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)

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

Now that Exchange 2010 SP2 is available for download, I’m sure many of you (like me) have already downloaded the binary and are testing it in the lab. Of course, the reason we test is because we want to ensure that we don’t create problems in production which is prudent and a best practice for administration. SP2 is a great service pack, and in a vanilla Exchange 2010 organization I seriously doubt you will encounter a single issue with this service pack, but how many of us are running a vanilla org, freshly installed from scratch? For the majority of us who aren’t, here are some pointers about SP2 that should prove useful.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Exchange 2010 SP2 Installation

You’ve probably seen this before. A user opens a help desk ticket because every time they try to send an email to someone, it bounces. That someone could be a co-worker using the same email system, or it could be a customer on an external email system – it doesn’t matter. When the user replies to an email sent from the other person, the reply is delivered flawlessly. But when the user tries to create a new email, it bounces.

You try to send an email to the remote person and it is delivered correctly. You use message tracking to try to run down the problem with the email, and you might not even find it (if you are searching on the recipient address that is…which is a hint).  It’s not until you have the users actually showing you what they are doing that you realize they have a bad address in their nickname cache.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Outlook Auto-complete

The Offline Address Book is one of those services offered by Exchange that usually just works. It enables disconnected users, or those running Outlook in cached mode, to maintain a copy of the Global Address Book and/or other address books on their local machine so that they can look up users on the go. And when it works, it works very well, but sometimes even the best services go awry and require some troubleshooting. And when that’s the OAB, knowing how to identify and resolve the problem gets those remote users back up and running in no time.

There are several things that can cause problems with the OAB. We’ll go over these based on whether you want to look at the server, the client, or the network, and we’ll see what you can do to fix any problems you find. Continue reading Troubleshooting the Offline Address Book

Even the best run Exchange implementation will require troubleshooting from time to time, and in many cases, that troubleshooting will involve client access. Client access can be particularly challenging when the client is not in the cube next to you.  Questions like “what are the symptoms? Has anything changed on your workstation? What error message did you get?” tend to overwhelm many non-technical users, and sometimes it’s just not convenient to walk over to the user’s desk, especially when they work in another timezone.

Figuring out the scope of the problem is crucial, and then you need to determine whether the problem is on the server side or the client side of the equation. When you cannot ‘touch’ the client, how can you test the client’s side of things?

Continue reading 10 Great Commands for Troubleshooting Client Access Issues

Every so often I come across a really great tool that I want to add to my toolbox, and share with others. Sometimes, the tool was built with one purpose in mind, but I use it for something else. Microsoft developed the Office 365 Deployment Readiness Tool for organizations to use when they want to move their email, IM, and SharePoint environments up to the cloud with Office 365, and this tool is invaluable for determining whether a company is ready to do this or not. It can be used for more than just that however. Whether you are considering a move to Office 365, another cloud provider, or just want to take a closer look at your internal environment, this tool can give you a very in-depth look into your environment.

The Office 365 Deployment Readiness Tool is a free download from the Office 365 website, using this link. At just over 7 MB, it should download and install fairly quickly on any currently supported workstation or server platform. The only rights needed to run this against your Active Directory are that you use a domain joined computer and a domain account – it does not require admin rights in AD.

Continue reading The Office 365 Deployment Readiness Tool

If you have ever needed to find a ‘missing email’ for a user, then you have probably tried to check queues, consulted log files, and suggested that users look in their outbox, their sent items, and their junk mail folder; all to no avail. Exchange includes a great tool for checking on email messages called Exchange Message Tracking. This browser based tool can be accessed through OWA, and gives the Exchange admin a simple and quick to use interface for checking on email messages, whether they were sent from an internal user or to them from an external sender.

Continue reading How to find that missing email with Exchange Message Tracking