In visiting with customers, a common misconception that I have encountered is with the understanding of how Single Instance Store (SIS) works in Exchange 2007. Unlike Exchange 2003, SIS is only used to reduce the size of the database when an attachment is sent to two or more users that share the same database. To illustrate this, I have setup my lab to send large attachments to several users, exported the attachments to a PST file, and then imported the attachments back into the database. Note:... [More]

I have recently had a few customers who are focusing on a consolidation or ‘modernization’ of their directory services infrastructure, including delegation models.  A big part of this adjustment is the consolidation or restructuring of OUs.  Then the question becomes, “How do we approach this?”  The following is not meant to be a comprehensive solution but rather a high-level introduction to the migration considerations and approach. Background In Active Directory, organizatio... [More]

I had a customer request to disable ActiveSync for all Exchange 2007 users and only allow active sync when an administrator enables the feature for a specific user. Below are the steps I developed to determine the devices that are enabled and how to disable ActiveSync for accounts with no devices paired with the mailbox. To automate the process, all you need to do is create a scheduled task on one of the Exchange servers to run daily. Happy Exchanging!!!! 1. We want to run this command to get ... [More]

The following is a checklist that I have started to develop in support of some of my customers which are considering whether to continue with on-premise services or to move to a private- or public-cloud. It’s a work in progress so if you have any suggestions, please feel free to add on. Topic Definition Public Cloud Private Cloud On Premises ... [More]

I was onsite with a customer recently troubleshooting a mail routing issue when an email message was sent to a large distribution group (150,000+ members) which had many nested groups. After we resolved the issue, a conversation was started about converting this large distribution group into a dynamic distribution group (DDG). Admittedly, I had very limited experience with DDGs. I decided to engage some of my peers at Microsoft who had experience deploying and supporting DDGs for customers of va... [More]

Hello all.  Eric here again.  OK, so maybe the title of this blog post isn’t the best, primarily because there could be a ton of reasons why some DC’s might not be able to sync time with the PDCE.  Some obvious examples would be port blockages, connectivity issues, DC’s set to “NoSync”, VM’s syncing to their host, maybe a broken IPSec policy on the DC, and a lot of other reasons.  I ran into what I thought was an interesting scenario today ... [More]

Greetings All. Eric here again. Recently I was doing an ADRAP remediation and one of the High Risk findings that the tool found was "Multiple Copies of a Primary zone Stored in Different Locations". In this environment all of the DC's were Windows Server 2008 R2. I've seen this finding on the ADRAP report a number of other times where the same zone was in the ForestDNSZones, DomainDNSZones, and Domain partitions, among other file based zones across different DC's all at the same time in some pre... [More]