Category Archives: Exchange Server

Office 365 – Bulk Assign Licences

Office 365 logo

Office 365 logo

 

So, in Office 365, how do you bulk assign licences to users.

I had a search around and could only really find examples using CSV file imports, what I wanted to do was pull the information in directly from Active Directory.

Whilst looking around I found the Get-ADUser cmdlet available through RSAT.

This cmdlet pulls out information from AD relating to accounts etc.

Using the -Filter command you can limit this to a specific OU.

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Office 365 and Exchange 2007 Mail Flow Issue for Sub Domain

Office 365 logo

Office 365 logo

I have recently had an Office 365 and Exchange 2007 Mail Flow Issue for Sub Domain. We have our primary users on [email protected] and have setup Office 365 to process mail for [email protected] .

The setup for Office 365 went extremely smoothly (with a lot of help from a friend – you know who you are J.P.) and I have integrated Office 365 with our on-premise Active Directory using ADFS and Synchronization Service Manager for Single Sign On.

However when a user,  [email protected] tried to send an email to [email protected] using the on-premise Exchange 2007 the mail was not delivered.

User [email protected] could send email to [email protected] without any problems, but again a reply from [email protected] was not delivered.

I investigated further on the Exchange 2007 Server and found that in Queue viewer there was an Unreachable Domain queue with emails which could not be delivered. Continue Reading

Windows 7 Rebuild Search Index

I experienced a problem today where I could not search for e-mails older than 1 day in Outlook. As I have over 10,000 email messages the search function is crucial to quickly find emails. The solution seemed to be a Windows 7 Rebuild Search Index. Continue Reading

Recover an Exchange 2007 Mailbox using DPM 2012

I needed to recover an Exchange 2007 mailbox using DPM 2012 recently and thought I would share with you the steps I took.

Although there have been many – very good – advances made in System Center Data Protection Manager 2012, the Exchange Item Level Recovery is still in need of some work. Continue Reading

Exchange Transport Rule Corrupting Mail

A really interesting thing was happening to some of our clients e-mails which we eventually discovered was relating to Exchange Transport Rules.

Here is the mail flow through our setup.


Internet

\/

Sophos ES1100

\/

Exchange 2010

\/

Exchange 2007

\/

Client


The reason for both Exchange servers is that we are currently in the process of migrating from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010.

In particular circumstances email was coming through containing what can only be described as “oriental” characters, see below…..

tml> 格ead> 猼tyle㰾!– .hmmessage P { margin:0px; padding:0px } body.hmmessage { font-size: 10pt; font-family:Tahoma } –>⼼style> ⼼head> 㰊body class=’hmmessage’㰾div dir=’ltr’> 昼ont face=”Tahoma” size=”2″>,⼼font㰾div style=”font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 10pt; “㰾br㰾/div㰾div style=”font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 10pt; “>

Upon further investigation and an attempt to replicate the issue it was found to occur through some e-mail clients when sent from mobile devices.

Our first instinct was to investigate any possible problems with the Sophos Email Appliance.

However upon doing further searches on the internet there was a suggestion that certain Exchange Transport Rules could be the cause of this issue.

As we were in the process of migrating from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 the existing Transport rule from our 2007 Hub Transport server had  copied over to the 2010 Hub Transport server.

The transport rule in question simply applied an HTML disclaimer to all e-mail both internal and external.

We disabled this rule and the problem disappeared (at least we were unable to replicate it).

Upon further research we found that we could enable the Transport rule to add a disclaimer to mail going external only.

It would appear that the process of Exchange Transport Rules re-writing certain HTML type e-mails  would cause the corruption of e-mail as illustrated above.

Installing Exchange 2010 SP2

This morning I have installed Exchange 2010 SP2.

I must say it was (as expected) a very straightforward process.

The setup wizard passed most pre-requisites first time.

The only pre-requisite which failed was the UM Language Packs.

As I work in the UK I had the en-GB language pack installed.

This was easily done using command prompt in the
<EXCHANGE SERVER INSTALL POINT>\bin directory

I ran;

Setup.com /RemoveUmLanguagePack:en-GB

Then continue with the install.

Once completed re-install the language packs, the desired language pack can be found here;
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=231660

Download the correct one and run it and you will have your desired UM language pack installed.

The only other issue I came across was the
“You must close all dialogue boxes before you can close Exchange Management Console” problem.

A quick google pointed me here;

http://smtp25.blogspot.com/2011/07/you-must-close-all-dialog-boxes-before.html

This seems to indicate some problem with IE9.

I added https://localhost  to trusted sites in IE9 and all worked fine.

So as said the install was all good and was straightforward.

 

Additional Steps for Exchange 2010 Migration

After evaluation of the new features of Exchange 2010 the decision to implement it was taken.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 introduces the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant or ExDeploy, a new Web-based tool that can help you with your Exchange deployment. ExDeploy asks you a few questions about your current environment and then generates a custom checklist and procedures that help simplify your deployment.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exdeploy2010/default.aspx#Home

DO NOT FORGET (as I did!)

Install Exchange SP1

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2010/04/07/3409710.aspx

Because I also neglected to tick the Install pre-requisites check box I also came acrosss the following aditional steps I needed to carry out……

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Auto Attendant Greeting / Menu Prompts

OK here we go again….

Microsoft in their wisdom thought it would be a good idea to disable a feature that most people would find very useful!

In trying to set up a site wide auto attendant I went through the relevant steps to add custom greeting and menu prompts to an auto attendant.

Got a decent Microphone.
Found a quiet room.
Got a staff well spoken member.
Recorded Greetings and Menu Prompts
Saved them as the appropriate type of WAV file (PCM 8kHz 16Bit mono)
Uploaded them via Exchange Management Console
Checked them on the phone system (Nortel (Avaya?) CS1000)
Sounded dreadful – hissing and cracking and quiet!
Not suitable at all!

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MS Exchange 2007 and Nortel CS1k UM Auto Attendants

Here is the scenario…….

Nortel CS1K
MS Exchange 2007
UM Auto Attendants Required

Main switchboard number was set to forward on busy to a UM Auto Attendant which would present a menu of available options for the caller to select as per the usual business call centre type.

The user would be forwarded to the UM Auto Attendant and if the UM Auto Attendant option selected was a phone number the phone would ring and if answered the call would continue as expected……
However…….
if the call was forwarded to an Exchange Voicemail number specifically or if the extension selected was busy or did not answer the caller would be asked to leave a message.
The caller would put on their best telephone voice and start to leave their message when after 10 seconds they would hear “Are you still there?”

Exchange could not hear the caller!

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MS Exchange 2007 Service Pack 2 Install with Language Packs

I recently installed Service Pack 2 onto my Exchange 2007 server but had a few problems which I will try to explain here……

Download Location…..
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ee7829a3-0ae8-44de-822c-908cd1034523&displaylang=en

When running the Setup program the server failed pre-requisite checks on the Unified Messaging because apparently Microsoft only want you to have “en-US” Language Packs installed.

So I needed to remove the “en-GB” Language Pack.

This would be done using the command;

Setup.com / RemoveUmLanguagePack: en-GB

BUT here is what I got…..

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