Exchange

If you are deploying Exchange Server 2010 in an environment with load balancers or firewalls which aren’t able to handle dynamic RPC port ranges, you’ll need to define static ports for the RPC Client Access Service and the Address Book Service on each CAS server. If you are using Public Folders, you’ll also need a third static port on the Mailbox servers hosting Public Folders.

This post includes a script that configures the RPC Client Access service and Address Book service to use static ports. Run this script on each CAS server to configure the services. Finally, on each mailbox server, configure the registry value listed at the bottom of the post.

The Exchange Online service in Office 365 as exposes a variant of the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) that you would normally use if you were managing an on-premises Exchange organization. Connecting to the Exchange Online EMS requires a few tedious but well documented steps.

Rather than manually running these steps each time you need to connect, the samples in this post show how you can add a quick shortcut to your Windows PowerShell profile to connect to the Exchange Online EMS.

This is part one of a three part series on configuring the Dell/Quest Free/Busy Connector for Lotus Notes. The Connector is part of Coexistence Manager for Exchange (CMN). In this post, we'll discuss how the connector works and examine the interface with Exchange. Next, we'll configure the Dell/Quest Web Services and the Domino Free Busy Connector Service. Future posts in this series will discuss configuring the remaining components of the connector.

This is part two of a three part series on configuring the Dell/Quest Free/Busy Connector for Lotus Notes. In Part 1 we took at look at the architecture of the Quest Free/Busy (F/B) Connector in Coexistence Manager for Notes (CMN) as well as how Exchange interfaces with it. We also configured the F/B Connector web services and the Domino Free Busy Connector Service. In this post, we’ll configure the Exchange Free Busy Connector Service, the Domino QCALCON task, and the Exchange organization.

This is part three of a three part series on configuring the Dell/Quest Free/Busy Connector for Lotus Notes. In Part 1 we took at look at the architecture of the Quest Free/Busy (F/B) Connector in Coexistence Manager for Notes (CMN) as well as how Exchange interfaces with it. We also configured the F/B Connector web services and the Domino Free Busy Connector Service. In Part 2, we configured the Exchange Free Busy Connector Service, the Domino QCALCON task, and the Exchange organization. In this post, we’ll complete the configuration by configuring Lotus Notes as well as building a test user in Exchange and Lotus Notes to validate the configuration.

Prior to Exchange 2007, Exchange stored F/B information in Public Folders, and Outlook clients knew where to go in the Public Folder store to find the data. With the desire to move away from Public Folders, this information became available via Exchange Web Services (EWS), also sometimes called the Availability Service (AS). This is a SOAP based web service hosted on the CAS server and accessible via HTTPS. Outlook 2007 and newer knows how to access this endpoint as does Outlook for Mac and various other EWS clients. Exchange 2007 also introduced the ability to provide a means for cross-organization F/B info without any complex public folder replication. The way this works is you define an “availability address space” in Exchange which tells Exchange for a given subdomain, send those F/B requests over to a different AS endpoint. This is a very common scenario particularly with mergers and acquisitions. Let’s consider one such scenario and see how to set this up (as well as how it works).

In…

I thought it would be useful to give a quick overview of the coexistence and migration components of a Lotus Notes to Exchange migration as well as a couple links I’ve come across that are pretty useful. I’ll put some info on configuring the various coexistence pieces in a separate series of posts later. First, two excellent resources if you’re just getting started with Notes:

• http://www.slideshare.net/NerdGirlJess/jmp105-how-stuff-works-domino-style
• http://www.slideshare.net/NerdGirlJess/bp108-admin-for-the-developer-install

Here’s my three part series on configuring the Free/Busy Connector:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

My assumption if you’re reading this is that you’re familiar with Exchange but not with Lotus Notes. It’s very helpful to have skilled and knowledgeable Lotus administrators at your disposal. With that in mind, I’ll do what I can to help you navigate the components of Lotus Notes that are going to be relevant. The first thing you’re going to need is a copy of the Domino Administrator a…

There are a litany of issues that will cause Exchange setup to fail when you try to uninstall an Exchange server. It’s really tempting to just skip the uninstall and go delete the server entry from AD using something like ADSI Edit, but, you’re always better off just fixing the problem. Michael B. Smith has a good review of these, however I thought I’d touch on one more, specifically the error "One or more users currently use a mailbox store on this server". This can be really frustrating, especially when you’ve checked each mailbox store for mailboxes and done a search using AD Users and Computers for mailboxes on that server and turned up nothing. Exchange setup is doing a search of AD for users who have a msExchHomeServerName value which is equal to the legacyExchangeDN of the server you’re trying to remove.

There’s a handy KB article, 924170, which suggests a mechanism to find the problem users, but, my experience tonight is that the directions don’t really actually work. The good news this is really eas…

Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 have no problem with users (or groups and contacts) which have a space in their mailNickname attribute. Unfortunately if you try to work with one of these users using Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010, the PowerShell cmdlets will throw a validation error similar to the following:

Property expression "John Doe" isn't valid. Valid values are: Strings formed with characters from A to Z (uppercase or lowercase), digits from 0 to 9, !, #, $, %, &, ', *, +, -, /, =, ?, ^, _, `, {, |, } or ~. One or more periods may be embedded in an alias, but each period should be preceded and followed by at least one of the other characters. Unicode characters from U+00A1 to U+00FF are also valid in an alias, but they will be mapped to a best-fit US-ASCII string in the e-mail address, which is generated from such an alias.
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (brianlab.local...Doe, John:ADObjectId) [Update-Recipient], DataValidationException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : 385167D4,Microsoft…

If your end users are using Exchange Server 2010 OWA, one of the things they can now do is track their messages from the Exchange Control Panel and see largely the same data an administrator sees. What isn’t enabled by default is the ability to delegate this on an organization wide basis via the Exchange Control Panel. There is a duplicate of this interface which lets a user search the entire organization’s message tracking logs. In order to access this, you need to do a couple of things:

1. Create an Active Directory security group to delegate the rights to in RBAC
2. Create a new Management Role Assignment for the Message Tracking role
3. Create a new Management Role Assignment for the View-Only Recipients role

I went ahead and created a group called “Exchange Message Tracking Access” and added my account to it. Next, I ran the following PowerShell command:

New-ManagementRoleAssignment -Role "Message Tracking" -SecurityGroup "Exchange Message Tracking Access"
New-ManagementRoleAssignment -Role "View-Only R…