The dirty little secret about migration to modern public folders

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Tony Redmond

Have you heard about a migration to modern public folders that has gone well? I haven’t. Apart that is from the demo migrations that appear at trade shows and conferences to show that all is well and that Microsoft hasn’t reneged on their promise to bring the cockroaches of Exchange kicking and screaming into the world of highly available mailboxes.

Microsoft has published a public folder migration checklist and written a number of scripts to support that checklist that you can download from their site (the scripts are also available in the $ExScripts folder on an Exchange 2013 server). The scripts support migration from legacy environments running on Exchange 2007 or 2010 servers to Exchange 2013 on-premises or Exchange Online (Office 365).

In theory, the procedure is straightforward.

  1. Wait until all mailboxes are moved to Exchange 2013. This step is mandatory because whereas Exchange 2013 mailboxes can access legacy public folders, the reverse is not true.
  2. Enumerate the legacy public folders and hierarchy and create a CSV file using the Export-PublicFolderStatistics.ps1 script.
  3. Examine the CSV output (a list of public folders and their sizes) to decide whether any adjustments need to be made. Pay attention to the limitations of modern public folders to make sure that you keep under whatever the currently documented limits are (250,000 folders and rising) after the migration is complete.
  4. Run the PublicFolderToMailboxMapGenerator.ps1 script to process the CSV file containing details about the legacy public folders and to map them to new public folder mailboxes. Essentially, the script attempts to break up the folders and divide them in a logical manner across a new set of public folder mailboxes. You control how many mailboxes are necessary by setting a maximum for the size of each mailbox. For instance, if you have 100GB of legacy public folder data to migrate, you could set the maximum size to 10GB and end up with 10 public folder mailboxes.
  5. Review the CSV file to decide whether public folders have been allocated in a reasonable manner.
  6. Create the public folder mailboxes, taking care to place them in databases that are capable of supporting the load that user connections will generate after you switch over to use modern public folders.
  7. Create a public folder migration request (only one can exist at any time) to process the CSV file that maps the legacy public folders to new public folder mailboxes. The processing is similar to a mailbox move in that the processing is performed by the Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) in the background. MRS connects to a public folder database, enumerates what it finds there (like a source mailbox), and transfers the data to the target (in this case, the public folder mailboxes).
  8. When MRS has moved the data, it halts (similar to a mailbox move that is auto-suspended).
  9. If everything seems to be good with the PF move request, you lock public folders for the organization (which has the effect of disconnecting users from legacy public folder databases), tell MRS to complete the move with Resume-PublicFolderMigrationRequest, wait for MRS to perform its incremental synchronization to move the last remaining vestiges of data from the legacy folders.
    Get-PublicFolderMigrationRequest | Set-PublicFolderMigrationRequest -PreventCompletion:$false
    Get-PublicFolderMigrationRequest | Resume-PublicFolderMigrationRequest
  10. Once MRS considers the move to be finished (the status shown by Get-PublicFolderMigrationRequest is “Complete”), you can validate that the data has been moved to the new public folder mailboxes by connecting to one of them with a test mailbox. Logically, you cannot connect to a modern public folder mailbox until the migration job is complete. The best way to do this is to run the Set-Mailbox cmdlet to override the normal mechanism used by Exchange to locate the public folder hierarchy using the command shown below. You can also run some scripts to compare what exists on the legacy side with what has been moved.                                                                 Set-Mailbox -Identity "Some Test Mailbox" -DefaultPublicFolderMailbox "PFMailbox1"
  11. If you are happy that everything has been properly moved to the mailboxes used by modern public folders, you can commit the organization to using modern public folders by performing a final switchover. To do this, you make sure that all the new public folder mailboxes are capable of providing the public folder hierarchy to clients and then run Set-OrganizationConfig to update the configuration and switch from old to new.
    Get-Mailbox -PublicFolder | Set-Mailbox -PublicFolder-IsExcludedFromServingHierarchy $False
    Set-OrganizationConfig -PublicFolderMigrationComplete:$True
  12. Have a beverage of your choice to recover while basking in the admiration of users who are now totally happy to be connected to the new, improved, and most modern of public folders.

Update 14 July 2014: As MVP Andrew Higginbotham points out, if you don’t do everything properly, you might end up by forcing all clients to see the infamous “The Administrator has made a change that requires you to restart Outlook.” Check out his blog for details.

It all sounds good. It all seems like it might even work. And it does, in a test environment where you have 10 public folders to migrate.

The procedure runs into difficulty when confronted by the average public folder hierarchy. Invariably, the hierarchy is old, badly organized, unmanaged, and contains enough rubbish to occupy several skips. The problem you see is that public folders have been around for a very long time and during their existence it is extremely likely that many people, both users and administrators, have had their fingers in the pie. Folders exist for no reason; folders exist that once had a reason but one that is now long forgotten; folders exist that contain useful information that no one knows about; and public folders exist that contain the greatest collection of old rubbish and corrupt items that you will ever encounter in your career.

And the good news is that the procedure as laid down will faithfully attempt to migrate all the old, unwanted, unhappy, unreadable, and undesirable information from legacy public folders to their new homes. That is, unless you take steps to stop this happening.

We know that a CSV file is generated in step 2 of the procedure to enumerate the public folder hierarchy and its folders. The CSV file contains two columns – folder name and folder size, so you end up with something like this:

“FolderName”, “FolderSize”
“\IPM_Subtree”,”0”
“IPM_Subtree\Contoso”, “248844”
“IPM_Subtree\Contoso\Departments”, “12487744”
“IPM_Subtree\Contoso\HQ”, “45254”
“IPM_Subtree\Contoso\HQ\CEO Office”, “147755”
“IPM_Subtree\Contoso\HQ\CEO Office\2007 Business”, “477444”

Reviewing the contents of a CSV file to identify folders that should be pruned from the hierarchy is a tiresome business if you have a couple of hundred folders to examine, especially when you don’t know a lot about the content of the folders, why they were set up, who uses them, and when they were last accessed in any meaningful manner.

But many hierarchies have a few thousand or more folders and the thought of having to go through the full set becomes something that would only excite a lonely monk in a cell on an island in the middle of the Atlantic. Most administrators would prefer to tear out their own fingernails than process this CSV file, which is a real pity because the big flaw of the migration process is that if you don’t take the time to prune, remove, and destroy old rubbish from the public folder hierarchy before MRS starts to move data, all of the rubbish will be moved.

You can’t even take the obvious approach of deleting large batches of folders from the CSV file in the hope that MRS will ignore them during the migration. MRS is pedantic and exact. It will migrate everything it finds in the hierarchy even if you remove all reference to a folder from the input CSV file.

The next issue is that old public folders have a habit of storing old items (naturally), some of which fall into the category of “malformed MAPI items”. In other words, they are corrupt in the eyes of modern MAPI clients and servers. Unless of course you are a genius and know how to how to choose servers that allow for such things, I don’t know of any… Legacy public folders are not to be faulted for storing this information. Folders store items and the items were good when they were stored. But MRS will complain if it encounters one of these “bad items” and they will be discarded en route to modern public folders. You control the tolerance MRS has for bad items by setting a bad item limit when you create the public folder migration request, but it’s easy to blow the normal limit (10 or thereabouts) that you might use for mailbox moves with the rubbish lurking in the deep and dank corners of old public folders. Eventually you can force MRS to process everything, but be prepared to lose some data and to restart the public folder migration request several times after upping the bad item limit.

The dirty little secret of public folder migrations is not that the process does not work. It does, but it is excruciatingly manual in nature and execution and requires more time and effort from an administrator than you might possibly imagine.

We have not yet seen many public folder migrations because few companies have yet completed step 1 to move all their mailboxes to Exchange 2013. We will see more as time goes by. The potential for pain is out there…

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Posted in Email, Exchange, Exchange 2013, Office 365 | Tagged , , , , , , , | 107 Comments

Improve Exchange – voice your ideas now

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Tony Redmond

Following up the request for input for an interview with Perry Clarke, Microsoft VP for Exchange development (the interview is this coming Friday, and I will publish the result on my Exchange Unwashed blog), a number of the Exchange MVPs have discussed how best to collect real-world user input for feature requests. The result is the Exchange Improvements site. Please visit it to add your input, browse other ideas, and vote for the improvements that you consider most worthy.

Why have such a site? After all, surely Microsoft receives tons of customer feedback either direct or via its field? The answer is that Microsoft absolutely does receive many ideas and suggestions for future products but many of these ideas naturally go through a filter. Ideas coming from a customer reflect the needs and requirements of a particular customer (obviously) and might be highly specific to their industry or business. I also think that the logic and rationale of some of these suggestions are badly communicated because they tend to come up during highly structured executive-level meetings between Microsoft and customers. Customer executives who attend these meetings are not usually experts in Exchange and don’t have the necessary background in operations or the technology to understand why a request might be important. Likewise, the Microsoft representatives might not just “get it” when they hear the idea and anyway, the discussion is often overtaken by more important and pressing events such as the need to review an enterprise software licensing agreement. I’ve participated in many executive-level meetings between vendors and customers and have seen this kind of interaction happen often.

Microsoft field representatives do their best to advance the needs of their customers but I suspect that they are just one voice in a very large company and that voice, unless it is well known and recognized by the product group, might be overlooked or ignored. It’s human nature to impose a personal filter on the deluge of email and other communications that flow within major corporations.

So the Exchange Improvements site will give us all an overt, public voice on improvements that you would like to see in the product. You can contribute ideas for both the on-premises and cloud versions of Exchange – given that the two share a common code base an idea that makes sense for one platform might very well make similar sense for the other and it’s a real win if an idea can be implemented for both Exchange Online (Office 365) and Exchange on-premises (either in an update to Exchange 2013 or a new version).

Naturally there is no guarantee that Microsoft will pay any attention to the outcome but I hear great reports of solid product group interaction for a similar site dedicated to Lync improvements, so there’s always hope.

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Posted in Email, Exchange, Exchange 2010, Exchange 2013, Office 365 | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Security updates for Exchange December 2013

Posted on December 6, 2013 by Tony Redmond

CU3Security

Updated: 10 December.

As anticipated, Microsoft released a set of security bulletins on Tuesday, December 10. Among the set, MS13-105 addresses a number of vulnerabilities in Exchange 2007, 2010, and 2013. The following updates have been released:

These vulnerabilities are addressed in the updates:

The roll-up updates for Exchange 2007 and 2010 contain nothing more than these fixes. As such, they should be much simpler to deploy than a regular roll-up update. However, be sure to test before deploying the code into production environments.

You’ll notice that KB2880833 appears to be the knowledge base article that describes the MS13-105 fixes for both CU2 and CU3. However, the CU2 page leads to download 41487 whilst the CU3 download is number 41526. Applying the updates changes the version number for CU2 to build 712.031 while CU3 goes to 775.041.

Exchange 2013 uses a different servicing model which means that security updates are released separately to cumulative updates. Security updates for Exchange 2013 contain all previous security fixes, so MS13-105 contains the fixes previously provided in the infamous MS13-061 release (August 2013). You can install MS13-105 on top of MS13-061. More details about these updates are available on the EHLO blog.

Naturally, those running Exchange 2003 or earlier versions can ignore the security bulletins because you live in the land of dead software, or software that has ceased to exist in the eyes of Microsoft.

Of course, Exchange doesn’t exist in a vacuum and the other security bulletins released today affect other products such as Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, and Office, so there are lots of updates to be done.

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Posted in Email, Exchange, Exchange 2010, Exchange 2013 | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Exchange Unwashed Digest – November 2013

Posted on December 4, 2013 by Tony Redmond

November 2013 was quite a month for me. I was all set to go to the annual Microsoft MVP Summit in Redmond when I had a sudden and so far unexplained collapse (kind of like a personal reboot) on November 15 that resulted in a fifteen-day stay in hospital. Although I didn’t get to Redmond, the wonders of Wi-Fi connectivity meant that I was able to continue working during my outage. Here’s what appeared in my Exchange Unwashed blog on WindowsITPro.com during November 2013.

Comparing Office 365 numbers to the total Exchange installed base (Nov 5): Numbers and statistics provide a great basis for debate, especially when you can undermine one of the urban myths of our time. In this case, it was the “everyone’s gone to the cloud” myth. Looking at the hard data that Microsoft has to provide to financial analysts rather than the often spurious untruths that emerge from salespeople, the current $1.5 billion/year run rate for Office 365 indicates that cloud Exchange users might be just over 5% of the overall installed base. That’s still lots of mailboxes, but somewhat less impressive than the cloud advocates might claim.

Using Get-HealthReport to monitor DAGs (Nov 7): Exchange 2013 includes some nice new cmdlets to help monitor the overall health of Database Availability Groups. Get-HealthReport is one that leverages the data accumulated by Exchange’s Managed Availability framework and it’s an interesting new way to grab a quick snapshot of what’s happening on a server.

Managed Folders deprecated in Exchange 2013 (Nov 12): Managed Folders appeared in a blaze of glory in Exchange 2007 and have now been extinguished in Exchange 2013. Or rather, they’ve been replaced by retention policies and tags. Why? Because successful use of managed folders requires humans to change their working patterns and we all know how easy it is to accomplish these kind of changes.

Summarizing what’s new and what’s gone in Exchange 2013 (Nov 14): Two topics were covered in this post. The first looked back at a slide presented at TechEd North America 2013 that summarizes changes made in Exchange 2013; the second considers a post by Exchange mailbox server VP (for that is what he is) Perry Clarke that sought to reassure the on-premises community that the future is bright. I thought Perry essentially made the same points as at MEC 2012. No much changed there. The service is the prime focus for development and on-premises will benefit from the work done there.

Deficient IBM and Hitachi 120,000 mailbox configurations (Nov 20): Microsoft runs the ESRP program to allow storage vendors to validate configurations. Some of the configurations work insofar as they fulfil the requirements of the program but are laughable when viewed through the lens of real-life operations. Two particular configurations from IBM and Hitachi, both purportedly valid to meet the needs of 120,000 mailboxes, attracted my attention. Read on to find on why.

Office 365 Message Encryption: Protect your email against the spooks (Nov 21):  No one likes the thought of their email being read by faceless overseers. That’s why the introduction of message encryption in Office 365 is an important step forward for protection against unauthorized access. The feature won’t be available until the first quarter of 2014 but it is great to see it happen.

Kitkat causes ActiveSync headaches for Android users (Nov 25): Over the last twelve months Apple iOS has been the whipping post for ActiveSync problems as the iOS mail app has caused problems such as severe and unexpected transaction log growth for Exchange 2010 servers. Now we see that the new Kitkat Android release has its own woes where clients cannot connect and synchronize with Exchange (and Office 365). It’s probably a blip on the road, but it proves that new releases of mobile device operating systems need to be checked out before they are introduced into corporate IT environments, even if you operate a BYOD policy.

Seeking quality with Exchange 2013 CU3 (Nov 25): The third cumulative update for Exchange 2013 appeared at last, delayed a tad to allow Microsoft to make sure that the software measured up to the desired quality level. So far it seems that CU3 has succeeded on that point as the number of reported glitches is less than either CU1 or CU2. A good sign for the future?

Wave 15 Office 365 admin interface unifies applications but lacks some functionality (Nov 28): I’d been meaning to post this note for quite a while because my Office 365 tenant was upgraded to Wave 15 in April. However, lots of different things have happened since, all of which have demanded to be published first. But I found a slot to say that the Wave 15 admin tools are nicer all round because they present a far more unified face than their Wave 14 equivalents – but it would be nice (from an Exchange perspective) if EAC was more obvious.

And now we’re into December. I think I can promise that I have some interesting stuff lined up – that is, unless even more interesting topics come along!

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Posted in Cloud, Email, Exchange, Exchange 2010, Exchange 2013, Office 365 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Using an intelligent Twitter stream to keep up to date

Posted on December 2, 2013 by Tony Redmond

I am often asked how I track new developments and information about Exchange, Office 365, Windows or the other technologies in which I am interested. My response is “by using Twitter intelligently”.

There’s no doubt that an extraordinary amount of dross is generated and shared daily on Twitter. People who feel the need to communicate the smallest detail of their lives in the most open manner do so by tweeting incessantly. These people are to be avoided as life is too short to be swamped by an endless stream of inbound drivel.

On the other hand, it is possible to make a targeted use of Twitter to create a stream of interesting material generated by people who operate in any particular area of focus. The hard part is to identify people who generate a high percentage of useful information in their Twitter stream as this can take some time and trial and error to sort out contributors who flood the network with copious but repetitive or useless contributions from those who know what’s going on and can help you to keep on top of things.  The nature of the medium is that some of the tweets sent by anyone are less than serious, but I think that you can make a good selection of contributors who have a strong track record of useful commentary on topics that you care about. At least, that’s my goal.

Here is my basic list of independent commentators that I use to keep my finger on what’s happening in the Exchange community. I pay attention to these folk when their contributions pop up in my Twitter stream together and find good content in their blogs. Hopefully this provides a good initial set to build your own stream. You’ll probably add some of the Microsoft sources such as the famous Squeaky Lobster or the official Microsoft Exchange source plus maybe some covering Office 365. I am always happy to hear of a good source, so reply to this post to let me know your suggestions!

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Twitter handle Blog Content
Paul Robichaux http://paulrobichaux.wordpress.com/ Exchange, Lync, Mac stuff (sometimes), aviation (quite a lot), and other interesting stuff
Paul Cunningham http://exchangeserverpro.com/ Real-life administration challenges for Exchange plus commentary on a wide range of topics, not all of which I understand.
Michel de Rooij http://eightwone.com/ Solid coverage of Exchange.
Michael Van Horenbeeck http://michaelvh.wordpress.com/ Writes articles for SearchExchange.com covering Exchange, ActiveSync, and other interesting topics. Mr. Hybrid connectivity
Jeff Guillet http://www.expta.com/ Lots of stuff about Exchange and virtual machines.
J. Peter Bruzzese http://www.infoworld.com/blogs/j-peter-bruzzese Writes a column for InfoWorld covering Windows technology, including Exchange and Office 365
Steve Goodman http://www.stevieg.org/ Another writer for SearchExchange.com. Lots more about hybrid connectivity and associated topics.
Pat Richard http://www.ehloworld.com/ PowerShell, Lync, and associated technologies are the keywords here.
Jaap Wesselius http://www.jaapwesselius.com/ Practical tips and observations about how to manage Exchange.
Johan Veldhuis http://johanveldhuis.nl/en Another practical contributor. Must be to do with being Dutch.
Michael B. Smith http://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael/ Good scripter. At least, he’s better than I am!
Brian Reid http://www.c7solutions.com/blog Ex-trainer (transport) for the late-lamented MCM course. He might just know something.
Tony Redmond http://windowsitpro.com/exchange-server What can I say? Read this blog and WindowsITPro.com too!
Posted in Cloud, Email, Exchange, Exchange 2010, Exchange 2013, Office 365 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Contemplating Yammer

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Tony Redmond

Microsoft’s $1.2 billion purchase of Yammer in June 2012 is now starting to get traction as the technology becomes more integrated with the rest of the Office suite. Officially described as an internal social network, Yammer is sometimes compared to a company-specific version of Twitter or Facebook (perhaps because all three products share the concept of a newsfeed), Microsoft has been busy adding functionality to Yammer by introducing features such as the ability to participate in Yammer discussions via email or the provision of a Yammer app (for Windows 8 and Windows Phone). All in all, things are progressing as you’d expect following a major technology acquisition.

Since November 6, Yammer has been available to all Office 365 enterprise tenants. Right now, its major point of integration with the other applications appears to be with SharePoint Online. There’s still quite a gap between Office 365 and Yammer as users are redirected to Yammer.com when they want to participate in a Yammer group or look at the newsfeed. No doubt the integration will improve over time as gaps close and functionality is smoothed.

Given the size of Office 365, it takes time to roll out new applications to all enterprise tenants. To discover whether your tenant has access to Yammer, go to the Office 365 Admin Portal and check the set of services that are available there. If Yammer is listed, you have it. Or at least, you can begin the process of setting Yammer up so that it can be used within your company. And you can also open up Yammer to allow interaction with external users who need to share information with people within your company.

Personal (P) Office 365 plans do not have access to Yammer, which I think is reasonable. After all, the personal plans are intended for small companies of less than 50 people or so. If you, like me, work in such a small group, it would be sad if you needed help to collaborate more effectively. Just shout at your colleagues a tad louder. Or use a Facebook group.

If you’ve already got Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync through Office 365, you might ask the question why you might want to use Yammer. Exchange is a great email server, SharePoint does a good job as a collaborative platform for document authoring and distribution, and Lync handles voice communications. But even though Exchange has modern public folders, site mailboxes, and shared mailboxes, it doesn’t have the kind of social networking capabilities that people have become accustomed to in products like Facebook and Twitter.

It seems to me that Yammer is a mixture of Facebook groups and Twitter messages with a mixture of “Likes”. All in all, it’s a combination that is very recognizable to anyone who has used the consumer social networking products, so that covers approximately 1 billion people. Even more important perhaps, the technology comes naturally to new people who are entering the workforce now who have grown up with constant and ongoing social interaction enabled by technology. Just look at the heads-down attitude adopted by people in any public transport today – everyone is busy on their mobile device checking whatever’s going on in Facebook and Twitter; Yammer offers companies the same chance to connect with their employees. The information pumped out on Yammer might be less interesting than gossip, but the hope is that it can improve business results.

Because of its ability to flex and improve, email has proven to be the most persistent and widely used collaboration technology. Over the last 25 years, many attempts have been made to create software that helps people to share information better. In the 1980s and 1990s, Digital Equipment Corporation had a wonderful tool called VAX Notes that was enormously popular within the company but much less so outside; Digital also launched a database-oriented collaborative product called LinkWorks in 1993 that crashed and burned without trace (but took many million dollars of corporate funding with it). I recall an attempt to deploy Groove in 2001-2002 when I was at Compaq; that product was a brainchild of Ray Ozzie (and was sold to Microsoft in 2005), but it failed because of the heavy demands it made on the networks and computers of the time. The history of Lotus Notes goes back to 1989. Notes is not strictly an email product and its application capabilities gave it the ability to be a more powerful collaboration platform than email-centric products like Exchange, but Notes is less popular now than it was in its heyday at the start of the millennium.

What I have learned from collaboration successes and failures is that no one technology is the right answer, even if it seems to be the greatest thing since sliced bread at the time (at least, according to the marketing material). Another thing I have learned is that no amount of executive enthusiasm will persuade people to use collaboration technology. I spent a lot of time at Compaq and HP attempting to persuade technologists to share their knowledge using the tools available at the time. I put a lot of energy into projects such as a SharePoint-based knowledge portal but my efforts were not always well accepted by the user community.

Any technology will probably fail if it does not “fit” the requirements and culture of a company. The question therefore is how well Yammer fits into the culture of any particular company – if it does, the basis exists for Yammer to be successful; if not, implementing Yammer will be an exercise in futility.

The needs of people change and flex as society evolves and I suspect that Yammer will find a niche in companies that have some or all of the following characteristics:

  • Large number of employees distributed across multiple locations
  • Many different groups
  • Young, mobile workforce
  • Constant flow of time-critical internal news (like product updates) directed at employees

It can be argued that existing technology can meet the needs of these kind of companies and I suspect that is true too. Every company has its own culture and mode of working and the question really is whether Yammer will fit well into a company. In my view, it’s more likely that Yammer will succeed in a young (less than 10 year old) company than in an older company where habits and working practice has had the time to ossify a little.

Yammer points to the fact that it had 5 million users before it was bought by Microsoft. I’m sure that this was an important point in justifying the desirability of the purchase and the $1.2 billion price. The question is how many Yammer users will there be in five years’ time. In other words, will the technology persist or will it fade and become a backwater of collaboration, used by a few advocates and ignored by the majority in the rush to embrace whatever the latest and greatest collaboration mechanism that’s available then – something like LinkTwitFaceYamBook. I’ll be watching with interest.

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Posted in Exchange, Office 365, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Review of the bug fixes included in Exchange 2013 CU3

Posted on November 26, 2013 by Tony Redmond

Now that Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 3 (CU3) has made its appearance (a little delayed to make sure that quality is high), it seems appropriate to review the set of bug fixes included in the update as reported by Microsoft in KB2892464. These are the fixes related to the on-premises version of Exchange; other fixes have been made for Exchange Online but are not reported here because they don’t impact on-premises customers. I’ve added some commentary on each of the fixes, some of which are the type that are surprisingly still being found in a product a year after its initial release.

Some new functionality is also included in Exchange 2013 CU3. Details can be found on the EHLO blog.

Anyway, upwards and onwards…

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KB Topic Comment
2874216 MS13-061 security fix The fix that caused all the problems for Exchange 2013 CU2 is included in CU3.
2865161 Errors copying items for eDiscovery searches Occurs if you attempt to copy unsearchable items (those that cannot be fully indexed for some reason).
2871980 Child domains are not displayed for selection when you create a mailbox using EAC EAC is supposed to display the names of the root and all child domains when you create mailboxes. It doesn’t before CU3, it does afterwards.
2878160 “The Active Directory user wasn’t found” error when you create or update an In-Place eDiscovery search Another child domain issue caused because the cmdlets used to create or modify eDiscovery searches (New-MailboxSearch and Set-MailboxSearch) access a local domain controller rather than a GC. All OK now.
2882608 Exchange Server 2013 does not share the inproxy.dll file Exchange 2013 and Exchange 2010 SP3 share this proxy file. The installation of CU1 forces EMS to use the Exchange 2013 version, which slows down Exchange 2010 SP3. It’s faster now.
2886115 Retention policies are not applied to Exchange Server 2013 mailboxes when user accounts are on different domains Another issue caused by an insistence on using a local domain controller. The DC is writeable, which is good, but it doesn’t contain accounts from other domains, so the Managed Folder Assistant is dead out of luck when it comes to apply retention policies.
2888274 WebClientReadFormQueryString string and WebClientEditFormQueryString string return incorrect URLs These strings can be used to read an item with Outlook Web App. Their format changed in Exchange 2013. No one seemed to have noticed until now.
2888315 Event 2112 or 2180 is logged when you try to back up a database Backup failures are not good. The problem is caused by an internal structure not being initialized correctly. It seems strange that this hasn’t been fixed until CU3, but maybe no one takes backups anymore.
2888612 Retention policy does not work after you run a cmdlet The KB reports that a problem exists when you apply a default archive tag to a mailbox (to move items to an archive after a set period); I assume that “after you run a cmdlet” applies when the Start-ManagedFolderAssistant cmdlet is used to apply the policy to the mailbox because I certainly haven’t noticed any problems with default archive tags when MFA runs in the background. Curious!
2889786 Sign-in format for Outlook Web App on mobile devices is not adjusted according to the Set-OwaVirtualDirectory cmdlet You can run Set-OWAVirtualDirectory in an attempt to have devices use the domain\user form of authentication but OWA will ignore this on mobile devices because it is hardcoded to use email addresses (UPN) to ease the dull and dreary lives of mobile users. Which is the way it should be, isn’t it?
2890650 Items in the Drafts folder are not stamped with the retention policy tag in Exchange 2010 or 2013 Draft items are looked at by MFA the first time a mailbox is processed but ignored thereafter. Not too big a problem because items shouldn’t really remain in the Drafts folder long enough for anyone to worry about retention. Should they?
2895487 “Copy Search Results” option does not work Looks as if eDiscovery search results occasionally report different numbers (found items versus expected), which causes its copy mechanism to fail, as you might expect when number checks fail.
2895500 DBCS characters appear garbled when you run some PowerShell scripts in EMS Exchange includes language-specific strings for its scripts in the installation kit. Some scripts appear to want to use American text instead of double-byte character set (DBCS), which causes some interesting results when they are run using Japanese or a similar language.
2895678 “Nombre de usuario\dominio” is displayed unexpectedly on the Spanish version of the OWA and EAC logon pages An error in translation causes OWA to look for users to enter User\Domain rather than the proper way around, which then means that they can’t log in – very frustrating (unless they know the proper format).
2902929 You cannot forward an external meeting request Neither Outlook nor OWA is able to forward a meeting request received from an external sender. Looks like Exchange gets its permissions messed up. All fixed now.
2902933 “Generate incident report” does not display the “Bcc” field An incident report can be generated if someone violates a data loss prevention policy, which can contain information taken from the message that caused the incident. It seems like the BCC field from the message is ignored.
2902934 Korean language localization issue in OWA Some localization issues existed in the Korean translation for OWA; I don’t speak Korean so I don’t know what these problems are, but clearly someone noticed.
2902936 You cannot change SMTP addresses for distribution groups by using EAC Seems like EAC has a few problems dealing with SMTP addresses for distribution groups because someone forgot to convert the format collected by the console into the format expected by the Set-DistributionGroup cmdlet running underneath. When in doubt, use EMS… what more can be said?
2902938 You cannot preview Office documents in shared folders (mailboxes) by using OWA OWA returns the address of the shared mailbox instead of the user’s credentials and they don’t match the desired set, so access fails.
2902939 EMS connection error when you separately install an Exchange Server 2013 Mailbox server and a Client Access server Looks like some date and time conversion problems stop EMS working if a non-English mailbox and non-English CAS server are deployed. Those who use English are not affected, but wouldn’t you think that this is the kind of thing that testing would have caught?
2883203 Exchange Server 2013 restarts frequently after Cumulative Update 2 is installed The fix for the Managed Availability problem for multi-domain forests described in this blog post.
2890814 No redirection to the Outlook Web App URL for Exchange Online users in an Exchange hybrid deployment Users who have an Exchange Online mailbox that connect to an on-premises server can’t be redirected because of a bad OWA URL. You can type in the proper outlook.com URL and everything works, so this is simply a case of a server getting its proverbial knickers in a knot.
Posted in Email, Exchange, Exchange 2013 | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Evolving Office 365 monitoring tools

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Tony Redmond

I’ve been playing around with the Office 365 Admin app, now available for Windows Phone 8 and due to be available “soon” for Android and Apple iPhone. Think of the Windows Phone users like myself as the advanced beta testers before the more popular devices get their teeth into the app.

Office 365 Service Status

Office 365 Service Status

In any case, the new app is part of an ongoing effort to make Office 365 a more manageable beast, something that’s critical when a platform is growing by leaps and bounds. The financial details reported by Microsoft (an annual run rate of $1.5 billion) indicate that annual growth might be in the region of 130% and although I’ve calculated that Office 365 still only represents a small percentage of the overall Exchange installed base, the millions of users who connect daily deserve to be supported by reasonable management tools.

Office 365 experienced a couple of early hiccups, all of which appeared to be teething problems of the kind that you might expect in a service that had not yet matured. When problems happened then, the Office 365 dashboard used to dissolve into meaningless data and Twitter became the most reliable source of information. Tweets from people around the world revealed the true nature of any outage as well as the steps being taken by Microsoft to resolve issues, all in a highly dynamic manner.

Twitter is great, but no self-respecting sales representative can make a pitch to a prospective customer that features Twitter as the fulcrum for support information when things go bad. Well, you could try and make the case that a company should build its support framework around Twitter, but I should imagine that the discussion might be short and feature several four-letter words, followed by a rapid ejection of the sales person from the premises.

Developments such as the Office 365 Admin app therefore save the bacon for Microsoft sales people as well as delivering a better support experience for Office 365 tenants. That can’t be a bad thing.

The app itself is pretty simple. I doubt that I will need to be told when Exchange Online is not working properly because a problem with something like email delivery is noticed pretty quickly. However, functions such as provisioning are not as visible and issues in applications like SharePoint Online might not be important to you as they are to end users who depend on a document library. It’s good to be able to get a status update at a glance, which is what this app delivers.

If a problem is known, you can drill down to view the details of the incident. For instance, I now know that a DNS problem affected some tenants on November 21. This information is available on the Office 365 portal but I probably wouldn’t have looked there unless I had to – the app makes the data more accessible.

Incident status

Incident status

The new app isn’t perfect (it doesn’t refresh automatically as it should sometimes), but it’s a reasonable start to what might become a very useful tool. All you can ask is to see progress… and I guess this is progress.

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Posted in Cloud, Email, Office 365 | Tagged , , , , | 13 Comments

Best-ever Exchange Unified Messaging book now available

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Tony Redmond

I see that Paul Robichaux’s “Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Connectivity, Clients, and UM (Unified Messaging)” has finally made an appearance on Amazon.com. This is the companion volume to my “Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability” book and it’s nice to see the pair finally appear. They were designed to provide the broadest possible view of Exchange, something that I think is now almost impossible to do in a single volume, so I am very happy to see Paul’s book become generally available.

It seems like Unified Messaging is on a bit of an upswing too. Attendees at the Exchange Connections conference in Las Vegas (October 2013) were asked to indicate how many were rolling out UM and it was interesting to see the growth over the last year. Roughly 10% of attendees polled said that they had UM projects whereas before the numbers were in the 1-2% range.

Of course, UM has been around for a while. Exchange 2007 was the first version to support the technology, so Microsoft is in its third iteration, which must mean that UM is ready to go. Seriously, companies such as Cisco and Nortel have offered integration between email and PBXs for many years. I have fond memories of visiting the Nortel UM development center in Galway, Ireland around 2001 for a briefing on their product. At that time it involved putting a board with a Windows 2000 server into the PBX. By comparison, things are so much easier today because of the general adoption of TCP/IP and SIP as the common interoperability protocols between PBXs and voice applications.

Given Paul’s long background with UM, it should come as no surprise that his book is very good on the topic. In fact, it’s the best out there. But the book also covers topics such as connecting Outlook to Exchange, Outlook Web App, ActiveSync, Lync integration, and the Client Access Server. I have no hesitation in recommending it as a good read – something that should be on every Exchange administrator’s bookshelf, especially if you’re involved with an Exchange 2013 implementation.

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PS: Books also available on Amazon.co.uk: Connectivity, Clients, and UM and Mailbox and High Availability

Posted in Email, Exchange, Exchange 2013 | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

The dubious value of LinkedIn endorsements

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Tony Redmond

Allow me to pose a simple question: what value does anyone get from the endorsements lovingly gathered and displayed (with no little amount of pride) by LinkedIn? I ask myself this in light of some of the endorsements given to me. But I’m sure that the same question has occurred to you too.

I don’t want to seem ungrateful. It is very nice that someone would take the time to indicate my capabilities to all and sundry when prompted to do so by LinkedIn. And it is indeed wonderful, if not a little scary, to observe just how many endorsements that you can gain over a short period – some in the most surprising areas and certainly not in areas that I consider myself to have much expertise.

My LinkedIn endorsements as of November 11, 2013

My LinkedIn endorsements as of November 11, 2013

Take virtualization for instance. I certainly have a passing acquaintance with VMware and have run virtual Windows servers using VMware workstation for many years. I even have used Hyper-V, but not as much as VMware. I can say that I have sworn liberally at both hypervisors and have had to rebuild servers when virtual machines go bad – probably too many times for me to claim any competence in the area.

Yet 20 of my esteemed contacts (at the last count) have seen fit to endorse me for possessing some skill in Virtualization. It’s true that no value is attached to each endorsement and the sheer count does not tell anyone who browses my profile whether I can barely spell the word or if I possess enormous insight into how hypervisors function. I can certainly talk about the topic and imagine that this is where many of the endorsements have originated. Hardly a way to find a true expert.

You can see that four of my contacts have endorsed me for “Cluster”. This is such an ambiguous term. Does it refer to my ability when working with VAX or VMS cluster technology, I wonder? Or the current Windows cluster technology? Or even a cluster of mushrooms. There is nothing to tell the reader what this term means.

Another issue is that the more LinkedIn contacts you have, the more endorsements you will collect. Think about it. If you have 100 contacts and I have 1,000, then ten times as many LinkedIn users will be invited to endorse me than you. The chances are that I will end up with ten times as many endorsements, and while some of those endorsements will be random, I will have a much more impressive profile.

I think these problems illustrate the problem faced by both LinkedIn and its users. On the one hand, LinkedIn wants to find methods that add value to its users. Allowing people to endorse each other so that others would gain some insight into the skills and competence possessed by an individual seems like a very good idea. And so it is, if the endorsements were higher quality.

An endorsement given at the drop of a hat (or in this case, at the click of a mouse) requires little thought on the part of the endorser. The endorsee is happy to accept the endorsement, but the reader who eventually looks at the collection of endorsements held by a LinkedIn user gains little value from the set. They do not know the competence of those who have endorsed the person; they do not know the basis upon which the endorsement has been given; nor do they know the standard by which the endorser measured the skills of the endorsee. In short, it’s a real mess and the resulting collection of endorsements is as much value as a set of plastic models collected from cereal packets.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no doubt that there are some people who never give an endorsement unless they have hard evidence that their recommendation is well deserved. However, my impression is that these folks are few and far between and anyway, no visible difference appears between an endorsement given on a whim and one given after long contemplation and reflection.

My conclusion therefore is that LinkedIn provides a service that some might find useful in terms of assessing the overall set of interests of an individual but not one that works if you are searching for leadership in any particular space.

Please do continue to endorse me if you like (I can’t stop you anyway) if it pleases you. I shall not be endorsing anyone until the system improves so that a real qualitative assessment can be provided by means of an endorsement. That’s a terribly difficult challenge to achieve. I think I shall be waiting for some time.

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Posted in Technology | Tagged | 2 Comments