This was a question from a college in Colorado. They had a student email account hijacked from a phishing scam and it was then used for a mass outbound spam attack. The question became: How I can prevent this? Is there a way to throttle outbound messaging per user? The answer, coming from Program Manager Todd Luttinen, is yes.
In Exchange 2010, there is a new cmdlet called New-ThrottlePolicy within that cmdlet you can set the RecipientRateLimit which limits the number of recipients a user can address in a 24-hour period. Having a low 24 hour send limit is the method for throttle mass spaming outbound per user. I believe Outlook Live has this outbound spam protection value set to 250 users per day per mailbox.
Read more about the cmdlet here.
I was asked this by a school district in Minneapolis that was deploying Exchange 2010. I have seen this becoming a popular deployment option since CAS is proc heavy (3 proc cores for every 4 mailbox proc cores) and Hub is not as proc heavy (1 proc core for every 5 mailbox proc cores with Antivirus running). Why not combine the two roles to maximize your server hardware? The question becomes what are the sizing guidelines for this?
We just published a combined Hub/CAS hardware guideline:
Combined Hub/CAS core processor to Mailbox processor core ratio - 1:1
Combined Hub/CAS RAM - 4GB RAM base + 2GB RAM per additional core Combined Hub/CAS min and max processors – minimum 2 cores and max core is 12 cores
Combined Hub/CAS RAM - 4GB RAM base + 2GB RAM per additional core
Combined Hub/CAS min and max processors – minimum 2 cores and max core is 12 cores
What are the gotchas for combining the two roles?
Load balancing configuration. If you create a CAS array with load balancing what do I do with the Hub on the same server? The answer is you can configure your load balancer to balance inbound SMTP traffic from non-Exchange (Internet, smarthosts, FOPE, etc). The big no-no is to configure Exchange hub to Exchange hub traffic or Hub to Exchange Edge traffic via a VIP/load balancer. The other option is to use DNS round robin for inbound SMTP traffic.
More information sizing the combined CAS/Hub role on TechNet here.
This was a question from a school district in Illinois. They wanted to prevent the students, hosted in OCS, from finding management via a search in OCS and accidently IMing/video chatting with them.
There is an ethical wall sample script written for OCS 2007 that still works with OCS 2007 R2 and is based on OU membership. You would essentially place your upper management accounts, etc in one OU and students in another OU to provide isolation in OCS:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=070DBCAB-472A-4EC1-AEAC-9273ECCD70C9&displaylang=en
There are also more robust 3rd party ethical wall add-ons for OCS from FaceTime, Akonix & Symantec that provide this functionality as well.
I was asked this by a university in Arizona with thousands of public folders. I found a free tool call PfRep on our Codeplex site that will analyze and help clean up Exchange 2000/2003/2007 public folders via visual color coding (red is heavily used in last 10 days and various shades of yellow represent folder used in last 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, etc).
Grab the PfRep 1.4 tool here.
I also found a tool called to help you migrate your Public Folder to SharePoint. Grab it here. There are also 3rd party tools to help you migrate your public folders to SharePoint such as Quest Software and others.
This was a pretty cool demo of the upcoming Windows Phone 7. I like some of the new Outlook Mobile combo calendar and email filter strip features and the overall UI look and feel.
Visit the new phone UI video demo here.
Here is the official Windows Phone 7 Series site here. What do you guys think?
One of the areas to review in migration from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 is around Auto-attendants and the use of custom prompts. In Exchange 2007 these prompts are stored in separate directories under “Program files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\UnifiedMessaging\Prompts\Custom”. From here the Exchange Replication Service replicates these prompts to every UM Server that hosts this dial plan.
Things have changes in Exchange 2010. We have introduced a new method to enable eDiscovery and Moderated distribution List called the Arbitration mailbox. The Exchange UM Server used the arbitration mailbox to store custom prompts. With this method we don’t need to introduce the replication service to ensure all UM server have the same information.
So, in short, there isn’t a migration method for custom prompts. The custom prompts will need to be located in the shares and use either the EMC or shell to import the new greetings/prompts.
To import these prompts you can do via cmdline:
import-UMPrompt -PromptFileData <Byte[]> -PromptFileName <String> -UMAutoAttendant <UMAutoAttendantIdParameter> [-Confirm [<SwitchParameter>]] [-DomainController <Fqdn>] [-WhatIf [<SwitchParameter>]]
The process would be this in a full upgrade from Exchange 2007 UM to Exchange 2010:
1. Install Exchange 2007 SP2 on all servers.
2. Install Exchange 2010 UM Server and add the Server to the Exchange 2007 Dial Plan
3. Create custom prompts if new prompt. If existing use Copy-UMCustomprompt to move to Exchange 2010 UM Server.
Use IMport-UMprompt cmdlet to import into a UM Dial Plan or AA on the UM Server.
4. From the UM Server in the same org with Exchange 2007 UM Server run this:
Set-UMDialPlan -identity MyUMDialPlan -LegacyPromptPublishingPoint $null
5. Finally, decommission your Exchange 2007 UM servers if there are no Exchange 2007 UM-enabled mailboxes in your org.
More info on Exchange migration can be found here.
Scalability. Lots of changes with Exchange 2010 including Voicemail preview. We haven’t seen the upper bounds of scale with Exchange 2010 but I can tell you that based on testing with Exchange 2007 SP1 against Exchange 2010 (with Voicemail Preview turned off) we can easily surpass the call concurrency established with Exchange 2007 SP1. Call handling for voicemail will vary based on the codec used and with WMA and a hardware profile with 2xdual-core Xeon/4GB Ram we were able to do 80 concurrent Voicemail calls. With GSM against the same we could do 100. In Exchange 2010 with a 2xquad core Xeon/16GB Ram we can do >80 on WMA, >100 on GSM, and with a new codec >100 on MP3. This translates to approximately 10K users supported via one UM Server.
Caller ID Resolution. One of the other areas that has changed with Exchange 2010 Unified messaging is around Caller ID Resolution. Bottom-line people want to see names not numbers on resolution. Let’s use AD as a source for phone #s in your organization. They probably have a phone number (if populated?) even if they aren’t UM enabled.
In Exchange 2007 Caller ID was based on the following:
In Exchange 2010 we’ve added AD lookup heuristics on several attributes. In AD phone attributes are not indexed and aren’t suitable for a direct query by Exchange UM. Instead UM copies reversed phone numbers to DTMF map attribute which allows a suffix search. Numbers searched (if present):
This is controlled by a new property in the UM Dial plan called AllowHeuristicADCallingLineIDResolution (true/false)
Exchange 2010 also can resolve against multiple dial plans. If User 1 (Dialplan A) calls Users 2 (Dial Plan B) and they are on the same PBX the extension lookup performed in the callee’s dial plan and any other dial plans specified by B’s EquivalentDialPlanPhoneContexts. BTW – in Exchange 2007 it would only look in the callee’s B plan.
If we look at the big picture here’s how Caller ID Resolution works in Exchange 2010. More info can be found in our technet guidance here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd351203.aspx. Paul Robichaux thanks for pointing this out!!!!
If you like visual aids to help understand how OCS 2007 R2 works, how the clients connect, protocols used, then there is an excellent poster available for download here. It is perfect your techno geek cube wall!
I broke it out so you could see what was on it:
Some really useful Exchange 2010 content just showed up. I really like the ‘How Do I’ short videos:
For short demos on how to get started with Exchange 2010, check out the new library of “How Do I” videos:
· Getting Started with Archiving in Exchange 2010
· Getting Started with Remote Management
· Getting Started with Message Retention in Exchange 2010
· Getting Started with Message Discovery
· Introduction to Exchange 2010
· Get Started with Role Based Access Control
· Get Started with DAGs
· Create and Configure Certificates
· Transitioning from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 Part 1
· Transitioning from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 Part 2
· Transitioning from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 Part 3
· Coexisting Exchange 2010 with Exchange 2007
· CAS ISA
Upcoming Exchange 2010 Webcasts that look like some great information:
· Introducing Exchange Server 2010
· Discover the New OWA: Outlook Web App
· Upgrade and Coexistence with Exchange Server 2007 and 2003
· Information Protection and Control in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
· Exchange Server 2010 High Availability
· Getting the Most out of Exchange Server 2010: Performance and Scalability
· Deploying and Managing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Transport Servers
· Addressing E-mail Archiving and Retention
· Exchange Server 2010 Management and Operations
· Calendar Sharing and Federation in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010