Exchange Management Pack and domain password policy
I've been working with a customer on a MOM deployment, and this week we have rolled out the MOM 2005 Exchange management pack. Once the MP is installed on the MOM server, the next step is to run the MP configuration wizard, which installs test mailboxes and enables message tracking so that MOM can determine if mail flow between databases is not optimal.
After a few minutes we got alerts saying that rules were failing due to MAPI logon failures. On inspection, the user accounts for the test mailboxes were in the AD and disabled (as expected), but the mailboxes were not visible in Exchange system manager.
To begin troubleshooting, we tried to enable the AD accounts and got an error saying "the account cannot be enabled because its password does not match the complexity requirements". Sure enough, the customer's domain policy specified that complex passwords were required. Once we changed the passwords on the accounts to strong ones, the mailboxes were automatically created and the MAPI rules in the management pack worked as expected.
So basically if you are deploying the Exchange management pack in a domain where complex passwords are required, manually reset the passwords on the test accounts to something which matches the domain security policy settings. It is self-explanatory in hindsight I suppose, which is why they say hindsight is a wonderful thing :-)
