Hello all, been a while since I last posted. I’ve been pulled away from Exchange for a while, and it didn’t seem to make much sense to post non-Exchange related topics to a website named msexchangehelp.com. Fortunately though, I’ve recently started a quick-turnaround Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013 migration project that I hope to complete in the next few days. Its always interesting to go back to Exchange 2007, especially now – thirteen years after it debuted and change the Exchange world. Exchange 2010 would really become the standard-bearer a few years later of course, but Exchange 2007 is w ..read more

As an Exchange admin, one of the hardest things to keep an eye on is AD. Not in the sense of your replication or DC health, but that everything is where it is supposed to be. Some of the most trivial calls end up being related to a distribution group, shared mailbox, or room mailbox not being in the proper OU, so the relevant team cannot manage them. Unfortunately there isn’t a tool out there (that I know of) that will help you keep an eye on this sort of thing without pounding you with notifications. For that reason, I created a script that I run weekly as a scheduled task. This script greets ..read more

Stepping away from Exchange for a minute, I was recently reminded that some people don’t have an Admin server, but still find themselves needing to manage an Active Directory environment. If that is the case, you’ll need to install the Remote Server Administration Tools on your PC. If you’re running Windows 7 you can download the installer here. For the AD Management tools Windows 10, you can download the tools here if you have an older build. For newer builds select “Manage optional features” in Settings and click “Add a feature” to see the list of available RSAT tools. From there you can pic ..read more

Feedspot, a content consolidator designed to give you a single place to grab content from blogs, videos, news websites, and RSS feeds, has added my humble blog to the Top 10 Microsoft Exchange Server blogs page! I hope this is the first of many selections this website receives, as the more eyes I can be in front of the more Exchange admins I can help :). The post Recognition… appeared first on MS Exchange Help ..read more

A few years ago when I was leading my first Exchange team, one of the very first lessons I learned was that everyone has a different idea for how to validate a change. When I started my IT career, I was taught after any change you reboot, and when the system comes back up you check the event logs, services, and any relevant application logs to make sure everything is running as expected. However, as I found out after delegating a patching change to a subordinate, everyone didn’t learn that same lesson. Hence, the Exchange 2010 Health Check script. Server restart – friend or foe?The Change Duri ..read more

Out of the box, Exchange 2010 comes with two primary tools for managing your environment – the Exchange Management Console (EMC) and the Exchange Management Shell (EMS). With just these two tools a good admin can do almost anything management asks of them The Exchange Management Console (EMC). Thick management tool installs 4 life! The EMC is the GUI tool, which is great to get a quick idea of how a server is configured, how many Transport Rules you have, or do anything that only has to be done a handful of times. The EMS on the other hand, is great for when you need to pull information from ..read more

Earlier today I ran into an issue where an Exchange 2010 deleted mailbox wasn’t showing in the Disconnected Mailbox view of the EMC as expected. Exchange 2010 EMC, where’s my missing mailbox? Knowing that sometimes the EMC doesn’t quite reflect current reality, I decided to run the following in the EMS to see what I could find: Get-MailboxDatabase | get-mailboxstatistics | where {$_.disconnectreason -ne $null} | ft database,displayname,disc* The results of the above PowerShell command were basically the same – a mailbox I had just disabled was nowhere to be found! After a few more minutes in ..read more

One of the first things a young Exchange admin will learn is that there is no built in IIS log maintenance capability for clearing out old log files baked in to Exchange. Hopefully this lesson comes when SCOM starts throwing drive space alerts, and not when the C: drive fills up and craters the server :/. To mitigate this risk, most admins create a simple script for regularly performing IIS log maintenance by deleting CAS log files older than a certain date. Here are a couple of scripts you can use, depending on your environment. 15 items so the script is working as expected. Based on file siz ..read more

Troubleshooting Exchange connectivity issues can often be a chore, especially if you’re trying to go line by line in the IIS logs. The close formatting in those text files makes for a blurry and mind-numbing experience, not to mention how easy it is to miss what you’re actually looking for. To make that experience easier (and to offload the hard work to PowerShell) I’ve put together the following IIS log parser script* that will allow you to search IIS logs remotely on multiple servers for lines that contain two different items and export that data to a CSV. For example, if your helpdesk repor ..read more

One of the first things you should update before integrating Exchange Online or EOP into your mail flow is your organization’s SPF record. If you plan to use EOP as your perimeter gateway you may think that the O365 IPs are all you need, and you can get away with an SPF record that looks something like this: v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. When Exchange Online shuffles emails around internally between tenants, any message from your on-prem environment will still need to be validated against your SPF record. What’s even more interesting, is if ..read more