PFE EMEA Messaging Engineers

How to Debug Exchange 2007/2010 OOF Replies That Don’t Properly Trigger

by PFE EMEA Messaging Engineers

I recently faced an issue with Out-of-Office (OOF) replies not working properly under Exchange 2007 SP3 with RU3 which was not easy to identify, and I thought it was interesting enough to share with you, along with the associated solution. The Symptoms: The OOF doesn’t trigger for all mailboxes located on a server. Only one [...]

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How To Quickly Manage Groups With Groups In Exchange 2010

by PFE EMEA Messaging Engineers

A common issue with Exchange 2010 is that you are unable to allow a Distribution list to be managed by a “group”. This was changed by design in Exchange 2010 to allow greater separation of Active Directory and Exchange management using Split Permissions, a feature that a number of our customers asked for. A great [...]

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What you need to check when Outlook fails to download the OAB

by PFE EMEA Messaging Engineers

Throughout the last weeks I have seen two different issues that prevented Outlook clients from downloading the OAB (Offline Address Book). One affected public-folder based OAB distribution and the other affected web-based distribution. I want to provide some hints on things that need to be checked in order to follow the OAB generation and publishing [...]

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What You Need To Know About Exchange 2010 DAG Failover Behavior

by PFE EMEA Messaging Engineers

In this article, I’ll provide some insight into changes in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Database Availability Group (DAG) failover behavior. The Exchange 2010 mailbox server which is part of the DAG uses windows clustering in a different way than previous versions and many administrators who are familiar with previous versions of Exchange may have incorrect [...]

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A Must Have Hotfix for Exchange DAGs running on Windows Server 2008 R2

by PFE EMEA Messaging Engineers

In early August 2011, the Microsoft Windows Sustained Engineering team released the following Knowledge Base (KB) article and accompanying software hotfix regarding an issue in Windows Server 2008 R2 failover clusters:  KB2550886 – A transient communication failure causes a Windows Server 2008 R2 failover cluster to stop working The Microsoft Exchange Server team has since [...]

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Why Does My SAN Keep Failing Microsoft Exchange 2010 Jetstress?

by PFE EMEA Messaging Engineers

As many know by now, in Exchange 2010, Microsoft managed to get disk I/O numbers so low that it’s able to run perfectly well on DAS (direct-attached storage) and even JBODs (i.e. DAS with no RAID configured).  So how come we should still run Jetstress, the tool that helps verify the performance and stability of [...]

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PowerShell for Microsoft Exchange 2010 Cheat Sheet!

by PFE EMEA Messaging Engineers

When working with customers, everyone who is new to Windows PowerShell finds it to be an amazing idea, but very daunting. Once you start using it, you will quickly pick up the syntax and how to structure your commands.  However, it can take a while to get to know which cmdlet to use, and what [...]

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What You Should Know About Geographically Dispersed Exchange High Availability and FSW

by PFE EMEA Messaging Engineers

This article discusses the recommendations around the placement of the Microsoft Exchange Server File Share Witness (FSW) in Database Availability Groups (DAG) where the DAG member is placed in two or more physical locations. Microsoft’s recommendation is to place the FSW in the primary location, or in the location with the highest number of users. [...]

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How to Create Custom Recipient Management Groups Using Exchange 2010 RBAC

by PFE EMEA Messaging Engineers

My customer wanted to assign the “Recipient Management” group to their helpdesk staff, who are responsible for the creation and management of their Exchange mailboxes. However, they didn’t want to give the “Delete” permissions to the helpdesk. This is simple to accomplish using Microsoft Exchange 2010 and RBAC (Resource Based Access Control)! When the helpdesk [...]

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Exchange 2010 SP1 Rollup 5 has been released

by PFE EMEA Messaging Engineers

The Exchange Product Group have published details of the recently released Rollup 5 for Exchange 2010 SP1. The hotfix details can be found here, and will be released under KB 2582113. There are a number of additional major fixes within this rollup, including the following: 2490134 : OWA’s zip-download does not work for some messages [...]

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