Clients that support Exchange 2010 archive mailboxes

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Tony Redmond

My post describing the issues that can arise when you enable an Exchange 2010 mailbox to have an archive is one of the most actively discussed on this blog. I think that this points to a certain lack of familiarity that still exists around archive mailboxes. People haven’t quite figured out how best to deploy and manage these repositories or whether they provide a better solution for long-term data retention than the third-party products available for Exchange 2010 and earlier versions.

One question that has to be answered in any Exchange 2010 or Office 365 deployment project is what clients to use. Naturally, Microsoft’s perspective is that you should use the latest and greatest clients, meaning Outlook 2010 or Outlook Web App (OWA). And indeed, apart from the caveat about Outlook 2010 versions explained below, if you deploy these clients, you will have no problem dealing with archive mailboxes because the clients include all of the necessary user interface and other code required to:

  • Open an archive mailbox
  • Enable user interaction with the contents of the archive mailbox in exactly the same manner as other repositories (primary mailbox and PSTs)
  • View associated retention policies and tags that control how items are automatically moved from the primary mailbox into the archive mailbox.

Outlook 2007 only satisfies the top two items. In other words, while you can use the latest version of Outlook 2007 SP2 patched with the February 2011 cumulative update to open and work with archive mailboxes, you won’t be able to see any detail of the retention policy that applies to a mailbox or the retention tags that are specified for the policy. This is acceptable if you take the stance that you don’t really want to bother users with details. The problem arises when users suddenly discover that items “disappear” from their primary mailbox and turn up in the same folders in the archive mailbox. Ah well, the help desk will cope.

Apart from retention policies, another difference between Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007 is that Outlook 2010 is able to display the archive mailboxes for multiple users, so it can handle the situation where a user has delegate access to other mailboxes and those mailboxes are archive-enabled. Outlook 2007 is restricted to just displaying the archive mailbox linked to the primary mailbox and cannot open those associated with delegates.

Not all versions of Outlook 2010 or Outlook 2007 can connect to an archive mailbox, even if fully patched. For example, if you purchase and use the version of Outlook that comes with the Student or Home packages, perhaps to use with a home computer, you won’t be able to access your archive mailbox. This is because Microsoft has restricted archive access to specific professional versions of Outlook, those that are typically used by enterprises and licensed through Volume Licensing Agreements (VLCs).

There’s some confusing information available on this point. For example, this Microsoft post might lead you to believe that the following Outlook editions are OK:

Outlook retail licenses

  • Outlook 2010 stand-alone
  • Outlook 2007* stand-alone
  • Outlook 2007* included with Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007

However, “stand-alone” is a curiously imprecise term. What’s for sure is that you shouldn’t expect to access an archive mailbox if you have the versions of Outlook 2010 included in Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010 or Professional 2010.  These versions connect to Exchange 2010 and will open the primary mailbox but will splendidly ignore the archive mailbox. My experience is that Outlook 2010 Professional Plus is the most reliable version when archives are concerned. I guess it’s the Plus that makes all the difference.

The unfortunate thing in all of this is that users of Office 365 Plan P1 who are the proud possessors of a version of Outlook 2010 might find that it’s not quite enough. To keep costs down, doesn’t include Outlook 2010 as it relies on OWA as its basic client. However, Plan P1 does include a 25GB archive mailbox that you won’t be able to use unless you have the right version of Outlook. Office 365 Plans E1 and E2 don’t include Office 2010 either, but Plans E3 and E4 do include Office 2010 Professional, so you get the right version of Outlook 2010 to access an archive mailbox (in the U.S., the step-up from Plan E2 to E3 is from $16 to $24).

Outlook 2003 is plumb out of luck when it comes to archive mailboxes. You can certainly connect Outlook 2003 to an Exchange 2010 mailbox server and Microsoft is continuing (under customer pressure) to do the work to make it easier to connect Outlook 2003 to Exchange 2010. However, that work doesn’t incorporate any attempt to expose archive mailboxes, probably because of a mixture of a) it’s a lot of work to do and b) why would Microsoft pour this effort into a client that they think is long past its best days. So if you connect Outlook 2003 to an Exchange 2010 mailbox that is archive-enabled, you won’t see the archive and won’t be aware of its presence. And unless you’re told about the processing that the Mailbox Folder Assistant (MFA) does to action retention policies, you won’t know what happens when items are moved into the archive mailbox when their retention period expires. This isn’t a good situation and it’s one of the reasons why you should move off Outlook 2003 if you have any plans in the short- or long-term to deploy archive mailboxes.

Outlook 2011 for Mac is also out of luck when it comes to archive mailboxes. I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be because Outlook 2011 is based on Exchange Web Services (EWS) rather than MAPI and while Microsoft has given strong guidance to developers that EWS is the preferred API for development against Exchange, MAPI has the advantage of history and all the features that have been developed using this API. Entourage, the earlier version of the Mac client for Exchange, used WebDAV as its API and won’t be able to connect to archive mailboxes either.

And finally, don’t expect to connect any mobile client to an Exchange 2010 archive mailbox. The problem here isn’t that the mobile device vendors don’t want to do the work to expose archive mailboxes. Rather, it’s that the current release of the ActiveSync protocol doesn’t incorporate support for archive mailboxes. Given the increase in both the number of clients that use ActiveSync and the power of those clients, especially in the tablet space, I hope that Microsoft closes this gap soon. Mind you, as we know from the wildly differing implementations of ActiveSync across Windows Phone, Apple devices, and Android devices, having support in ActiveSync is one thing, seeing the user interface appearing and working in devices is quite another.

I have ignored IMAP4 and POP3 clients in this discussion. Let’s face it, in the modern world these are brain-dead clients that do a rudimentary job of processing email. The find people who created the RFCs behind these protocols had no conception of online email archives so the protocols cheerfully function in blissful ignorance that such repositories exist. Such is the nature of progress.

– Tony

Posted in Exchange, Exchange 2010, Office 365, Outlook | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Paris and Toulouse in one rugby weekend

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Tony Redmond

This past weekend I travelled to Paris and Toulouse to be the TV Match Official (TMO) for two games in the opening round of the 2011-12 Heineken Cup campaign. First up was the game between Racing Metro 92 and Cardiff Blues in Stade Colombes on Friday night followed by a quick TGV journey to Toulouse for the Stade game against Gloucester on Sunday afternoon.

Stade Colombes is where France used to play international rugby up to 1973 (Ireland won their last game there, leading to a drought until the famous win in 2000) and it also hosted the 1924 Olympic Games where the USA won the rugby gold medal. By modern standards it’s a tired old ground that cannot be compared to modern facilities, which is probably the reason why it served as the location for the film “Escape to Victory“. Even so, it was nice to be able to handle a game in one of rugby’s oldest international grounds.

Refereeing team for Racing Metro 92 v Cardiff Blues: (l-r) Brian McNeice, George Clancy, John Carvill

From a travel perspective, in Paris we stayed at the Pullman Hotel near La Défense and ate in the Sebillon restaurant in Neuilly on the evening before the game. Both are recommended if you need to visit the north-western side of Paris. The Pullman hotel is situated beside the CNIT congress center and a major Metro/RER station on line 1, which is one of the best metro lines to get to major Paris landmarks. The Sebillion is 4 metro stops away from CNIT towards the center of Paris. It is a typical Paris restaurant of the old style (think of waiters in black jackets and white aprons serving in rooms reminiscent of the 1930s complete with lots of brass lamps). The food is very good, although the foie gras might be a tad rich if you’re watching your cholesterol levels.

Heineken Cup regulations require refereeing teams to be “in country” the day before a game, just in case weather conditions prevent travel. Sometimes this is a pain because you end up spending a lot of time waiting around for a game but it’s understandable when you consider the kind of weather disruption that we’ve experienced over the past two European winters. It’s always easy to kill time in Paris as there’s a ton of things to do or visit. We visited on Armistice Day, commemorating the end of World War I (on the 11th hour of the 11th day of November, 1918) and thought it appropriate to visit the Musée de l’Armée at Les Invalides, the location of a number of exhibits covering various aspects of the French military since 1643 as well as Napoleon’s tomb.

It would be easy to spend a complete day in the museum. I hadn’t visited it since the early 1980s and my memory was of a somewhat dusty and packed environment. However, the museum has been completely revamped and is a pleasure to walk through. Over a period of three hours, We got to visit the halls holding exhibits for the two World Wars and “From Louis XIV to Napoleon III” where there’s all manner of things to see from V1/V2 rockets used in World War II to an armored breastplate worn by a French cuirassier at Waterloo who had been killed due to some terrific blow to the left-hand side where a great hole had been torn in both the front and back plates.

Getting back to rugby, Cardiff won the game 20-26 in a reasonably tight encounter. Only one TMO intervention was required to confirm a try that was dotted down tight to the left-hand corner flag. The excellent replay facilities provided by the French TV crew made it relatively easy to make the decision. The late evening (9pm) start meant that we didn’t finish until close to 11pm. Racing Metro did a nice job taking care of us with a meal afterwards and we got back to the hotel just before 1am.

TMO workstation

And then on to Toulouse. I like to travel by train and the French TGV service is usually excellent. Alas, it was not so on Saturday as SNCF (the French train operating company) decided to first pause the train for nearly an hour outside Bordeaux and then stop in Montauban to have everyone scramble off the TGV to another platform to get on a crowded regional train for the last 30km to Toulouse. The upshot was an unpleasant conclusion to the journey and a late arrival into Toulouse.

I stayed in the Grand Hotel de l’Opera in Place Capitole. Usually Irish refereeing teams use the Pullman or Crowne Plaza hotels when we are in Toulouse so this was the first time that I’d stayed in the Grand Hotel. The decor of the room didn’t especially please me because I’m not a fan of deep red wallpaper and heavy brown furniture that created an impression of what I think the inside of a fin de siècle bordello might have looked like. In any case, the room was clean, bed was comfortable, and the shower was good and that’s all that is really important.

Dinner followed the viewing of Munster’s great escape at home to Northampton. We headed to J’Go, a restaurant owned by some rugby people that specializes in food from the south of France. I’ve eaten in their restaurants in Paris and Toulouse and have never had a bad meal in either place. Absolutely recommended if you like duck, lamb, or pork (no steaks here) and the frites maison (chunky chipped potatoes cooked in duck fat) are delicious if potentially heart-threatening.

Sunday dawned bright and clear. My after-breakfast stroll took me to the market in Place Victor Hugo where I found a wonderful combination of bustle, activity, food, and noise gathered around stalls selling everything from coils of thick sausages and confit de canard smothered in white duck grease to the feet of veal and pigs, ready to be stuffed and consumed on a Sunday table. Freshly killed (or so the sign proclaimed) hares and rabbits stared out at the passing crowd, their eyes seemingly shocked at what had happened to them. Cheese and wine were available alongside many types of bread, all of varieties totally unavailable in a supermarket, which is the reason why the French love shopping for food in markets.

Kids playing the warm-up match before Toulouse v. Gloucester

The game between Toulouse and Gloucester was preceded by some matches involving ten year olds on the main pitch at Sept-Derniers (the home stadium for Stade Toulousain). What really took our attention was the eleven year old referee. It was fantastic to see someone so young controlling a game – and doing it well. Simon McDowell and I walked over to talk to the young referee at half-time and discovered that he didn’t play rugby and only wanted to referee. Simon gave him an IRFU pin, something that I am sure he will treasure for ever, and we offered as much encouragement as we could give to someone at the start of his refereeing career.

Refereeing team for Toulouse v Gloucester: Simon McDowell, Peter Fitzgibbon, Michael Black

Toulouse won the game 21-17. The purists were probably offended by Gloucester’s decision to accept their bonus-point loss when they kicked the ball out of play when in possession at full-time, but they had probably calculated that coming out of Toulouse with one point and restricting Toulouse to a four-point win was probably as good a result as they were likely to get. Toulouse have to go to Gloucester in the last game in the pool and Gloucester probably figure that they can get more out of that fixture than Toulouse allowed them today so overall they should be ahead. We shall see.

So there we are. An interesting weekend of Heineken Cup rugby in France with the added bonus that Leinster gained a good draw against Montpellier, Munster beat Northampton in a thriller, and Ulster beat Clermont-Ferrand. Of the four Irish teams, only Connacht came up short and that was in their first Heineken Cup fixture. Of course, Connacht is in the same group as Toulouse and Gloucester and I suspect that they will have some influence over the eventual group standings. Lots more rugby to come over the winter. It’s nice to be in Heineken Cup mode again.

– Tony

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Favorite Exchange 2010 books

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Tony Redmond

At the recent Exchange 2010 Maestro event in Greenwich, CT, I was asked to give my opinion about the set of Exchange 2010 books that are currently available on the market. Clearly I won’t comment about my own Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out
book as a review of that text is best left to others who were less intimately involved in its creation. However, I do have some views about other books that I have read.

I’ll prefix my comments by saying that writing a book about a topic such as Exchange 2010 is bloody hard work for very little reward, especially when you encounter the parasites of the world who steal content from books and never even acknowledge the author (click here for more on that topic). It’s also true that writing books about software can be an elusive dance sometimes as the engineers make changes in beta code to get a product out the door. Errors can therefore be expected. The best books minimize errors by both double-checking with multiple sources (engineers, documentation writers, program managers, other experts such as MVPs) and by testing everything that they learn about before they commit any words to paper (or into your favorite word processor). Even so, errors can creep in and even get by the eagle eye of the book’s technical editor. Such is life.

I’ve included a table of books at the end of this post together with links to their print and Kindle editions in Amazon.com. Of course, there are other online bookstores that you can go to but I thought that I’d gather all of the relevant information from one source. I also include the number of reviews and current star rating at the date of writing. The number of reviews provides a very rough indication of how popular a book is – it could be the case that a book is more popular than it seems but that people just haven’t taken the time to write a review. Star ratings are very subjective but again can give some guidance. I don’t agree with all the ratings. For example, I think that Mastering Exchange 2010 is too low at 3.1 stars while Exchange 2010 Instant Reference doesn’t really warrant five stars when compared to the other books in the list. You can make your own mind up.

And now to comments about each book:

Exchange 2010 Best Practices (Microsoft Press) is a good, solid book that incorporates lots of ideas about what best practice should be when planning a deployment. It suffers a little because it appeared just as Exchange 2010 SP1 was under development and so its coverage of SP1 is sparse and incomplete. However, that being said, this is certainly an excellent book to dip into as you plan and then execute your Exchange 2010 project.

The Exchange 2010 Administrator’s Pocket Consultant (Microsoft Press) is “portable and concise”. In other words, it’s not one of the doorstep volumes like some of the other books. Length is traded for brevity in the interest of walking you through the major components of Exchange 2010. The author is not an Exchange expert, but he has the ability to communicate in his writing. Don’t expect in-depth discussions about the finer points of Exchange (like the Database Availability Group) and SP1 content is limited.

Exchange 2010 Server Administration: Real World Skills (Sybex) sets out to help candidates who wish to understand Exchange 2010 to a level where they can pass the Microsoft 70-662 and 70-663 certification exams. I have an instinctive dislike of books that are focused on tests but I understand how they help people. If you need to prepare for the kind of questions that you expect to see in these certification exams, you could invest in this book. I wouldn’t, however, use it as the basis of understanding how to design an Exchange 2010 deployment.

Exchange 2010 Administration Instant Reference (Sybex) is a step up from the Pocket Consultant in its coverage of Exchange 2010 topics. It’s highly rated in terms of stars but I don’t think this is a five-star book. It will certainly do a job for you if you want something that you can quickly plunge into to retrieve a concise description of something about Exchange 2010, but the depth and insightfulness isn’t there and it’s weak on SP1.

Mastering Exchange 2010 (Sybex) is the latest in a long line of very good “Mastering” books that have been written about different versions of Exchange. This volume is definitely weakened by the authors’ decision not to include coverage of the Database Availability Group (DAG). I can understand their reluctance to include content that might not have been to the standard that they wanted but the reviews that the book has received clearly indicate disappointment on the part of its readers. That being said, I am an admirer of the Mastering series and recommend this book.

The Exchange 2010 PowerShell Cookbook (Packt Publishing) is a relatively new book written by a real expert. PowerShell is one of those topics that can enrage people. Some love the power and the functionality released by the shell; others cling to the GUI tools and resist change. This book will help both groups by expanding the knowledge of those who already understand the Exchange Management Shell and by showing those who prefer the GUI that PowerShell isn’t really all that bad once you get used to it.

Exchange 2010 Unleashed (SAMS) should have been roped up at publication and not released on the general public. It’s a weak book, released in a hurry to be first to market when the original version of Exchange 2010 appeared, and it shows all the signs of sloppy writing, bad cut-and-paste from the previous Exchange 2007 book, and a lack of knowledge about the subject matter. It will do absolutely zero for you in terms of information about Exchange 2010 SP1. I admire Rand’s ability to get books out the door quickly but it would be nice if a tad more energy was devoted to quality control and editing.

Exchange 2010: A practical approach (SysAdmin Handbooks) delivers what it promises in the title. No high-brow treatment of architecture and design principles, but plenty of let’s get our sleeves rolled up and start a deployment going. I like Jaap’s approach and I like the way he brings his experience to the table. This book won’t cost you very much but I can guarantee that you’ll extract some value from it.

So there you are – just one person’s opinion. I hope that you find success in whatever book you decide to buy.

– Tony

Author Print edition Kindle edition Amazon rating/number of reviews
Siegfried Jaggott/Joel Stidley Exchange 2010 Best Practices Exchange 2010 Best Practices (Kindle) 5 stars/14
William R. Stanek Exchange 2010 Administrator’s Pocket Consultant Exchange 2010 Administrator’s Pocket Consultant (Kindle) 4.8 stars/8
Joel Stidley/Erik Gustafson Exchange 2010 Server Administration: Real world skills Exchange 2010 Server Administration: Real World Skills (Kindle) 4.4 stars/5
Ken St. Cyr Exchange 2010 Administration Instant Reference Exchange 2010 Administration Instant Reference (Kindle) 5 stars/2
Jim McBee/David Elfassy Mastering Exchange 2010 Mastering Exchange 2010 (Kindle) 3.1 stars/9
Mike Pfeiffer Exchange 2010 PowerShell Cookbook Exchange 2010 PowerShell Cookbook (Kindle) 5 stars/10
Rand Morimoto Exchange 2010 Unleashed Exchange 2010 Unleashed (Kindle) 3.1 stars/21
Jaap Wesselius Exchange 2010: A practical approach Exchange 2010: A practical approach (Kindle) 4.5 stars/2
Tony Redmond Exchange 2010 Inside Out Exchange 2010 Inside Out (Kindle) 5 stars/7
Posted in Exchange, Exchange 2010, Writing | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Starting a voyage with Mac

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Tony Redmond

I’ve been using DOS or Windows PCs since the first IBM PC appeared. Over that time Microsoft-powered computers have infuriated and annoyed me on a regular basis but I think that I am now inured to the ways of Windows. Perhaps this will change with the advent of Windows 8 and the wonders of the new Metro interface. We shall see.

Not everyone is so sanguine about Windows. Take my wife. A wonderful woman but one with no patience for dealing with the demands for frequent updates that Microsoft, Adobe, and other software vendors pop-up with ever-increasing frequency to annoy and disrupt her work. Of course, as the resident IT support department and help desk, it falls to me to answer all the queries of “why is Windows asking me to do this?” or “what does that message mean?” Being a husband of many years standing means that I have wonderful tuning capabilities when it comes to removing such demands from my consciousness but even so, some of the support queries get through. And if you’re not an IT type of person (some would say “nerd” or “geek” in this respect), the queries do become tiresome.

So the executive in me decided that change was necessary. The situation was accelerated when her (now rather elderly) HP dv2000 laptop decided that it didn’t want to work any more. My suspicions are that the graphic controller or motherboard simply gave up the ghost after four years hard work but I wasn’t going to pay a PC technician to tell me that I had the choice of paying several hundred dollars to resurrect the PC or roughly the same to buy a new one. A change is as good as a rest, or so they say, and a change from a PC is either a new PC running the latest version of Windows or, horror of horrors, a Mac.

No Macintosh computer had ever darkened our house but inroads had been made through several generations of iPods, three iPhones (but not the latest 4GS – yet!), and a first generation iPad. All were sterling examples of good design and had opened a crack in my defenses. And then I visited Greenwich, CT to teach a class with Paul Robichaux…

Paul is well-known for his love of all things Apple. He carts around a rather nice MacBook Pro and I have seen how content this computer makes Paul. On the other hand, I’ve also seen him swearing at applications that he develops for the iPhone so it’s not all wonder and light in the Apple world. Nevertheless, it was enough to persuade me that maybe a MacBook Air would be a good solution.

A visit to the local Apple Store was duly organized and two middle-aged nerds started to poke at the various models that were on offer, undistributed for once by the herds of blue t-shirt chad Apple salespeople that normally descend any time I walk into a store. Left alone, we were able to measure the 11 inch MacBook Air against the 13 inch and debate the relative screen size, keyboard, and weight. Both models are examples of engineering and design excellence and their lightness is unique, but overall I think that the Apple MacBook Air 13.3-Inch was the better choice and that’s what I bought (note: Amazon.com has keen prices for this model at present and offers the advantage of not charging sales tax, so that’s where I bought).

Apple MacBook Air

Apple MacBook Air

So far the experience with the MacBook Air is mixed. Setting it up has been relatively painless and the Microsoft Arc Mouse that we’ve been using with our PCs works well with the Mac. Printing is the big exception so far. I cannot make the blessed Mac connect to my faithful HP C6180 printer wirelessly (it will and has printed via USB). All of our other PCs (most running Windows 7) connect without a problem and this has been the case since the first day that I installed the printer. Much browsing of the net, downloading of patches, and viewing of YouTube videos has been done to no avail. It’s a wonder to me that Apple can’t make wireless printing as easy an experience as Microsoft obviously has. We shall see where this particular journey takes me as I figure out the magic incantation that printing obviously requires and then work out all the differences between Outlook 2010 (for Windows) and Outlook 2011 (for the Mac).

Fun and games all round,

Tony

Posted in Email, Technology | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Fall Exchange Connections wrap-up

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Tony Redmond

I’m home from the Fall 2011 Exchange Connections conference and have successfully transitioned from the Las Vegas sunshine to the drab wonders of an Irish winter. I’m wondering whether I will be able to readjust back to both the weather and the change from the wonderful suite that I occupied for five nights in THEhotel where I lucked out and was given a room on the 62nd floor. In fact it really wasn’t a 62nd floor as you might think because floors 39 through 59 don’t exist. The wiki article on THEhotel states that the penthouses (suites) range in size from 1,500 to 2,500 square feet. I’m quite prepared to believe this as the suite was bigger than many apartments that I have seen. And the best thing about it was the incredible view over the Las Vegas strip.

View of the Las Vegas strip from THEhotel

The good news is that the professional rugby season is about to hit high gear as the Heineken Cup starts. This weekend I am in Belfast for the Ulster v. Connacht Rabodirect league match. Next weekend the travel starts and I’ll be in Paris on Friday night for Racing 92 v. Cardiff before taking the TGV to Toulouse for the Toulouse v. Gloucester game on Sunday afternoon. Should be a good weekend of high-class rugby!

Getting back to Connections, my personal highlight was the chance to give a keynote on Wednesday morning. A good crowd of around 400 cast off the effects of yet another night in Las Vegas and struggled in for an 8am start to hear my session on “Why Microsoft’s head is in the clouds and what it means to you”. You can download the PDF for the session here: Exchange Connections Keynote

I was also impressed by Jeffrey Snover’s keynote. Jeffrey is best known as the father of PowerShell and now he is the Chief Architect for Windows Server. He and I both worked at Digital Equipment Corporation in the past and I also had the honor and privilege of working with his wife Jo-Ann on products as varied as DECwrite, Electronic Business Documents, and TeamLinks. She was a great programmer then and I’m sure she is a great photographer now as that’s what her passion is today.

Jeffrey’s views on how Windows server technology will evolve as cloud economics take effect on datacenters and the resulting follow-through for administrators were thought-provoking. Essentially, the transition of workload from on-premises servers to the cloud will force administrators to upskill or lose their jobs. “Managing with a mouse… is a strategy for failure” was one of the more noteworthy comments he made, meaning that if you persist in attempting to manage servers one click at a time, you’ll be rapidly bypassed by the need to automate operations to deal with tens or hundreds of servers at one time. “Automation is the heart of cloud” and “Automation is central to Windows 8 Server”. Indeed – I think we get the message!

Standardization and automation were the two pillars of his mantra and PowerShell is core to the ability to achieve these aims. Jeffrey noted that Windows 8 Server will include over 2,330 cmdlets to allow for management of just about anything on a server and that PowerShell has spread across many Microsoft and non-Microsoft products so that it is possible to build automation in a way that just wasn’t possible before.

The week before Connections, I took the risk of publishing a blog post about “Eliminating PowerPoint sins“. It was a risk because I clearly had to deliver a session that didn’t replicate the problems that I described – too much text on slides, too many slides, slides that the presenter didn’t know well, lack of practice, and so on. You can download the session from the link above and make your own judgment as to how well I did on the format of the slides! In passing, I note that Kevin Allison’s slides were highly colorful (Metro like), few in number, and a low word count, which was quite unusual for a keynote session delivered by a Microsoft executive. Greg “four times” Taylor poked fun at me by including a perfectly blank slide during his session on Exchange 2010 SP2. Regretfully, the remainder of his slides were not up to the same standard.

Other sessions persisted in the same old mistakes. Color choice for text and graphics seemed to be more important for this event. Perhaps it was the projection system in use in the various rooms or the slide template used by Connections but I found some slides very difficult to read when projected on-screen. This was especially so when presenters committed the cardinal error of applying the Connections template to an existing presentation and not checking the result until the slides were projected. If you take a deck created with a template that uses light backgrounds and apply one that is based on browns and yellows, you absolutely need to go through each slide to check the resulting color selections for text, graphics, and objects. It seemed that quite a few presenters forgot and so inflicted eye pain on their audiences.

At a conference like Connections, it’s impossible to get around to every session, even within the limited scope of “just Exchange”. Overall, I thought that the sessions that I attended were of high quality and delivered real value to attendees. Microsoft provided a good set of speakers, both from the engineering group and the field, and I especially liked Tim McMichael’s sessions on the Database Availability Group.

It was good to see so many MVPs at Connections and to hear them share their knowledge of practical hands-on deployments with the attendees. These sessions provide a counterbalance to the product and engineering descriptions delivered by Microsoft so that people gain a complete understanding of technology from multiple perspectives. For example, Michael B. Smith made an eloquent case for why no one would ever buy an Office 365 P1 subscription and should buy E1 instead, the logic being that getting telephone support is worth the extra $4/month (in the U.S.) alone. I’ll keep my P1 subscription for now but I certainly can see the value in the case that Michael makes.

Some speakers suffered from glitches such as the microphone snafu that meant that Mike Crowley broadcast his session on Office 365 Administration to another room. Fortunately Mike has a strong and clear voice and was able to dispense with the microphone when the problem was pointed out! Some network glitches also meant that online demos were a risk and proved once again that presenters are always best to avoid demos altogether or have control over local resources if at all possible.

Finally, thanks must go to Lee Mackey, co-chair of the Exchange Connections conference and remarkable individual. Lee lives in Vegas and was kind enough to take care of an MVP group over dinner at N9NE in The Palms (my review isn’t published yet, but suffice to say that it’s not as good as others have been) on Wednesday night. Setting everything up and making sure that people are taken care of wasn’t unusual as Lee makes sure that everyone is happy any time people he knows are in town. Thanks Lee!

– Tony

Posted in Cloud, Exchange, Exchange 2010, Office 365, Rugby, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Exchange 2010 compliance at Exchange Connections

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Tony Redmond

I’ve already published an article about the news about Microsoft’s PST capture tool that Ankur Kothari shared at the Fall 2011 Exchange Connections in Las Vegas. Here I’d like to record some of the interesting observations and Q&A interchanges that occurred at the session. In passing, the deck that was used in this session is similar to that posted here.

The session was attended by about 120 people. Ankur asked how many were planning a PST eradication project in the next year. I was surprised that about 50% raised their hands. I’m not surprised that PSTs should be eradicated as this is absolutely the right long-term strategy to pursue. I’m just a tad taken aback that such a high number are actively embarked on such a strategy. Perhaps this was a proactive crowd.

On Office 365, Ankur noted that Single Item Recovery (SIR) is enabled by default for all mailboxes. SIR means that all changes to deleted items in a mailbox such as attempts to purge the items or to edit their contents will be tracked by Exchange for the retention period that’s specified. In this case, Office 365 uses a retention period is 14 days. On-premises Exchange 2010 mailboxes are not enabled for SIR by default. You have to enable mailboxes explicitly by running the Set-Mailbox cmdlet. For example:

Set-Mailbox -Identity Tony -SingleItemRecoveryEnabled $True

The retention window is configured per-mailbox or per-database. For example, if I wanted to set a retention period of 365 days for a mailbox, I’d run a command like:

Set-Mailbox -Identity Tony -RetainDeletedItemsFor 365

Whereas for a mailbox database I’d use a command like:

Set-MailboxDatabase -Identity DB2 -DeletedItemRetention 365

Of course, expanding the deleted item retention period (for a database in particular) increases the storage requirement for a database and shouldn’t be altered unless necessary. It’s also worth noting that calendar items are retained for 120 days at least even if a smaller retention period is specified.

The next factoid that I learned is that Office 365 uses a Managed Folder Assistant (MFA) workcycle of seven days. By comparison, the on-premises Exchange 2010 MFA uses a one-day workcycle. The workcycle sets a goal for the MFA in terms of how often it should process a mailbox to stamp items with retention tags and action items whose retention period has expired. I guess it’s logical that Office 365 would want to minimize the amount of processing load that MFA imposes on mailbox servers but a 7-day workcycle does mean that items in mailboxes might not be processed as quickly as you’d expect. For example, an item that you’d expect to move to the archive after 30 days might linger in the mailbox and only move after 36 days. A small point to keep in mind.

It’s logical but might escape some that retention policies have to be maintained in two places if you operate a hybrid on-premises/cloud environment. For on-premises Exchange 2010, retention policies and tags are maintained in the Exchange configuration data in Active Directory and are not shared with the cloud. Therefore, if you’ve created a set of retention policies and tags to enforce compliance, you have to duplicate them in both places.

Some scripts are provided on the Exchange 2010 kit that can help, even if the ongoing synchronization will be a manual process. Details of the scripts can be found in the deck referred to above. As per this TechNet article, the magic that assures that both policies are deemed to match is having a similar RetentionId property. Having the same policy and tag occurs automatically in at least one instance. If you enable an archive mailbox for an on-premises user, their mailbox is assigned the “Default Archive and Retention Policy”. This policy is the same on both sides of the cloud divide so it follows that the policy can be implemented consistently. Before you rush to implement archive mailboxes and their associated retention policy, you might like to read this post.

If policies are not identical on both sides, mailboxes that are moved to Office 365 cannot maintain the tags that the on-premises MFA stamped on them. The tags are removed by MFA when it processes the Office 365 mailbox for the first time because MFA cannot resolve the tags (this is the same behavior that exists when you delete a retention tag from on-premises Exchange). All of this means that it’s important the same policies and tags are available on both sides else the Office 365 MFA cannot apply them to the newly arrived mailbox.

Ankur was asked whether it’s possible to apply a retention tag with a transport rule to an outgoing message as it passes through the transport system en route to another domain. The answer is “no” and again it’s pretty logical as Exchange has no knowledge of what kind of target domain you’re sending to and anyway, it’s only Exchange 2010 that would have any chance of understanding and applying the retention tag on arriving items. Also, would you like if an external organization had the chance to apply retention policies to items under your control? The real answer here is that if you want control over outgoing items you’ll have to use Active Directory Rights Management Services to apply templates and then hope that the receiving servers can understand and respect the restrictions.

The question was posed whether Exchange 2010 discovery searches can generate a manifest (perhaps in XML format) of all items discovered by the search so that this can be included in a PST (generated by the New-MailboxExportRequest cmdlet) and provided to a legal investigator. Again the answer is no. Exchange captures items that satisfy search criteria in the target discovery search mailbox and it’s up to you to decide how to process them from there on. I’m sure that someone clever could use Exchange Web Services to scan the discovery search mailbox and enumerate the items retrieved by a search to create a manifest – maybe this has already been done elsewhere or perhaps it’s a feature of one of the third-party compliance products that now compete with Exchange.

Ankur was asked how to migrate items from a third-party archive to Exchange 2010. The answer was that some products include the ability to restore items from their archive into user mailboxes. If this is possible, then the user can move the recovered items into the archive or let Exchange do this automatically through archive tags in a retention policy. The alternative is to use products such as those available from Transvault to move data directly from the archiving solution to Exchange 2010.

An interesting question was how best to export data from a discovery search mailbox on Office 365? The problem here is that the New-MailboxExportRequest cmdlet is not available to Office 365 administrators, probably because the cmdlet depends on the ability to access a network file share where it will create the PST to hold the exported data. Of course, Office 365 doesn’t have access to network file shares in your environment so it can’t write out the data. So you have to revert to the age-old answer of using Outlook as an intermediary. Connect Outlook (2007 or 2010 – 2003 can’t connect to Office 365) to the discovery search mailbox where the data is located and drag and drop to a local PST and then provide that PST to whoever needs it. A kludge, but it works.

An interesting session, if only because of the Office 365 gotchas that I hadn’t really considered up to now.

– Tony

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

Exchange General Manager speaks at DevConnections

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Good technology conferences allow attendees to meet movers and shakers in the industry, specifically people who are relevant to the technical interests of the attendees. I think that the Exchange Connections conference has a good record in this respect and so it was that Kevin Allison, General Manager of Exchange (on-premises and cloud) turned up to provide a keynote at today’s event.

Kevin used a different type of Microsoft presentation to that we have seen from other executives in the past. Large amounts of text were replaced by blocks of color on a photo background similar in appearance to the Metro UI as seen in Windows 8. It was a refreshing change to the normal “death by PowerPoint” that happens so often in sessions delivered at conferences. Kevin’s last slide featured an interesting photograph of a two-fingered salute which might be deemed offensive in some places! I’m sure that this was totally unintended.

Getting back to the substance of Kevin’s presentation, he began by noting that there has been a very fast uptake of Exchange 2010, faster than any other.  In other words, customers are migrating to Exchange 2010 faster than they moved to either Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2003 when they were released. He then reported that 20% of Fortune 500 have bought Office 365 seats. My take on this is that companies are investing in some Office 365 seats to be able to assess exactly how they might be able to use cloud services. It’s kind of “kicking the tires” to figure out whether they want to run Office 365 completely, use a hybrid environment, or continue with on-premises Exchange. It will be interesting to see how many of these companies end up deploying Office 365, but I suspect that we won’t discover this for a few years yet.

Exchange is a product that has a very large community. Kevin acknowledged that the community is quick to express its opinion on what’s happening with Exchange and said that the engineering team pays attention. He cited the addition of support for Windows 2008 R2 in Exchange 2010 and the increasingly broad support for mobile devices and different browsers as areas where customers have driven change. Also mentioned was the reintroduction of UDP support in Exchange 2010 for smoother connections for Outlook 2003 clients.

Everyone knows that Exchange’s reputation for quality has suffered in the past year as they have had to recall two roll-up updates (RU3 and RU4) due to bugs that were found in the code after it was released to customers. Kevin apologized for these lapses and admitted that they were a big hit to his team’s credibility. Mistakes do happen but the fact that two problems followed each other in quick succession really marred the record of the sustained engineering team.  He said that Microsoft’s scenario testing didn’t catch the problems and allowed them to slip through. This has resulted in a revision of the overall testing process to assess end to end processing rather than just focusing on individual features.

In terms of new functionality for Exchange, Kevin noted that their development cycle has changed from the traditional two-year plan/coding/test approach to six-month drops. To a large degree, the change in approach has been forced by the cloud and Microsoft’s need to adapt to market demand. Functionality is now provided in small chunks rather than in major pieces, which seems awfully like the way that Google rolls out improvements for Google Apps and Gmail, which means that Office 365 users see small but incremental changes in functionality over time. See this blog for more detail about Office 365’s release cadence.

Some have expressed the worry that Microsoft has too much focus on the cloud and has forgotten their on-premises installed base. Kevin said that Microsoft runs three Exchange environments for its own use – on-premises, cloud, and test so they are aware of the need to serve all environments. There will be new features and updates in Exchange 15, the next major release of Exchange that is being worked on today.

Right now, the Exchange team is working to push out Exchange 2010 SP2. Kevin said that “SP2 is about you”, which I didn’t quite understand, possibly because I didn’t listen well enough at that point.  He cited GAL segmentation (Address Book Policies) and the Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW), which reduces the number of steps required to configure on-premises to cloud communications from 50 to six as major areas of improvements in SP2.

When challenged about the date when SP2 will be available, Kevin said that Microsoft always expected it to be in Q4 2011. He had hoped that this would be in October but the current plan is that SP2 will ship in the next four weeks. It’s critical that Microsoft gets SP2 right and they are paying huge attention to quality. He noted that bug rates are going down drastically and it looks very good. The two main reasons for holding SP2 from shipping now are first to make sure that UDP support works smoothly and then to tweak the HCW to ensure that secure messaging is correctly set up for on-premises to cloud connections. In addition, great attention is being paid to testing.

When asked about the different release schedules for Office 365 releases and on-premises Exchange, he said that on-premises updates follow the well-established cadence of RU-SP-release but that updates for Office 365 are sped up so that every two weeks to six weeks cycle they patch code with minor fixes. New features then appear every six months. To apply updates, Microsoft takes servers out of the pool, re-image the computers with new software, and reintroduce into the server pool. They also use a swing site approach to apply yearly updates to move from one major build to another when servers running the software are introduced and the Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) is used to move mailboxes to get users to new build. This approach ensures data integrity because MRS cleans up any problems. Up to 10,000 users moved hourly.

Lots of requests come in for new features or functionality changes. Microsoft triages the list every two years to figure out what new features should be included. Your favorite feature (his is a List Server) might not be included if it’s way down the list. Available development time also gets in the way of being able to do as much as they’d like and Kevin acknowledged that the overall admin system was unfinished in Exchange 2010 and had to be completed in SP1. Features are often cut because there are no resources to do the work.

Kevin was then asked about security policies. He noted that US Government is Microsoft’s largest customer so security is terrifically important. ActiveSync has been a frustrating area because not all vendors implement full functionality. Microsoft now tests top 10 devices in the market including Apple, RIM, etc. but there are lots of other combinations of handset and O/S that support ActiveSync that are not tested. Apple has a good record of rolling out fixes and 98% of their devices are up to date. Android is very different and the vast majority of these devices have never received an O/S update so ActiveSync bugs are not fixed. Vendors get feedback and test reports but the issue then comes down to the desire of the vendors to fix their code and roll out the fix. Acknowledged that server fixes are also made and this helps all devices but it won’t fix everything, especially on old versions of Exchange.

What about Microsoft delivering Apps for iPhone or other devices? Kevin said that Lync and OneNote have apps planned but most of the focus for this group is now on the Windows 8 UI so that applications work well across a variety of devices. Kevin pointed to Exchange 2010’s support for the premium version of OWA on Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari as a change in Microsoft’s implementation so that the same experience is gained across all devices.

Kevin was asked about Exchange 2010 archiving by a customer who noted some deficiencies in the search capabilities, especially extending to SharePoint. Response is that discovery and search in Exchange 2010 is a first implementation that meets the needs of many customers but might not fit the needs of all. Microsoft plans to invest further in this area.

What about virtualization? Kevin said that while Hyper-V and VMware have done a good job of supporting Exchange, he doesn’t believe that virtualization is the best platform for Exchange. He pointed out that Exchange has done a lot of work to avoid problems that might arise from the interaction between the hypervisor and the application and that they are happy to use virtualized servers themselves in some instances. The big thing is that Exchange does not believe that VMs are the best way for every implementation. Office 365 does not use VMs at all – their servers all run on the base hardware

Kevin was asked about multiple forest support without using federation services. He acknowledged this as an area that needs to be improved. The issue is all around the complexity of dealing with all of the other components that might exist in such an environment including third party directories. They have this on their roadmap and are looking at it.

Kevin wasn’t asked some of the more interesting questions that could have been posed. For example, I was staggered that no one asked about the future of public folders in future versions of Exchange or why public folders are not supported in Office 365. I guess that it was time to go and get a coffee or something and people just plain forgot about these unwanted vestiges of Exchange’s past…

Now back to the rest of the sessions at Connections…
– Tony

Posted in Cloud, Email, Exchange, Exchange 2010, Office 365 | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Greenwich, Sybari, and debates about PC versus Mac

Posted on October 30, 2011 by Tony Redmond

This past week we (Paul Robichaux, Brian Desmond, and I) finished the last in the current series of Exchange 2010 Maestro events. We were in the Hyatt Regency in Greenwich CT, which proved to be a perfectly acceptable location. Attendees were focused throughout, enduring all that we could throw at them and even having the stamina to ask some pretty demanding and interesting questions as the clock ran out on Friday afternoon. We also had a good time during Friday’s exercise where we break attendees up into small groups and ask them to act in the role of consultants who come in to present their recommendations for the deployment of Exchange 2010 in a 12,000-seat pharma company. The presentations are usually a lot of fun with extreme heckling all round and they’re valuable too because everyone gets to learn how to put the concepts that we discuss into practice. There’s nothing like being asked to justify a design decision to focus the mind.

During the event Paul published an interesting comparison on his blog between the relative costs of Apple Mac and PC laptops to investigate whether Apple really does command a price premium for their products. He concludes that Apple does charge more as vendors such as Dell and Lenovo will sell you comparable but cheaper hardware.

I didn’t agree with his comments about the HP offering as I thought that he shouldn’t have chosen the HP Elitebook 8760w laptop with the 17″ screen. An 8560w might have been more representative even if it doesn’t have a quad i7 processor. My day to day laptop is the older Elitebook 8530w and it has served me well for a couple of years so I will probably upgrade to the newer model when the time comes. Paul made the point that he has experienced shoddy quality with Dell and HP laptops when compared to those available elsewhere. I think that’s fair providing you’re talking about laptops that are designed to a low price point and intended for light consumer use. There is a world of difference between those PCs and other models designed for business use. You can certainly buy a $500 laptop today but in reality it’s a discardable item that will eventually break, probably sooner than later, if you put it under stress.

I published three articles on WindowsITPro.com this week. One was a routine report that Microsoft had released RU6 for Exchange 2010 SP1. The others received more of a reaction. First, I sallied forth on the topic about the options that exist for companies that have public folders today who want to consider going to Office 365. Microsoft has published a white paper on the topic that is brief and doesn’t really sugar-coat the bad news that any route is painful. Read my views on the topic here.

The other post discussed the many bad ways that presenters at conferences misuse PowerPoint. I received quite a number of messages as a result, probably because there are so many bad presentations delivered at all sorts of events. Presenters use their decks as a crutch, don’t bother to learn the material, assemble all sorts of weird and wonderful graphics that don’t help, confuse people in a blizzard of bullets, and so on. We’ll just have to wait and see whether the presenters at next week’s DevConnections event are up to standard…

While I was in Greenwich I had the chance to catch up with two old friends from Sybari. For those who don’t know, Sybari was a small anti-virus company that developed some innovative approaches to protecting Exchange servers at a time when their opposition persisted in using slow and not very effective methods to stop viruses wrecking havoc. Back in the days of the infamous “I Love You” virus most Exchange anti-virus products logged on using MAPI and so resembled a hyperactive user who accessed all the mailboxes on a server to read messages and detect suspicious payloads. MAPI was never designed to serve as the foundation for anti-virus detection and its use was both very slow and demanding in terms of CPU drain on the server. Sybari developed a hook in their Antigen product that allowed them to load their anti-virus code while the Store process was initializing and was much more effective and efficient than anything that came before.

Eventually Microsoft, who really hated the Sybari approach and did all in their power to bad-mouth it for a number of years, came around to the conclusion that they had to provide anti-virus vendors with a better method to integrate with Exchange and developed the AV API. And then Microsoft acquired Sybari in 2005 for its technology and to become part of the beginning of what is now the ForeFront product family (pages about Antigen are still lingering in TechNet). I was an external director of Sybari for a number of years leading up to their acquisition by Microsoft and enjoyed myself enormously while learning a lot about how small (but nimble) companies operate. It’s also fair to say that Sybari carved out a special niche for themselves in the hearts and minds of people who bought their products, especially for those who attended conferences such as TechEd and the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC). Sybari always had a great stand and organized draws for impressive prizes such as a Harley-Davidson bike or a Mini Cooper.

But it was the Sybari parties during conferences that will linger long in the minds of those who attended those conferences, whether the somewhat private affairs organized by Sybari’s CEO, Bob Wallace (a man who had enough stories of his time as a NYC policeman to keep a party going for ages), or those run by the sales team in various night clubs. I never attended any of the night club events but have seen sufficient photographic evidence to convince me that people had fun, even if they might not welcome the discovery and publication of said photographs today.

Anyway, getting back to Greenwich, Tom Buoniello and Rocco Donnino came across to pick me up to go to dinner in Tom’s outrageous Ford F-250 SuperDuty truck. It was quite an impressive beast and evoked an impressive reaction from the valet who met us when we arrived at L’Escale restaurant. I’m sure it made quite a difference to the normal Mercedes and such that he’s expected to park.

L’Escale came with high recommendations but was just OK. Despite being a “high-end” restaurant, I sometimes felt that the waiting staff thought that they worked at McDonalds and wanted to clear us out as quickly as possible. It was also notable how quickly they served wine, obviously in an attempt to get us to buy a second bottle. They would have probably preferred if we had consented to hook up with a drip from the bottle. The food was OK but not memorable.

But writing restaurant reviews is not the purpose of the visit. Instead, it was an opportunity to catch up with the work that Rocco and Tom are doing at AppRiver and for me to learn how Microsoft partners who specialize in the SMB market are dealing with Office 365.

I was impressed at AppRiver’s approach to support and how they are hand-holding customers who are transitioning to Office 365 as I think that this is an area rich of potential for services companies. The fact is that Office 365 when delivered by Microsoft is essentially “roll-your-own” support. There are too many opportunities to attempt to figure out problems through web sites or (if you purchase Plan E) to navigate the depths of telephone support. Being able to call on a competent partner such as AppRiver seems like a nice option for small companies that want to take advantage of the power and functionality offered by Office 365 while having a safety net just in case. It costs a few dollars extra per month but what price is piece of mind? Appriver is expanding into Europe and has plans to work with other services companies around the world too, so I’m sure we will hear more about them.

Jet Blue Airbus 320 being deiced in JFK

And now on to the delights that Las Vegas promises for Hallow’een. I can barely wait (this comment is strictly tongue in cheek) but it will be nice to meet some of the world-class experts who are presenting at DevConnections, including Greg “four times” Taylor (he of Client Access Server fame), Lee Mackey, Jim McBee, and so on. Paul Robichaux and I have a one-day seminar to deliver on Monday and I’m looking forward to that too. Unfortunately weather meant that the trip started badly as JFK was shut by the first October snow fall for 150 years in the NYC region. Jet Blue did their best to get everyone going and a five hour delay is probably the best that you’d expect in the circumstances.

Upwards and Onwards…

Posted in Cloud, Email, IASA (architects), Technology | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Exploring Office 365 recipient limits

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Office 365 is available in a number of plans. Small business owners, like myself, find the low-cost entry point of Plan P1 very attractive while larger enterprises will find that the “E” plans better suit their needs (see this blog post for more information on the differences between Plans E and P). All hosting environments impose some limitations on users to prevent them absorbing more than their fair share of resources and this is the case in Office 365 where recipient limits are one of the more obvious restrictions that you might run into.

The recipient limit determines the total number of recipients to which a mailbox can send messages to in a 24-hour rolling period. Plan P sets a recipient limit of 500; Plan E increases the limit to 1,500 (see the Office 365 help for more detail). A recent ZDNet article advised small businesses to pay attention to the small print of Office 365 plans (good advice in itself) and cited recipient limits as an example. The article quoted Microsoft’s justification for setting recipient limits at these values as:

“In the world of email, one of the thresholds that must be enforced is the amount of email that is sent through the system by any one user or organization in order to combat spam, mass-mailing worms & viruses.”

This is reasonable as no hosting provider wants to get themselves into the situation where they are the host for a spammer. It’s fair and reasonable to impose a block on anyone sending vast quantities of spam to all and sundry. The problem here is that the limits chosen by Microsoft might be a tad low. That, allied to the fact that there’s no way for Office 365 support to release the guillotine if a user inadvertently exceeds the limit, creates the potential for customer dissatisfaction.

Consider the scenario where someone is sending messages to customers to inform them of a new business offer and therefore blasts out an email to all customers in their address book to then find that they have hit the limit and cannot send any further email until the 24-hour block elapses. They can continue to receive email but any attempt to send a response is rejected by Exchange. This isn’t good because it’s unlikely that many of the small businesses who use Office 365 Plan P will be aware of or understand recipient limits. On the other hand, it’s yet another example of how Microsoft has thoughtfully left a gap for other hosting providers to fill by offering similar plans and price points to those available with Office 365 but with higher limits.

But how are the recipient limits implemented? Apart from the help file (and who reads those unless absolutely necessary?), there’s no trace of any setting that an Office 365 tenant administrator can assign to a mailbox, at least not on the surface. But if you care to fire up PowerShell and poke around behind the scenes we can find out how recipient limits are applied.

First, you need to connect a remote PowerShell session to your Office 365 domain. Brian Desmond has published a tip showing how to insert some code in your PowerShell profile to make connections easy and there are many articles available that explain the various steps that are needed to connect. I’ll assume that you can do this and arrive at a point where you’re connected and ready to go.

Every Office 365 mailbox is assigned a mailbox plan that defines the settings that are applied to that mailbox. If you run Get-Mailbox | Select MailboxPlan you’ll see a pointer to the mailbox plan, which will be something like this:

MailboxPlan : eurprd04.prod.outlook.com/Microsoft Exchange Hosted Organizations/xxx.onmicrosoft.com/Defau
lt-f5eda48a-1df7-40ac-b99f-3a73a94f8a8d

This isn’t very human-friendly but just accept that it proves that the mailbox has been assigned a plan. You’re likely to find that there’s just one mailbox plan for a Plan P tenant while Plan E tenants might have several, depending on how many of the E variants they use.

Running Get-MailboxPlan | Format-List reveals all the settings applied to a mailbox or we can apply a filter (see below) to reveal just the settings that refer to recipient limits.

Running Get-MailboxPlan to view recipient limits

Aha… some light bulbs come on in heads around the world and ask “If I can use Get-MailboxPlan to view recipient settings, couldn’t I use something like the Set-MailboxPlan cmdlet to increase them?”  Good idea, but the wonders of RBAC mean that tenant administrators can’t run a command like:

Get-MailboxPlan | Set-MailboxPlan -RecipientLimits 5000

The reason of course is that Exchange’s Role Based Access Control (RBAC) security model filters the available parameters for Set-MailboxPlan so that tenant administrators don’t see RecipientLimits as a valid option (RBAC allows you to define roles to the granular level of suppressing individual parameters for a command). If you attempt to set a value, PowerShell returns an error.

Oops! Set-MailboxPlan doesn't work

I would have been terrifically surprised had I been able to increase my recipient limit and it’s good to know that RBAC allows me to see information about mailbox plans but stops me playing with limits. While we might disagree with the limits Microsoft has set for the Office 365 plans, it’s nice to understand how they are implemented.

– Tony

Posted in Email, Exchange 2010, Office 365, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 2 Comments

RWC ends and I’m off to Greenwich and Vegas

Posted on October 23, 2011 by Tony Redmond

This coming week I’m travelling from Dublin to Greenwich, CT for the last in the current series of Exchange 2010 Maestro training events where I’ll be joining up again with fellow MVPs Paul Robichaux and Brian Desmond to deliver around twenty hours of lectures between Wednesday and Friday. The lectures are supplemented with some group work and hands-on labs so our attendees won’t have much time on their hands. After that I’ll be heading to Las Vegas for Halloween – or rather, to deliver a keynote session at Exchange Connections at 8AM (local) on Wednesday, November 2. Should be good fun.

In rugby matters I was glad that New Zealand won the Rugby World Cup by beating France 8-7 in a game that surprised people because of the intense nature of the French performance that stretched the All Blacks to the very limit, forcing them to play out the last few minutes in a pick-and-drive style that they probably didn’t want to and keeping Kiwis around the world on tenderhooks. The All Blacks deserved to be acknowledged as the world’s #1 team as they won every one of their matches. France kept their best and most convincing performance until last but lost to both Tonga and New Zealand during the group stage.

Rugby World Cup 2011: New Zealand captain Richie McCaw salutes triumphant All Blacks after final victory over France

It was also good to see Richie McCaw, the All Black captain, win his 103rd cap. I have two particular memories of Richie McCaw in his early career. First, as a member of the Junior All Black side that won the IRB/FIRA U-19 World Cup in Wales in April 1999 and then when he won his first cap against Ireland at Lansdowne Road on 17 November 2001. I was the assistant referee for the final (Steve Lander of England was in the middle), which New Zealand won 25-0 against Wales in Stradey Park, Llanelli. Other future All Blacks in that squad included Jerry Collins, Mils Muliaina, and Aaron Mauger. The Welsh team had future internationals in Adam Jones, Dwayne Peel, Rhys Williams, Jamie Robinson, Ceri Sweeney, Ryan Powell, James Bater and Michael Owen. While McCaw is probably the pick of the bunch, a lot of other quality players came through to full international level from that tournament. Some excellent referees were there too including Kelvin Deaker (New Zealand), Joel Judge (France), and JC Fortuin (South Africa) (see group shot below).

Referees at the IRB/FIRA U-19 World Cup in Wales 1999

New Zealand beat the Irish team in their semi-final. In the other game, Wales drew 10-10 with South Africa and went through to the final on the basis that they had scored a penalty and a goal against a drop goal and goal! The rules of that tournament were a little hard to understand at the time… I refereed that semi-final and didn’t quite know what would happen at the final whistle until the crowd went crazy when the announcer said that Wales had won on a technicality. The game was televised live and played in front of around 15,000 people in Bridgend. Standing between the Welsh and South African teams as they belted out their national anthems before that game is still one of my best rugby memories!

The All Blacks won the 2001 game by 29-40 after being behind 16-7 at half time. It was one of the “could have” games for Ireland who played with controlled ferocity in the first half before the greater physical strength and fitness of the All Blacks secured the victory. On this occasion I patrolled the sideline as the reserve official (No. 4 – the referee was Andre Watson of South Africa) and spent most of my time attempting to control the All Black bench. Ten years ago the International Rugby Board (IRB) didn’t exert the same kind of control that exists today on sideline activities where each team is limited to the number of people that can enter the pitch and where those people can position themselves. It was a constant struggle to stop water bottles being thrown onto the pitch like grenades, manage substitutions, and so on.

Even though he was relatively young, McCaw played well that day and showed some of the promise that he has so richly fulfilled since. He was presented with the traditional first cap at the dinner that night and was good enough to share a drink at the referees’ table afterwards. 102 test matches later he’s still a winner and deserved to lift the William Webb Ellis trophy today.

On other matters, blog posts elsewhere this week were a commentary on the retirement of Shane Robison as HP’s CTO, thoughts about some goodness that might have lurked in the RIM (BlackBerry) outage, and relief that Microsoft has eventually fixed the IE9 bug that affected the Exchange Management Console (EMC). I also enjoyed the TEC 2011 EMEA event in Frankfurt where I had the chance to chat with many old acquaintances. It was nice to meet up.

Now on to the U.S., training, and more conferences. It’s a busy time.

– Tony

Posted in Exchange 2010, Rugby, Training | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments