Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

  • Extracting the Exchange 2010 version number for a server

    I was asked me the other day what the best method is to retrieve information about the build version for Exchange 2010 that’s installed on a server. There are two ways of approaching the problem. You can either fetch the information that’s stored on the server itself or you can…

  • Why bother with Outlook 2003?

    When Microsoft released Outlook 2003 in October 2003 (The history of Outlook is a good link to the history of Outlook), it marked several breakthroughs for Exchange clients. First, Outlook 2003 introduced RPC over HTTP and laid the foundation of the access enjoyed by many users enjoy as they connect…

  • SharePoint 2010 for Dummies – that must be for me!

    The redoubtable team of Kevin Laahs, Emer McKenna, and Veli-Matti Vanamo have gotten into the saddle once again to produce SharePoint 2010 All-in-One For Dummies (also available from Amazon.co.uk). The book is scheduled for publication on 4 November 2010 so treat this as advance notice together with some background. This eclectic combination…

  • Making client connection settings available to ECP

    The “Account Information” page of the Exchange Control Panel (ECP) contains a pointer to “Settings for POP, IMAP, and SMTP access…” The intention is to provide users with the information that they need to input into clients that use these protocols so that they can connect to Exchange. Users need…

  • The remarkable disconnect between Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2007

    *** See note about December 2010 cumulative update for Office 2007 at the end of this post. The recent release of Exchange 2010 SP1 is good news for the Exchange community because it improves the overall quality of the product and introduces some new features such as block-level replication within…

  • Auto-tagging in Exchange 2010

    Exchange 2010 includes the ability for administrators to define retention policies to control how long items are allowed to remain inside user mailboxes before Exchange will automatically take action to move or remove the items. A retention policy is composed of a set of retention tags that can apply to…

  • The meaning of events 4113 and 4114 to Exchange 2010 SP1

    One of the lesser discussed updates included in Exchange 2010 SP1 is the addition of database redundancy monitoring by the Microsoft Exchange Replication service. This occurs for databases that are in a Database Availability Group (DAG) and is intended to ensure that each replicated database has sufficient healthy copies to…

  • Exchange 2010 SP1 reaches RTM status

    Microsoft declared that Exchange 2010 SP1 had attained a sufficiently high standard of code and features to warrant release to manufacturing (RTM) on Monday, August 23. This decision was reached by the development team “war room” after the customers who participated in the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) provided their votes…

  • On Abbey Island

    Unlike the impression that many have of Irish people, I have never spent much time getting to know the Ring of Kerry. In fact, I’ve always regarded it as a route much beloved of tourists and therefore cluttered with tourist buses or – perhaps even worse – tourists driving hire…

  • Freeing up disk space after Exchange 2010 installations

    If the disk where you installed the Exchange 2010 binaries seems a little clogged after the installation, you can relieve some of the pressure by cleaning up files that the Exchange 2010 installation leaves behind after it’s complete. The installation process should really clean up better after itself but it…