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.

Exchange 2010 SP1 Help Updated (Feb2011)

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Michel de Rooij

The Exchange 2010 SP1 help file has been updated (February 22th, 2010). You can download it here.

Exchange 2010 Mailbox Role Calculator 14.4

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Michel de Rooij

Missed this one, but apparantly the Microsoft Exchange Team silently released a small update of the Exchange Mailbox Role Calculator, bringing it to version 14.4.

This version includes the following fixes since 14.2:

Fixed stretched DAG scenario that had one database copy in each datacenter not reporting results due to new copy validation check
Fixed secondary datacenter log disk calculations to correctly calculate the formatted disk space
Fixed Table headers in the Storage Design tab to show disk count / Secondary datacenter
Fixed two-node stretched DAG scenario that resulted in calculator not reporting results due to new copy validation check

You can download the calculator here, consult the changeblog here or read through the usage instructions here.