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.

Windows Mobile 6.5.3

Posted on February 2, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

Today Sony Ericsson released a new phone, the Aspen. Normally that wouldn’t be worth blogging here, but the press release contained something of interest:

Operating system: Windows Mobile® 6.5.3

So, that might imply Windows Mobile 6.5.3 is now official. Exchange-wise nothing changed; changes are mainly UI focused or under the hood. These include capacitive touchscreen support, multi-touch, touch controls (bye stylus), consistency, horizontal scroll bar instead of tabs, magnifier, Start Menu drag & drop, increased browser performance (IE), improved memory management, smoothed pan & flick gestures and speed improved zoom & rotation speed. It also contains updated runtime tools (.NET CF 3.5 and SQL CE 3.1) as well as Arabic read/write document support.

Also, it seems Sony Ericsson licensed SPB Mobile Shell as both Pro and Lifestyle models contain SPB Mobile Shell 3.0. Apparantly plain Windows Mobile isn’t appealing enough; Sony uses SPB Mobile Shell and HTC has HTC Sense UI.

ForeFront UAG Exchange Publishing Guide

Posted on February 2, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

The ForeFront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) team published an update on ForeFront UAG content series. One of these guides is the Forefront UAG Content Series- Exchange Services Publishing Solution Guide, which can be downloaded here.

For those interested, the other ForeFront UAG guides are:

Configure External Client Access Domain

Posted on January 31, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

Many articles on (re)configuring Exchange 2007’s internet-facing Client Access Server contain steps to (re)configure all external URLs. Most of the times this is a list of one or more of the following cmdlets to execute:

Set-OWAVirtualDirectory –Identity <CASSERVER>\OWA (default web site) -ExternalURL https://someURL/OWA
Set-OABVirtualDirectory –Identity <CASSERVER>\OAB (default web site) -ExternalURL https://someURL/OAB
Set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory –Identity <CASSERVER>\EWS (default web site) -ExternalURL https://someURL/ews/exchange.asmx
Set-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory –Identity <CASSERVER>\Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync (default web site) -ExternalURL https://someURL

In Exchange 2010 this process has been made easier because Exchange 2010 setup will ask you if it’s an “external facing” Client Access Server, after which it will configure externalURLs for you. But what if you want to reconfigure the setting afterwards? Exchange 2010’s Configure External Client Acess Domain to the rescue! To access it, start Exchange Management Console, expand Server Configuration and select Client Access node. Now either click Configure External Client Access Domain in the right pane or select it after right-clicking.

After entering the new external domain and adding the Client Access Server(s) to which to apply the setting, click Configure.

As you can see from the progress windows, the new URL will be set as ExternalURL for the virtual directories. Note that you can ignore the warning on setting the ExternalURL identical for ‘owa’ and ‘ecp’ to the same value using Set-ECPVirtualDirectory, because the wizard will do that for us.

Exchange 2010 Mailbox Role Calculator 3.5

Posted on January 31, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

The Microsoft Exchange Team released an update of the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator. The new version is 3.5 and it includes the following features/improvements since 3.2:

Version 3.5
Improved the text on the input tab with regards to the number of database copy instances you would like for both HA and lagged copies. Also fixes an issue where in a high availability architecture the calculator may size the solution based on activating more database copies during a second server failure event than the total number of database copies deployed on the server.

Version 3.4
Corrects a memory and CPU utilization issue where you deploy a site resilient architecture with multiple mailbox servers and a single database copy in the primary datacenter. Specifically, the calculator would determine the active database copy configuration after a single server failure and then size the CPU and memory requirements. However, since there is only a single database copy in the primary datacenter, the solution cannot survive with all copies hosted in the primary datacenter. Therefore, the copies need to be activated in the secondary datacenter. Version 3.4 corrects this scenario by ensuring there are at least 2 database copies in the primary datacenter in order to calculate the active database count after a single server failure.

You can download the calculator here.

70-663 Design/Deploying Exchange 2010 exam

Posted on January 29, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

As of today the exam “70-663 PRO: Designing and Deploying Messaging Solutions with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010” is live at Prometric. Click here for info on preparing for 70-663 or to schedule this exam at Prometric.

On a side note, I checked the MCP site to see if the results of 71-663 (beta) were in. I passed! Wasn’t too hard though. That’s exam 28 on my list of MS exams since 1996.