Back in early December, I wrote an article called A Deeper Look into Exchange 2010 SP2 where I discussed some of the new changes being added to Exchange and to the Active Directory schema. If you didn’t read that article, click the link above, and then come back here. It’s okay, I’ll wait. Back and ready to go? Good. In that article I indicated that the new extension attributes could be available for customers who want to store additional information in Active Directory but don’t have suitable attributes already in place, and don’t want to roll their own schema extensions.

In a new post over at the Exchange Team Blog, You Had Me at EHLO, Nino Bilic wrote an article a couple of weeks ago that has prompted me to update you about this, and to revise what I said, in his post on Custom (aka. Extension) attributes in Exchange 2010 SP2 and their use, Bilic talks in detail on the two additions to the object class ms-Exch-Custom-Attributes. Continue reading 30 New Custom Attributes? Not So Fast

Often, Exchange administrators will receive escalated help desk tickets from users complaining that Exchange is “slow” and demanding resolution. These sorts of tickets (slow being at best a relative term and never specific enough about what precisely is considered to be slow) can be extremely challenging to work, since the subjective nature of slowness is often combined with an inability to replicate the problem, or the problem is intermittent. The Exchange admin can take a look at the server(s) for high CPU utilization, low memory conditions, disk and network queue lengths exceeding the norm, and finding nothing, shrug it back off to the desktop support team as a client issue. While it is often a client issue, there are several places between Outlook and a user’s mailbox that can cause intermittent slowness, and are fair to call networking bottlenecks. In a six part series of articles, we’ll look at how Exchange interacts on the network with various other services to help you identify network issues, and troubleshoot them when they occur.

In many cases, troubleshooting Exchange network bottlenecks will require a network trace, and may also require performance monitor counters. This series of articles will talk about both of those in general terms; how to use NetMon or Wireshark, and PerfMon are out of scope. In Part 3 of this series, we’re going to discuss the connectivity you need to permit through firewalls for Exchange to function properly on the network. Continue reading Troubleshooting Exchange Networking: Firewalls (Part 3)

Customize the Exchange Management Shell as an Exchange administrator, it’s only a matter of time before you embrace the dark side and come to know the true power of shell. The Exchange Management Shell is the direct interface between you and the underlying PowerShell cmdlets that are used to query, configure, and manage Exchange. Getting comfortable with a command line interface after years of GUI work is a big shift for many admins, but if you start out slow, and work your way through things step by step, you’ll soon find that you are a PowerShell Jedi. Making something your own is the first step towards getting comfortable with it, so in this post, we’ll see how to customize the Exchange Management Shell to make it your own. Continue reading Customize the Exchange Management Shell

Often Exchange administrators will receive escalated help desk tickets from users complaining that Exchange is “slow” and demanding resolution. These sorts of tickets (slow being at best a relative term, and never specific enough about what precisely is considered to be slow) can be extremely challenging to work, since the subjective nature of slowness is often combined with an inability to replicate the problem, or the problem is intermittent. The Exchange admin can take a look at the server(s) for high CPU utilization, low memory conditions, disk and network queue lengths exceeding the norm, and finding nothing, shrug it back off to the desktop support team as a client issue. While it is often a client issue, there are several places between Outlook and a user’s mailbox that can cause intermittent slowness, and are fair to call networking bottlenecks. In a six-part series of articles, we’ll look at how Exchange interacts on the network with various other services to help you identify network issues, and troubleshoot them when they occur. Continue reading Troubleshooting Exchange Networking: Active Directory (Part 2)

Whether you are troubleshooting an Exchange server performance issue, trying to see how well you sized your servers, or just want a better idea of what your users are doing, the Exchange Server User Monitor from Microsoft (or ExMon as it is known to its friends) is a great, free tool you can use to gather all sorts of information about your Exchange environment. The Exchange Server User Monitor has been around for years, and this latest version, 14.2.247.5, was released in December of 2011.

You can download ExMon from this link and use to evaluate a server, or an individual user’s interactions with that server. As with many tools from Microsoft, this has been around for years, but gets an update and a facelift every so often. With ExMon, you can view the following information: Continue reading Cool Tools: Microsoft Exchange Server User Monitor

Often Exchange administrators will receive escalated help desk tickets from users complaining that Exchange is “slow” and demanding resolution. These sorts of tickets (slow being at best a relative term, and never specific enough about what precisely is considered to be slow) can be extremely challenging to work, since the subjective nature of slowness is often combined with an inability to replicate the problem, or the problem is intermittent. The Exchange admin can take a look at the server(s) for high CPU utilization, low memory conditions, disk and network queue lengths exceeding the norm, and finding nothing, shrug it back off to the desktop support team as a client issue. While it is often a client issue, there are several places between Outlook and a user’s mailbox that can cause intermittent slowness, and are fair to call networking bottlenecks. In a six part series of articles, we’ll look at how Exchange interacts on the network with various other services to help you identify network issues, and troubleshoot them when they occur.

In many cases, troubleshooting Exchange network bottlenecks will require a network trace, and may also require performance monitor counters. This series of articles will talk about both of those in general terms; how to use NetMon or Wireshark, and PerfMon are out of scope. In Part 1 of this series, we’re going to discuss how Exchange is dependent upon and interacts with DNS on the network. Continue reading Troubleshooting Exchange Networking: DNS (Part 1)

If you’ve been working with Exchange for several years, you might remember a little thing from Exchange 2003 called Outlook Mobile Access. This HTML only version of browser-based access to your Exchange mailbox was developed at a time when smart phones were mostly a dream, but web browser capable phones, Palm Pilots, and Windows CE devices ruled the portable space. In a world where bell bottoms are once again popular, it should come as little surprise that OMA is back, this time courtesy of Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2010.

The Exchange Team at Microsoft decided to bring back the mini version of Outlook Web Access because apparently there is still a large demand for mobile access to Exchange email in parts of the world where web capable, but not fully “smart” phones, are still in use. These devices have less horsepower, fewer features, and only a basic HTML web browser, but cost less and require less bandwidth as well, making them perfect for area with less infrastructure, and very popular amongst prepaid plan customers. Continue reading No smartphone, no problem. Meet SP2’s OMA.

Users of practically every supported version of Windows, whether desktop or server, 32 bit or 64 bit, and even the low attack surface Windows Server Core should immediately review Microsoft Security Bulletin MS11-100 and begin testing and deployment of this patch as soon as possible. The patch, covered in KB2638420 addresses four vulnerabilities in the Microsoft .NET Framework, including 1.1 SP1, 2.0 SP2, 3.5 SP1, 3.5.1, and 4. Three of the four were privately reported, while the last one has been publicly disclosed. Continue reading Microsoft Releases Critical, Out Of Band Update

Users interested in deploying a hybrid configuration have been looking forward to Exchange 2010 SP2 for months so they could take advantage of the new hybrid configuration wizard included with SP2. That wizard takes dozens of manual steps and automates them in a simple to follow wizard, which we discussed in this article a few weeks ago.

While the hybrid configuration wizard is a great improvement in setting up an Exchange system with some mailboxes on premise, and others with a cloud service provider, it seems a small glitch made it through to the release of SP2. It seems that many customers are running into issues using PKI certificates that were previously issued and which worked without a problem in Exchange 2010 RTM and/or SP1.

Continue reading Certificate Problems with Hybrid Configuration in SP2