If you have followed TheEmailAdmin for any length of time, you have probably gotten the idea that PST files are not anything we’re fans of. We’ve discussed the adverse impact to performance, alternatives to using PST files, and that with Exchange 2010 and Microsoft’s Large Mailbox Vision, there’s really no reason to have PSTs anymore.

And yet, time and again, as a consultant I find PST files on users’ hard drives, in their home directories, and even in team folders, accessed by large groups of users. Once, I even found a user storing their PST file in their Dropbox folder so that they could access it from multiple machines, but they couldn’t figure out why Outlook threw an error every time they tried to open their PST file.

Continue reading Your Mission: Seek and Destroy all PSTs

Some estimates peg the average amount of time a typical knowledge worker spends on email each business day at three hours. If the typical readers of this blog are anything like me at all, we can probably double that number, and add six or more hours each Saturday and Sunday to that. Continue reading 11 Tips to help you avoid inbox overload

I am normally one to go rush out and deploy patches and updates at my earliest convenience; I have been burned far more often by unpatched machines than by bad patches, but it seems that in this case time was on my side, as I had not yet deployed RU4 to my Exchange environment. Truth be told, it has been a very busy couple of weeks and I wasn’t even aware that RU4 was out, which strictly speaking, it isn’t, as Microsoft has pulled this RU from the shelves after some customers reported issues with it.

Continue reading Exchange 2010 SP1 RU4 pulled after customer issues

A few months ago I wrote a post listing fourteen online resources for email admins that included several of my favourite troubleshooting resources. In this post, I want to take you for a closer look at the best one of the lot for testing remote connectivity to Exchange, the Microsoft Exchange Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer. You can access this test suite by clicking the link above, or directly at its URL, https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/. There are several great tests this tool can run through to ensure that you have properly set up remote access to your Exchange infrastructure, and you will want to bookmark this site and refer to it whenever you setup, or change, the external connectivity to Exchange.

Continue reading How to troubleshoot remote connectivity to Exchange

A few months ago I wrote this article about troubleshooting Outlook when it throws an Error 10. Having run into it again, and realizing that my previous article didn’t go into the details when there really is a mismatch between the name(s) on the certificate and how your client is configured, I thought this would be a great topic to cover in this week’s post. Continue reading Error Code 10 Redux

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on How to Configure Exchange to Support Inbound Email for SharePoint, and at the end of that article I promised to show you how to permit SharePoint to automatically create contacts in the GAL so that users could easily find email enabled lists, and you wouldn’t have to manage that manually. I actually wrote that I would cover it the week after but meanwhile got some other ideas and focused on those. So here it is!

If you haven’t read the previous post, click on the link above and get your Exchange organization and SharePoint server(s) ready for inbound email first. Test that with a list to be sure mail is flowing correctly, and then come back here to proceed with configuring the Directory Management Service. DMS enables SharePoint to automatically create contact objects in Active Directory, which will then be visible in the GAL, so that when a SharePoint admin (or power user) creates a list or library and chooses to email enable it they won’t have to then request assistance from an Exchange admin. This can be very useful for companies that use SharePoint and email integration heavily, but as an Exchange admin you need to keep a couple of things in mind, and you want to get your AD admin (if that is not you) to read this as well, to be sure everybody is cool with what is going on.

Continue reading How to Configure the Directory Management Service with SharePoint 2010

Autodiscover in Exchange 2010 is one of those critical little black box services that just seems to work, chugging along quietly behind the scenes, making it incredibly easy to connect Outlook, Windows Mobile, and Entourage clients to Exchange. That is, until it doesn’t, and then things just turn ugly very quickly. While older Exchange 2007 implementations could function with an improperly configured Autodiscover, Exchange 2010 organizations depend upon it, especially when clients want to share calendar information externally, and/or integrate with Office Communications Server or Lync Server.

Autodiscover provides information to other Exchange servers within the organization as well, but in this article we are just going to cover the client side of things. To ensure that things go along as smoothly as possible, let’s take a look at what Autodiscover is and what it needs in order to run smoothly. Continue reading Inside Exchange 2010:Exchange Autodiscover

If everyone could run Outlook, we’d never have a need to enable other legacy protocols on Exchange 2010. However, you are likely to run into the odd network hardware, help desk application, or the odd mobile device that doesn’t support ActiveSync and find yourself needing to support POP3 or IMAP protocols for access. While Exchange 2010 does support these protocols, they are not turned on by default, and there may be some further configuration settings you want to make if you enable these protocols.

Continue reading Inside Exchange 2010: enabling POP3 and IMAP access

It does not take much to encourage me, and the positive comments I received on the post Inside Exchange 2010: What is the Transport Dumpster? was enough to convince me to take on another Inside Exchange 2010 post. In this post, we are going to take a look at a feature added to Exchange 2010 called Shadow Redundancy.

Shadow Redundancy is related to the Transport Dumpster in that it is a high availability mechanism implemented to prevent data loss if a failure occurs while a message is in transit. Whereas the Transport Dumpster is designed to protect against the failover of a mailbox server that is a part of a database access group, which means that it doesn’t offer anything for mailbox servers that aren’t, Shadow Redundancy can protect against data loss in an Exchange environment that includes only a single Edge Transport server and a Hub Transport/Client Acesss/Mailbox server.

Continue reading Inside Exchange 2010: What is Shadow Redundancy?

In our previous post involving Exchange and SharePoint, we covered how to troubleshoot issues with SharePoint sending outbound email through your Exchange infrastructure. In this post, we’re going to go over how to setup Exchange so that it can send email to SharePoint.

Enabling inbound email to SharePoint is a great way to allow users to email messages and attachments to SharePoint lists and document libraries. Email could originate from internal users or external, and can be used to simplify document submissions, or as a way to start a workflow. If a user creates a meeting and includes a SharePoint calendar in the invite, SharePoint can automatically create a calendar entry.

Continue reading How to Configure Exchange to Support Inbound Email for SharePoint