Category Archives: UC&C

Microsoft licensing confuses lots of people, me included. Fellow Exchange MVP Michael B. Smith has two great posts covering Exchange licensing and OCS licensing. They make for interesting reading if you’re not up on the intricacies of these licensing terms.

On Friday, I set myself up for the hat trick: I was going to upgrade my primary desktop to Mac OS 10.5, my work laptop to Vista SP1, and my home Exchange server to 2007 SP1. I only got one of the three done because I ended up busy with actual, y’know, work— my Exchange box was the only one I got around to. However, during the upgrade, I faced an annoying problem: the Exchange setup utility failed when it tried to upgrade the UM service.

I checked the event log and found that the UM service was failing with event ID 1183. As far as I can tell, that’s a totally undocumented error. It turns out that, when the UM service attempted to issue itself a new self-signed certificate, the service was throwing an error and crashing with an unhandled exception. Because the UM service wouldn’t start, Exchange Setup (quite sensibly, IMHO) wouldn’t continue.

The fix ended up being to restore the correct permissions on c:\documents and settings\all users\application data\microsoft\crypto\rsa\machinekeys. This is the location of the computer account’s personal certificate store, and for some reason, the permissions on it were incorrect. Adding NETWORK SERVICE:F and Domain Admins:F back to the ACL fixed the problem and allowed the setup utility to finish its work. (The longer-term fix comes in two parts: fix New-ExchangeCertificate so it doesn’t fail with an unhandled exception in that case, and then figure out who borked the permissions on that folder.)

What about the Leopard and Vista upgrades? Hey, tomorrow’s another day!

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Unified Messaging

You probably already know how to use Outlook Voice Access to listen to your messages, get calendar information, and so on. Did you know that you could use it to send voice mail messages to distribution lists? It’s true. Check it out:all you have to do is dial into OVA, say “Directory”, then say the name of the distribution list. Record the message, say “send this message”, and you’re done!

A few tips on things you should be aware of:

• The distribution list is actually a dynamic grammar for Speech Server. It’s rebuilt daily. When you create a new DL it won’t immediately be included in the grammar. Check C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\UnifiedMessaging\grammars\en\distribution.cfg to make sure the DL is there. You can force a rebuild with Set-UMServer -GrammarGenerationSchedule.
• Take a look at C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\UnifiedMessaging\temp\distribution.grxm if you want to know whether the DL is included.
• By default, Exchange will automatically create grammar entries for DL names. If you don’t want this behavior, edit C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Bin\globcfg.xml and set EnableDistributionListGrammarGeneration to false.

I was wondering about this the other day: what happens when someone attempts to leave a voice mail message on an Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging server when the target mailbox is full?
It turns out that Microsoft helpfully documented this already: if the mailbox is nearly full (such that the VM would make the mailbox go over quota), it’s still delivered. If the mailbox is already over quota, the UM server tells the caller that the mailbox is full, and the caller isn’t allowed to leave a message. This may be actually useful if you want to create an announcement-only mailbox, but I haven’t tested doing so yet to ensure that it behaves as expected.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Unified Communications, Unified Messaging

I know the title of this post sounds like a case study, but it isn’t. Remember that New York Times story last week about how Eli Lilly was negotiating with the US Department of Justice over a US$1 billion settlement? At first, Lilly thought the Gray Lady had gotten information from the DoJ… but it was one of their own lawyers who mistakenly sent a confidental e-mail thread memo to the NYT’s Alex Berenson instead of her fellow attorney, Sanford Brad Berenson. Oooops. Read the whole story here, then consider how much value an information rights management (IRM) system like Windows Rights Management might have provided to that law firm (to say nothing of the poor attorney who made a mistake– I bet her future career prospects are pretty dim.)

Update: Portfolio got a few of the details wrong, so I’ve edited the above post. NPR’s “On the Media” has an interview with Alex Berenson that provides some more background detail if you’re interested.

Intermedia, well-known as a provider of hosted Exchange services, just sent out a press release announcing their software-as-a-service hosted version of OCS 2007. They’re offering presence, IM, and PC-to-PC voice; no conferencing or telephony integration. Still, this is an interesting move, and it should be especially attractive to those who are already using, or considering, Intermedia as an Exchange hosting provider.

Technorati Tags: OCS 2007, Unified Communications

I got a very interesting press release from Ferris Research this morning. They performed a survey of more than 900 (for some reason, I want to say the exact number was 916) companies of various sizes and in various verticals. 654 of the companies were in North America; most of the rest were in Europe. I don’t have the full report to analyze it yet, but there are some very interesting claims:

• Across all organizations surveyed, Exchange has a 65% market share, with major strengths in healthcare and telecom enterprises.
• Internal and hosted POP/IMAP solutions are used in about 15 percent of organizations of all sizes, with 5% of large organizations using them.
• Notes/Domino has about 10% market share across the surveyed organizations, with particular strengths in manufacturing and financial services.

Ferris claims that this is “by far the largest survey ever done on messaging systems”. I’ve requested a copy of the full survey (benefits of being in the press, y’know) and will report more detail once I get it. For now, let’s just say that the numbers Ferris is reporting certainly don’t match up with the numbers claimed by Lotus advocates (and who would’ve guessed that POP/IMAP had such a penetration?) OBTW: GroupWise’s market share is “negligible”.

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, Exchange 2007, Unified Communications

As with so many other things, there’s a right way and a wrong way to create custom attributes for use with Exchange. These attributes can be made to appear in the custom attribute slots in Outlook, so you can extend the GAL (and views of it) to include things like birthdays, employee IDs, or other data not include in the schema. The wrong way is just to pick what looks like an unused MAPI attribute ID. Dave Goldman explains the right way here.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

It turns out that Windows Mobile devices have unique device IDs. This comes about because WM is part of the Windows CE family, so each WM device has a two-part unique ID. The first 4 bytes represent a device family (e.g. all, say, HTC S730s will have the same 4-byte value). The remaining 12 bytes are supposed to be globally unique to all devices from the manufacturer, so that two (say) Palm Treo 750s will have two different device IDs. These IDs are not the same as the IMEI or phone number (in part because not every device will have an IMEI or phone number– consider a WiFi-only device that syncs to EAS).

There are several different uses for the device ID. From an Exchange perspective, the two biggest ones are:

• looking at the IIS logs on the CAS server to see when a particular device synced and what happened when it tried (e.g. are there errors? did the sync complete? when was the last sync?) Some of this information is visible on the Mobile Devices tab of the OWA’s Option page, or you can get it using the get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics cmdlet.
• provisioning access by device. For example, you can allow only a specified device to connect for a user, which prevents them from using other (presumably unsupported or unauthorized) devices. To do this, you use the set-CASMailbox cmdlet with the ActiveSyncAllowedDeviceIDs switch.

Technorati Tags: Windows Mobile