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.

Exchange 2016 and IM Integration

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Ex2013 LogoThose configuring IM integration for OWA and Lync or Skype for Business know the drill of editing the web.config files on your Exchange servers and configuring the certificate thumbprint and Lync/SfB pool? That especially became a nuisance as after each Cumulative Update those settings needed to be reconfigured, for which I wrote a Configure-IMIntegration script.

The Exchange team has obviously listened to feedback from customers and made this setting persistent in Exchange 2016. No longer is it required to dive in those web.config files after installing each CU. Instead, you now configure these settings using the Set-Override cmdlet, which will store the setting in Active Directory.

For example:

New-SettingOverride -Name '<Description>' -Server <Server/Wildcard> -Component OwaServer -Section IMSettings -Parameters @("IMServerName=<Server/Pool FQDN>","IMCertificateThumbprint=<Certificate Thumbprint>") -Reason "<Reason>" -MinVersion "<Minimum Version To Apply To>" -MaxVersion "Maximum Version to Apply To"
Get-ExchangeDiagnosticInfo -Process Microsoft.Exchange.Directory.TopologyService -Component VariantConfiguration -Argument Refresh

For example, to configure the override for all servers with a name starting with EX16, configuring lync.contoso.com as pool FQDN and a specific thumbprint, only for Exchange builds starting at 15.1.225.42 (Exchange 2016 RTM), you could use:

New-SettingOverride -Name 'IM Integration' -Server EX16* -Component OwaServer -Section IMSettings -Parameters @("IMServerName=lync.contoso.com","IMCertificateThumbprint=12345678123412341234567812345678123126789") -Reason "Configure IM" -MinVersion "15.01.0225.42"
Get-ExchangeDiagnosticInfo -Process Microsoft.Exchange.Directory.TopologyService -Component VariantConfiguration -Argument Refresh

Finally, restart the OWA App pool to have OWA reread the new settings:

Restart-WebAppPool MSExchangeOWAApppool

Exchange 2016 goes RTM!

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Ex2013 LogoUpdate (4nov2015): You can block creating mixed DAGs using Cmdlet Extension Agents, I blogged about that here.

Today, the Exchange Team reached a milestone for the On-Premises by releasing Exchange Server 2016. The official announcement contains information on new features and enhancements.The version number of Exchange 2016 RTM is 15.1.225.42. After extending it, the schema version should report 15317, and the forest and domain versions after preparing Active Directory should read 16210 and 13236, respectively.

Much of what’s new or requirements for coexistence scenarios were already announced during the release of the Exchange 2016 Preview, a little over 2 months ago. I did a write-up on that here. However, some features didn’t make it for the RTM release. For example, the feature that makes Search Indexer use Passive Database Copies for indexing, instead of copying indexes from the active copy, is to be expected in a later Cumulative Update. Also, the auto-expanding Archive feature, available in the Preview, has not made it in the RTM version.

Also make sure you read the Release Notes, which contain important information on potential issues. For example, Exchange 2016 does not prevent you from adding Exchange 2013 Mailbox servers to an Exchange 2016 Database Availability Group, or vice-versa. This ability is also not blocked by the Exchange Admin Center console. This is totally unsupported (the database structure is different), but more importantly also puts your data at risk. Just don’t.

Some links to get you started:

The first Cumulative Updated is to be expected in Q1’16.

Accompanying the launch, Microsoft also published a number of videos highlighting certain aspects or features. One of them is the ever charming Greg Taylor talking about Exchange Server 2016 – Performance, architecture and compliance updates:

Other videos from the Exchange Team and Office Garage:

2015 Microsoft MVP Award

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I am proud and happy to announce I got re-awarded the Microsoft MVP Award for Exchange Server for the third year in a row:

mvp2015

MVP awards are given to individuals by Microsoft in recognition of their contributions to the technical community, such as this writing on blogs or books, presenting, forum contributions or The UC Architects podcast.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my readers, followers, fellow MVPs and of course the Microsoft employees that have encouraged, helped and supported me over years.

My MVP profile can be found here.

IT/DEV Connections 2015 Wrap-Up

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imageNote: For those that attended Jaap and my workshop on Monday, Managing Exchange On-Premises and Exchange Online using PowerShell, the slidedeck is available here and the sample code is available here.

Last weekend, I returned from one of the largest, independent conferences on Microsoft technologies, IT/DEV Connections. The conference, which took place in the city of Las Vegas, is spread over a 3-day period on popular topics, like Exchange, Windows, SQL or SharePoint, and has a track for Infrastructure as well as Development (hence the ‘IT/DEV’). Apart from the many speakers, most of them experienced Microsoft Valuable Professionals, Microsoft celebrities like Tim McMichael were also presenting sessions.

Like many conferences nowadays, IT/DEV Connections took off with several pre-conference workshops on Monday. One of these workshops was done by fellow Exchange MVP and countryman Jaap Wesselius and myself. We talked a whole day about ‘Managing Exchange On-Premises and Exchange Online using PowerShell’. The turn-up was above expectation, which is always nice, and we had good interaction with, and feedback from the audience. This made our session, from a presenter’s viewpoint, very worthwhile.

imageSince I had no sessions after the workshop, I was free to attend sessions by fellow presenters. Tony Redmond kicked off with a keynote, analyzing the current landscape for Exchange and Office 365, and making references to sessions later that week, should people be interested in those topics. It’s also where you learn who is running what, and as it turned out most attendees are running Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2013 On-Premises, but with an increasing interest in Office 365.

During the week, apart from the excellent contents presented, I was very humbled to learn lots of presenters made references to several of my scripts, e.g.

This conference is also the place where Exchange MVP fellows Tony Redmond, Michael van Horenbeeck, Paul Cunningham and Jeff Guillet presented their 2nd edition of their book, ‘Office 365 for Exchange Professionals’.  Congratulations to them reaching this milestone, looking at the non-stop amount of changes happening in the Office 365 environment. You can get your own copy of the updated book here.

It’s becoming a tradition that the last Exchange session of the conference is a ‘Ask the Experts’ panel session, where the audience can ask a panel of presenters questions, or where the current landscape for Exchange or Office 365 can be discussed. It’s a great way to close the conference, before everyone gets back to their corners of the world, back from the crazy city that is Las Vegas to reality.

imageIf you didn’t consider IT/DEV Connections before, you should. The conference is a must-visit, especially with Microsoft having consolidated MEC, MMS etc. in a single, huge event which is Ignite now. Connections is not small, but the more intimate setting allows you to catch up with peers more easily, have discussions over a pint, great catering, and without the need to max out your step counter. The Aria resort is very nice place to host this event, great for business with a pleasant conference area without too much of the distractions like the other hotels. If you plan on visiting next year, save the date: September 19-22, 2016!

I also want to thank ENow for again hosting an epic Scheduled Maintenance party. Location this time was the Ghostbar at the 55th floor in Palms Resort, which gave an amazing view over the city of Las Vegas and the Strip. I wore my ENow-branded NFL jersey to the party, a gift from ENow last year. This lead to funny moments, as this is ENow’s event gear, and many people mistook me for an employee, thanking me when leaving the party.

Finally, here are some of the other Exchange Connections wrap-ups:

iOS 9 Outlook App & Lync 2013 App Issues

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iphone6After Apple released iOS 9 to the public yesterday. From an Exchange or Office 365 perspective, iOS 9 supports the enhanced calendar features of Office 365 and Exchange 2016 when that is released. Unfortunately, incidents have been reported with the Outlook app and the Lync 2013 App.

Regarding the Outlook App, iOS9 users might not be able to start the Outlook App or the Outlook app will just crash. The far from ideal workaround offered by the Outlook team, is to reinstall the Outlook app.

outlookappcrash

Of course, this also requires users to reconfigure accounts and Outlook App settings, so organizations can expect some calls to the service desk by users who upgraded. Organizations can report on the currently registered iOS8 devices that syned in the last 30 days, using:

Get-MobileDevice | Where-Object {$_.DeviceOS -like 'iOS 8*' -and $_.whenChanged -gt (Get-Date).AddDays(-30)} | Select UserDisplayName, FriendlyName, DeviceModel, DeviceOS, whenChanged

This will product a list of users, the name of their device, the device model and OS and when it last synced with Exchange. This information can be useful when you want to proactively approach users with iOS8 devices.

For Lync 2013 users, there are sign-in issues when they have configured different region and language settings on their iOS device. Those users will be presented the following:

Lync2013SignInIssue1

The issue has officially been confirmed through publication of KB3096704, which states:

“This problem is fixed in the Microsoft Skype for Business for iOS app that will replace Lync for iPhone and Lync for iPad when it’s released. No fix for this issue is scheduled for the current releases of Lync for iPhone and Lync for iPad”.

Since the Skype for Business app is not available yet, this is not good news. Mitigation is possible by matching the region with the language setting (or the other way around), after which you need to reinstall the Lync 2013 app from the store.

With all this in mind, should organizations wish to first test the new iOS against their Exchange environment for potential other issues, you can block iOS 9 from accessing your Exchange 2013 environment, or Office 365 tenant if you must, using the Access/Block/Quarantine feature. First you need to retrieve the reported DeviceOS string for iOS 9 for a device:

Get-MobileDevice | Where-Object {$_.DeviceOS -like “iOS 9*”} | Select DeviceModel, DeviceOSLanguage, DeviceOS

The reported DeviceOS strings then is used to create an ActiveSync device rule. For example, my iPhone 6 reports DeviceOS as “iOS 9.0 13A344”. To block these devices with iOS 9.0 and put them in quarantine, run the following:

New-ActiveSyncDeviceAccessRule -QueryString "iOS 9.0 13A344" -Characteristic DeviceOS -AccessLevel Quarantine

If you would like to know more about the Access/Block/Quarantine option, check out this article.