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.

Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer

Posted on February 25, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

Today the MS Exchange Team released the ExPDA tool, or Exchange Server Pre-Deployment Analyzer. This tool is meant to scan and analyse your current e-mail enviroment for possible. ExPDA can also be used as an decisionmaking tool, helping you through the process of implementing Exchange 2010.

ExPDA is based on ExBPA – Exchange Best Practice Analyzer – but looks more at the complete topology than at the system level. Amongst many other things, it scans current Exchange (2003, 2007) systems and domain controllers/gc’s for required patchlevels, connectors and domains and forests for required modes in order to implement Exchange Server 2010.

ExPDA runs on Windows 7, Vista SP2, Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows Server 2008 R2 and even Windows Server 2003 SP2. Check the team’s announcement for more details. You can download ExPDA here.

Forefront Security for Exchange SP2 RU1

Posted on February 18, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

With all these “2010” information you could forget that most customers are still running earlier versions. For people running ForeFront Security for Exchange SP2, Rollup 1 was released yesterday. Besides a new parameter (called feature) for enabling of disabling FSE on a cluster node, RU1 contains no less than 30 hotfixes. For a list of fixes, consult the related knowledgebase article here. You can download FSE SP2 RU1 after submitting a hotfix request here.

Exchange 2010 Mailbox Role Calculator 4.5

Posted on February 17, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

It looks like the Microsoft Exchange Team is working very hard on improving the Exchange Mailbox Role Calculator, because today they released version 4.5 (around 2 weeks after releasing 3.5). This version includes the following changes since 3.5:

Included minimum number of global catalog cores in calculation results;
Ability to specify different RAID parity settings for Restore LUN;
Improved formatted capacity of a disk drive calculation;

Version 4.5 of the calculator also includes several bugfixes; consult the changelog (or should that be changeblog 🙂 ).

Looking at the number of changes and the changes itself I’m puzzled why the Mailbox Storage Calculator suddenly jumped 1 major version (3.5->4.5) where one would expect a minor version update.

You can download the calculator here.

BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express

Posted on February 16, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

Today at the Mobile World Congress, RIM announced the BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express (BESE). BESE is positioned by RIM as a free(!) alternative for small to medium sized companies which require BlackBerry’s security and manageability, but don’t require all enterprise funtions. For example, this also means lack of advanced monitoring and high availability options found in the enterprise product. BESE will work with Exchange 2003 SP2, 2007 SP1 and 2010 in combination with Windows SBS 2003 and 2008. Very helpful is the BlackBerry comparison chart you can download here (PDF).

You can read the full press release here. BESE is scheduled for release in March. BESE has its own webpage on RIM’s website here.

Windows Phone 7

Posted on February 15, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

Windows Phone 7, shouldn’t that be Windows Mobile 7? Yes and No. Windows Phone 7 (WP7) is the successor to Windows Mobile 6, but the rebranding also hints at changes in the approach towards Windows Phone 7, being a mobile platform instead of an operating system. At first glance WP7 is very social networking, multimedia and game focused. The (clean and neat) GUI is also full of animations when you interact with it. I wonder what that will mean for battery life.

You can watch the recording of the press conference from Mobile World Congress 2010 here. For more information on WP7, check out Engadget’s hands-on review here or check out the online demo here.

Update: More information in this hands-on demo on Channel 9 here.