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]

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]

Since Exchange 2007 was released and carrying on with Exchange 2010 part of the installation process is running setup commands /pl, /p, /ps, and /pd (more information here). Even during service pack upgrades some of the setup commands are needed. During each setup command an ExBPA pre-check is ran before making any changes to the infrastructure to ensure the environment is ready for the new version of Exchange. A common problem that I have noticed over the years is that when pre-check fail, for ... [More]

This is post 3 in a series of 3 Exchange mini health assessment posts. The CAS role mini heath check post can be found here. The HUB mini health assessment post can be found here. The third PS1 script is a limited health assessment for the Mailbox role. The script runs through 4 functional areas:  core Exchange service status, Test mail flow, MAPI connectivity, and ExBPA (errors are exported to the report and warnings are displayed on screen). Once the data is collected, the results are ex... [More]

This is post 2 in a series of 3 Exchange mini health assessment posts. The CAS role mini heath check post can be found here. The Mailbox mini health assessment post can be found here. This script provides a limited health assessment for the HUB Transport role. The script runs through 3 functional areas:  core Exchange service status, Edge Sync Heath, and ExBPA (errors are exported to the report and warnings are displayed on screen). Once the data is collected, the results are exported to a... [More]

Part 2 of a 2 part post. Part 1 provides a background for Virtual List View (VLV) and the impact on Exchange of disabling this functionality. In this part we’re going to look at some examples of error messages which will be returned from ExBPA and OWA when VLV is disabled. Test Environment 2 – 2003R2 SP2 dcs 2 – Exchange 2003 – Windows 2003 1 – CCR Windows 2008 2 – HUB\CAS Windows 2008 Outlook 2003 SP2 Outlook 2007 All Outlook clients are in online mode The environme... [More]