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.

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!!!

Windows server 2008 - The next big thing!

As all of the Exchange Administrators would have been aware that Exchange 2007 is making ripples in the IT industry for the advanced features and simple design, Microsoft is ready with the release of the next big server lines

• Windows 2008
• SQL 2008 and
• Visual Studio 2008

Find the details in Windows server 2008 home page and the countdown clock indicating the launch date.

Windows 2008, incorporates some amazing features like:

• Option for Windows core installation.
• Installation of server roles as opposed to default installation in 2003.
• Windows fail-over clustering.
• Virtualization support.
• Stoppable Domain services.
• Federation service.
• Rights management service.
• New backup tool (not pre-installed).
• Read only Domain controller for unsecured office locations.
• 32 installable features and 16 installable roles in total.
• Ease of administration through Server manager console.
• Reduced attack surface.

The list goes on, so why not go to the Technet Windows 2008 site and check it out.

Windows 2008 guide by Mitch Tulloch is an excellent book to start with Windows 2008 and adopt early for the technology.

 

Enjoy learning!

Getting Started

First things first! Before you get to troubleshoot Mail flow and other stuff, a novice administrator should be aware of certain things that will make his/her life easier.



Generally a Exchange administrator receives two types of issues:

• Server Incidents and
• User related (Outlook and Exchange settings related)

For a Novice to start learning exchange, a great place to start is the Microsoft Technet site.

http://technet.microsoft.com/hi-in/exchange/default.aspx

Coming back to Exchange Issues, there are a lot of things that can go wrong in a Exchange environment, in any case the places to check for clues of what could have went wrong are:

• Event logs(eventvwr) and
• Performance Monitors(perfmon)

Event logs are a great idea to track the issues real time and diagnose a incident.

To start with there are different types of events, the default ones are:

• Application.
• Security and
• System.

We will be interested in Application logs(For Exchange related events) and System logs(For Windows Server OS related logs)

The types of Event logs are:

• Information
• Error and
• Warning.

There are various parameters to a Event log like:

• Event ID.
• Source.
• Category.
• Time.
• Date and
• Computer in which event took place.

Event logs might look scary with out the necessary tools to decode, the most important site you need to have in your favourites is Microsoft Technet Events and Errors lookup page:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/support/ee/ee_advanced.aspx

Instead of wasting time by typing all the version details and stuff just enter the Event ID and from the result choose the appropriate one by using the Source, Category and Version of a product.

Another place you can lookup Events in case that event is logged by a Non-Microsoft product or application is:

http://www.eventid.net/

and ofcourse there is www.google.com for all other things

Once you get used to these tools, you can easily troubleshoot the events or at least get pointers to where to start from.

Another place to monitor system activity in real time to see the status of a Hardware or a software is Performance Monitor(perfmon).

Here you can add the counters of various applications or hardware and monitor their real time activity easily. Just play around with it to know which counter is for what hardware or application.

We will share about Outlook related issues in the next Blog.