Troubleshooting Exchange 2007 Free/Busy

    In Exchange 2007 the Free/Busy information is stored and accessed in the respective mailboxes, as compared to Exchange 2003, where the Free/Busy is accessed from Public folders.

Public folder distribution is in-efficient because of the fact that it is not up to date in certain circumstances. In Exchange 2007 the Public Folders are De-emphasized and Client Access Server (CAS) role takes most of the functions provided by Public Folder like:

1. Access to a Exchange mailbox Free/Busy information.
2. Offline Address Book (OAB) distribution.
3. Outlook Web Access (OWA)
4. Outlook Anywhere (previously RPC over HTTP) etc

and in addition to the above the CAS Exchange role provides Auto-Discover service and Availability service.

Availability service:

Availability service is the web-based Free/Busy access provided by CAS role. When a user creates a meeting request for his manager (say), the user's exchange server contacts the Availability service URL which opens the Manager's mailbox and get's the free/busy information to complete the process.

Troubleshooting:

To troubleshoot the availability information, use the

Test-OutlookWebservices cmdlet for scenarios like free/busy information of self, user on same server, user on server in different site etc. You can user Verbose parameter to check the process carried out by Exchange server.

Example: Test-OutlookWebServices  -Identity user1@domain.com -targetaddress user2@domain.com

Deleting specific mails from all mailboxes in Exchange 2007

 

       When a mail is sent out by a virus (say) from a Top officials' mailbox (or) a circular mail sent with incorrect information needs to be deleted from all the mailboxes, we had no direct option to do that in Exchange 2003, but Exchange 2007 incorporates this feature of searching and deleting particular mails from all (or) specific mailboxes in the Exchange organization.

     Here's how to do that with the Export-Mailbox cmdlet.

• Let's say we need to delete the mail with subject Q2 Results, create a Temporary mailbox and run the below cmdlet with a account that has the Exchange Full Administrator's permission.

Get-Mailbox |Export-Mailbox -TargetMailbox temp@example.com

-SubjectKeywords "Q2 Results" -DeleteContent

Setting up Disclaimers in Exchange 2007

 

        Disclaimers are one of the common requirements these days to be added to the mails that are sent from a organization to avoid legal situations.

        With Exchange 2003, it is only possible to add disclaimers through third party software. With Exchange 2007, it is a built in feature and is implemented through Transport rules.

To create a Disclaimer rule:

• Open the Exchange Management Console and expand the ‘Organization Configuration’ container.
• Select the ‘Hub Transport’ container and in the Actions pane select “New Transport Rule”
• In the Open Transport rule wizard, give a name to the rule and add appropriate comments below.
• Uncheck the ‘Enable rule’ option if you intend not to implement it immediately. Click Next to continue.
• The Conditions page gives you a lot of options to chose from, as to when this rule be implemented, chose the one that best reflects your requirements (In this case for mails sent outside the organization) and click next.

• In the Actions page, select the ‘Append the Disclaimer text…’ rule and edit the rule description in the below pane as required. You can also format the text with limited options.

• In the Exceptions page, select the exceptions you want to apply and click next, the Configuration summary page shows configuration you have selected for this new rule. You can click back and change the settings if needed.

• Click New in the wizard page to create the Disclaimer rule. You can select the Transport rule Tab in the Hub transport container and change the settings if you wish to, by going to the rule properties. You can also set the priority of the rule.

The "LEGAL" way to restore mails!!! - PFdavAdmin

      Most of the Exchange Administrators would require to restore mails or any mailbox items deleted (Hard or Soft deleted).

      Administrators just by the rush to finish the work, use to take the ownership of user mailboxes and open it to recover the mails.

      This is a potential security and legal risk, which may lead to losing their job(which has actually happened to one of my colleague).

      So the Easiest workaround is to user "PFdavAdmin" maintaining the privacy of the user and avoiding security breach.

Here are the simple steps to use PFdavAdmin to recover deleted mails:

1. Extract the tool to your server desktop. Open the Tool from the extracted folder.

2. Open the tool and enter the Exchange server name in which the user mailbox is(need not be FQDN!), the Domain Controller(DC) can be left alone for the tool to pick it up automatically.

3. Make sure the "All mailboxes" option is selected.

4. Click OK. The tool will list all the mailboxes in the server by the user's ALIAS (so note down the user's alias too.), select the user's alias and open it.

5. In the list, select the "Top of Information store" and select the folder from which the mail was deleted.

6. In the right side of the screen select the "Items" tab and "Show deleted items" at the bottom, to list the deleted items.

7. Select the items and right click to restore them.

Personal to Global SPAM settings with Exchange 2007!

         We all know that we can classify a sender as Safe or Blocked in Outlook 2003/Exchange 2003 environment, this is just local SPAM control solution in Exchange 2003.

        Exchange 2007 takes is a little further with the cmdlet Upadte-Safelist.

        This cmdlet synchronizes the JUNK mail settings of the user to the Exchange Transport servers and allows for the JUNK mail handling at the server level itself.

       This classification becomes important as EDGE server role which is not part of the Corporate network, handles the mails to the users based on the data in the ADAM, avoiding false positives.

You can choose to Sync either the Safe sender list or the Safe recipient list or Both, the default being Safe sender list.

Ex:-

Update-Safelist -Identity <UserAlias> -Type "Safesenders"

Update-Safelist -Identity user1 -Type "Saferecipient"

Update-Safelist -Identity user2 -Type "Both"

 

You can apply it on the Server/Storage group/Store level or to a particular filter setting.

Exchange SP1 out!!!

Folks Exchange SP1 is available for Download, this really is a exciting news as SP1 packs the power punch in it(literally) for the Administrator.

There are tons of new features added and improvised compared with Exchange 2007 RTM.

The release notes is available here.

All the new features included in SP1 are published in Technet

Enjoy SP1!!!

Unavailable Offline Address Line (OAL) information

A user reported that he is getting erratic information in the Address List, below is the problem:

• User’s outlook runs in Cached Exchange mode
• User’s outlook in few instances is not showing the “Organization” information of any user in Global Address List.

This is basically to do with how the Global Address Lists works.

When a user is working in Cached Exchange Mode, the Outlook downloads the Offline address book for offline viewing of exchange user information. This offline address list does not have the following information of Exchange users:

• “Organization” tab information.
• “Member of” tab information.

Since this information is retrieved online from a Global Catalogue server, they will not be available for offline viewing.