provtest AllAboutHMC.xml

ProvTest blog...

It has been a fun run for me writing this blog. Unfortunately, I no longer have the time to continue putting new entry on this blog. I sincerely hope this blog has been useful to you all. Thank you all.

PS: And for those who are wondering about the roadmap of HMC, as written on the website, http://www.microsoft.com/hosting/solutions/hostedmessaging.mspx, with the release of Exchange 2010, Microsoft is creating a new way to support hosted Exchange deployments. Hosting in Exchange 2010 will be supported approximately twelve months after the release of Exchange 2010.

HMC 4.5 is the last version of this solution. 

HMC Resource Management - Part #5 - HMC Resource Management and SharePoint and OCS

In the last blog, I discussed about the HMC Resource Management for Exchange. This entry, I will discuss about the HMC Resource Management for SharePoint and OCS.

Fortunately for us, there isn't a lot of resource management required for both of this product. Let's start with SharePoint.

HMC Resource Management for SharePoint

If I have to put it simply, HMC hardly manage the resource for SharePoint. SharePoint, like Exchange, the main resource to manage is the disk, which is the SQL server disk space. The HMC product team for SharePoint decided that we leave the disk space monitoring and management back to the SharePoint product itself and did not want the complexity of resource management in HMC. As a result, from the HMC database standpoint, HMC really only manage the Organization Plan for SharePoint, which touches just the PlanManager database. ResourceManager database was not touched at all by default.

Not only does the HMC SharePoint not use the HMC databases for resource management, it also does not use the database to keep track of how many sites have been created for the organization. Instead it uses Active Directory.

The only control HMC has on the SharePoint, out of the box is the number of sites and sub sites that can be created by the organization. Here is a sample request of the Organization Plan creation for HMC SharePoint,

<request>

  <procedure>

    <execute namespace="HostedSharePoint2007" procedure="CreateOrganizationPlan" impersonate="1">

      <executeData>

        <preferredDomainController>ad01.fabrikam.com</preferredDomainController>

        <planDescription>Basic Sharepoint</planDescription>

        <planName>Basic Sharepoint plan</planName>

        <maxSites>100</maxSites>

        <maxSubsites>500</maxSubsites>

      </executeData>

    </execute>

  </procedure>

</request>

See that it only control the maximum number of sites and maximum number of sub sites. There is also no User Plan for SharePoint because the management of the user functions and access is through SharePoint itself instead.

So, after subscribing the appropriate SharePoint plan to an organization, the next step is to create the site itself. Here is a sample request XML for site creation,

<request>

  <procedure>

    <execute namespace="HostedSharePoint2007" procedure="CreateCustomerSite" impersonate="1">

      <executeData>

        <org>LDAP://ou=alpineskihouse,ou=consolidatedmessenger,ou=hosting,dc=fabrikam,dc=com</org>

        <preferredDomainController>ad01-wh.fabrikam.com</preferredDomainController>

        <target>http://app01-ra:22778</target>

        <site>http://app01-ra:8081/sites/testsite2</site>

        <title>Test site 2</title>

        <siteName>SharepointSite2</siteName>

          <owner>

            <userPrincipalName>Sharepoint4@alpineskihouse.com</userPrincipalName>

            <email>Sharepoint4@alpineskihouse.com</email>

            <name>Admin</name>

          </owner>

        <description>Testing create site</description>

        <lcid>1033</lcid>

        <webTemplate>sts#0</webTemplate> 

        <quota>

          <warningLevel>1000000</warningLevel>

          <maxDBSize>2000000</maxDBSize>

        </quota>

        <hhUrl>http://team.alpineskihouse.com</hhUrl>

      </executeData>

    </execute>

  </procedure>

</request>

When you submit that request, part of the HMC SharePoint's namespaces and procedures logic will be retrieving from Active Directory, checking the following path to see if there is any sites available under this branch, for example,

• dc=fabrikam,dc=com
• ou=hosting
• ou=consolidatedmessenger
• ou=alpineskihouse
• cn=_Private
• cn=Services
• cn=SharePointSites

It will then enumerate and see if the number of sites there has exceeded the maximum site or sub site as defined the Organization Plan. If it does, then it will fail. If it does not, it will proceed and execute the provider to create the appropriate SharePoint site. If you look at the request XML, we can also specify the quota but it should be noted that the quota isn't stored anywhere in the HMC database at all. It is being set at the SharePoint side. Hence, if you want to retrieve to find out the quota, the only authoritative way is to check SharePoint itself and not through HMC.

So, that's pretty much it for SharePoint. There really isn't much to it.

HMC Resource Management for OCS

HMC Resource Management for OCS is even less complicated. The ResourceManager database isn't used by HMC OCS at all. In fact, the Organization Plan for OCS is nothing more than just a place holder of enabling the service, having just the plan name and that's it.

The User Plan does have a little bit more value or feature that you can specify. However, other than using the PlanManager database to track which plan the Organization has subscribed to and which User Plan the users have subscribed to, there is really no specific resource management required for HMC OCS.

It is a simple model.

Conclusion

So, that's it, I hope this give you a good overview of what's going on in HMC Resource Management. It may not consist of everything but if you feel that you need to know more and can't find it anywhere, leave a comment here and I will try to respond to you.

HMC Resource Management - Part #4 - HMC Resource Management and Exchange

Now, let's talk about the most confusing portion in the HMC Resource Management, which is the Exchange resource management. The reason why this Exchange resource management seems highly complicated is because there are a few layers or levels of relationship that linking everything together. I, myself do not claim to fully comprehend the whole database schema and all the relationship but I believe I have worked on it enough to understand most of the essential relationships and I will try to explain them in this blog in the simplest form possible.

In my opinion, once you understand the high level concept, everything will begin to fit into the picture and HMC Resource Management for SharePoint and OCS will be a walk in the park.

The reason for doing resource management is because we have finite resource. So, to understand the resource management in HMC for Exchange, we must first understand the business problem that we are trying to resolve and what resource in Exchange that is finite that we need to manage.

Yes, it is disk space. It all comes down to disk space, really. Every system has a finite amount of disk space. We can put a lot of disk space to be used by Exchange but there is still a limit at the end. While disk space may be cheaper compared to 5 years ago, it isn't free. With multiple companies hosted in the same hosting environment, and many companies hosted on the same Exchange server, sharing the same disk space, and with each company may grow or reduce their mailbox users, it is essential for us to have the ability to properly manage the disk space so that the disk do not get filled up and that we are getting good return on investment.  

Exchange Resource Management

Tracking the Exchange Resource

With the objective set to have a mechanism to properly manage the resource, we can start looking at this from ground up. To start with, we need to know how much disk space does an Exchange server has. We know each Exchange server many have multiple mailbox stores. Therefore, the first thing we need to do is to make sure HMC knows the following,

• How many Mailbox stores are there on that server
• How much disk space is available for each of the mailbox store.

To do that, we perform the procedure, Exchange 2007 Resource Manager::AddExchangeResources each time we add a new mailbox store, specifying the server name, the mailbox store as well as the space available on that box.

When you do that, there are a couple of entries being created in the ResourceManagement database. We created an entry in the rmcore_ResourceInstance table. The instance_location and instance_description will give you the server name and the mailbox database name. Do take note that we do not store the storage group name. At the same time, it also records down the capacity of the mailbox store in another table (blockmodel_ResourceCapacity).

Note: The above is a high level explanation and does not explain all the tables involved in the database.

Now that we know the storage of each server, the next question is how we are going to track which organization and users are using it. This can become slightly complicated to explain.

Tracking Organization Usage

Because we have finite resource, we need to be able to plan and manage our resource. That's why when we subscribe an organization to an Exchange Organization plan, we usually need to specify the amount of space this organization will use unless it is Dynamic Quota which I will explain more later.  I will discuss briefly about the Dynamic Quota, Fixed Quota and mailbox allocation algorithm later but for ease of explanation, I will primarily use Fixed Quota over here. Obviously, this Exchange resource management in HMC is such a big topic that I know I can't cover everything in a few blog entries.

So, how does it all work? When we subscribe an organization to an Exchange organization plan, what HMC will do from the resource management standpoint is to allocate some of the spaces from the Exchange Resource we added earlier. So, basically, it is something like the following,

• Server 1
• Mailbox Store 1 (200 GB)
• Organization 1 (10 GB)
• Organization 2 (10 GB)
• Mailbox Store 2 (200 GB)

The above we have Server1 having 2 mailbox store with each having a size of 200GB and we have an Organization Plan to allocate 10 GB per organization for Mailbox Store 1. Now, we can also distribute them to different mailbox stores or different mailbox servers like the following,

• Server 1
• Mailbox Store 1 (200 GB)
• Organization 1 (3 GB)
• Organization 2 (10 GB)
• Mailbox Store 2 (200 GB)
• Organization 1 (2 GB)
• Server 2
• Mailbox Store 3 (200 GB)
• Organization 1 (5 GB)

Note: Organization 1 may have mailboxes in different mailbox store because it has been allocated mailbox space in 3 different mailbox stores.

The above is what we called fixed quota, meaning an organization has been specifically bought a specific amount of disk space and they will get allocated with those spaces. If they have used up those spaces, they won't be able to create any more mailboxes until they delete some or they buy more and it will need to be allocated with more space. This is really not difficult to understand at all.

Now, from the ResourceManager database, what's going to happen is this,

• Like tracking the Exchange resource, HMC will also track the Organization resource. This is done in the similar manner as the Exchange resource. It will create resource instances in rmcore_ResourceInstance table. It will create one resource instance entry per mailbox store per organization. Meaning if I have an organization being allocated space in 2 different mailbox store, it will create 2 different resource instances.
• Now, because the Organization resource is taken out from the Exchange resource, it means the organization is also a consumer of resource. Hence,
• It will create an entry in the rmcore_ConsumerInstance for this organization.
• Then it will record the space taken by the organization on blockmodel_ModelAllocationData table, mapping it to the Exchange resource.
• Exchange resource capacity will be updated to reflect the available space.

Note: It should be noted that the above is a high level and does not include all the tables involved. For example, rmcore_MappingTable will be also be updated to record the mapping of the resource instance with the consumer instance. The above is to facilitate the understanding of how things get tied together.

Tracking Mailbox Usage

This is very similar to Organization taking the resources from the Exchange resources, except this time, it is Mailbox taking the resources from the Organization resource. So, it actually look like the following,

• Server 1
• Mailbox Store 1 (200 GB)
• Organization 1 (3 GB)
• User 1 (1 GB)
• User 2 (2 GB)
• Organization 2 (10 GB)
• Mailbox Store 2 (200 GB)
• Organization 1 (2 GB)
• User 3 (2 GB)
• Server 2
• Mailbox Store 3 (200 GB)
• Organization 1 (5 GB)
• User 4 (2 GB)

So, from the ResourceManager database, what's going to happen is this,

• Because a mailbox is the final consumer of the resource, it will not create any resource instance.
• It will consume the resource from the Organization resource, it means,
• It will create an entry in the rmcore_ConsumerInstance for this mailbox.
• Then it will record the space taken by the mailbox on blockmodel_ModelAllocationData table, mapping it to the Organization resource.
• Organization resource capacity will be updated to reflect the available space.

Does it make sense so far? I hope it does. I know it can be slightly confusing.

Dynamic Quota

So far, we talked about Fixed Quota. There is also another option called Dynamic Quota. Dynamic Quota basically free the organization from specifying a specific amount of disk space. Instead, it doesn't allocate the organization any space until we create a mailbox for that organization. So, when you create a mailbox in an Organization that dynamic quota has been enabled, it will,

• Dynamically find an Exchange resource that has space using the resource selection algorithm.
• Then allocate the resource from those Exchange resources to the Organization resource. It will create the resource instance if necessary.
• It will also create the necessary records including organization as the consumer instance and etc.
• Then it will allocate the organization resource to the mailbox appropriately just like the fixed quota.

One thing you should know is that when using Dynamic quota is the deletion. When you delete the mailbox, it will also remove the resources accordingly. However in Fixed Quota, it will only free up the space in the Organization resource but it will not remove the organization resource from the Exchange resource because those are fixed resource allocated to the organization.  

All the logic of dynamic and fixed is actually in the application (HMC namespaces and procedures). There is no difference in the database itself.

The above should give you an idea of how things fit together and a little bit more insight to how the allocation of Exchange resources in HMC.

Resource Selection Algorithm

I mentioned about the resource selection algorithm. I just want to briefly explain a bit on this. There are 3 resource selection behaviors that you can specify,

• tightPack - attempts to use the smallest number of mail stores
• level - level seeks to spread allocations evenly across available stores
• minStoreCount - minStoreCount attempts to minimize the number of stores allocated to each organization.

Shared or not Shared

Finally, the last thing I want to mention is that you can also set a resource to Shared or Not Shared. When you add an Exchange resource, you can specify that mailbox store as Shared or not Shared. Shared means it can be used by more than one organization. Not shared means it can only be used by a single organization.

Exchange Public Folder Resource Management

The resource management for Exchange doesn't stop at the mailbox. The ResourceManager database is also being used to manage the Public Folder as well.

When we create an Exchange Organization Plan, we also specified the Public Folder space to be allocated for organization using that plan. Like Mailbox Store allocation for the Organization, Public Folder store from the database perspective is actually no difference. There isn't anything very interesting to talk about there.

However, when we create a Public Folder for the Organization, that's something I like to touch on. HMC treats Public Folder as a consumer instance for the resource, which is really like a mailbox as a consumer to an Organization mailbox store resource. So, when you create a Public Folder for an organization,

• It creates a consumer instance. The instance_description in rmcore_ConsumerInstance table will be ‘public folder' and the instance_name will be ‘<ORG GUID>\ <public folder name>.
• It will then consume the resource from the Organization Public Folder store resource, it means,
• o it will record the space taken by the public folder on blockmodel_ModelAllocationData table, mapping it to the Organization public folder store resource.
• o Organization public folder store resource capacity will be updated to reflect the available space.

Here is a sample SQL query that I use to retrieve all public folders in the Resource Management database,

SELECT

                a.instance_Id,

                c.CommonName,

                substring(a.instance_name,1,32) as OrgGUID,

                substring(a.instance_name,33,50) as PublicFolder,

                b.actual_used,

                a.instance_description,

                (select distinct instance_location from rmcore_resourceinstance where instance_name = d.instance_location) As Server

FROM

                [ResourceManager].[dbo].[rmcore_ConsumerInstance] a,

                [resourcemanager].[dbo].[blockmodel_modelallocationdata] b,

                [planmanager].[dbo].[customers] c,

                [resourcemanager].[dbo].[rmcore_resourceinstance] d

WHERE

                a.instance_description = 'public folder'

                and substring(a.instance_name,1,32) = replace(c.customerID,'-','')

                and a.instance_id = b.consumer_id

                and b.resource_id = d.instance_id

Public Folder Offline Address Book Resource Management

Offline Address Book resource management is nothing fancy as well. Once you understand the resource management model, everything will become relatively mundane. Like the Exchange Resource, we need to first add the Public Folder OAB server resource to the HMC environment.  By default, there should be no more than 1000 OABs per Public Folder server. However, I strongly recommend you to discuss this with Microsoft to understand the scalability of this.

Once you have added the Exchange resource, when you create the first MAPI user, it will attempt to create the AL, GAL and OAB and during that time, the organization will be a consumer of the public folder OAB resource. Since there is only one OAB allowed per organization, the decrement will always be just 1.

Here, I have some SQL query that will allow you to dump out some data, which you can also do through some of the procedures, of course,

/* List the OAB public folder Store  */

select

                a.instance_id,

                a.instance_name,

                a.instance_description,

                a.instance_location,

                c.actual_max,

                c.actual_free

from rmcore_ResourceInstance a,

                 rmcore_ResourceType b,

                 blockmodel_ResourceCapacity c

where

                b.type_name = 'ExchOABPublicStore07'

                and a.type_id = b.type_id

                and a.instance_id = c.instance_id

/* List All Organizations and their OAB server */

select

                c.CommonName as Org,

                a.instance_name as OrgGUID,

                d.instance_location as Server,

                e.actual_used

from

                [resourcemanager].[dbo].[rmcore_consumerinstance] a,

                [resourcemanager].[dbo].[rmcore_consumertype] b,

                [planmanager].[dbo].[customers] c,

                [resourcemanager].[dbo].[rmcore_resourceinstance] d,

                [resourcemanager].[dbo].[blockmodel_modelallocationdata] e

where

                a.type_id = b.type_id

                and b.type_name = 'ExchOABOwningOrgConsumer07'

                and a.instance_name = replace(c.customerID, '-','')

                and a.instance_id = e.consumer_id

                and e.resource_id = d.instance_id

HMC Resource Management - Part #3 - HMC Plan Management

In part#1 and part#2, we discussed about the databases in the HMC Resource Management and also we briefly discussed about how Active Directory fit into the picture of the HMC Resource Management.

Now, before we dive into the resource management of each product, let's talk about Plan Management.

Plan Management

In HMC 4.x, we brought in the concept of Organization Plan and User Plan. We don't have such concept in HMC 3.5. We only have what we called the Mailbox Plan in HMC 3.5 and part of what is included in the HMC 4.x's Organization Plan is included in the Organization creation process. The concept of Plan Management can be confusing because there is Organization Plan and User Plan and etc. I remember when I first started with HMC; it took me a while to fully understand it. So, it is only fair that I spend some time to talk about that first and then as I explained, hopefully things will become clearer and that you guys don't need to go through the same learning process as I did.

What's a Plan?

A Plan or sometimes referred to as a Service Plan, is really an aggregation of service features. It is a mechanism combining key aspects of users and organizations in the HMC environment. For example, specific service features such as mailbox size, mail protocols, Microsoft Outlook Web Access feature segmentation, and disk quotas.

The best way to explain this perhaps is through examples. Let's do that. Assuming we are a hosting company and there is an organization, say Company A. This organization wants to use our hosting services and Company A has the following requirements,

• Need E-mail service
• Need SharePoint service
• Need OCS service
• 10 of the 50 users in Company A are VIP and they should have 2GB mailbox.
• The rest of the 40 should only have 500MB mailbox.
• Everyone in the company will use SharePoint service
• Only the VIP will use OCS

As the hosting company, we need a mechanism to properly assign, store and track the appropriate services we allocate or provide to Company A as well as his users. We also want to give the administrator of the Company A to have the flexibility changing his users' features. So, this is what we need,

* In HMC 3.5, we do not have the concept of Organization Plan, instead we expect everyone to subscribe to e-mail service as the creation of the organization can only be done when someone subscribe to the e-mail service. There is no SharePoint Organization Plan or Live Communication Organization Plan in HMC 3.5. Hence, you can't really enable or disable individual service. In HMC 4.x, services provided to organization can be enabled or disabled separately. It will make it easier to add additional services to the environment such as CRM.

** This obviously limitation here is that the change of features based on collection of features or plan. For example, for the above example, if one of the users in Company A needs to have a 5GB mailbox and then another user that has 2GB mailbox must have IMAP4 access (assuming the rest must remain the same), the recommended way to do it is to create another 2 user plans instead of providing a way to just change the those needed feature (it is possible to modify the user directly and change the feature, it is also possible to override the feature during the mailbox creation. However, it is important to note that HMC does not track individual feature).

Here's how it works...

With the above, I hope you understand why we need to have Organization Plan and User Plan. Let's look at the relationship and how it pans out for Company A,

1. Creation of Organization Plan, we need to create 3 Organization Plans, one for Exchange, one for SharePoint and one for OCS,
• Exchange Organization Plan, here we can also specify if this is dynamic quota, the specific mailbox or public folder databases to be used or specific version of client.
• SharePoint Organization Plan, here we can also specify the number of sites or sub sites available to be created for this organization. 
• OCS Organization Plan there isn't much required to be specifying on this. However, it can be easily customized to say have a plan to limit based on the number of users*. 
2. Subscribing to the Organization Plan. Now that we have created the Organization plan, the organization needs to subscribe to those plans. In another word, to enable the organization for those services. 
3. Next, creation of User Plan, we need to create 3 User Plan if it is not already there. Most hosters will just sell their service based on a few standardized plans. This sort of make billing and provisioning easier too. 
• Email User Plan 1 - We need to create a User Plan for Exchange that will have 2 GB mailbox size. 
• Email User Plan 2 - We need to create the 2^nd User Plan for Exchange that will only allow 500MB mailbox size. 
• OCS User Plan 1 - We need to create a User Plan that have the default OCS features (since it is not specified in this case). 
4. Associating User Plan to Organization (Add Available Plan). Like the Organization Plan subscription, we need to make sure that the Organization is made aware that it can use these User Plans. 
5. Create or enabling user for specific service with the available plan. Associating the user plan to the organization really only doing the linkage and user still do not have access to the service. Remember in part #2, we discussed about the user creation in Active Directory? Well, you have to do that first and then you can come and enable the user for the specific service (messaging or OCS) and assign that user with the appropriate plan.

Note: I think it is important to note that different companies or organization can share the same organization plan.

Now, there are also a few things I should mention here, firstly, we didn't create SharePoint User Plan. The reason is because there is no User Plan concept in SharePoint service. The management of the user access to the SharePoint site is through SharePoint itself most of the time rather than through HMC. Secondly, User Plan can be shared by many organizations and thirdly, when you change a feature in the User Plan, it does not change the existing users.

* While it is possible to customize what being put in the plan but obviously when you do that, it changes the schema slightly and that it may require you to use customized namespace and procedure. The features in the above plans are all out of the box features.

 So, that's a quick overview of how it works. Now, let's look at what's in the Resource Management database, yeah?

What's being stored in the database?

I will talk about the OCS and SharePoint in the later blogs but for now, to make things simple, let me talk about the Plan and subscription information stored in the databases from the Exchange perspective only.

• PlanManager database
• All the Organization Plans and User Plans are stored in the same place. From the database standpoint, there is really no difference between Organization Plans or User Plans. They are being differentiated by the application (which is what defined in the namespaces and procedures). 
• If you open up the SQL Server Management Studio, you will find the following tables, 
• Services - this table defines the services available, such as Exchange, AD, OCS and etc. 
• ServicePlanTypes - this table defines all the Plan Types, whether it is an Exchange Organization Plan, OCS User Plan and etc. It also refers to the Services table so that we will know what type of plan that is. 
• ServicePlans - when you create an organization plan or user plan, it will create an entry here, mapping it to the appropriate PlanTypeCode. 
• Features - this table defines all features available. 
• ServicePlanFeatures - this table ties what features in which Service Plans. 
• ServiceDependencies - this table specifies the dependencies, for example, before you can subscribe to the Exchange Mobility service, the Organization should also subscribe to the Exchange service first. 
• CustomerPlans - then you have this table that records the plans that the organizations have subscribed to.

So far the above is pretty straightforward. Creation of plans only involves the PlanManager database. Subscription of an organization to the Exchange plan however will involve the ResourceManagement database. Subscription of an Organization to SharePoint or OCS will not involve the ResourceManagement database. I will this discuss those in the later blogs.

• ResourceManager database
• When we subscribe an Organization to an Exchange Organization Plan, we can specify if this Organization is using Dynamic Quota or Fixed Quota (I will discuss this in later blogs). In HMC 4.x, you cannot specify which mailbox store to assign the organization to as it is based on a specific algorithm, however you can run another procedure to specifically allocate a mailbox store for that Organization and deallocate what has been allocated automatically earlier. Hence, we need to keep track of that. I will touch of this later but for now, you just need to know that it will create entries in the Resource Management the moment you subscribe an Organization to an Exchange Plan. When I explained this later, everything will become clearer. 
• SharePoint and OCS do not use this database.

So, there you go, this is a quick walk through of the Plan Management.

HMC Resource Management - Part #2 - HMC Resource Management and Active Directory

Things have been busy for me and i haven't had the time to complete this series in a timely fashion. In part #1, we briefly talked about what’s in the PlanManager and ResourceManager databases from a very high level. In the next few parts, we will go in a little bit further to discuss how HMC manage the resource allocation in Exchange, SharePoint and also OCS.

Before we get into that, I think it is essential to talk about how HMC database, PlanManager is linked with the Active Directory. It is important to understand that it isn't the purpose of this article to discuss about the database schema but I will discuss briefly how they are linked.

The best way to explain this, in my humble opinion is to walk through the provisioning process. As we walk through them, I will explain how the data is being stored in the database and then I will provide some examples and discuss about some of the tables and their purpose.

As you all know, the first thing you need to do before mailbox enable a user, or enabling the user for OCS or creating the appropriate SharePoint site for the organization is to create the organization itself and the appropriate users for that organization. In the HMC world, an Organization means a company and all the users and groups in that organization are grouped under an Active Directory container or Organizational Unit (OU).

So, let's take a closer look and see what is being inserted into the database. Note:

Creating Organization

Procedure: To create an organization, you called Hosted Active Directory::CreateOrganization.

1.       What is created in Active Directory? When this procedure is called,

a.       It creates the Organization OU container in the Hosting container.

b.      it will also create some of the system container and objects such as,

_Private

Allusers@<org>

Admins@<org>

CSRAdmins@<org>

c.       AD object creation is one thing; the procedure will also stamp the appropriate permissions to ensure that only users in this Org should have access to objects underneath this OU.

2.       What you should know about otherWellKnownObjects? OtherWellKnownObjects are heavily used in HMC to 'extend' the Active Directory schema to link with other objects. For example, MPS will use otherWellKnownObjects to link the _Private folder, the Admins, the CSRAdmins, the parent folder to this organization. This is important to know because a number of the procedures in MPS will use this reference.

Note: You should know that however Allusers@<org> are not 'linked' in this otherWellKnownObjects. This is one of the common issues where renaming of Org will cause problem.

3.       What is in the database then? There aren't many things being put into the database during Org creation. Because otherWellKnownObjects are used to link most of the things like Admins, CSRAdmins and _Private folder, there is no reason to keep any one of those in the database. Hence, you won't any record of those admins account in the database.

PlanManager is the only database that you need to look at this point. When an organization is created, it will create a record in the Customers table in the PlanManager database. Say if you create a new Organization called TestOrg, if you perform a query like this,

SELECT * FROM [PlanManager].[dbo].[Customers] WHERE CommonName = 'TestOrg'

You will one record being retrieved showing you the following fields,

CustomerID -> This will match it to the objectGUID of the OU container or the object.

ParentID -> This will match it to the object GUID of the Parent OU or holding OU

StatusTypeCode -> This will tell you if this Org or object is still active or enabled.

CustomerTypeCode -> This will tell you the type of Object is this. For example,

        - BU is business user

        - BZ is business organization

        - CT is contact object

        - GP is group object

        - CU is consumer user

        - RO is Reseller organization

        - IR is Information Worker

CommonName -> This stores the name of the organization. If it is a user, it will store the user email or contact email for Contact object or group name if it is a group object.

Note: You should know that Customer table does not just contain the Organization OU object. It consists of almost everything that is created in the Active Directory, such as OU, User, Contact, Distribution Groups.

Also, the database has been designed to cater for customization and extension. You can define your own type if necessary and you can find out all the types that are available from the CustomerTypes table.

The above doesn't cover in detail everything is being executed by the procedure and it also does not cover some of the hidden things written into the database. For example, there is difference between creating a reseller organization and a normal business organization. A consumer organization is also different compared to a business organization. You can see they are being differentiated by the CustomerTypeCode. You should also know when you create a Business Org for example, it will also subscribe the Organization to a BusinessPlan which is a default plan for Business.

In short, the mapping is by GUID and it creates only the OU record and subscribed the OU to a business plan if it is a business Org. Now, in the later parts, I will also go a little bit deeper into the plans in the database and how each service like Exchange has Org plan as well as user plan. For now, from Active Directory standpoint, it is quite straightforward and it won't touch ResourceManager database at all.

Creating a User

1.       What is created in Active Directory? When this procedure is called,

a.       It creates the user object in the Organization OU. Obviously prior to executing the creation, it will perform some checks such as whether the path being passed in is correct or not.

b.      It doesn't create anything else other than the user object but what it does do is that will insert this user to the appropriate security groups such as the AllUsers group created during the Org creation.

c.       It will then perform the appropriate permissions hardening.

2.       What is in the database then? Creation of the AD user object will create a record on the Customer table in the PlanManager database.

Creating a Group

1.       What is created in Active Directory? When this procedure is called,

a.       It creates the group object in the Organization OU. Obviously prior to executing the creation, it will perform some checks such as whether the path being passed in is correct or not.

b.      It will create a group object in the Active Directory.

c.       It will then perform the appropriate permissions hardening.

2.       What is in the database then? Creation of the AD group object will create a record on the Customer table in the PlanManager database.

Creating a Contact

1.       What is created in Active Directory? When this procedure is called,

a.       It creates the contact object in the Organization OU. Obviously prior to executing the creation, it will perform some checks such as whether the path being passed in is correct or not.

b.      It doesn't create anything else other than the contact object but what it does do is that will insert this user to the appropriate security groups such as the AllUsers group created during the Org creation.

c.       It will then perform the appropriate permissions hardening.

2.       What is in the database then? Creation of the AD contact object will create a record on the Customer table in the PlanManager database.

So, there you go. I think it is pretty straightforward. As you can see, creation of objects in Active Directory, from MPS standpoint does not create anything outside of PlanManager database. It does not touch the ResourceManager database at all. You should also see that all the records created, uses the Active Directory object GUID as the primary reference in the MPS's PlanManager database.

Hosted Messaging and Collaboration Knowledge Base Articles

This page used to provide just the HMC related updates but now it has been updated to provide the specific product service packs, rollup updates, hotfixes that have been tested by the HMC product group. With this, I will no longer provide any quarterly list of updates on what hotfixes have been tested like I used to. :) Here is the link,

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/serviceproviders/cc563918.aspx

For example, you can see the Update Rollup 9 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (KB970162) have been tested for HMC 4.x.

HMC Resource Management - Part #1 - PlanManager and ResourceManager – Overall Concept

I believe one of the most mysterious parts of HMC is about the MPS engine and the Resource Management databases. Between last December and January, I blogged about how different products (Exchange, SharePoint and OCS) integrate in a HMC Solution. However, understanding just the integration points without knowing the resource management portion definitely does not paint a complete picture of what HMC is.

Since then, I have received requests to discuss a bit about the resource management in HMC and what those databases that shipped with HMC are storing and being used. So, in my next few entries, I intend to spend some time talking about the following,

1.       PlanManager and ResourceManager – Overall Concept

2.       HMC Resource Management and Active Directory

3.       HMC Resource Management and Exchange

4.       HMC Resource Management and Windows SharePoint Services

5.       HMC Resource Management and Office Communication Servers

The aim for this is not to go crazily in-depth nor is it meant to discuss the full database schema and etc. I realize most of our HMC administrators come from an infrastructure background (in fact, mostly from AD and Exchange) and find it difficult to manage the environment (or sometime even fearful to do anything) because there has been very little about how those databases work in the HMC environment.

My objective is to help the HMC administrators to better understand the relationship and hence able to better plan for recovery, database integrity checking, have better process on how to troubleshoot and handling issues and not blindly go into a HMC environment doing things that may potentially mess up the environment. For example, moving mailbox from one database to another using cmdlets, reconnecting a mailbox to another user, re-enabling sip user and etc.

Let’s get started. This introduction is going to be something extremely light. I want to talk briefly about the purposes of these databases and what things are being stored in it on a very high level.

When you install HMC 4.5, it creates 5 databases. They are MPFConfig, MPFAudit, MPFTranLogData, PlanManager and ResourceManager databases.

The first 3 are used by the MPF engine and I will talk about that some other time as there are tons to talk about too on those. Some of those databases can be used to better analyze the history of all the transactions, used for better performance analysis and also to configure some advance configurations not shown in the interface.

For now, we will discuss about the last 2 databases, PlanManager and ResourceManager.

PlanManager Database

PlanManager used to be called HeCustomerDB in HMC 3.5. While, the concept hasn’t changed much since HMC 3.5, I am going to refer to just the PlanManager which is what HMC 4.5 is using today. There is obviously a big change from HMC 3.5 to HMC 4.5 such as introduction of organization and user plans in HMC 4.5 and also support of different version of the hosted products. So those have resulted in additional categories and features and etc.

PlanManager stores more than just plans (I personally think it should be named something else). On a high level, it has the following,

1.       Active Directory Object reference. It consists of all the references to all the objects created in AD. Such as, OUs, Users, Contacts, Groups, SMTP domains. Something that I will go into greater depth in when I discuss about the Resource Management and Active Directory.

2.       Mailbox assignment. It also consists of information of mailbox GUID linkage to the respective AD objects. I will also discuss that further in the Resource Management and Exchange later.

3.       Plans information. It consists of all the plan information, including all the features of each plan. For example what mail feature or quota is tied to which plan. Different product tends to be slightly different and I will discuss that accordingly when I discuss about different products.

4.       Plan Assignment. It also consists of what plans are those organizations assigned to.

I think it should also be noted that you can further ‘extend’ the capability of the database yourself. Such as you can add additional feature, add in additional customer type or asset type and etc. which your control panel can use if needed.

ResourceManager Database

ResourceManager database right now is primarily used by Hosted Exchange only. The complexity and the need of tracking the resource allocation for individual organization, for public folder, for OAB, for individual mailbox user, for different mailbox store created has created the need to track that on a separate database.

As I walk through different products in the next few entries, you may realize that WSS and OCS are not using the ResourceManager database as they are less complex in terms of the needs for resource allocation and management.

ResourceManager, on a high level has the following,

1.       Mailbox Stores and their sizes. It consists of all the mailbox stores and their available size.

2.       Public Folder Stores and their sizes.

3.       OAB Servers.

4.       Public Folder allocation for each organization.

5.       Organization’s OAB assignment

6.       Organizations and their allocated size.

7.       Organizations and their assigned mail stores.

8.       Individual mailbox and the mailbox size assigned to them.

Now, I should also highlight that the reference to AD objects are often using GUID and I also blogged about this earlier this month (http://blogs.technet.com/provtest/archive/2009/07/15/matching-the-guid-from-ad-with-mps.aspx).

There you go; this is a simple overview of the 2 mysterious databases that has so often make HMC looks more complicated than it really is.  I believe once you understand what’s in the databases, you will find that it isn’t that bad at all.

Troubleshooting HMC OCS’s Address Book Segregation

HMC 4.5 has been out for a while now. We are beginning to see more and more people deploying OCS into the HMC environment as the concept of using IM as one of the corporate communication tools getting better acceptance.

One of the most common issues when setting up the OCS in HMC is configuring the address book segregation. To be honest, that’s really the only major customization you need to do to have OCS in HMC environment. If you want to know more about what are the customizations we have in HMC, you can refer to my previous blog, HMC 4.5 and Office Communications Server 2007.

In my previous blog, I talked about the address book segregation customization introduced by HMC into the OCS 2007 on a very high level. Here, we will take a closer look at the mechanism, how it should work and what are the things to look at if it doesn’t work.

1.       Address Book Generation or Synchronization.

So, firstly, in order for you to have address book segregation, obviously you need to have different address book for different organizations, just like Global Address List in Hosted Exchange. Once you have completed the installation of the OCS servers, by default, it generates one address book. Think of it like the Default Global Address Book in Exchange. Now, we really don’t want that. If you have that, you should delete those to avoid confusion.

Go to the server where you have your OCS address book, such as \\OCSPOOLWEB01\ABS

If there are files there, you should remove them all.

Then by following one of the deployment steps in HMC deployment guide, Procedure W08-DWHO.66: To enable Address Book Isolation, to be specific, you will use a tool called ABSConfig.exe from the OCS  2007 ResKit and through WMI to enable the feature called Partition ABS data by Organizational Unit and create individual ABS files per OU.

Essentially, with this option enabled, when the OCS tries to perform the address book synchronization, it will generate address book based on OU instead of everyone in one big address book. So, if you want to find out if the address book generation is working accordingly right now (assuming you currently have sip enabled users in your environment), look at the ABS output location. It should have a structure following your domain OU like the following,

\\ OCSPOOLWEB01

\ABS

            \fabrikam.com

                        \Hosting

                                    \ConsolidatedMessanger

                                                \AlpineSkiHouse

                                                            *.dabs

                                                            *.lsabs

                                                \Tailspin

                                                            *.dabs

                                                            *.lsabs

If it does not have any of the OU structure and just have the plain .lsabs and .dabs files in the root of ABS folder, then it probably means the feature has not been activated.

You can force a call to generate or synchronize address book by calling the following,

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007\Server\Core>ABServer.exe -syncNow

Of course, if you have absolutely zero sip enabled users in the environment then nothing will be generated.

2.       Address Book Redirection

Once the address book has been generated, of course the next thing is to make sure that it should redirect to the user to the appropriate address book according to the location of the user. This is documented in the following steps, Procedure W08-DWHO.68: To enable redirection on the external Address Book Website.

Now, here I want to highlight a couple of things which I think has kind of being left out in the deployment guide.

a.       Configuring Redirection. The deployment guide only request you to configure web.config file in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007\Web Components\Address Book Files\Ext\Handler

This is the External handler. This handler will be used only if the connection is through external (based on the configuration of the Office Communicator client). This is where sometimes things get slightly confusing because when you are setting up stuff, you tend to try connecting through the internal server name and that will trigger the internal handler instead.

So, if you may actually want to configure the internal handler as well, which is the web.config file in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007\Web Components\Address Book Files\Int\Handler

So, once all these have been setup, when you try to download the address book from Office Communicator, it will send you to the IIS location containing the address book. Authentication will take place and based on the authentication, it will redirect you to the appropriate path containing the address book. If you look at the IIS log, you find something like the following,

Note: See how Communicator will first request for /Abs/Int/Handler/D-0c03-0c04.lsabs and then authentication happened and when it finally got authenticated, it got redirected (302) and it goes to /Abs/Int/Files/hmc45.com/Hosting/ConsolidatedMessenger/AlpineSkiHouse/D-0c03-0c04.lsabs.

b.      Configuring Application Pool account. Now, everything is in IIS and the redirection happens in IIS through an application pool created by OCS installation.

If you note the IIS log above, you will find that the Office Communicator client isn’t the one that will send you to the exact path but it was the application pool that is serving the directory that figures out which path to redirect you to.  

If you right click at the application pool (LSGroupExpAppPool) in the IIS, you will find the identity running this pool is RTCComponentService.

This is important, in order for the redirection to work; the RTCComponentService must have the appropriate permissions to know where those accounts are from (when they authenticate). By default, this account has no permission to the Hosting container in HMC because of how we harden the Hosting container. Hence, in order for it to work, RTCComponentService should be part of the Windows-based hosting Service Accounts. If it is not there, you need to add it to the group and then restart the IIS.

c.       ABS location and connection.

The last thing to check is how the IIS able to connect to the address book file share. If you look at the Abs\Ext\Files properties in IIS Manager, you will find that it is pointing to a network directory for the ABS. Click on Connect As button to find out what user it is using to connect to the file share. It is important to make sure that the password for that user is correctly set AND also that the account has not been disabled or locked out.

3.       Quick Tests using Internet Explorer

To find out if the redirection is working.

a.       Find out a .lsabs file in the ABS folder, say in  

\\OCSPOOLWEB01\ABS\fabrikam.com\Hosting\ConsolidatedMessanger\AlpineSkiHouse\F-0b72.lsabs

b.      Then go to the web site where your address book is being published, say, https://web.consolidatedmessenger.com/Abs/Ext/Handler/F-0b72.lsabs

c.       It should prompt you for user name and password. Enter a sip enabled user in the AlpineSkiHouse.

d.      It will then redirect you to  https://web.consolidatedmessenger.com/Abs/fabrikam.com/Hosting/ ConsolidatedMessenger/Alpineskihouse/F-0b72.lsabs and allow you to download the file.

e.      If it doesn’t work, then check the IIS log to find out why.

Yes, you should use web-based distribution OAB.

HMC has been in the market for a while and as it grows, we are beginning to see many HMC providers are expanding their infrastructure and having more users and companies subscribing to their environment.

I also observed that the growth is especially obvious recently with the current economy situation where it makes so much sense for many companies to move their email, their SharePoint and corporate IM to the hosted model because of low startup cost and a low and predictable maintenance cost. Not to mention, it is much more feasible to do so nowadays with the current bandwidth and technology.

I noticed that the growth is particularly strong in the MAPI space. Customers are demanding better and richer Outlook email, communication and collaboration experience which HMC offers today rather than those simple POP3 and IMAP4 email technology.

Now, because of the growth in MAPI organizations, I feel that it is probably important for me to briefly talk about the need to move towards web-based distribution OAB instead of continuing scaling out the number of OAB Public Folder server.

We all know that in order to host MAPI clients, having Outlook to access the address list offline, we need to make sure each organization has an Offline Address Book available to be downloaded. Prior to Exchange Server 2007, the storage of the OAB is only in Public Folder Server. In HMC, it is recommended to dedicate Public Folder servers to host OAB and each OAB PF server shouldn’t have anything more than 1000 OABs. If you have more than that, you should either scale out by creating a new OAB PF server to host the new OABs or you can consider increasing the MaxPageSize in Active Directory. The latter, in my opinion is slightly dangerous as it may potentially generate performance impact to your whole Active Directory infrastructure.

So, everything sounds logical here, what’s the concern here? Well, the primary concern is that each Public Folder OAB created consumes a Replication ID (ReplID) in the Public Folder Hierarchy. The Replication ID has a limitation of approximately 32k. What does that mean? It means if you have more than 32k OABs in the environment, you may have problem with your OAB generation and download if they are in Public Folder.

It should also be noted that ReplIDs do not get cleaned up. Once it is created, it stays in the Public Folder Hierarchy until you refresh the Public Folder Hierarchy (which can be a rather tedious exercise) even if you delete the OAB. So, it means, if you create a new OAB and then delete it, it will still take up 1 count.

How do you know how many ReplID count you have now? Easy, go to your Exchange Server, look at the perfmon counter, MSExchangeIS Public\ReplID Count, you should be able to find your ReplID Count there.

I know some of you are probably getting worried knowing that there is a limit there. Good news is, there is a default quota limit being set as documented in this article, you should also take a look at this article, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb851493.aspx. So, chances are, you probably know about this ReplID by now if you have exceeded the limit.

You can definitely increase the default quota limit to allow things to get going as long as it is not over 32k. The long term solution is to move to Web-based distribution which doesn’t have such limitation.

Obviously the caveats of moving towards a pure Web-based distribution OAB is that the environment needs to be upgraded to HMC 4.5 (if you are already running HMC 4.0, moving to 4.5 is a piece of cake but if you are running HMC 3.5, then it needs a bit of planning but not end of the world) and it requires the client to be Outlook 2007 and above. Older version of Outlook will still work for all their functionalities except when it comes to downloading Offline Address Book (OAB) and also any feature that may require OAB (such as selecting contact when you are offline).

Consider the fact that the process to reset the Replication ID should you exceed the limit may require you to reset the whole Public Folder Hierarchy; I will start thinking

1.       Switching all my clients to Outlook 2007 only (after all, there is no reason not to do that as Outlook 2007 provides better OOF functionalities and also better free busy and availability data).

2.       Move to HMC 4.5 if you haven’t already done so.

3.       Then, enable Web-Based Distribution OAB and use that only. You may need to change your control panel to set it to only create Web-based Distribution OAB or something.

It should be noted that this is only applicable to OAB creation; it is not applicable to the normal Public Folder creation.

So, there you go. If you are not using Web-based Distribution OAB today in your HMC environment and you are anticipating rapid growth, you should.

Tip: How do you find out who are the users in your HMC environment doing MAPI access?

Typically in a corporate environment, to find out who are the users using Outlook MAPI access and the version, you can Microsoft Exchange Server User Monitor, or ExMon (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9A49C22E-E0C7-4B7C-ACEF-729D48AF7BC9&displaylang=en).

ExMon is really good to gather real time data but may not be good tool if you want to find out who has been doing MAPI access for the past say 3 months. Unfortunately, there is really no good tool to do that right now in a corporate environment. In HMC, the story may be a bit different because one of the good things about Hosted Exchange in HMC is that all client traffics will go through CAS, whether it is MAPI, POP3, OWA and etc.

In HMC, MAPI access comes in the form of Outlook Anywhere or RPC over HTTPs. Because of that, we can harvest the data by looking at the IIS log. When it comes to reviewing the IIS Log, you can't run away from tapping into the power of the LogParser. All you have to do is to identify the specific pattern for example, the following should give you a list of users that have logged on through RPC over HTTPs or Outlook Anywhere.

Logparser.exe" -i:IISW3C -o:CSV "SELECT DISTINCT cs-username from ex090402.log where cs(User-Agent) LIKE '%MSRPC%'"

Of course, you can also run it against a list of files by doing *.log instead of specifying a specific log file.

If you can identify other patterns such as Outlook 2007 will always try to connect to the web services (whereas older versions of Outlook do not do that), then you can do the same as well such as the following,

 Logparser.exe" -i:IISW3C -o:CSV "SELECT DISTINCT cs-username from ex090402.log where cs-uri-stem LIKE '%Exchange.asmx%'"

There are other examples but I will leave it to you all to explore. You can find more examples here too, http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/09/12/446982.aspx.

Messing with otherWellKnownObjects

otherWellKnownObject attributes have been widely used in HMC as a cross reference as well as very much as a kind of a poor man’s AD schema extension strategy. J This blog aims to discuss it and also provide some ways to work with this attribute using HMC procedures.

Firstly, here is a list of common otherWellKnownObjectGUID in HMC,

List of common otherWellKnownObjectGUID in HMC

• 7DEF010C6019A1458068D74AD1A3C1FA
•  name="FolderUsers"
• Eg.:CN=FolderUsers@alpineskihouse.com,OU=ALPINESKIHOUSE,OU=CONSOLIDATEDMESSENGER,OU=Hosting,DC=fabrikam,DC=com
• A276E3A170F0C24699770F593818501E
• name="FolderAdmins"
• Eg.:CN=FolderAdmins@alpineskihouse.com,OU=ALPINESKIHOUSE,OU=CONSOLIDATEDMESSENGER,OU=Hosting,DC=fabrikam,DC=com
• D22DFCC5B73645E99E16C9AD3D61F34F
• name="OfflineAddressList"
• Eg.:CN=ALPINESKIHOUSE OAL,CN=All Offline Address Lists,CN=Address Lists Container,CN=HMC45,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=fabrikam,DC=com
• 9E444526CB6F4D5C9A59C9A84E26B627
• name="AddressList"
• Eg.:CN=ALPINESKIHOUSE AL,CN=All Address Lists,CN=Address Lists Container,CN=HMC45,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=fabrikam,DC=com
• 89FB25B7DF784FC198A493E2E8A0EE7E
• name="GlobalAddressList"
• Eg.:CN=ALPINESKIHOUSE GAL,CN=All Global Address Lists,CN=Address Lists Container,CN=HMC45,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=fabrikam,DC=com
• 4619BE598BF441DB8C9DB0482E62E386
• name="MultiGroupPointer"
• Eg.:CN=MultiGroup,CN=_Private,OU=ALPINESKIHOUSE,OU=CONSOLIDATEDMESSENGER,OU=Hosting,DC=fabrikam,DC=com
• EA755D448CE64157A20E82B7CCBE14B0
• name="OrgType"
• Eg.:CN=customer,CN=WatOrgTypes,CN=_Private,OU=Hosting,DC=fabrikam,DC=com
• 3B6FF4FA8AA248039AD8F9493A43B704
• name="ChildOrgCreators"
• Eg.:CN=CSRAdmins@alpineskihouse.com,OU=ALPINESKIHOUSE,OU=CONSOLIDATEDMESSENGER,OU=Hosting,DC=fabrikam,DC=com
• 65F37ECB46704F0E9300E1FB48E1096E
• name="UserCreators"
• Eg.:CN=Admins@alpineskihouse.com,OU=ALPINESKIHOUSE,OU=CONSOLIDATEDMESSENGER,OU=Hosting,DC=fabrikam,DC=com
• 58888CFC8F7F430C8183102CD5758D81
• name="ForeignOwnerOrg"
• Eg.: OU=CONSOLIDATEDMESSENGER,OU=Hosting,DC=fabrikam,DC=com
• CC016CF08DEF4EA4A05C9C54B198785A
• name="ThisOrganizationRoot"
• Eg.:OU=ALPINESKIHOUSE,OU=CONSOLIDATEDMESSENGER,OU=Hosting,DC=fabrikam,DC=com

How to reset the otherWellKnownObject using HMC procedure

Sometimes, you may find it necessary to reset the otherWellKnownObject for whatever reason such as you may accidentally remove the Offline Address Book. This may result in the otherWellKnownObject reference to be invalid.

You can set or reset the otherWellKnownObject attribute by running the following procedure,

Sample Request:

If you wish to clear it, you just don’t set anything on the referent.

How to retrieve the otherWellKnownObject using HMC procedure

Sample VBScript to retrieve otherWellKnownObject

Sample PowerShell to retrieve otherWellKnownObject

Matching the GUID from AD with MPS Databases

We all know how the PlanManager database and the ResourceManager database are used to keep track of plans and the relationship between MPS and the Active Directory. We know that each object in the Active Directory has unique objectGUID and hence the objectGUID is being referenced to by both databases.

Because objectGUID is unique, it is important to understand that recreating a user, even though it has all the similar display name, last name, password length and all other attributes, it will still be a different object altogether. Knowing this is important because this is how MPS maintain the reference and relationship between AD and MPS.

However, if you look at the database, you will realize that the reference of GUID can be somewhat confusing sometimes because depending on different databases, MPS stores the GUID in different format. I am going to attempt to demystify some of those confusions.

Let’s start. Most of the time, if the AD Object GUID is not being used as the primary key, then it is being stored as the short format (or unformatted GUID) such as this, a 32 digit alphanumeric (0-F)

78CD7DD959FCE840891BA6C698AF1C27

If it is being used as a primary key, then it is usually stored in the long format (or formatted GUID), such as this,

Also, a 36-digit alphanumeric (including hyphens)

7642104C-8DC8-3B4A-A421-A8EFD444CAEE

For example,

Tip: How do I instruct HMOabUpdate to update all the Offline Address Books in my HMC environment?

Most of you know HMC does not rely on the usual Exchange OAB generation schedule to trigger OABgen. Instead, HMC introduces a custom tool called HMOabUpdate that gets activated based a scheduled time to automate the generation of Offline Address Books. The tool will detected the changes since the last run and will only trigger OABgen on the OABs that requires updates.

HmOABUpdate or sometimes called the HEOabUpdate as well is really a simple tool. What it does in each run is to retrieve the last start and complete date and time and then based on those information, it will then retrieve from the HMC database to find out which organizations' OABs need update and will trigger the OABgen for those OABs accordingly.

So, this is how you can instruct HMOabUpdate to update the offline address books for all the OABs known by the HMC environment.

·         Go to the server where you install HMOabUpdate (usually it is on one of the MPS engines)

·         Start up RegEdit

·         Navigate to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Provisioning\HmOABUpdate

·         You should find 2 keys in that, LastCompleteDate and LastStartDate.

·         Edit the value to a date that is like before you install the HMC environment, something like 01/01/2000 for both of the keys.

·         Then kick start the HmOABUpdate by either starting it from your scheduled tasks or manually running the HmOabUpdate.exe from the cmd line in the directory, C:\Program Files\Microsoft Hosting\Provisioning\Exchange OAB Update.

Of course, you don't always have to modify the date so far back. You can always change it to something like 2-3 days ago if you want to just update OABs again for those changes made 2-3 days ago.

 Hope you find this useful.

What's going on to group expansion in HMC 4.5 Office Communications Server (OCS)?

When you are using Office Communicator, one of the nicest features (in my opinion) is the capability to add a group and expand it in the contact list. This feature really makes organization and group of contacts more consistent throughout the company. Unfortunately, this feature didn’t make it into HMC 4.5. As a result, while you still can add group, when you try to expand it, you will see the following message,  

Use of this group is restricted.  Contact your system administrator to request the required permissions.

I did a bit of investigation and found that the primary reason is because the logon user does not have the appropriate AD permission on the Group object, hence it failed to expand the group and resulting in the error shown above.

In my investigation, I also found a quick work around; however, you will have to manually do it. Of course, knowing how smart some of you are, you can probably and easily whip out some clever scripts or to enable the group to be allowed for group expansion in OCS.

This is what you can do,

a. Go to the Group object that you want to expand
b. Open up the security
c. Go to the Advance
d. Add AllUsers@<company domain>
e. Just add "Read Permission"

Once added, voila, any logon user in that organization will be able to expand the group object.

Exchange 2007 SP1 RU8 has been validated for HMC 4.0 and HMC 4.5

On a monthly basis, the HMC test team will conduct a Windows update compatibility test (where the major roll-ups and updates will be tested) on different versions of HMC environment.

Windows update compatibility tests (Exchange 2007 SP1 RU8 was included in this test) on HMC 4.0 as well as HMC 4.5 have completed successfully. This means Exchange 2007 SP1 RU8 has been validated for both HM 4.0 and HMC 4.5.

Click the following for the full list. HMC 4.0 and HMC 4.5.