the caller ID presented from the PBX is not in E164/DID (Direct Inward Dial) format. Some gateways allow for extensive manipulation of the caller ID, some less so. The good news is...

Further to my blog post on April 30th , I have updated the powershell script to output in a more usable manner and also detect more information about your exchange servers… ServerName TransportVer CASver StoreVer SERVER1 08.01.0336.000 08.01.0336.000...

Over the last 12 months I have had various occasions where I needed to quickly check the store.exe version installed on each mailbox server within the organisation. Seemingly there is no way to do this directly via PowerShell or Exchange cmdlets. ...

One of the things I like about Jetstress is that it tends to identify failing or failed components before the servers go live.  Its not all about how many IOPS a storage array can provide, sometimes its just as important to prove the stability of...

Exchange Server 2007 introduces many new and really well defined recipient types. One of them is the one my customer asked me about. The process to create a Shared Mailbox will create a disable Active Directory user as there is no point to have it - that...

I’m guessing that over the next few months IT managers are going to be pushing their staff really hard to justify any spend.  ..and projects to upgrade to Exchange Server 2007 are not going to be immune. Clearly to have any chance of getting the...

One of the most often asked, and most difficult to answer, questions concerning Microsoft System Centre Data Protection Manager (dpm) is how long will it take to backup and restore data...  As you'd expect the answer is 'it depends'.  So I thought...

Everyone knows its a good idea to automate your installations of Exchange.  It provides a solid, repeatable process by which to deploy your infrastructure – and it takes less time – win/win!. One area that I have witnessed repeatedly over the last...

In this post I will try to bring you the way that all Recipient Lists, such as Address Lists or Distribution Lists behave in Exchange Server 2007 and what should we do with our old ones from Exchange Server 2003 and a few advices to some possible issues...

In continuation of my last post, Exchange Recipients, I brought this one to kind of complement a bit more and go deep on the troubleshoot side. Besides that will try to show differences or what we have new since Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server...

As Exchange technologies using multiple AD site infrastructures become more popular, Exchange PFE engineers have to build LAB’s spanning multiple AD sites using Virtual PC/ Virtual server or Hyper V. I always used to use multiple NIC’s and Routing and...

I have just received a note from Erin Bookey announcing the public beta of JetStress for Exchange 2010.  You can download your copy here… http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=13267027-8120-48ed-931b-29eb0aa52aa6#tm...

One my personal bugbears with Exchange over the last 10 years or so has been the total lack of a useful auditing function.  Sure, you can see who accessed a mailbox, but since Outlook 2003 and the extended Free/Data the Windows Server event logs...

By default when you run a command through PowerShell to retrieve values with registry keys, the response shows the values as being empty. Here’s an example – I use the following command to set an excluded DC: Set-ExchangeServer -Identity CSX2K71 -StaticExcludedDomainControllers...

Looks like the team have been busy finishing off the test tools for Exchange 2010.  The Exchange 2010 Loadgen beta has also gone live in the last few weeks, here is a link… http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID...

Over the past few months I have lost count of the number of times I have been asked is “X” version of Exchange supported on “X” OS or against “X” GC’s.  Well, finally someone has put together all of this information in a single location… http://technet...

Exchange Recipients have changed a quite a bit since Exchange Server 2003. With this post I will try to give you an overview of how it works now and eventually a few tips regarding troubleshooting. Recipient Management One thing that definitely will make...

Well, its been a long time in the making and I for one have been waiting for a long time for this data to be published publically.  I was fortunate enough to be taught by Bill Thompson at the ECoE during my Masters rotation and he went through some...

Don't forget to attend the next in the UK MCSTalks series.  Today's topic is 'Security and PKI'.. For details of how to register to listen in go to the 'MCS Talks' blog at; http://blogs.technet.com/mcstalks/default.aspx   This is a list of the...

This event will be held in London at the MSFT offices in Cardinal Place near Victoria. This month we have a topical session led by Clive Watson, Brett Johnson and Julius Davies from Microsoft. We will be discussing the new support statements surround...

There's a very good TechNet article available that describes the steps that are required in order to fail over from a CCR cluster in one site, to an SCR target in another site. It also covers the procedure to fail back once the problem has been resolved...

I've been spending quite a lot of time looking at mail routing options using a shared namespace - not something most people tend to do, however quite important in this case J I found some information at MSExchange.org that helps clarify the routing...

Welcome to the Microsoft UK Unified Communications Community Blog.  This blog will include content from a variety of sources within Microsoft in the UK... MCS: Microsoft Consulting Services - architecture & design for messaging and UC. PFE: Premier...

UK consultants are currently presenting a series of webcasts on Technet.  For details of how to register to listen in go to the 'MCS Talks' blog at; http://blogs.technet.com/mcstalks/default.aspx   The following is taken from the blog : "The...