** Updated 24-08-2011 to include enable-OrganizationCustomization step as an optional extra. 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...

Many of the customers I work with are currently making their way through an Office 365 technical pilot that needs to include Mac OS X machines as well as various versions of Windows.  The Windows stuff seems fairly well documented and since we now...

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...

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.. ...

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 have been involved in a number of discussions recently regarding Outlook performance troubleshooting in the cloud. Mostly these discussions were in the context of why the customer didn't want to move to the cloud since they figured it would be impossible...

This has been an interesting bit of work for me.  I have been working with a customer who really needed to provide their users with the ability to manage calendars across different Exchange organisations.  When they initially presented this...

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...

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...

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...

I have had a few recently from customers wanting to use Lync 2010 Mobile on their shiny mobile devices. I thought I would go through the steps here to connect iOS devices, such as iPad and iPhone as well as Windows Phone WP7 devices to Lync Online in...

I am just posting this here since it's a bit of information I regularly provide to customers and I always have trouble remembering where I found it (yes I know I should create a browser bookmark, but I thought I would share!). When you deploy Office...

Hello everyone … My name is John Rodriguez, and I'm a Principal PFE based in Minneapolis, MN. I'm also one of Neil's frequent collaborators, particularly on load simulation tools. When he wrote his recent article on performance analysis of Jetstress data...

I want to start this blog by apologising for the lack of posts recently… this is mostly due to me not having anything interesting to say and not wanting this blog to be watered down with irrelevant nonsense… that and working on stuff that I can't talk...

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...

Quite often when I am working through Jetstress escalations I will ask to see the BLG files from the test. These files contain performance counter information that was logged during the test run and they show us a lot more about what is really going on...

If there is one thing that has always been lacking in Exchange its a mechanism to inventory and report on your infrastructure.  Personally I think its something that should be in the Exchange Management Console, but that's a different story… The...

Last month I wrote a blog about connecting Office 2011 for Mac to Office 365 .  This post generated a lot of interest within the community, but mostly for the wrong reason!  i.e pretty much everyone that tried this was unable to connect Lync...

I have just been told that RU4 for Exchange Server 2010 SP1 has been released to web for… Download Link is here… http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26554 Issues that the update rollup resolves 2537099 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb...

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...

I guess it's pretty obvious by now that I am a bit of a nerd when it comes to Exchange and Outlook performance. One area that has always felt like a black box though is migrating data into Office 365 Exchange Online service. The problem for me was that...

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...

I have been working on a number of Exchange projects recently with cloud integration.  One common area of concern when you move a workload to the cloud is end user performance – will my users have an acceptable experience? To help customers make...

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...

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...