Windows Server 8, Exchange, and Digital Command Language

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Tony Redmond

The IT industry has a habit of refreshing itself by reusing ideas from the past. The recent news that Windows Server 8 will boast a much-enhanced array of PowerShell cmdlets and the ability to log onto servers via the web with PowerShell Web Access brought a number of thoughts to mind (read my WindowsITPro.com blog for more on this topic).

First, Windows is becoming more and more like great mainframe and minicomputer operating systems such as OpenVMS (my personal favorite, but I acknowledge my bias) by discarding the PC-like requirement for administrators to physically log onto servers to perform management tasks through a GUI. I include RDP access in this comment because RDP is just a remote GUI session to a server.

Second, it’s taken a while for Windows to fully embrace PowerShell but it now seems that we’re getting there with Windows Server 8. PowerShell has been around since 2006 or thereabouts but Windows seemed reluctant to generate the modules and cmdlets that administrators needed to perform basic management. For example, it took several years before basic Active Directory management could be done through PowerShell. Exchange 2007 was the first major server product to support PowerShell. Some queried the wisdom of this decision but its sagacity has been proven many times since.

Exchange 2010 went further with the implementation of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to determine what cmdlets and cmdlet parameters are available to users according to their membership of role groups. RBAC is linked to channeling PowerShell sessions via IIS in the implementation of Remote PowerShell to remove the need to log-on to a physical server. This is huge both in terms of enabling management of tenant domains in Office 365 and setting out work that Windows has built on in Windows Server 8.

Third, even after two versions and some five years of PowerShell support in Exchange, it seems that some administrators still don’t consider PowerShell (or more correctly, the Exchange Management Shell) to be worthy of their time. Perhaps it’s because they think that the GUI tools are sufficient for the task; perhaps it’s because they don’t have the time to get to know PowerShell; or maybe it’s just because they don’t care to get to grips with a command-line language whose syntax smacks suspiciously of Linux or UNIX.

The good news for those folks is that while PowerShell’s syntax is a little quirky at times, it’s relatively easy to get to know. Anyone who can write BASIC (showing my age, VAX BASIC and VAX COBOL were the two programming languages that I used most) can write PowerShell scripts, even ones that work. And casting back to my remark at the start of this piece, anyone who thinks that fantastic things can’t be done with scripting languages has obviously never looked at some of the incredible scripts that folks are writing today. But this has always been so as UNIX and Linux servers were always managed with scripts and OpenVMS had DCL, the Digital Command Language.

The highlight of DCL was VMSINSTAL.COM, the standard product installer for OpenVMS systems. VMSINSTAL was huge, complicated, and worked very well. Its major developer was Paul Anagnostopoulos, who wrote a great book called Writing Real Programs in DCL. If you ever explored the depths of VMSINSTAL or read Paul’s book, you quickly understood the amazing things that could be done with a scripting language.

Things haven’t changed much since I first encountered VMSINSTAL in 1985 or thereabouts. We have new technology of course and that technology is more complicated and complex than its predecessors. But the need for system administrators to automate common tasks through scripts (or equivalents) still exists and that’s why I am so glad to hear that Windows Server 8 will, at last, fully embrace its own scripting language.

– Tony

Posted in Active Directory, Exchange 2010, Office 365 | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

PowerShell books for Exchange Administrators

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Following my post on why I think every Exchange administrator needs to know PowerShell, I was challenged to say what books someone should read to get up to speed on the topic. So here goes (click here to see my list of good technical books to read).

To begin, the fundamentals of PowerShell itself including command syntax and how to work with scripts are well covered in Windows PowerShell Cookbook: The Complete Guide to Scripting Microsoft’s New Command Shell or Windows PowerShell in Action, Second Edition  (the first edition of this book was what I used to learn PowerShell originally, way back when it was known as “Monad”). I also think that Windows PowerShell 2.0 delivers a lot of value. Any of these books will serve well as a starting point for your journey.

Moving to Exchange 2010, the best recommendation that I can give is to get a copy of Microsoft Exchange 2010 PowerShell Cookbook by Mike Pfeiffer. Mike is an Exchange MVP who has made many contributions to the Exchange community with well-written scripts and other snippets of PowerShell code, so it comes as no surprise that his book would be equally valuable. Remember that Exchange 2010 provides the essential underpinning for Exchange Online in Office 365, so a lot of what you will learn from this book can be applied in an Office 365 environment.

There’s a world of difference in PowerShell between Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 because of the expansion in cmdlets and the introduction of Remote PowerShell. However, if you need an Exchange 2007 PowerShell book, you could consider Professional Windows PowerShell for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (Programmer to Programmer) as it’s probably the best in the field.

Hopefully this answers the question!

– Tony

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

Why Exchange Online Administrators need to understand PowerShell

Posted on September 17, 2011 by Tony Redmond

In my recent review of the free Microsoft Press ebook “Microsoft Office 365: Connect and collaborate virtually anywhere, anytime”, I concluded that the book was a curate’s egg for Exchange administrators. I’m not sure if the analogy worked for readers outside Ireland and the U.K., so in the spirit of clarity, I should specify that a curate’s egg is good in parts and that’s just what I thought about the ebook: it was good in parts. Some explanation is required.

Before starting, let me be clear that I write from the perspective of an Exchange administrator who’s attempting to get to grips with Office 365. Those who simply want to understand Office 365 and gain a broad overview of what capabilities exist in Microsoft’s cloud service will be satisfied by the depth and breadth of the information presented in the ebook because it lays out the basic functionality of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online and explains how to start off an Office 365 deployment. So good so far.

The issue is that the book rapidly becomes unsatisfying for Exchange administrators. This is probably not a problem for the author or the majority of the book’s readers because I very much doubt that it was written to tell Exchange administrators the finder points of the deployment and management of Exchange Online. However, the book does excellent service by illustrating that there is much more work to be done in Exchange Online deployments than you might think – unless, like me, you only have to manage Office 365 for a couple of users and therefore spend no more than a couple of seconds daily thinking about the task.

It’s true that a good portion of companies that will migrate to Office 365 will be small enough to be able to take the “big-bang” approach to move overnight. These companies probably won’t need to do a lot of administrative work once they are operational on Office 365. The companies that I think need to do more work are those who have more than a few hundred users to migrate or those that will run a hybrid environment with some mailboxes remaining on-premises. Administrators in these companies should not assume that they can approach Exchange Online in a state of blissful ignorance. They will need to upskill themselves to understand how Exchange 2010 works because they will use many of the Exchange 2010 administrative tools to get work done. And in a hybrid environment, we’re probably talking about Exchange 2010 SP2 as it contains some new features that enable better interoperability with the cloud.

The knowledge gap will be highest for Exchange 2003 administrators as those who run Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010 today will already have some awareness of PowerShell, and PowerShell is the key element in the equation because it allows Office 365 administrators to penetrate past the limitations presented in the GUI tools such as the Exchange Management Console (EMC) or Exchange Control Panel (ECP).

The key fact to remember here is that all of the Exchange management tools are built on a common layer represented by PowerShell cmdlets. Anytime code is run by EMC or ECP it calls cmdlets, so if you understand the cmdlets and their parameters, it therefore follows that you’ll be able to use them to do useful work. By their very nature, all GUI tools are limited by the imagination of their developers and access to PowerShell allows administrators to bypass those limitations and build their own tools to meet specific requirements.

So getting to know how to connect to Office 365 with Remote PowerShell is an important thing for an Exchange Online administrator to know (Brian Desmond has posted a good tip about adding the connection to your PowerShell profile). Becoming familiar with the environment that is accessed thereafter and knowing the cmdlets and their parameters is equally important. Finally, you need to understand the limitations of the environment presented to PowerShell when you connect to Office 365 because it is emphatically not the same as Exchange 2010. Many cmdlets available to an administrator in Exchange 2010 are not exposed by Office 365 because the functionality available through those cmdlets are reserved for the Microsoft administrators who take care of Office 365. Nevertheless, more than enough cmdlets are present to use useful work – or enough to be dangerous because the execution of any PowerShell cmdlet occurs without benefit of the protection afforded by the safeguards incorporated into GUI tools.

I cheerfully accept the need to be careful when managing Exchange through PowerShell because of the flexibility and functionality that this method enables. Novice PowerShell administrators, especially those coming from Exchange 2003, need to get up to speed with PowerShell and understand the basics of how to manage mailboxes, servers, and the other Exchange objects before they plunge into Office 365 as I very much doubt that the Office 365 support line will be sympathetic if you report that you’ve just blown away something important because you made a mistake and ran a cmdlet that you shouldn’t have. Such is life.

My recommendation to Exchange administrators who are considering Office 365 is two-fold. First. read the ebook to get a broad overview of what’s possible with Office 365. The best part of the book are the chapters that deal with SharePoint Online and Lync Online, so they will serve to increase knowledge and point to how Office 365 can deliver much more value apart from email. Second, get hold of some good Exchange 2010 books and read up on how components such as EMS, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and ECP work. You’ll definitely need to understand these components to work successfully with Remote PowerShell. And when you do, you’ll discover that Office 365 is more powerful and flexible than you imagined – that’s got to be a good thing!

– Tony

If you’re looking for an Exchange 2010 book that deals in depth with the components discussed in this post, please consider Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out, also available at Amazon.co.uk. The book is also available in a Kindle edition. Other e-book formats for the book are available from the O’Reilly web site. Alternatively, you could come along to our Exchange 2010 Maestro training in Greenwich, CT next month and really get an insight into how these pieces work together to manage Exchange 2010.

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

Some light appears at the end of the tunnel in the strange case of Exchange, IE9, and MMC

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Tony Redmond

There’s been lots of debate about the issue that appears on computers running the Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010 management console (EMC) after the installation of IE9.  The symptoms are described in the EHLO post of 9 September. Interestingly, the problem doesn’t appear on every computer, a point that has been strongly made by Microsoft representatives in debates on various mailing lists. However, the facts are that the problem does appear on many computers and that Microsoft hasn’t done a sparkling job of managing the situation. In a nutshell, Microsoft failed to detect that this was a problem that affected many people and needed to be fixed and then compounded the issue through interminable internal discussions between the engineering groups responsible for Internet Explorer (IE), the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), and Exchange.

At last it seems that IE has accepted that the problem lies in their code and that the Exchange and IE teams are now working to come up with a solution. I’ve debated the issue at length with various people in Microsoft, including some of their senior management, and my overall assessment of the situation is available at WindowsITPro.com.

Despite recent hiccups on the quality front, I don’t think that Exchange has a systematic or enduring quality problem. Nor do I think that they have a communications problem, if only because of the frequent updates that are rich in content that get posted to EHLO. This situation seems to be one of those that fell between the cracks that can sometimes appear in very large organizations, especially when it’s in a component that is shared across products.

Although Microsoft might portrait itself as a company that marches to a single beat, in reality all of the different parts such as the engineering groups function inside an ecosystem that is both competitive and subject to stress. For example, all groups have to meet ship dates at certain quality standards and fixing their own bugs to allow products to ship on time at the right level of quality creates a fair amount of pressure. I think that the IE9-MMC-Exchange bug has exposed some weakness that Microsoft management is all too aware of now. Let’s hope that they pay more attention to problems that arise in shared code in the future!

– Tony

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

Creaking Office 365 infrastructure caused by Microsoft success?

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Last April I was in sunny Las Vegas for “The Experts Conference” (TEC). While there, I reported on a keynote given by Kevin Allison, the General Manager for Exchange Customer Experience. Kevin discussed the challenges of developing a single product that has to function well both on-premises and in the cloud and also referred to the issues that Microsoft faced to build out and maintain the infrastructure that supports Exchange Online.

The problems recently suffered by Office 365 brought Kevin’s remarks to my mind and a suspicion, possibly totally unfounded, has formed that issues such as not ensuring that network components have sufficient redundancy or messing up a DNS configuration might well be symptoms of an infrastructure that is struggling to cope with success. There’s no doubt that hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of mailboxes have migrated to Exchange Online since Microsoft launched Office 365 formally on June 28. And when you think about it, handling success like that can’t be easy… and the rebalancing of mailboxes across databases to ensure consistent load must be hellish.

So I’ve written a piece for WindowsITPro.com to reflect on the matter. See what you think…

– Tony

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

Bad week for cloud services, but at least RWC 2011 has started!

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Tony Redmond

It hasn’t been a great week all round for cloud services. On Wednesday, Google Docs had an outage that lasted anything from 30 minutes to an hour, frustrating users who couldn’t do any work because all their data was “in the cloud”. The need for offline access for Google Docs was underlined and I hope that Google deliver on their plans to deliver this capability soon. My take on the two outages is reported on WindowsITPro.com.

Amusingly some folks who monitored the Twitter feed about the Office 365 outage suggested that customers consider IBM’s cloud equivalent, LotusLive. Based on the recent experiences of Microsoft and Google, one wonders when IBM is due to have a major outage for its cloud services. Talk about tempting fate!

On another note, it’s great to see the Rugby World Cup (RWC) begin in New Zealand. I thought that George Clancy refereed the opening game very well and on a professional note, the two TMO calls were easy enough. The first was the more difficult as the question was whether the trailing boot had hit the touch line before the ball was grounded. Good high-definition TV delivered all the necessary visual evidence. The second call was resolved by an excellent angle from a camera on the left-hand touch line that clearly showed the Tongan grounding.

The last try gave NZ some relief as they probably wouldn’t have been too happy with a scoreline of 34-10 given the excellent start made by the All Blacks. 41-10 reflected a good second half by Tonga that gives them some hope for the remainder of RWC. Now we wait for Sunday when Ireland take on USA!

– Tony

Posted in Cloud, Email, Office 365 | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Be careful when you use BCCs

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Tony Redmond

I’ve just posted a mea cupla to WindowsITPro.com describing a recent embarrassing situation that I caused for myself by copying someone as a BCC recipient on a note sent to a confidential distribution list. That person then promptly sent a note to the distribution list and exposed the fact that they now knew about the existence of the list. Cue major uproar and a red face for me.

I feel bad about the whole situation, especially for the people who own the distribution list whose confidence I (somewhat) betrayed. My thoughts about the person who sent the note were probably darker, but I guess they believed that they thought that they were doing the right thing. In any case, my tale of woe is a caution to all that you should only BCC someone on email if you are sure that they’ll use the information contained in messages properly – and that they won’t drop you in the brown smelly stuff that emits from bovines.

– Tony

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Have hosting companies a future competing against Office 365?

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Microsoft has a habit of introducing products that suddenly set a new price point for a market. The best example I can offer is SharePoint 2001. Prior to its launch, products that allowed enterprises to build portals that allowed users to search document libraries were very expensive and usually complex to set up and manage. Although Microsoft positioned SharePoint 2001 as a “departmental” product, largely because it didn’t offer any real management interfaces and had problems scaling to deal with the requirements of very large enterprises, there was enough power and promise in SharePoint 2001 to make it a strong competitor immediately. And even better, its price point was in the low thousands of dollars at a time when CIOs were accustomed to writing large checks in the hundreds of thousands for other products. SharePoint subsequently became one of Microsoft’s most successful products and was the fastest product to make it to one billion dollars of license sales.

Moving forward to today, Office 365 is likely to cause the same disruption in the hosting market. For $6/month (in the U.S.), you can buy a subscription for a single user who can use Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online. Other plans offer increasing levels of functionality and are priced up to $27/month. But even the $6 plan P1 includes a 25GB mailbox.

Of course, Microsoft did not invent the hosting market and around the world there are many companies who have done an excellent job of offering hosted Exchange and SharePoint (in particular). They’ve solved some of the engineering difficulties inherent in basing a hosted service on software that was designed for traditional on-premises deployments and built out their own automation, support, provisioning, and billing platforms to serve customers. All-in-all, they’ve done a great job.

But the advent of Office 365 has changed the world. Quite apart from the pricing pressure and the need to compete against Microsoft’s marketing and sales legions, hosting companies have to prove to customer CIOs that they can do a much better job. The future is bleak if they can’t demonstrate compelling reasons for going with a third party rather than taking the simple option of signing up for Office 365.

I’ve been thinking about what hosting companies can do to resist the Office 365 tsunami and posted some thoughts on the matter on WindowsITPro.com. As always, I’m interested in what others have to say on the topic. Let the debate begin – and let’s hope that competition spurs innovation that we can all benefit from.

– Tony

Posted in Cloud, Email, Office 365 | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

I never knew that my thoughts on Exchange and Office 365 were quite so fluent in German

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Tony Redmond

The nice people from Quest have been kind enough to invite me to give a keynote at the European edition of “The Experts Conference” (TEC), which is scheduled for October 17-19 in Frankfurt.

As part of the event, they asked me to interview with a German magazine called NT4Admins (you can see from the title that this magazine has been around for a while). Appropriately (at least for me), the interview was conducted by email and has now been published on the magazine’s web site. I’m impressed that my thoughts are expressed so lucidly in German. Mind you, as I don’t speak German at all save a few common words, it’s easy to impress me!

My German readers might like to have a look at the interview and see what they think. And if you’re interested in TEC Europe, you should sign up soon and come along for what I think will be a very interesting conference in October.

– Tony

For those who don’t speak German, here’s my reply in English to the questions posted by NT4Admins. If you’re really into the topic, you can compare the German translation on the site with the text below. Suffice to say that the translation offered by Chrome was “interesting” at times.

Many companies have Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 running in their it environment. If they have to upgrade  there are some options: Go with Windows 2008 Server R2 and Exchange 2010 (SP1) or just use Office 365. What can You recommend for small, medium and larger enterprises?

I think that there are two very different groups of customers here. Those who run Exchange 2003 should look at Office 365 (or another hosting provider) very seriously because it will be easier for them to move to the cloud than to deploy Exchange 2010. Most small to medium companies don’t see email as a core competence and should be able to get a better service from a hosting provider than they can provide themselves. Of course, there are exceptions that prove the rule, especially for companies who don’t trust the cloud or have some other solid reason for wanting to keep email on-premises, but I think that moving to a utility service simply makes sense for many of the small to medium companies who run Exchange 2003 today.

Companies that run Exchange 2007 are in a different category. First, they aren’t under the same pressure to migrate because Microsoft will still support Exchange 2007 for a number of years yet. Second, they have already gone through the architectural changes experienced during migrations from Exchange 2003 and will therefore find it much easier to move to Exchange 2010. Third, they are probably using hardware that is relatively new and doesn’t need to be replaced. For these reasons, I think that fewer of these companies will move to Office 365.

Large enterprises are in a different space because their requirements for email are often more complex than can be delivered by a utility cloud-based service. In addition, Microsoft won’t offer dedicated instances of Office 365 that permit more customization until next year at the earliest, so while their complexity requires more time to plan for any migration, these companies have the time to figure out what they should do and can wait until they see what Microsoft delivers for a dedicated Office 365 service.

If companies are thinking about a hybrid solution – run a part of the Exchange mailboxes on premise and the other part as a Office 365 solution: What implications will hurt the IT pros ?

I don’t think anything about a hybrid solution will hurt IT pros. After all, by definition a hybrid solution is more complex because it uses both on-premises and cloud components. IT pros have to synchronize those components to deliver a seamless service to users so there’s work to be done there. On the other hand, moving some of the load to the cloud should free up time to allow that work to be done.

The decision “use Cloud Services” or “run Exchange 2010 on premise” will be driven by the cost of operation for the solution. How can 3rdparty tools help the “on premise guys” to run their Exchange environment in a more efficient way?

First of all I’ve got to comment that the cost equation is very much more complex than the simplistic view of cost per mailbox per month. Many other costs surround email including network, hardware, storage, people, third party software, and so on. Anyone who considers a move to the cloud has to understand the full cost picture first to know where they might save and where they will have to spend more money. For example, the network infrastructure used in most companies is inward-facing because that’s how users access services. As you move applications to the cloud the focus switches somewhat as a lot more traffic now flows across Internet connections so the network infrastructure has to be adjusted to reflect this tact. In addition, monitoring, support, and SLA measurement take more effort, all of which will cost.

I see opportunity for third-party software vendors to help companies who use cloud, on-premises, and hybrid Exchange environments to run their operations more smoothly and effectively than is possible with out-of-the-box tools. This means that the third-party software vendors have to be constantly looking for where they can close gaps in Microsoft’s toolset. However, it’s always been the case that third parties have to stay at least one step ahead of Microsoft for customers to want to buy their products so there is little change here.

Concerning storage for Exchange 2010 (SP1): Are there any new ideas useful: Microsoft has focused again on direct attached storage for Exchange (are there no more SAN necessary?). And how can SSDs help to increase the real data throughput on the different roles of Exchange 2010 server?

SANs are still valuable, especially when a company takes a storage-centric approach to its architecture and uses shared storage to host multiple applications. Exchange’s focus on direct attached storage is good news because it allows customers more choice in the kind of storage solutions that they can select as well as forcing down the cost of storage for Exchange. However, that’s not a good reason to scrap a SAN if that SAN is in place, delivers the right performance, and is an asset from which the company needs to get a return. SSDs are clearly fast but they are still very expensive. I haven’t seen any data that shows that companies can get much advantage from using SSDs to host any of the Exchange server roles. Over time, as SSDs become denser and prices decrease that equation will probably change but we are not at that point now.

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

Offline Gmail returns but doesn’t make Microsoft quiver (too much)

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Yesterday Google relaunched offline access for Gmail, Calendar, and Docs. The new HTML5-based capability replaces the previous functionality built using Google Gears. Gmail is the first application to get an upgrade in the form of a Chrome application that can be launched using a new tab within the Chrome browser (no other browsers need apply). My conclusions on the topic can be read in a new post on WindowsITPro.com.

Essentially, although I like seeing the offline capability returning to Gmail and will use it, I still despair at the inability of Google to create a really good email and calendar client that will threaten the dominance of Outlook and force Microsoft to innovate faster. Oh well… see what you think and feel free to disagree!

– Tony

Posted in Email, Technology | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment