Author Archives: Michel de Rooij

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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.

Updated Exchange 2010 Architecture Poster

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Microsoft updated the Exchange 2010 Architecture poster yesterday. No major changes, only a small correction as far as I can tell (Edge Transport Server Role SMTP Send and Receive connectors were mislabeled).

You can download the poster here.

MS publishes Exchange 2010 Tested Solutions

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Microsoft published several technical solution papers on how to design, test and verify Exchange 2010 solutions for a certain number of mailboxes for a few vendors. The papers are as follows:

The documents walk you through the steps regarding design decisions, challenges while meeting customer requirements.

Outlook 2007 archive KB published, omits archive function

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After releasing the hotfix for enabling Exchange 2010 personal archives for Outlook 2007 users yesterday, the related knowledgebase article was published today (KB2458611).

What you might notice when reading the list of fixed issued is that the article doesn’t mention the included support for archives. Interesting. One might wonder what that implies from a support perspective.

Update: There are reports of issues with Outlook 2007 after installing update KB2412171, like Loss of Archive/Auto-Archive functions (not to be confused with personal archives), performance issues and Outlook Anywhere/NTLM issues.  Since KB2458611 is based on that update, so you might expect similar issues. More information here by Outlook MVP Ben Schorr.

Update: Official information confirms three issues have been identified with this fix:

  1. Secure Password Authentication issues when configured but server doesn’t support it (e.g. GMail);
  2. If you haven’t configured an Exchange account,
    1. Performance issues;
    2. Inability to configure AutoArchive for IMAP/POP3 or Outlook Live accounts.

More information on the Outlook Product Team blog here.

Update: The Microsoft Exchange team blogged about the December 2010 update for Office 2007 here. They state that “This update extends archive support to Outlook 2007”. In the same blog, the archiving functionality I described earlier here is hereby also officially confirmed.

Update: The Outlook team re-released the hotfix which addresses the 3 issues mentioned above (and on which the Outlook team blogged here). You can download the updated KB2412171 hotfix here.

Outlook 2007 hotfix for Exchange 2010 Personal Archive support

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Update: After fixing some issues (see here) the Outlook team re-released hotfix KB2412171 and made it available for direct download here or you can get it through Windows Update.

It seems the Office 2007 Cumulative Update for December 2010 (KB2479671) will contain support for the long awaited support for Exchange 2010 Personal Archives in Outlook 2007. Note that support is limited as not all functionality found in Outlook 2010 is present, but it is usable from a customer perspective.

After applying the Outlook 2007 hotfix (SP2 is a prerequisite), archive-enabled users can do the following:

  • Access and move messages to or from their personal archive;
  • Mailboxes for which you have full access permissions will be automatically added to your Outlook view (known as auto mapping of shared mailboxes) inspecting the msExchDelegateListLink attribute (more info on this at Steve Goodman’s blog here);
  • If you have full access permissions to an archive-enabled mailbox, that archive will be accessible and automatically displayed as well.
    In the screenshot below you’ll the the user’s mailbox (Francis Blake), his Personal Archive and he has full access permissions to Philip Mortimer’s mailbox, who is also archive-enabled:

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Unfortunately, there are also a few things not implemented, e.g.

  • No support for archiving policies, meaning users won’t be able to override centrally configured retention and archiving policy settings using personal tags in Outlook. More info on archiving policies and personal tags here;
  • Not integral searches, meaning you need to search the mailbox or the personal archive seperately. Searching “all mail items” will not retrieve results from the personal archive, as shown in the screenshot below:

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It is unknown if these omissions are going to be introduced in a later hotfix, as the initial hotfix for personal archives in Outlook 2007 was set for Q1/Q2 2011.

Be advised that this hotfix will enable personal archive functionality for the following product versions only:

  • Office Ultimate (Retail)
  • Office ProPlus (Volume License)
  • Office Enterprise (Volume License)
  • Outlook Standalone (Retail or Volume License)

Note that the Outlook 2007 update for archive support is still not mentioned on the cumulative update page as the cumulative update package has yet to be released. However, the KB article has been published (KB2458611). You can request and retrieve the individual hotfix here.

Thanks for Ankur Kothari (@ankbomb) from product management for the early update.

Exchange 2010 SP1 Rollup 2 & RTM RU5

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Today the Exchange Team released Rollup 2 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 (KB2425179). This update raises Exchange 2010 version number to 14.1.270.1.

Here’s the list of changes included in this rollup:

  • 983186 The mailbox alias of a user contains the “?” character unexpectedly after you run the “Enable-Mailbox” cmdlet to create a mailbox for the user in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
  • 2295902 An excepted occurrence is not excluded from a recurring iCalendar message for an Exchange Server 2010 mailbox user
  • 2385017 You cannot edit public folder items even though you are the owner of the items in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
  • 2385194 You cannot connect to an Exchange Server 2010 mailbox by using a MAPI application when a Mailbox server and a Client Access server are installed on different computers
  • 2397171 You cannot reply or forward a large email message on an Exchange Server 2010 mailbox
  • 2403783 An incorrect label is displayed in the date field in a public folder item when you open the item by using OWA in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
  • 2408924 The subject of an item is deleted when you use the “UploadItems” operation together with the “Update” action or the “UpdateOrCreate” action in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
  • 2409597 You cannot open a public folder item when the default public folder database for the mailbox database is unavailable in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
  • 2423776 The Exchange Information Store service crashes frequently during a public folder replication process on an Exchange Server 2010 public folder
  • 2431500 You cannot connect to an Exchange Server 2010 mailbox simultaneously by using Outlook Anywhere from several Windows XP-based computers
  • 2433642 The “FETCH (BODYSTRUCTURE)” command returns a corrupted file name of an email message attachment on an Exchange Server 2010 computer
  • 2452075 You cannot connect to mailboxes in a recovery database on a server after you install Exchange Server 2010 SP1
  • 2458005 The Exchange Mailbox Replication service crashes when you use the “New-MailboxImportRequest” command to import a PST file to an Exchange Server 2010 mailbox
  • 2458419 “A temporary change has occurred that requires you to connect to a different server” error message when Exchange Server 2007 mailbox users try to access their mailboxes by using an Exchange Server 2010 Client Access server
  • 2322161 The replay queue length on passive copies of mailbox databases in Database Availability Group continues to increase in an Exchange Server 2010 environment
  • 982004 Exchange Server 2010 users cannot access the public folder
  • 983492 You cannot view updated content of an Exchange Server 2010 public folder
  • 983549 Exchange Server 2010 removes the sender’s email address from the recipient list in a redirected email message
  • 2467001 The MSExchangeTransport.exe process crashes or stops responding on a Hub Transport server that has Exchange Server 2010 SP1 installed

The team also released Exchange 2010 Rollup 5; that is, Rollup 5 for the RTM version of Exchange 2010 (KB2407113). Note that this KB article hasn’t been published yet so no details on the changes. The Exchange 2010 RTM RU5 update raises Exchange 2010 version number to 14.0.726.0.

When running ForeFront Protection for Exchange, make sure you disable ForeFront before installing the rollup and re-enabling it afterwards, otherwise the Information Store and Transport services may not start. You can disable ForeFront using fscutility /disable and enable it by using fscutility /enable afterwards.

For those still unaware, update rollups are cumulative, i.e. they contain fixes released in earlier update rollups for the same product level (RTM, SPx). This means you don’t need to install previous update rollups during a fresh installation but can start with the latest rollup published right away.

You can download Exchange 2010 SP1 Rollup 2 here; Exchange 2010 (RTM) Rollup 5 can be downloaded here.