Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

Category: Exchange

  • Useful Visio stencil for Exchange 2010 SP1

    Microsoft has made an updated Microsoft Office Visio stencil for Exchange 2010 SP1 available for download. As you can see from the screen capture, a wide variety of shapes is available in the stencil including some for Windows components (Active Directory, Certificate Server, domains, etc.), people, and other parts of the…

  • Avoiding outdated addresses during a migration to the cloud

    One of my current projects is to help a large multinational move from Exchange 2007 to a dedicated instance of Microsoft BPOS running Exchange 2010. BPOS is having some woes of its own with yet another outage causing disruption to customers around the world. Let’s hope that Office 365 provides…

  • Microsoft embarrassed by Exchange 2010 SP1 RU4

    On July 13, Microsoft took the decision to withdraw Exchange 2010 SP1 RU4 (the fourth roll-up update for SP1). As you’re aware, a roll-up update (RU) is a regular release of the patches and other fixes that Microsoft has accumulated for a version of Exchange. RU4 was released on June 22, 2011…

  • Do PSTs contain anything of value?

    In musing about the news of the PST Capture tool that Microsoft plans to release soon, I started to consider the question of whether tools like this can actually find and recover any useful information. The worry of executives and lawyers is that PSTs contain all manner of corporate secrets and…

  • Moving a database between DAGs

    A recent email discussion between MVPs focused on a topic that I totally missed in my Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out book (also available at Amazon.co.uk), so think of this as an update to chapter 7. The problem arises after you set up a Database Availability Group (DAG) with mailbox servers and…

  • On PST ingestion: Microsoft brings a new tool to the table but…

    Today’s announcement that the Microsoft Exchange development group plans to release a tool to allow administrators to discover Personal Storage (PST) files on a network and then import the data into Exchange 2010 on-premises servers or Exchange Online (Office 365) left a couple of unanswered questions floating. Don’t get me…

  • Interesting price differences for Office 365 accounts

    Due to be formally launched in NYC on Tuesday, June 28, there’s no doubt that Microsoft has had enormous success with its Office 365 beta program. Depending on whom you talk to, tens of millions of people signed up to use Office 365 to have the opportunity of trying out…

  • Generating Exchange 2010 reports with PowerShell

    From time to time, someone in the Exchange community outside the Exchange development group comes up with a contribution that adds an enormous amount to many different deployments. I think that the PowerShell script posted by Steve Goodman on his blog may just be in that category. For years, I have…

  • “The Register” runs ESEUTIL to rescue an Exchange 2003 server

    It’s nice to see that “The Register” continues to support Exchange 2003 administrators with advice such as that offered in the article “Help my Exchange server just rebooted” posted on June 18, 2011.I’m assuming that the article was about Exchange 2003 because the screen shot displayed system files dated from…

  • Measuring Outlook 2010 network latency

    One of the truths often overlooked by those who wish to rush into the cloud is that the characteristics of their network will change dramatically. Some of the traffic that is currently processed internally will have to be channeled out across the Internet to the selected cloud provider. For example,…