About Michel de Rooij

Michel de Rooij, with over 25 years of mixed consulting and automation experience with Exchange and related technologies, is a consultant for Rapid Circle. He assists organizations in their journey to and using Microsoft 365, primarily focusing on Exchange and associated technologies and automating processes using PowerShell or Graph. Michel's authorship of several Exchange books and role in the Office 365 for IT Pros author team are a testament to his knowledge. Besides writing for Practical365.com, he maintains a blog on eightwone.com with supporting scripts on GitHub. Michel has been a Microsoft MVP since 2013.

Mac Outlook 2011 & Exchange 2003

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Michel de Rooij

There are still a lot of questions and tweets on Mac’s Outlook 2011, Exchange 2003 and why that combination doesn’t work. I can only assume people overlooked the system requirement in the Apple store, which clearly states “Exchange support in Outlook 2011 requires connectivity to Microsoft Exchange 2007 SP1 RU4 or later”.

The reason for lack of support lies in the fact that Outlook 2011 connects to Exchange Server using what is called Exchange Web Services. These services were introduced with Exchange 2007 (and thus are also available in Exchange 2010). The result is that Office 2011 can’t synchronize information, like e-mail, contacts and calendar, with Exchange 2003.

On a side note, you could use Entourage 2008 which utilizes the WebDAV protocol. This is supported by Exchange 2003 as well as 2007, but was discontinued in Exchange 2010.

Is this bad? I think not. Apart from the requirement, which is clearly mentioned, Exchange 2003 is almost 8 years old now. Products evolve and mainstream support has already ended for Exchange 2003. Even if Exchange 2003 is running rock solid, organizations should be considering on what to do with their Exchange 2003 environments as part of the IT life cycle management process.

Exchange 2010 SP1 Prerequisites on 2008 R2 SP1

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Michel de Rooij

After Exchange 2010 SP1 became publicly available I wrote, apart from the SP1 changes, also on the prerequisites differences, comparing Windows Server 2008 with Windows Server 2008 R2. Note that these prerequisites are additional to the server roles and features required to install Exchange 2010 server roles.

With the recent release of Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 a new operating system level was introduced to the spectrum. It would be interesting to see what impact R2 SP1 has on these prerequisites. When we put that Exchange 2010 SP1 prerequisites in a table, comparing them to Windows Server 2008 R2 prerequisites, we get the following:

Component	Windows Server 2008 R2	Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
AD RMS	KB979099
.NET Framework 2.0	KB979744 KB977020 (CAS)
.NET Framework 3.5	KB982867
ASP.NET 2.0	KB983440
UCMA (UM)	UCMA Runtime 2.0	UCMA Runtime 2.0
Content Filtering (Hub, Mbx)	Office 2010 Filter Pack	Office 2010 Filter Pack

That’s excellent, no hotfixes to install upfront and the required reboot that goes with it. For the suspicious, here’s a what Setup reported missing on a freshly installed Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 server:

So, we can conclude going straight to Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with Exchange 2010 SP1 should make the job of deploying Exchange 2010 SP1 easier and save you some time.

Error 0x00f0818 or 0x800b0100 installing Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Michel de Rooij

As the guy behing WorkingHardInIT blog pointed out here, there are people experiencing issues when installing Service Pack 1 on Windows 2008 R2 (or Windows 7) related to missing or corrupted files in the WinSXS\Manifests or Servicing\Packages folders. The related error code is 0x00f0818, but from personal experience I can say may also apply when Windows Update produces error code 0x800b0100.

The missing or corrupted files can be viewed by the System-Update-Readiness-Tool which will generate logfiles at %SystemRoot%\Logs\CBS. For example, a failing SP1 installation might produce the following CheckSUR.log (excerpt):

Checking Package Manifests and Catalogs
(f)    CBS MUM Corrupt    0x800F0900    servicing\Packages\Package_1_for_KB2416471~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.1.1.0.mum        Line 1:
(f)    CBS Catalog Corrupt    0x800B0100    servicing\Packages\Package_1_for_KB2416471~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.1.1.0.cat
..
Checking Component Store
(f)    CSI Manifest All Zeros    0x00000000    winsxs\Manifests\amd64_wpf-presentationhostdll_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16542_none_cc28a17e399280f3.manifest    amd64_wpf-presentationhostdll_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16542_none_cc28a17e399280f3
..

The blog mentioned gives a nice writeup on how to solve this issue by (temporarily) fixing ACLs and then replacing the files mentioned in CheckSUR.log by copying them off a second – identical – installation. But this may get clumsy when the section “Unavailable repair files” mentions a lot of Manifests and Packages, and prone to error with these long filenames.

Fortunately, we can automate this process a bit as I’ll describe below. Before doing this, follow the steps contained in the mentioned blog to set up permissions correctly (don’t forget to reverse changes afterwards). Note that in this procedure I’m going to use a drive letter X: for storing the repair files.

First, copy the CheckSUR.log to a file named files.txt. Edit files.txt and remove the line “Unavailable repair files:” and everything before that. Save the file.

Then, open an command prompt on the system we’re going to copy these files off and enter the following:
for /f %f in (files.txt) do @copy %SystemRoot%\%f X:\%f /y

Next, on the system with issues, open an elevated command prompt and enter the following to make backup copies of the corrupt files:
for /f %f in (files) do @move %SystemRoot%\%f %SystemRoot%\%f.bak /y

Finally, enter the following command to replace the missing or corrupt files:
for /f %f in (files) do @copy X:\%f %SystemRoot%\%f /y

Of course, this procedure can be adjusted to your liking; you could for example copy the repair files directly off another system using the system share.