Exchange and the Real Time Messaging services have been this on-and-off couple for quite some time. Originally released as part of Exchange 2000, and split up with the release of Exchange 2003 and Live Communications server, the internal real time messaging component continues to evolve.
This is probably Microsoft's Christmas present for you – not so shocking details of the way Microsoft, the most attacked and spammed entity on earth handles its incoming and outgoing mail.
Microsoft today announced the release of Microsoft Exchange “12” Beta 1 — the code name for the next version of its leading server for e-mail, calendaring and unified messaging, to a select group of testers.
In a further effort to make Exchange easier to manage and troubleshoot and potentially save support centers some calls, Microsoft releases two more tools, the Microsoft Exchange Server Disaster Recovery Analyzer (ExDRA), and the Microsoft Exchange Server Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer (ExPTA).
As part of the release of Exchange 2003 SP2 you can expect most of the Exchange related tools to be updated. Amongst those is the PFDAVAdmin tool that allows you to gather more information about your public folders and manage permissions and replicas more effectively.
It took a while but now this is a supported configuration as long as you've installed Exchange 2003 SP2 and Virtual Server 2003 R2. Clustered Exchange is still not supported.
Microsoft are still trying to bring Entourage closer to Outlook's capabilities as an Exchange client. Could it be that Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Service Pack 2 was out the door too soon? Anyhow, an update is already available that fixes issues with synchronization and permissions.
Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) enhances your messaging environment by adding improved mobile e-mail, better protection from spam, and advanced mailbox fundamentals.
This free tool allows you to assess the ROI (Return on Investment) that migration to Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003 from NT4, NetWare, Exchange 5.5, and GroupWise will bring an end customer. It is an invaluable tool for migration project managers.
The patch relates to a vulnerability in CDO. This vulnerability apparently does not exist in Exchange 2003 but also appears in the all the other supported Microsoft products that run IIS, including Windows 2003 SP1.
With Windows 2003, Microsoft delivered the Volume Shadow Copy Service, essentially, Microsoft's take on snapshot technology allowing fast backup and restores. I remember everyone at the office excited about this, only it didn't worked quite as we hoped for, initially. Also, it didn't support Exchange. Now, following Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003 service packs, VSS for Exchange is now supported.
Standby servers are really useful in large environments. They are used to implement secondary sites for disaster recovery, and for testing purposes. For years, there was never a good solution for implementing a standby solution for Exchange clusters due to the complex nature of clustering. Now Microsoft releases and supports a solution for standby clustered Exchange 2003.
ADModify.NET is a free tool primarily that can be utilized by Exchange and Active Directory administrators to facilitate bulk user attribute modifications.
As Exchange 2003 SP2 draws by, Microsoft will take you through all the new features and improvements in a series of webcasts starting October 17th. Later in the month you get a series of Exchange 2003 In Depth webcasts covering administration and maintenance issues.
Microsoft announced today the agenda for this conference on the 7th and 8th of November. While this conference is aimed at serious exchange ISVs and developers it will shed light on some new features of the next Exchange version. It also means that a circulation of a beta version of E12 is near, even if it is a closed one.
ISA Server, as a newcomer Firewall from Microsoft was generally greeted with some skepticism from security experts due to the reputation Microsoft had for security holes in its other products. That said, as an application layer protection Firewall, ISA server had for a period, no competition and is still considered the best one for allowing secure access to Exchange services from the Internet.
You knew that sooner or later this was going to happen, so make way for the future of computing as the next version of Exchange is made available only on DVD media.
It has always been difficult to explain the importance of the IT department. Some executives see this the department as "the one that constantly spends and doesn't make a profit". One of the reasons for this is the difficulty in showing the value of having a competent IT staff and quality software and hardware and measuring the output of this department.
Microsoft will hold a couple of Technet support webcasts today and next week which will help you troubleshoot Exchange Client connectivity issues and Offline Address Book (OAB) download issues.
I'm happy to note that the Microsoft Exchange team seems determined to continuously improve their Exchange support utilities while we are waiting for Exchange SP2 and E12.
Microsoft will acquire FrontBridge Technologies, a leading provider of managed services so it will be able to offer in the near future hosted messaging services based on its constantly improving hosted offerings.
Exchange 2000 and 2003 are not supported on Windows 2003 64-Bit Edition. Unfortunately, Exchange 2003 SP2 will not even deliver WOW64 support for Exchange.
Microsoft is trying to push the Sender ID technology in an effort to globally reduce junk e-mail levels. One of the major obstacles is that this technology needs to be adopted by all the DNS servers providing mail services. The next versions of Microsoft's anti-spam components of Outlook and Exchange will think of any e-mail coming from a source that did not implement Sender ID as suspect. Should you panic? Not yet.
The Microsoft free security analysis tool has just been updated. For Exchange admins this tool can be used to determine whether patches are required for Exchange server, Outlook clients and supported operating systems.
The problem of slow shutdowns is not actually a SBS specific one. It exists for every server which is both a domain controller and an Exchange server. There are workarounds for this available which mostly include shutting down Exchange services before shutting down the operating system as described in one of my articles.
New version of ExBPA v2.1 is now available. It includes new WMI extensions to collect hardware information, performance baseline scan, cluster reporting, wildcard collection from the registry, UDP support, checksum operations, improved interface , and over a hundred new rules. It also includes various bug fixes.
July is a mixed bag in terms of Exchange webcasts, though it seems that security remains the primary issue for Microsoft as webcasts continue to focus around this subject.
Great news for Exchange users as the expected service pack will raise the 16GB limit to a mind boggling 75GB which is more than enough for most small to medium businesses considering the cost of disk space.
The Exchange Profile Update tool (Exprofre.exe), released last year as a replacement for the Outlook 2000 newprof.exe tool is now updated to support Exchange 2003 SP1.
A webcast on the 25th of May presented by Kevin Laahs, Principal Consultant in HP Services' Advanced Technology Group, about the new security enhancements and other features in OWA plus options for implementation.
In a packed hall of developers and industry partners at Microsoft Mobile & Embedded DevCon 2005, Microsoft Corp.'s annual mobile and embedded developers conference, Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft, announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows Mobile (TM) 5.0.
For some companies, Exchange server availability has become a top priority due to the increased use of e-mail for business use. For some companies Exchange downtime could mean loss of millions of dollars.
Tech·Ed 2005 is Microsoft's largest technology educational conference and will be held in Orlando, Florida June 5-10. It is sold out by now but you can get your hands on the latest Exchange and other developments by watching webcasts, ordering the DVD box or attending some of the other worldwide Tech Ed conferences. Here at MSExchange.org we will comb through the information released in Tech Ed and bring you a summary of the new Exchange developments.
The Log Parser tool has been quite a useful tool for analyzing IIS, Event Viewer log files and such. This tool is now even better, allowing you to analyze those cryptic XML outputs that almost every new Microsoft application now provides. It can also read registry and Active Directory information which can be quite handy.
Anything and everything you always wanted to know about this handy tool that helps enforce corporate message retention policies and manage information store sizes, straight from the guys who develop it.
San Jose, California - Sonasoft, Corp. announces that it will be conducting a series of seminars around the country on the topic “Disaster Recovery for Microsoft Exchange Servers”. The first seminar will be conducted at the Microsoft facility in Mountain View, California on April 27. Industry experts and partners will be invited to present in these seminars.
The new tool, originally used internally in Microsoft, allows you on a user basis, to see how much resources a user on an Exchange server consumes in terms of CPU, latency, network traffic and disk space.
The Security Configuration Wizard (SCW) adds the Exchange services executables to the Exceptions tab of the Windows Firewall. However, if these executables are not found in the default location then SCW misses them.
So, by now all the major players in the mobile solutions business have licensed the Exchange ActiveSync technology and will enable all of their newest models. But what about existing models?
It is no secret the Microsoft is the most attacked company over the Internet. There is much to be learned from the way the Microsoft IT department handles its large quantities of unsolicited e-mail and infected messages.
I've encountered some pretty weird error messages in my time as an Exchange expert. Microsoft plans to change this situation in the upcoming service pack and with E12, the successor to Exchange 2003.
More webcasts are coming your way in April, it feels like its online TechEd all year long. April, so it seems, is the month of in-depth technical presentations, all level 300, and recommended even to Exchange experts. Watch out for slides showing inside tips as they can be quite useful!
Microsoft posted on its web site a whitepaper describing the use of the PRF that can be used to configure new Outlook profiles or modify existing ones.
The Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA) Management Pack can be used to deploy the ExBPA tool on computers running Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5, Exchange 2000 Server and Exchange Server 2003.
TrendMicro's Antivirus products are widely used, especially in medium to large companies. The Internet Security Systems Protection Advisory has published an advisory concerning flaw in the ARJ parsing engine used by the entire TrendMicro Antivirus line that has been discovered and researched by Alex Wheeler of the ISS X-Force.
In all Exchange versions since version 5.0 you can create up to 75 rules using the Outlook Rules Wizard and the Out of Office Assistant. The numbers of rules you can create may vary according to the size of each rule. Rules grow larger if you have a lot of recipients in them, for example.
Extending your knowledge of Exchange by using the web has become quite easy in the last month with Microsoft providing webcasts, articles and documentation. If this isn't enough for you, you can now register to two free Exchange web seminars provided by Windows IT Pro, known for their popular magazines.
The memory leak could happen when you use a program such as LoadSim that uses Collaborative Data Objects (CDO) or MAPI32 to log on to or to log off mailboxes from multiple mailboxes at once.
Following PalmOne and Motorola's licensing of ActiveSync, Nokia has also announced the inclusion of this technology synchronizing Exchange with cellular devices.
Microsoft released in the last few days a few security related patches for all kinds of vulnerabilities. I would recommend installing all of them, preferably after testing in a lab environment. For Exchange Administrators a new vulnerability found in the SMTP engine allowing remote execution of code is the most relevant patch.
A bug has been found in Exchange allowing Outlook 2003 users to recover deleted items even if the server has been configured not to allow this. This problem affects both Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003.
Microsoft decides to align its next Office version and Exchange version naming which apparently will go back to version numbers instead of years. For now the next version, scheduled to be released in late 2006 or early 2007, is named E-12.
It seems like just a week and a half ago the ExBPA tool has been updated and yet 50 more rules have been added and the version has been updated from 1.6.3.1 to 1.6.7.1.
Just when you thought Microsoft published through its website all the whitepapers you could use, fifteen new ones are now available, aimed at the small to medium business market.
The Scriptomatic tool allows you to easily create WMI based scripts to query your hardware, operating system and applications for all type of information.
Two new troubleshooting articles, one about RUS permissions and the
other regarding (mostly SMTP) transport issues have been published on
the Microsoft website.
Anybody who deals with synchronizing Exchange and PocketPCs or Mobile Smartphones (soon to be simply called Windows Mobile) would know that doing so is not always a straightforward process. Sometimes the process provides cryptic errors, and is accompanied by all kinds of reboots in an attempt to troubleshoot them. So, a new release of Activesync naturally brings joy to our hearts.
Now in version 1.6.3.1, this tool keeps getting better, now adding
checking abilities for FSMO roles, directory replication connectors,
ISA server, recently installed Windows and Exchange updates, and
cluster node discrepancy detection.
It has been a confusing week as different media sources got conflicting announcements from Microsoft officials regarding the release of Exchange Edge Services, essentialy a componentialized mail relay system that will also protect e-mail from junk e-mail and other attacks.
Microsoft really are intent on making this tool a useful one for Exchange admins as version 1.1 is out the door real fast. It now includes a slightly improved GUI and performs more tests.
This update is the second version for the SMTP componenet since Exchange 2003 SP1 has been released and takes care of a problem that occours when you use VAPI 2.5 and the Intelligent Message Filter.
Though Motorola has been delivering synchronization with Exchange using Activesync technology for its MPx220 Smartphones based on Microsoft's Smartphone OS, Motorola now lincensed Activesync technology for use in its Linux based A780 mobile phones.
The MSExBPA tool used to diagnose Exchange problems and offer solutions just got better as Microsoft publishes version 1.6.0.1. Updated in this release are the XML file used by the tool to analyze information and the help file.
Microsoft resubmitted the Sender ID framework specification to the Internet Engineering Task Force which should publish a preliminary RFC in a few weeks.
If you like Technet webcasts and are interested in connecting devices to Exchange 2003 November 15-18 is the week for you as Microsoft tells all about wireless connectivity using mobile devices to Exchange 2003.
The MSSearch component of Exchange provides a way to create Full-Text Indexes for Exchange Stores which allows for faster searches. Microsoft has now released a VBScript based tool to manage, fix and get the status of Full-Text Indexes in the entire organization.
There is little information on hosting Exchange on the Internet. Microsoft provides a seemingly comprehensive document about hosting Exchange 2000 but with little real technical know-how information. Now is your time to learn about this hefty subject straight from the source.
Microsoft has always been the company most dedicated to providing extensive documentation of its products. To make it easier to search for these articles Microsoft published the availability of these articles at the Microsoft support web site as Knowledge Base articles.
This Level 300 webcast will be delivered by Paul Bowden, a Program Manager at Microsoft and will focus on the now commonly referred to as ExBPA tool, the automated health check and troubleshooting tool for Exchange 2000/3.
A new tool is available on Microsoft's web site that can be used to troubleshoot Exchange configuration problems by collecting information
from your servers.