Date range exports with New-MailboxExportRequest

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Tony Redmond

From Exchange 2010 SP1 onward, a new method is used to export and import mailbox data. Instead of forcing administrators to run Outlook on a mailbox server so as to be able to use Outlook’s ability to read and write PSTs, Exchange 2010 SP1 contains brand-new code for PST access and eliminates any need to run Outlook. This is a very good thing as it’s always best not to run applications designed for client computers on servers.

The new code is exposed through a set of cmdlets that mimic the approach taken for mailbox moves. In other words, you create a new request to export or import data, you can manipulate or  view properties of a request, you can fetch request statistics, remove a request from the queue, and so on. The actual processing of the requests is performed by the Exchange Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) running on a Client Access Server (CAS), just like mailbox moves.

We are still getting used to the new implementation and it’s not surprising that we’re still discovering the breadth of the capabilities provided by its developers. One such example occurred recently when the question was posed as to the best way to export data for a particular date range. I think this is likely to be a pretty common request as you obviously don’t want to be forced to export the complete contents of a mailbox unless absolutely necessary, especially as mailboxes get larger and larger. No only would such an export take longer than required for a subset, it also exposes additional possibility that confidential user data might be compromised inadvertently. In other words, the fewer items that you export from a mailbox, the less chance that any item might be viewed by someone other than its owner.

At first glance, the set of available parameters for the New-MailboxExportRequest cmdlet don’t seem to include anything that can help, until you notice the hidden gem that’s buried in the ContentFilter parameter.

“For more information about filterable properties, see Filterable Properties for the -ContentFilter Parameter.”

There’s a huge range of filterable properties that can be explored. For this purpose the best parameter is “Received”, which takes date stamps as its input and allows you to search for items that match a particular date span.

Note: The New-MailboxImportRequest cmdlet does not support a ContentFilter parameter. This might be because it’s easier to implement a filter like this when dealing with server-based data that is already indexed (Exchange 2010 indexes every item in every mailbox automatically) whereas applying a filter to information held in a PST wouldn’t be as effective or efficient. The PST file format is, after all, not the greatest structure that the world of IT has ever seen.

As an example of date range filtering in action with New-MailboxExportRequest, this code looks for any item (in any folder) that has a received date in the range 2 March 2010 to 31 March 2010 from the “Pelton” mailbox [this is an update from the original post – see Matt’s comment below]. Any items that are found are exported to a PST in the specified file share (FilePath). See this post for more information about configuring a network file share as a repository for mailbox import and export requests.

New-MailboxExportRequest -ContentFilter {(Received -lt '04/01/2010') -and (Received -gt '03/01/2010')} -Mailbox "Pelton" -Name DPeltonExp -FilePath \\ExServer1\Imports\DPelton.pst

Exporting a date range of items using New-MailboxExportRequest

Unfortunately there’s no GUI available for the New-MailboxImportRequest, New-MailboxExportRequest, and their associated cmdlets so everything has to be done through the Exchange Management Shell (EMS). Such is life. The good thing is that the possibility exists to export items using a date range and that we’ve learned more about the potential that lurks behind the ContentFilter parameter, but only for mailbox exports.

– Tony

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Posted in Exchange 2010 | Tagged , , | 94 Comments

Exchange Panel Session at TEC 2011

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Tony Redmond

I participated in an interesting panel sessions at TEC 2011 EMEA in Frankfurt on Tuesday. Panel sessions can be an embarrassment for both panelists and audience if no one asks any questions or the questions don’t contain sufficient meat to warrant a good discussion – or even some controversy. In this case, the panel consisted of Greg Taylor and Ross Smith IV from the Microsoft Exchange development group, Jaap Wesselius, a Dutch MVP and author of Exchange 2010 SP1 – A Practical Approach, and Ilse Van Criekinge, author of Exchange Management Shell: TFM (PowerShell for Exchange 2007). Ilse was an MVP when she wrote her book but now works for Microsoft Belgium. The moderator was David Sengupta, another MVP who works for Quest, the organizers of TEC.

I attempted to take notes of the questions and answers during the session and list them below. I’m sure that I have omitted something, but hopefully nothing important!

Q: Has Microsoft done anything to fix the problem that occurs when an Exchange 2010 mailbox server goes down and it has a public folder database that is used by other servers?

A: Exchange 2010 SP1 RU2 contains a fix that allows mailbox servers to look for other public folder databases to take over if their preferred server goes offline. The code isn’t optimized because it works on the basis of searching within an administrative group – Exchange 2010 only has a single administrative group to hold all servers so the code might select a public folder database that is on a remote server. However, the code works and provides a solution to keep people working until the preferred server comes back online.

Q: What can you say about Exchange 15 (E15), the next version of Exchange?

A (Microsoft): We can’t say anything at this time because Microsoft has not announced any public information about what we are working on for the next release of Exchange.

Q: What recommendations would you give about online maintenance for Exchange 2010 databases?

A: Exchange 2010 has moved to a model where database maintenance is constantly running in the background on a throttled basis so that it doesn’t overwhelm a server. You don’t really have to do much because ESE defragmentation now runs on a 24×7 basis. However, it’s worth noting that maintenance now pays more attention to making sure that database pages for items are contiguous with the B-tree structure as this allows ESE to retrieve large chunks of sequential information rather than many random I/Os as you might see in previous versions of Exchange.

Q: Do Exchange 2010 mailbox servers have a problem when very large amounts of RAM are installed – for example, 192GB?

A: Yes, there’s a known issue with servers that are equipped with very large amounts of RAM. A hotfix is available.

Q: Sometimes my users report that Outlook requests credentials when a CAS server is unavailable.

A: We’d need more details to understand exactly what’s going on here. However, Microsoft recently recommended that customers move to Kerberos-based authentication between CAS servers and MAPI clients as per the article on the EHLO blog.

Q: We’d like to give delegate access to the archive mailbox on a folder by folder basis but this isn’t possible in Exchange 2010.

A: Other customers have indicated that they’d like this functionality. Please complete a request for feature enhancement and submit it to Microsoft through your local office. Feature requests from customers are taken very seriously and will be assessed as the engineers design functionality to be incorporated into future versions of Exchange.

Q: Any comments about VMware versus Hyper-V as a virtualization platform for Exchange 2010?

A: Exchange 2010 works well on both hypervisors. Choosing between the two is really a decision that the company has to make and may be influenced by the use of one or the other for virtualization of other applications.

Q: Is it possible to use RBAC to delegate the ability to install a new server from scratch?

A: No. Delegated Setup is supported but an organization administrator has to do some up-front work to create the conditions by which an unprivileged user can complete the installation. Some operations will always require a high level of permissions, such as deploying the first mailbox server in an organization when the system arbitration mailboxes are created and secured against user access.

Q: How should I distribute mailboxes across databases? I have a couple of 600GB mailboxes that serve as journals for all email in the last three months – should they be on separate databases?

A: Generally it’s best to randomize distribution of mailboxes across available databases as this usually results in a pretty good distribution of workload. There will always be exceptions to the rule. Journal mailboxes are one; discovery search mailboxes are another. You need to understand the workload that these mailboxes undertake before you decide in which database they should be placed.

Q: Some people don’t trust the cloud. Specifically, they don’t trust Microsoft to protect their data when it’s in Office 365. What can you say about that?

A: Microsoft makes a huge amount of effort to secure and protect customer data that’s held in Office 365. The number of people who could potentially gain access is severely restricted so that the number is held to the bare minimum and any support tools that are in use have filters applied to them so that any personal data is cloaked and invisible to support personnel. If you still don’t trust Microsoft, you can use Active Directory Rights Management Services to encrypt all email.

Worth also saying that Microsoft has made an investment of billions of dollars in datacenters and engineering work to deliver Office 365. If they were to lose the trust and confidence of customers through breeches of security or customer privacy within Office 365, it would compromise the chance that Microsoft would ever realize any benefit from that investment. If only for this reason alone, Microsoft is taking all possible steps to satisfy audit requirements and protect customer data in whatever way that they can.

It’s also acknowledged that national security legislation might force hosting providers like Microsoft to deliver data to national authorities. It is a common problem across the industry.

Q: I’m experiencing a slow mailbox move from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 (with MRS) in that data is being moved at around 1GB/hour. What’s going on?

A: Many different factors can contribute to slow movement such as server load (source and target), the health of the source database, and the network connection between the two servers. In this case it seemed that the mailboxes are quite large and contain thousands of items in the “critical folders” (like the Inbox). Exchange 2003 wasn’t as effective or efficient at handling large mailboxes as is the case with Exchange 2010  but even so, this rate seems slow. Some further investigation is required.

Q: Can you comment on the “PST capture” tool that was announced by Microsoft in July?

A (Microsoft): We can’t comment. The tool will be released when it is ready.

A (others): There are third party tools available for PST ingestion. If you can’t wait for Microsoft to release its tool, you should look at others available on the market. A web search for “pst ingestion” will throw up many different tools that you can investigate.

Q: Will social networking kill email?

A: Social networking a la Facebook is just another method of communication. The thing about electronic communications is that they’ve been evolving over thirty years or more and as long as email, which is the predominant method of electronic communication, continues to evolve, then it won’t go away anytime soon.

Social networking is in flux too. Four years ago we were all talking about sites such as Bebo and MySpace. Now it’s Facebook and LinkedIn. Who knows what we’ll be talking about in ten years.

Q: Will Exchange 2010 run on Windows 8 Server?

A: There are no plans for this to happen at this time.

Q: What would you like to see happen in terms of Exchange development

A: The Microsoft folks couldn’t comment as this would enter the realm of E15 and they don’t want to talk about that. 

A (others): If we look back at a meeting held in 2004 to consider the future development of Exchange, I was asked to describe some areas of weakness into which the product group could invest. I said:

  • Automation – avoid administrative mistakes.
  • Documentation – increase the level of coverage and the quality of the documentation.
  • Improve reliability
  • Get rid of all the registry hacks that are spread throughout the product.

If we look at Exchange today, we see that Microsoft has succeeded in delivering greater automation (such as the EMC wizards) plus the ability for companies to automate their own procedures with PowerShell. The depth and quality of Exchange documentation is impressive and the development group does a good job of communicating with the community through its blog. Reliability is much enhanced in Exchange 2010 especially with the advent of the Database Availability Group and associated features such as single page patching. And most of the registry hacks have been removed. So there’s progress. The trick for Exchange now is to maintain progress and continue to make the product easier to manage, more robust, and easier to understand and to remember that there’s a very large group of customers who want to stay on-premises and not go near Office 365, so let’s keep on delivering for them too.

Q: When will Microsoft ship Exchange 2010 SP2?

A: By the end of the year.

Q: Why can’t I secure mobile devices with Exchange 2010?

A: ActiveSync is licensed to many different device manufacturers and it’s up to the licensee to decide what parts of ActiveSync they should implement. Some of them decide to implement the bare minimum required to synchronize email, others implement the complete protocol and support features such as remote wipe. The problem is that control is in the hands of the device vendors and they are intensely influenced by the consumer market where security is not a big selling feature. In addition, large companies have allowed users to bring in their device of choice and use them to connect to Exchange, so there’s a huge variety in implementations.

Microsoft is looking at how to secure mobile devices better in the future, but for now we have whatever the device vendors opt to implement. Hopefully the ActiveSync certification program will help.

Q: What about hosting mode?

A: Microsoft recently announced that they will discontinue hosting mode for Exchange 2010. It is included in Exchange 2010 SP2 but will be dropped in E15. Instead, hosting partners are advised to build their offerings around the enterprise version of Exchange 2010 and leverage some of the new features included in SP2 such as Address Book Views.

Worth pointing out that third party hosting providers can build added-value offerings around Exchange 2010 to compete with Office 365. For example, they can support Outlook 2003 clients and public folders, both of which are not supported by Office 365, or support deployments of Unified Messaging or BlackBerry devices too.

Q: What about SQL? Will Exchange ever move away from ESE?

A: The future is ESE. ESE is easy, SQL squeals like a pig.  [Comment trademarked by an Exchange engineer; he knows who he is. We won’t embarrass him here]

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

RWC events, weekly happenings, and Frankfurt calling

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Wow… what a Rugby World Cup (RWC) semi-final. Wales were desperately unlucky to end up at the wrong end of a 9-8 result as France staggered through to the final to emulate their feat at the original RWC in 1987. Much of the commentary since the final whistle has centered around the sending off of Sam Warburton, the Welsh captain by Alain Rolland for a dangerous “spear tackle” in the 18th minute. Some of the articles written have been reasoned and logical, such as those by Paul Ackford in the Daily Telegraph or the comments made to the BBC by Robert Jones, an ex-captain of Wales.

Others, including many of the Twitter contributions immediately following the game were ludicrous and often offensive and certainly did their authors no credit. They exhibited proficiency with many four-letter words that they attributed to the referee but failed to communicate anything but their disappointment at what eventually turned out to be an epic Welsh failure where the best team did not win on the day. So close and yet so far…

Wales v France

The fact is that Alain Rolland had no choice but to award a red card. Ever since the infamous double-tackle on Brian O’Driscoll in the first minute of the first Lions Test against New Zealand in 2005, there’s been a growing awareness about the danger of a spear tackle and the consequences that can flow for a player who is picked up and then dropped on their head or neck. I doubt that anyone would have complained if the red card had followed a bad injury to Vincent Clerc, the French player who was tackled, but the fact that no serious injury ensued does not excuse the action of committing a spear tackle.

Law 10.4 (j) is “lifting a player from the ground and dropping or driving that player into the ground whilst the player’s feet are still off the ground, such that the player’s head and/or upper body come into contact with the ground, is dangerous play. Sanction: penalty kick

(By the way, the International Rugby Board (IRB) has published an excellent Laws application in the Apple iTunes Store that you can download and install on an iPhone or iPad, including video snippets to illustrate many points of law. The application makes a great reference point when arguments occur)

But the law is not the complete story. There’s also an IRB memo from 8 June 2009 that provides a directive to referees and unions as to what sanctions should be applied for spear tackles. Directives are used by the IRB to set standards and to instruct referees how the text laid down in the laws of the game should be applied in practice. The relevant text is:

At a subsequent IRB High Performance Referee Seminar at Lensbury referees were
advised that for these types of tackles they were to start at red card as a sanction and work backwards.

The IRB is serious about referees maintaining standards to protect players and all of the RWC referees will have been instructed to comply with current directives. The teams also know about these directives and understand the consequences of failure to comply. The matter is quite clear in both this RWC statement and the statement made by Paddy O’Brien, IRB referee manager, following the red card. The matter is therefore simple. A player made a spear tackle. The referee applied law and the relevant directive. End of story.

Today’s game between New Zealand and Australia didn’t provide quite so many dramatics but was quite absorbing for long periods before the All Blacks clinched a 20-6 win. On this form it’s hard to see how France will live with the All Blacks during next week’s final but Les Bleus have a nasty habit of surprising and we shall just have to wait and see.

Back to technology (much simpler and less passionate than rugby), I updated my geriatric iPhone 3GS with the new IOS 5.0 operating system. Despite some reports on the Internet that told of people ending up with bricked devices when they attempted to upgrade to IOS 5.0, I didn’t meet any problems and the upgrade was successful with all my settings moved back to the device after 30 minutes or so. I did not elect to use iCloud as that’s for another day and I want to be sure that calendar synchronization with Outlook isn’t affected by synchronizing data into iCloud.

I published two articles on WindowsITPro.com this past week.

  • The first discusses the choice that small companies who want to use Office 365 face when they consider Plan P or Plan E for deployment. Plan P is for Professionals and very small companies; Plan E caters for SMEs. There are good and bad things about both and I look at the various issues in the article. It seems to have received a good reaction.
  • The second explores the question whether any of the reviews written about cloud application suites are in fact useful. My theory is that the two major suites (Google Apps and Office 365 – especially the latter) are still a tad immature in terms of widespread deployment and experience with performance against SLA, support, upgrades, and so on. Reviews can do a nice job of describing current feature sets, and there’s value in that, but they can’t really tell you how a suite will function over an extended period.

Next week I am in Frankfurt for TEC Europe 2011 where I am delivering a keynote session on Monday morning and participating in a panel session on Tuesday. Hopefully I will get to other sessions and learn from the many great presenters that come to “The Experts Conference”. I shall report back here!

– Tony

Posted in Office 365, Rugby, Technology | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Answering questions from SearchExchange about Office 365 deployments

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Last week I sat down (in virtual terms) with Matt Gervais, site editor of SearchExchange.com to discuss some questions arising from a recent survey that they had done of Exchange customers to determine their attitude to Office 365.  You can download the taped conversation at your leisure.

The questions I was asked were:

  • At this point everyone’s heard about the recent Office 365 outages. Are these hurting/do you think these will hurt future purchasing decisions?
  • In a recent site survey, several readers pointed to those outages as to their main reason for being wary of a 365 migration. What kind of assurances can you give prospective Office 365 customers who are skeptical?
  • The majority of respondents to our survey said they would likely be deploying a hybrid scenario, though Microsoft mentions the hybrid wizard is primarily for companies who need to coexist during a move to Office 365. It seems a hybrid scenario is desirable for many companies. Can you elaborate on that? (What are the benefits of just hybrid?)
  • What types/sizes companies do hybrid scenarios make sense for/not make sense for?
  • It seems that Office 365 mostly makes sense for SMBs, is it going to make sense for large enterprises moving forward, or do you see this mostly working best for smaller companies?
  • What improvements/changes would you like to see in Office 365 SP1? Also, do you have any predictions?

Again, you can download the tape of the conversation from SearchExchange.com. It sounds OK, but you’d expect me to say that!

– Tony

Posted in Email, Exchange 2010, Office 365 | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Office 365 plans for small companies – unnatural limits?

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Microsoft has unwittingly (or not) created a long term problem for me. Right now, I expend the grand sum of EUR6.35 monthly for a single Office 365 Plan P1 subscription. I think that this is terrific value but then again, I don’t have to buy Microsoft Office as Microsoft kindly gives me access to that program through the MVP program. Thus, I happily use Outlook as my day-to-day client, backed up with a blast of Gmail just to keep all options open. All quite sufficient for a single person company.

However, what would happen if my small wee company suddenly expanded and I had to deal with many employees? Suddenly I’d find that Microsoft doesn’t facilitate an upgrade from Plan P1, which is deemed to be the plan best suited for professionals and small companies, to one of the E plans, designed for enterprises. Apparently Microsoft believes that the demarcation between a small company and an enterprise occurs when 25 people or so are involved in a business (the upper limit for Plan P1 for any tenant domain is 50). If I was successful, I’d face the fact that I’d have to basically reset my involvement with Office 365 and start over with Plan E.

This seems like an oversight on Microsoft’s part. I am sure that they have some sense of their own company’s history and recollect that while Plan P1 would have been great for Bill Gates and Paul Allen when they were writing BASIC for the Altair in Albuquerque, it wouldn’t have been so good when the fledgling Microsoft Corporation touched down in Redmond. Maybe Bill Gates would have accepted the logic that determined that his company couldn’t move forward with a service, but maybe not.

In any case, more of my ramblings on the topic can be found on WindowsITPro.com, including the essential differences between Plan P1 and Plan E* and why these might be important to a deployment of Office 365.

Have fun,

Tony

Posted in Cloud, Office 365 | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Parasites who steal from books

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Tony Redmond

I’m a tad annoyed. In fact, I am very annoyed. Very annoyed to discover that some people believe that it is right and proper to take text from my Exchange 2010 SP1: Inside Out book and use it in their web pages. This is just unfair and not at all professional. It’s not what you’d expect from reputable companies and it’s another nail in the prospect of writing new books about Microsoft technology (a topic that I cover in this blog).

The situation is as follows. I was advised by a very smart person that I should look at some pages where I might discover some interesting information. My first port of call was to Exiis Corporation, who are a Microsoft Certified Partner. This accreditation leads you to believe that Exiis might well comply with reasonable standards of business conduct but it appears that it’s OK to take text from published works and hide it in the source of their web pages. If you go to the Exiis page covering their Exchange 2010 services, you’ll see a page that looks similar to that used by many other services companies. [See below for an update: the offending page has now been removed]

Exiis Corporation Exchange 2010 Consulting and Support

But behind the scenes, if you look at the page’s source HTML, you find this interesting material:

The source behind the public face of Exiis

This material is extracted from chapter 8 of my Exchange 2010 book. It is possible that this material is in the page source so that it would be indexed by search engines and therefore drive additional page views to the site.

But Exiis is at least subtle. The folks at programming4.us are much more blatant and insist on showing their copied material up front and central on pages such as “Exchange Server 2010: Day-to-Day DAG management“. I am sure that it was quick to steal my material but it’s also easily detected

Programming4.us puts it all out in public

Once again, it’s chapter 8 that provides the popular material, maybe because it’s extremely well-written and cogent. Or maybe it’s just because the people responsible for these sites won’t do the bloody hard work that is required to understand the technology and then explain it as simply and clearly as possible.

It would have been intelligent had Programming4.US tried to disguise the source of the material but they didn’t even do some fundamental cut and pasting to change terms like “DAG-Dublin” (which are probably only ever going to be used by an Irish author) to something more generic, such as “DAG1”. Duh!

To say that I am disappointed to discover this situation would be an understatement. I’m mad at companies that misuse my work. And I would welcome the help of any and all who read this article to avoid using the services of companies who steal copyrighted material and effectively function as parasites on the back of the technology community. I know that I shall take every opportunity that is presented in the future to damn these people to where they can do no damage. An Irishman riled is not a pretty sight!

– Tony

Update (late Friday evening): The CEO of Exiis has been in contact with me. According to him, the problem is due to a “web part or search malfunction”. I don’t know if I understand this assertion because the text from the book is included in the HTML source of the page. Nevertheless, I am assured that the information is being eliminated from the page as I type. We shall see…

Update 2 (Saturday, 6am Ireland). Some progress is being made. Microsoft Legal has contacted the offending parties and asked for the material to be taken down from the web sites. I note that Exiis has replaced their pages with an “Under Construction” notice. Their CEO assures me that their SharePoint server has been flushed to remove any cached data. I still don’t understand how text extracted from the book ended up in the source HTML for pages though!

Under Construction - some progress

I notified the people at Programming.Us that they had misused some of my content and received the response shown below. Whereas Exiis at least immediately took proactive steps to remove the content, Programming.Us didn’t seem to be the least perturbed to have been found out. I do not know who these people are but I don’t think I would ever do business with a company that exhibits such questionable business ethics.

Response from Programming.Us

Update (Saturday, 4pm): The nice people from Programming4.us replied to me to tell me how they managed to get the material from my book that appeared on their site. I am taken aback by the sheer “I don’t care” kind of attitude in the response:

“Hi,

I paid for my contributors to write the article and send it back to me, but I did not expect was that they copy from books or from internet. ”

Programming4.US never thought that their contributors might have copied stuff

I’ve asked Programming4.US to provide me with the name of their contributors. I doubt that they will give me the name but it’s worth asking. Several notes that I have from other authors indicate that this site is replete with plagiarized information taken from books and articles and indeed, I’ve been pointed to another page that these fine people lifted from my Exchange 2010 book covering the topic of unique database names.

As a reader doesn’t have to pay for the material, the Programming4.US business model must be ad-based and they are using material stolen from others to drive page views. I doubt that the advertisers who appear on this site understand the kind of business ethics favored by Programming4.US, but I doubt that they do.

On the upside, I have been in further communication with the CEO of Exiis Corporation and I believe that they have taken the appropriate steps to erase any trace of the the material from their web site. There is some doubt as to how the material turned up in the HTML source but I can certainly understand that mistakes do happen and that things do go wrong at times, especially with technology. I hope that Exiis Corporation can now put this sorry episode behind them and no further occurrence is detected.

Update (Sunday, 10am): More from Programming4.US, who seem quite unabashed about the whole situation and cheerfully reveal more about the seamy underside of knowledge acquisition. Essentially, the people who provide content for the Programming4.US site find one of the (unfortunately) many sites that hold PDF copies of technical books and grab whatever they need from content developed by others.

Programming4.US contributors grab content from PDFs

I had a look at the site in question and found copies of just about every Exchange 2010 book that I know about. Most of the download sites pointed to by the entry for my book seem to have been forced to remove the PDF due to legal action, which is good, but the problem with sites like this is that they pop up, are used for illegal downloads, and then disappear again. Of course, no one can be sure that going to one of the download sites might not cause some kind of virus or other unwanted code to be passed to a PC, so that’s just another issue.

The coordinating site appears to be based in Russia and has a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Policy notice. I have followed the instructions contained in this notice and protested the availability of my book on the site. We shall see what they say.

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Office 365 dedicated subscriptions: service descriptions available now, service in 2012

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Microsoft released the service definition documents for the dedicated versions of Office 365 on October 4, 2011. The dedicated subscription plans add to the existing range of “P” (professional and small business) and “E” (enterprise) plans that are available now.

Dedicated subscriptions are typically taken up by large companies that support more than 30,000 mailboxes (up from the 5,000 requirement in BPOS). Support, or rather the quality of support, is the big difference between running a dedicated instance of any service and taking out a subscription to a general-purpose service. A dedicated instance typically comes with the kind of hands-on customized attention from Microsoft that enterprise customers have become accustomed to and expect. The revenue associated with a dedicated instance is sufficient to warrant attention from local Microsoft management too, so any problem that occurs during a migration or during operations is usually handled with a level of local knowledge and customized attention that you simply don’t get from the phone support available to customers who purchase Microsoft’s “E” plans. And customers who buy the “P” plans (like myself) don’t get support at all, unless you consider the opportunity to consult sources such as web sites, blogs, and Twitter when things go wrong to be within the definition of “support”!

Releasing these documents allows companies who might consider a dedicated instance to begin the work to analyze their options. A lot of up-front preparatory work is usually necessary to figure out how best to perform a migration. In addition, there’s the small matter of negotiating the conditions for a dedicated subscription, including pricing, with the local Microsoft sales team, a process that invariably takes time before all the t’s are crossed and i’s dotted and the deal is signed.

Large-scale migrations don’t happen overnight and flawless hybrid co-existence is a sine que non before it can start. The release of Exchange 2010 SP2 and its hybrid co-existence wizard will make the task of setting up data sharing and mailbox moves between on-premises and cloud servers much easier. Exchange 2010 SP2 hasn’t been released yet, so that’s another item on the checklist that large companies have to wait for, plus of course the time that they’ll need to test out SP2, introduce it into production, and the configure everything to work with Office 365 – and set up Active Directory Federation Services to support single sign-on between the two environments.

All of these factors probably mean that the deployment of dedicated instances of Office 365 won’t start until sometime in 2012. BPOS customers who are champing at the bit to move to a more modern platform (and one that is hopefully more reliable) have been told to wait until Microsoft is ready to move them as there’s a lot of work to be done to smooth the passage of mailboxes, mail routing paths, and other settings from BPOS to Office 365.

In the meantime, the documents released by Microsoft indicate that they’ll have two kiosk (browser-based) and four enterprise plans for dedicated subscriptions. Details of the different variants of SharePoint Online and Lync Online can be found in the service description documents.

Table 1. Office 365 Suite Plans

Office 365Plan K1D Office 365Plan K2D Office 365Plan E1D Office 365Plan E2D Office 365Plan E3D Office 365Plan E4D
Exchange Online Kiosk D
Exchange Online Kiosk D
Exchange Online Plan 1D
Exchange Online Plan 1D
Exchange Online Plan 2D
Exchange Online Plan 2D
SharePoint Online Kiosk D
SharePoint Online Kiosk D
SharePoint Online Plan 1D
SharePoint Online Plan 1D
SharePoint Online Plan 2D
SharePoint Online Plan 2D
Office Web Apps
Lync Online Plan 2D
Lync Online Plan 2D
Lync Online Plan 2D
Lync Online Plan 3D
Office Web Apps
Office Web Apps
Office Web Apps
Office Professional Plus
Office Professional Plus

The Exchange Online variant of Office 365 comes in three flavors. The kiosk (K) plan is browser-based and replaces the old deskless worker approach taken in BPOS. Table 2 provides an overview of what you get in each plan.

Table 2. Messaging Plan Feature Overview

Features
 Exchange Online
Kiosk D1		 Exchange Online
Plan 1D		 Exchange Online
Plan 2D
Mailbox size
500 megabytes (MB)
5 gigabytes (GB)
25 GB
Access methods
HTTP (Outlook Web App with some settings disabled2), POP3**
MAPI, HTTP, Exchange ActiveSync, POP33, IMAP43
MAPI, HTTP, Exchange ActiveSync, POP33, IMAP43
Device connectivity support
Not supported
Exchange ActiveSync
BlackBerry Enterprise Server (optional)
Exchange ActiveSync
BlackBerry Enterprise Server (optional)
Service levels
99.9 percent
99.9 percent
99.9 percent
Service continuity from
full data center failure
2 hours or less recovery time objective (RTO)
2 hours or less RTO
2 hours or less RTO
Outbound fax
Not supported
Optional
Optional
Hosted voicemail
Not supported
Not supported
Supported4
1 Plan names for Exchange Online have changed under Microsoft Office 365. Kiosk D Plan was formerly Deskless Worker, Plan 1D was formerly Standard, and Plan 2D is a new plan.
2 Inbox rules, instant messaging (IM) integration, short message service (SMS) integration, and access to other mailboxes are disabled.
3 Intranet only.
4 Hosted voicemail is a Tech Preview feature for early adopter customers. During the Tech Preview, users with Exchange Online Plan 1D subscriptions can also access hosted voicemail.

Of course, these documents represent Microsoft’s thinking as of now and are subject to change. However, I think that they are an aid to planning. It also allows companies to compare and contrast the alternatives that are available from other hosting companies who are able to provide dedicated instances of Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Lync 2010 customized to your requirements. Let the fun begin!

Candidate for worthless tweet of the week (as repeated ad nausem by people who have very little of their own opinions to share): “What do Disneyland and @Office365 have in common? They are both open 365 days a year.” 

– Tony

PS. Some readers have commented on my WindowsITPro.com blog “Writing books about Microsoft technology just got a little bit harder” and asked if I plan to write any more books on Exchange. For now the answer remains maybe, just maybe…

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Gmail shows Office 365 how to meet a 99.9%+ SLA

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Tony Redmond

The really bad thing about the Office 365 outages in August and September is that the accumulated 330 minutes of downtime means that Microsoft cannot meet its published Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.9%. To their credit, Microsoft has already acknowledged that they failed to meet their SLA in August and September and compensated affected Office 365 users with a 25% credit. However, losing 330 minutes means that it is impossible for Microsoft to meet its SLA performance for the whole of 2011.

According to the SLA Calculator, the downtime permitted by a 99.9% SLA is 8h 45m annually, or 525 minutes. Office 365’s downtime is 330 minutes but that’s for just the three months since its formal launch on June 28. Thus, we can conclude that Microsoft will be unable to meet a six-month SLA of 262.5 minutes (525/2). Of course, others might well have a different interpretation and that’s the joy of figuring out just what the data really means, hence the famous remark about lies, damned lies, and statistics!

The point is that Microsoft has some work to do to restore customer confidence around the ability of Office 365 to meet its SLA (and better) over a sustained period. Meantime, over in Mountain View, Google is probably chortling into their cappuccinos because Gmail has posted sparkling numbers for 2010 and the first six months of 2011. My take on the situation is now available on WindowsITPro.com.

Have fun!

– Tony

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September 2011 wrap-up

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Lots has happened during September, much of which I have covered in other posts. This post serves as a wrap-up for other bits and pieces that I haven’t managed to get to over the month.

First, a recommendation for rugby fans. Have a look at Brendan Fanning’s WordPress blog where he’s been doing a great job providing background information about the Rugby World Cup (RWC) with a natural focus on Ireland. Brendan is a professional rugby journalist who writes for some fine newspapers and it’s great to have the colour commentary that he provides in the blog to fill out the constraints that match reports often impose for space reasons. It’s also nice to read about the hotels that Brendan has been staying in as he journeys around New Zealand as it’s always good to have recommendations for the future.

Of course, RWC has occupied many hours in September in order to keep up with all the games. It’s been worth it at times to see games such as South Africa v Wales and Ireland v Australia but I fear that there’s been too many mismatches elsewhere. Now we’re moving to the crunch time in the quarter-finals when players, coaches, backup teams, and officials really earn their crusts.

I want to give some credit to Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier, software that rescued a VMware virtual disk for one of my Exchange 2010 test servers this month. For one reason or another, probably a loose power connection that caused the server to go offline, a virtual disk had become inconsistent and naturally enough, the server failed any time it attempted to access the disk. For once, Google and Bing couldn’t find me an answer apart from suggesting that I might copy the problematic file to a host server and run Chkdsk against it. But that plan went bust when I couldn’t copy the file using normal Windows commands. Another Internet search turned up the Unstoppable Copier and it did the job, fixing errors in the .vdmk file as it copied it to another disk. I was then able to move the copied and fixed .vdmk back to its original location and VMware was happy to load it (and hasn’t failed since). I love software that just works and this program is in that category.

Speaking of software, I took the time to install the 64-bit version of the Windows 8 Developer Preview onto my faithful HP Elitebook 8530w to have a look at the new Metro interface (this article provides a good starting point while the Windows 8 Blog contains some excellent background about what the developers are attempting to do to refresh and enhance Windows).

Downloading the code from MSDN posed no problem and after burning the ISO file to a DVD the only other step I had to take before installation was to create a 25GB partition on my hard drive. Windows 8 installed without any trouble and most things seem to work. Some bugs are to be expected in anything with a “preview” label. I haven’t made my mind up about Metro but imagine that it’s a matter of getting used to it, just like it took time to jump from the Windows 3.1 interface to Windows 95 all those years ago. There’s plenty of time for Microsoft to tweak Windows 8 before it appears and I’m sure that they will receive plenty of feedback from this preview.

The Fall technology conference season will soon be upon us and I plan to be in Frankfurt for TEC Europe (Oct 17-19) and then in Las Vegas for Exchange Connections (Oct 31-Nov 3). It’s great to see that Tim McMichael of Microsoft will be giving two sessions at Exchange Connections as he is an undoubted expert in the field of Microsoft clusters and related technology, including Database Availability Groups (DAGs). If you doubt this statement, have a look at his latest blog post on collapsing DAG networks in order to optimize replication. Tim doesn’t work for the Exchange development group and his viewpoint is very practical and hands-on. His sessions should be very productive, along with other sessions on Office 365 which I am looking forward to. I believe that you can still register for these conferences should the urge take you.

Exchange Connections will be a good place to get a view on the way that the market is evolving, especially in terms of how quickly companies are moving to Office 365 (I suspect that the pace is accelerating in the SME segment and is much slower in the enterprise, if only because Office 365 for Enterprise is not yet available). There are some signs that the move to the cloud has started to affect hardware companies. For example, a recent IDC report forecasts lower server sales in the U.K. because companies don’t need to buy as much hardware (or replace existing hardware) if they start to use cloud-based services. Mind you, other reports indicate that server sales remain strong so there’s some doubt in the system or maybe the data reported by the different vendors.

Although the hardware companies will sell servers to cloud providers that revenue will not close the gap and profits will be much lower. Fewer servers will be sold and those that are sold are likely to be stripped down models built to the cloud provider’s standard rather than the full-featured models that are normally bought by IT departments. And because the cloud providers buy so much, higher discounts will be necessary to secure the business against frantic competition from other hardware vendors.

Finally, I’ve written a lot about PowerShell and its importance to Exchange during the month. There’s still more to be said on the topic and one article that caught my attention was an excellent piece by Don Jones that attempts to explain to Windows administrators just what PowerShell is and is not. Amongst his comments Don attempted to explain why PowerShell isn’t a command-line interface (CLI) because it’s really much better than that:

PowerShell isn’t a Command-Line Interface
This is kind of a secret, so don’t let on that I told you. In reality, PowerShell is a set of .NET Framework classes – an “engine,” if you will. The cmdlets you’re used to seeing are also .NET Framework classes, written to a specific standard. PowerShell’s engine instantiates those classes, and calls methods within them to make stuff happen. 

One way – just one, mind you – for you as a human being to interact with PowerShell is through a command-line interface. You type cmdlet names (e.g., instantiate classes), add parameters to them (setting properties of the class instances), and press Enter (thus calling the methods that make that class do stuff). 

I guess it’s fair to call PowerShell a CLI, since that’s it’s most visible means of interaction. But the fact that it really isn’t a CLI is kind of important to understanding why everyone is so excited about it.

The full article contains many other nuggets of useful information. Definitely worth reading. I also enjoyed Mark Minasi’s article on what he’d like to see from Windows 8 and that’s another interesting commentary to consider.

Now on to October…

– Tony

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Weekend in Connemara

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Tony Redmond

We’ve just passed a very pleasant and relaxing weekend in Connemara, my favourite place in Ireland. Oscar Wilde described Connemara as “savage”, probably due to the rock-strewn rugged landscape that creates a real challenge for farmers to scrape a living. Of course, Connemara was part of the destination that Oliver Cromwell had in mind when he dispatched the native Irish “to hell or to Connacht” during the plantations from 1650 onward, a bitter episode in Irish history that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

On a brighter note, Connemara is a much different place today. My preferred area is the triangle of Roundstone – Ballyconneely – Clifden, which is where my family has been coming for vacations since the 1970s. Good habits die hard.

Roundstone harbour with the Twelve Bens in the background

Roundstone is a small fishing village that has expanded greatly in the last twenty years or so through the construction of many holiday apartments and houses surrounding the core of the village. This location has been extensively blogged about by fishing sites like https://www.reelchase.com, so you can get a sneak peak without going. Even so, Roundstone retains a lot of its charm and is a pleasant place to halt for a coffee. The Sunstone cafe is a good place to stop.

The road from Roundstone to Ballyconneely passes some bays fringed by white sand beaches and headlands that serve as great locations for walks. Gorteen and Dog’s Bay are the two most famous of the places to stop to explore.

A nice day on Dog’s Bay

On a nice day there’s nowhere nicer to enjoy a bracing walk than to stroll down from the car park at Dog’s Bay and move around the headland to the rocks that fringe the Atlantic. Then again, the walk can be pretty miserable on a typical Connemara day when the rain blows in from the west and is persistent enough to penetrate all but the best all-weather clothes. But on a positive note, the weather last Sunday was bright and clear and the wind, while always present, didn’t chill to the bone.

The village of Ballyconneely isn’t much to write home about. Blink and you’d miss it in passing. However, the real value is not in visiting the pub, church, and post office that collectively make up the village. It is the surrounding countryside and the sparkling beaches that line the bays that provide the compelling desire to return to this region time after time.

Boat at a small pier close to Bunowen, Connemara

My favourite walk is from the beach at Ailebrack to Bunowen before looping back towards the golf club and Ailebrack. It’s roughly 6km, give or take a kilometre depending on where you start and the walk brings you from sandy beach over grassy commonage past small inlets to beach again before turning to walk to the memorial to the B-24 crew that was rescued in 1944 when they crash-landed en route from the U.S. to Iceland. From there it’s another 1.6km back to Ailebrack passing the 6th hole of Connemara Golf Club. I used to play there as a teenager but lost a lot of desire to play golf due to my inability to hit straight and the grasping nature of the rough that hid any mishit ball against the frantic searches of its owner.

There’s much more to see in Connemara than the brief glimpse described here. North of Clifden you’ll find Cleggan and the boat ride out to Inisboffin and then further north to Killary, Leenane, and Renvyle up to the Mayo border. South there’s the Gaeltacht around around Carna and Carraroe. To the east you’ll find Maam and Recess, all worth exploring. But to the west, at least from Ballyconneely, there is nothing but the Atlantic Ocean.

Connemara is more than a place. It’s also a state of mind. Stress is almost guaranteed to depart during a stay here, which is of course the major reason why I keep on coming back. There’s nothing like having the mind blow through the rattling spaces of your brain to clear things out and make all clear again!

– Tony

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