After a painstaking examination of the various pros and cons of signing up for a cloud-based email service and that of an on-premise deployment, your company finally decides on the latter option.  Before jumping into deployment phrase however, there remain a number of important decisions that need to be made first.  Today, I want to highlight some of these areas, and offer some suggestions that I hope will be helpful to administrator tasked with setting up Exchange Server. Continue reading Decisions to Make When Deploying an On-Premise Exchange Server

Installing software is always an activity that administrators must allocate extra time to in order to prepare for the unexpected problems that can occur. And of course there is the time that must be allocated to handle the prerequisites.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Installation of Exchange Server

Exchange Server uses several components and processes to route email messages from outside the organization through the internals of an Exchange Server transport pipeline. Many of the components and processes include: SMTP Receive, Submission, Categorizer, Local Delivery and SMTP Send.

A couple of ways that email messages can enter the transport pipeline include through a receive connector or via the pickup directory. Messages may also be placed in the submission queue by the store driver. One action that is always performed is the categorizing of the received email message. After categorizing the message, the message is placed in a delivery queue to await delivery to a mailbox or for routing to a recipient on another server maybe within a different company.

Queues are used to hold messages or data that needs further processing before reaching their final destination. Each queue of messages is processed based on its location in the transport pipeline. The transport system holds messages inside memory queues for processing. If the transport service goes down then the contents of the memory queues are “committed” to the database so as not to lose any data. These transport queues should be monitored in order to establish a baseline of activity and performance levels. If there is a problem with processing any of the messages then the messages will stay inside the queue until the problem is resolved. An administrator can use the Queue Viewer (Exchange Management Console) to correct any problems with the queues.

Continue reading List of Management Tasks for Transport Queues

Last week, I wrote the post 5 Reasons why Exchange Server will Remain Relevant, where I highlighted the reasons why I believe Microsoft’s flagship messaging server will be around for some time yet.  Moving on, I would like to address an issue that fast growing organizations restricted to on-premise deployment of Exchange Server may eventually find themselves at: that of deteriorating performance due to the invariable growth in the size and number of their mailboxes.

Obviously, the most straight-forward method of catering to growing needs would be to splurge on a new, more capable server, or to make use of load-balancing so as spread the workload across more machines.  Both options are costly however, and may entail significant disruption to get everything installed and properly configured.  Today, I would like to suggest some relatively simple upgrades that businesses can use to lengthen the lifespan of their existing Exchange Server hardware.

Upgrade your Server with Gigabit Ethernet

If your Exchange Server installation is still running off Fast Ethernet, then an upgrade to Gigabit Ethernet may yield perceivable improvements for your local clients.   This can be especially true for mid-sized organizations with large number of users on the LAN.  This is an attractive option due to the sheer simplicity of swapping in a new gigabit Network Interface Card (NIC), and is an upgrade that can be completed within existing maintenance windows.  In addition, the cost of a Gigabit Ethernet server adapter is cheap at just over a hundred dollars these days.  Of course, this is assuming core network switches are able to support your upgraded server hardware, which may entail the purchasing of a corresponding gigabit module if this is not the case.

Continue reading How to Lengthen the Life Span of Your Exchange Server

In his article, “Exchange 2010 Mailbox Moves and Mailbox Resiliency”, Ross Smith discusses certain data loss scenarios that can exist even though Exchange Server 2010 includes continuous replication block mode. Continuous replication block mode was added to Exchange Server 2010 to provide greater protection from mailbox data losses.

Ross Smith specifically describes scenarios that result from a high logging generation rate environment. These scenarios often occur during mailbox move operations. One example given is when a mailbox has been moved from an active database to a second passive database. Then, right after the move, the server hosting the primary (or active) database fails. As a result of the primary server failure, the second database is then activated. But because the “AttemptCopyLastLogs” operation is unable to complete, the recently copied mailbox will not have a complete copy of the pre-move mailbox.

He then further discusses the Data Guarantee API and some of the API calls that can be used to help maintain and ensure successful mailbox move operations. Some of the calls mentioned include:  Check Replication Health and Check Replication Flush.

Continue reading Mailbox Replication Service

The prevalence of free and high-quality web-based email services has undoubtedly helped advance the prevalence of emails. Indeed, one of the first stops for a new Internet user these days would be to first pick up an email account or two at one of the free webmail providers.  Given the familiarity of users with web-hosted emails, should Exchange Administrators be at all concerned that Exchange Server would eventually lose its appeal?

Well, my personal opinion is that Exchange Server will continue to retain its relevance for some time yet, especially in the realm business. I’ve highlighted some of the reasons below.

Continue reading 5 Reasons why Microsoft Exchange Server will Remain Relevant

It is never good news to have servers compromised by hackers or corporate espionage.  Given the finite resources of any company however, the open secret is that not every computing node on the network can be equally well-protected.  As it is, priorities are often heavily skewed towards protecting servers running crucial Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) services, or publicly accessible Web servers.

What many businesses do not realize is how the humble email server is often overlooked and left under protected.  Yet it remains a front-facing server due to its location on the Internet, or in the DMZ that demarcates the Internet from the relatively safe harbor of the company intranet.

I want to highlight five repercussions of a hacked Exchange Server account today so as to illustrate the importance of ensuring that your Exchange Server is patched in a timely manner, as well as the need to ensure that adequate best practices and security defenses are put in place.

Continue reading 5 Repercussions of a Hacked Exchange Server Account

Exchange 2010 SP1 offers significant capabilities for data storage and retention, all of which can be greatly enhanced by the addition of third party archiving solutions. These solutions can increase mailbox storage to virtually unlimited capacity, provide for search and discovery, reviews for compliance and internal investigations, disaster recover scenarios, and more, all by maintaining a complete record of all messaging that is kept separate from the Exchange infrastructure.

Continue reading 3 Ways to Implement Exchange 2010 Archiving

For those who prefer their email to arrive at specific mailboxes, owning multiple mailboxes can be advantageous as emails are naturally filtered out based on audiences, subject material and even personal correspondences.  On the other hand, they can dramatically increase the amount of work that the mail servers have to do, especially if more than one user is running multiple mailboxes.

There are Exchange servers that enable users to gain access to several accounts in just one profile, which eliminate re-logging into a different username every time you want to switch accounts.  For you to be able to enjoy this feature, the administrator needs to configure Outlook in such a way that it will permit access to multiple email boxes in just one profile.

Continue reading Using Multiple Mailboxes In One Profile

In his blog article, “Exchange mailbox protection explained” , Stephen J. Bigelow discusses the problems with unprotected Exchange mailboxes and the various options for protecting them.

He explains that unsecured mailboxes can be easily compromised and their contents stolen. There are other problems associated with unsecured mailboxes such as: identity verification, privacy and proof of delivery. Additionally unsecured electronic mailboxes are subject to spam, viruses, and other harmful malware that is all too common with using popular, everyday email systems like Hotmail, AOL, Gmail and even Outlook. And almost all of these mail systems use the open-to-anyone Internet as their communications vehicle.

Stephen goes on to explain that the loss of email data impacts not only the productivity of the employee but also the productivity of the company or organization that the employee works for.

If I think about how the loss of my email content would affect my business activities then I immediately start thinking about backing up my data. I cannot afford to lose any of my emails. As an email administrator it is your responsibility to protect against the loss of, or the invasion of, all emails that circulate through your organization’s email server.

Stephen explains the various ways that an Exchange Server administrator can protect the email contents of their servers.

Continue reading Protecting Mailboxes with Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR)