The Outlook Personal Folders file (PST) had its day.  It was once the ultimate or perhaps only solution to reducing the cost of storing old emails within the Exchange server database.

Those days are largely gone.  Exchange servers can scale up to much larger database sizes than they could 10 years ago.  Disk and tape storage is cheap, and emails themselves are getting larger and larger.  And enterprise email archiving is efficient, cost effective, and even comes built in to the latest version of Exchange Server.

The benefits of the PST format are now close to nil, while all of the problems remain.  PST files are single-user access only, can’t be indexed or easily searched, are sensitive to corruption when they get larger or are being accessed over networks, and consume more space due to their general inefficiency.

But many organizations have a lot of archived emails still stored in PST files.  Moving to a new Exchange server doesn’t magically solve that problem.  The question is what should you do about all those PST files? Continue reading What to do With Those PST Files

The worst possible time to define your uptime and availability requirements for an Exchange environment is when that environment is unavailable.  No email administrator wants to hear “We need this working within 2 hours” when they are looking at a dead server that is going to take all night to recover.

Uptime and availability should be defined within an SLA, or Service Level Agreement.  An Exchange Server SLA should exist in all organizations, even those that provide their own internal IT services.  The SLA is between the IT supplier or IT department and the rest of the business, and clearly defines what is an acceptable downtime or outage of the Exchange environment.

Why Are SLAs So Important?

The existence of an SLA supports many facets of the design and operation of the Exchange Server environment.

Budget – When a business defines their service level requirements they are making a commitment to providing the funds necessary to deliver those service levels.  An SLA is one of the best pieces of leverage the IT department has to secure those funds and implement an appropriate Exchange system.  Without the backing of an SLA the IT department may struggle to get approval for Enterprise server licensing, multiple servers for clustering, and other high availability components.

Server and Network Design – Exchange Server environments are designed to meet defined SLAs.  Certain uptime expectations can only be met with the right server design.  A business that is willing to go a day without email would not need the same infrastructure deployed as a bank that can’t go more than 15 minutes without email.  Clustering, redundancy, site-to-site failover, are all design points that would be included or excluded based on the SLA. Continue reading Exchange Server SLAs, and Why You Need One

On more than one occasion I have worked with a customer whose email archiving strategy could be stated like this.

“When people stop working for us we never, ever delete their mailbox.”

As you might guess from the title of this post, that is not really “email archiving”.  You could call it “email keeping”, but I would put it as “creates more problems than it solves”.

If your email archiving strategy is to have no strategy at all, and that’s a deliberate decision by your organization, then consider some of the problems that you are creating.

• Every mailbox you keep adds to the size of the database, which therefore consumes more disk space, and more backup media
• Larger databases take longer to back up, and longer to recover if there is a problem
• Every mailbox you keep is an active mailbox that can potentially continue to receive emails, increasing your storage needs at a rate faster than necessary
• Every mailbox you keep is also an active user account, leaving a potential attack vector for hackers or disgruntled former staff
• When the time comes to migrate to a new email server, the amount of data to move is that much larger
• Keeping emails in mailboxes on an Exchange server (prior to Exchange 2010 which relatively few organizations have moved to yet) does not make them easily auditable

Email Archiving Solutions

A proper email archiving strategy can be conceived and executed with the right archiving solution.  Here are some of the ways that email archiving can be implemented. Continue reading When Email Archiving Isn’t Really Email Archiving

Email is one of the most heavily used communications method which makes your Exchange servers critical to your business.

The health and performance of your Exchange servers should be a top priority, and this means that you must monitor the server performance as part of your routine so that problems can be discovered early and resolved before they begin to make a serious impact.

Here are 5 performance counters to monitor on your Exchange servers today.

1. % Processor Time

This counter shows the amount of time that the CPU is processing a task.  This counter should typically be below 75%, although it may run higher during heavy workloads such as backups.  If the processor time is consistently high you will want to look into which processes are utilizing the CPU the most.

2. Processor Queue Length

When instructions are sent to the CPU they go into a queue to be scheduled for execution.  This counter shows the length of that queue, and should ideally be no higher than 5 for each processor in the server.

When this counter is above the ideal threshold along with a high % Processor Time it indicates that the server workload is too high for the CPU resources available.

3. Memory Available MBytes

This counter shows the amount of memory that is not in use and is available for new tasks or processes, and should be at least 100Mb at all times. Continue reading 5 Performance Counters to Monitor on Your Exchange Servers

Microsoft Office 2010 has reached the RTM (release to manufacturing) milestone, which means that it is now code complete and ready for release to the market.  This latest version of Office will become generally available next month.

Office 2010 includes Microsoft Outlook 2010, which sports a refreshed user interface and a range of new features to improve usability and productivity for email users, particularly in business environments.

The Ribbon

First introduced in other Office 2007 applications the Ribbon interface is now also included with Outlook 2010.

The 2010 version of the Ribbon is an improvement over the controversial 2007 implementations, with customizable tabs to make your most commonly used tasks and options more accessible.

Included in the Ribbon are Quick Steps, which are a series of buttons that you can configure to perform custom actions that you frequently take, such as creating a button to start a new email message for your team, or a button to archive an entire conversation in one click.

Conversation Management

Outlook 2010 has new views for combining and collapsing conversations so that they do not clutter up your inbox and their message sequence is not scattered among other inbox items.  You can also see your own sent items in the conversation which avoids the need to hop into the Sent Items folder to find your own messages. Continue reading 5 Killer New Features of Outlook 2010

Email is not just for people.  It is also used by other services, applications and devices for a multitude of communication scenarios.

Some examples of this are applications that send email reports to users, such as enterprise backup software; devices that offer email capabilities, such as scan-to-email; and applications that receive and parse email messages, such as job ticketing systems.

With these types of requirements it is very common for an Exchange Server environment to host a lot of non-user mailboxes.  In larger environments this can present some challenges.  Each mailbox requires a corresponding user account, which presents some security risks.

And if not tracked and managed properly the number of mailboxes can grow and result in mailboxes that no one knows about or understands the actual purpose for.  This type of mismanagement will crop up at key times such as when migrating to a new Exchange Server, which makes planning and risk management difficult for the project team.

With all of that in mind here are some tips for maintaining a well managed Exchange Server environment for service and application mailboxes.

Only Use a Mailbox When Necessary

This may seem an obvious statement, but a mailbox is usually only required to receive email, not to send it.  For devices and applications that simply need to send out messages over SMTP there is usually no need to create them a dedicated mailbox.

For Meeting Rooms and Equipment Use Those Mailbox Types

Exchange Server 2007 and 2010 come with a dedicated mailbox type for room and equipment facilities.  Using the correct mailbox type ensures that the room or equipment is shown correctly in address lists and calendar appointments.

For more information about these mailbox types check out this three part series on managing Exchange resource mailboxes.

Secure the Mailboxes

When you do create mailboxes for non-user access always set a very strong password, and disable the user object in Active Directory.  When you use the special Room and Equipment mailbox types the account is automatically disabled for you. Continue reading How to Manage Service and Application Mailboxes in Exchange

Ten years ago we measured mailbox sizes in megabytes.  A 20mb mailbox was adequate.  A 100mb mailbox was a luxury.

Today we measure mailbox sizes in gigabytes.  A single message in today’s email communications could easily consume the entire mailbox quota of a decade ago.  We’re sending more email, bigger email, and keeping it longer.

Email server products such as Microsoft Exchange Server have responded to this growth in storage needs with support for more processing power, more efficient database schemas, and improved performance on storage hardware.

In fact, most of the storage performance gains of the last 4 years have been in the efficiency of the Exchange Server product itself, not in the performance capabilities of storage hardware.  Hard disks are getting bigger, but they aren’t getting faster.

As we become more reliant in the ability to retain and access email data quickly it is no surprise that we are storing more and more of it in our mailboxes.  This increase in email storage reveals some new bottlenecks in IT systems – the ability to adequately back the data up.

Backup Challenges

Backups are experiencing similar growing pains to disk storage.  Tape speeds and capacities increase through new generations of the technologies, but when disk speeds and network speeds don’t increase with them there is only so much throughput that you can achieve.  Eventually many larger enterprises reach a stage in which a nightly, full backup of the Exchange system is not possible within the backup window.

Three key technologies have surfaced to help enterprises manage these growth issues with email storage:

• Archiving
• Synthetic Backups
• De-Duplication

Archiving

Email archiving usually involves moving older, less frequently accessed data from the primary storage to a secondary storage system.  The secondary storage system may be built in to the email server, such as Exchange Server 2010’s archiving feature, or it might come in the form of a third party product that integrates with Exchange. Continue reading 3 Technologies for Improving Backup Efficiency for Growing Exchange Environments

We are conducting our lives and our businesses in an increasingly mobile world.  We need access to our critical business information from multiple locations and using multiple devices.

These needs often clash with the requirement to keep our data secure.  Exchange Servers are kept behind corporate firewalls which restrict who can access them and how they can connect to their mailboxes.

Secure mobile access to mailboxes on Exchange Servers is typically achieved through one or more of these methods:

• Virtual Private Network (VPN)
• Outlook Anywhere
• Outlook Web App (OWA)
• ActiveSync

Virtual Private Networks

A VPN is a secure communications tunnel established between two endpoints.  These endpoints can be two devices such as routers or firewalls, or can be between a client device such as a laptop and a firewall.

Mobile workers use VPNs to establish LAN-like network access to their corporate network.  This usually means that once connected to the VPN they have access to the same network resources they would be able to access when connected to the LAN from within the business premises.  In more security conscious environments this access is sometimes limited to just the few resources they need, but in a practical sense operates just as if they were on the LAN.

Using VPNs for access to Exchange Server makes sense when there are other needs for VPN access as well, such as access to application servers, file servers, or intranet sites.  Rather than each resource having its own independent access method, the VPN provides an “all in one” access solution.

However sometimes VPNs are not practical.  It is not uncommon for a mobile worker to find they are unable to establish a VPN tunnel because of restrictions on the foreign network they are currently working on.  This is mostly the case for IPSEC and PPTP VPN tunnels.  SSL VPN tunnels usually have no such problems because the SSL/HTTPS port is usually permitted out through firewalls.

Outlook Anywhere

Outlook Anywhere was formerly known as RPC-over-HTTPS, which accurately describes how it works.

The Outlook connection to a mailbox server over RPC is tunnelled through an SSL/HTTPS connection so that it can traverse firewalls, as well as to secure the communications over untrusted networks. Continue reading 4 Ways to Access Exchange Server Mailboxes through Firewalls

SearchExchange has written an article on the best and worst practices for email archiving in Exchange Server.  It is a detailed post and I agree with it, however it highlights some best practices that Exchange Server does not do very well on its own without additional systems in place.

PST Files

Outlook PST files are big disk space consumers and are not subject to inspection and retention by archiving systems.  Exchange Server itself cannot prevent the creation of PST files.  This requires the use of other systems such as Group Policy restrictions and file server storage policies.

For environments where PST files have been allowed to proliferate, Exchange Server offers very little in the way of tools to efficiently import the data into archives.  Fortunately there are third party email archive applications that do offer these tools for bulk processing of PST archives.

Separate Archival and DR Storage

The built in archiving available in Exchange Server 2010 does not separate active mailbox data from archive mailbox data.  Both types of data are stored in the same database, subject to the same backup and recovery process.

The best practice is to store and backup archive information on less expensive, high volume storage, and retain it separately (though it can be sent to the same offsite location as the active data).

During a recovery situation the active data can then be restored first as a priority, and archive data restored separately later when normal services have been resumed, because archive data is usually a much lower priority for restore in a DR situation.

Centralize Email Storage

Although Exchange Server environments are typically consolidated into fewer physical locations these days compared to previous years, in larger environments they are still often distributed into regional locations.

Archive information is best kept as centralized as possible, in one primary location with an additional offsite backup copy.  Again the archive features of Exchange Server 2010 limit this capability, because archive data is stored in the same location as the active mailbox. Continue reading Email Archiving Best Practices that Exchange Server Doesn’t Do Well

The concept of message size limits in email systems dates back to the earliest years when email first became available.  In those days network speeds and server processing power were both much smaller than today’s modern computer networks.  Large emails could saturate the available bandwidth on network connections or overload a server to the point it would crash.

The concept carried forward into modern environments as email became an often overused method of transferring files between parties.  It was not unusual for Exchange Server environments to have multiple configurations in place that queued large email delivery for outside of business hours so that regular daytime email traffic was not slowed down.

Current versions of Exchange Server (2007 and 2010) removed that particular capability, in a nod towards modern networks having bandwidth and server resources far in excess of even just 5 years ago.

So does this mean the concept of message size limits is no longer important?  I helped a customer this week with a problem that demonstrates it is still very important.

The customer’s Exchange server had experienced a crash of the Transport services, which could not start and stay running for longer than a few moments before they would stop again.  The servers logs told me that the Transport services were exceeding their maximum threshold for resource utilisation and were then being stopped as a result.

On closer inspection I noticed that the Exchange servers had no message size limits configured on them.  There was one limit of 200mb specified on the hardware appliance that accepted incoming internet email, but otherwise no limits configured on internal or outgoing email. Continue reading Are Message Size Limits Still Important in Exchange Server?