Category Archives: UC&C

Say you have a user and you want to let them use Exchange ActiveSync with one device, but not another one. Exchange 2007 allows you to control device sync based on the device ID. Only devices whose device IDs appear on the magic list can sync; other devices cannot. (I guess that makes this feature the equivalent of the invite list at a Beverly Hills party.) Because the device ID restriction is per-mailbox, it also lets you keep users from swapping devices. To do this, use the Get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics cmdlet to get the device ID, then the Set-CASMailbox cmdlet with the ActiveSyncAllowedDeviceIDs switch to add this deviceID to the list of allowed devices. If the list is NULL, which is the default, a user can sync with any device. Multiple devices can be specified in the allow list separated by semicolons. (Thanks to Microsoft’s Vanitha Prabhakaran for the tip!)

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

As promised at the MVP Summit, Microsoft’s unified communications group today released the public beta of Office Communications Server 2007. Grab it here, or swing by the beta forums and see what’s happening. I’ll have lots more to say about OCS 2007, but right now I’m busy setting it up for the roadshow.

Technorati Tags: Unified Messaging

Another cool UC&C tidbit: a company called m-networks apparently has a commercial (e.g. supported) product that acts as a call control gateway for linking Asterisk and Live Communications Server. I’m not sure how big the market for such solutions is but it’s good to see some of the ad-hoc hackery surrounding this particular integration supplemented by supported commercial products.

Technorati Tags: Unified Messaging

This is very cool:
Mitel Delivers Direct SIP Connection to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging.

Mitel’s embedded SIP integration eliminates the need for a separate SIP gateway as a go-between from a 3300 ICP SIP connection to an Exchange Server 2007 resulting in support for multiple forms of Unified Communications including voice, email and fax. Mitel can deliver this capability to existing 3300 ICP customers through a software upgrade that simply delivers the SIP server’s (gateway) functionality resulting in reduced complexity, time and cost for our customers. Native support of SIP on the 3300 ICP enables customers to take full advantage of the deployment of open standards and maximize their investment either in a Mitel or a multi-vendor environment that supports an open standards approach.

This is great news because it saves the expense and hassle of buying a separate gateway product just to integrate with the PBX. Back in August of last year, I met with the Mitel folks and strongly encouraged them to pursue direct interop; I believe that vendors who can directly talk to Exchange 2007 servers are going to sell more PBXes than those that don’t. I like the Mitel 3300 quite a bit (so much so that we bought one for our new office) and I’m pleased to see Mitel getting some first-mover advantage in this market.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Mitel, Unified Messaging

Very cool news: MS has announced the feature list for Exchange 2007 service pack 1. Those of you who have blasted Exchange 2007 for not having public folder access in OWA (yeah, I’m talking to you) will be glad to know that it’s back, along with public folder management in the Exchange Management Console, S/MIME in OWA, POP and IMAP configuration GUI, and a few other nifty features.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

My UPDATE columns for this week and next cover the process of updating Exchange 2003 to handle the upcoming DST change. (I’ll update this post with links to the columns when they’re published.) Oddly, as I was writing this week’s installment, I found myself wondering how Notes and Domino will manage the DST transition; today I saw Ed’s post on the topic. Apparently no matter whose messaging system you use, it’s still a messy process. Of course, Exchange 2007 doesn’t have this problem; if you hurry maybe you can get your environment upgraded before the DST switchover 🙂

UPDATE: here’s part 1 of the series.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

So I was trying to figure out how to exempt a particular IP address from connection filtering on an Exchange Edge Transport server. I needed to do this to keep Edge from deciding that the internal relay server was generating spam. It’s going to be injecting spam (for some tests I’m doing), but I didn’t want the sender reputation agent to decide that the server was a spammer itself.

My first thought was to add the server’s IP to the IP accept list. That wouldn’t work, though, because mail coming from IPs that appear on the accept list are tagged with an SCL of -1, indicating that no further filtering is necessary. I could have turned off connection filtering altogether, but I didn’t want to do that either. Finally I broke down and pinged a friend who works for Microsoft, and once he understood what I wanted to do he came up with the right answer: I needed to use the set-transportConfig cmdlet’s -internalSMTPServers flag.

Once I knew that, I was able to find references to the cmdlet all over the place (including one at Bharat’s blog from yesterday… I guess that’s a good reason to be more diligent about my blog reading!) As much as I’ve worked with Exchange 2007 over the last year, I still have a lot to learn.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

Devin asked me, and I realized that apart from TCP 5060 (for SIP) I didn’t know. A little googling, however, produced this topic in the Exchange documentation. See table 1, which shows the remaining ports that you have to keep open to make UM work across a firewall.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Unified Messaging

On the heels of my EWS post the other day, a new post from Microsoft’s Wes Haggard, this time explaining how to use EWS to find contacts.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

This is a hassle; I got two separate notifications from fellow MVPs that my Barracuda box was blocking their inbound mail. When I checked the Barracuda logs, sure enough, it had rejected both messages; the reason listed was “Intent (xmlsoap.org)”.

“Intent” is the status code the ‘cuda uses to indicate that it blocked a message because it contains a spammish URL; it’s essentially the equivalent of SURBL. I checked the two messages, and sure enough they contain a reference to xmlsoap: “http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/”. However, this reference comes from the original message in the thread, which was an HTML message! Apparently somewhere in the round-trip reply cycle, the HTML version was converted to plain text, which exposed the xmlsoap reference, which the Barracuda improperly blocked. Evidently spammers have sent HTML-formattted mail from Outlook before, so xmlsoap.org has ended up on the intent list. Thankfully the Barracuda interface has an easy-to-find “Exempt this URL” link, so I could clear the ban, but it’s still not what I would’ve expected.

Excellent news: the 32-bit versions of the Exchange 2007 management tools are now available. This download includes the Exchange Management Console, the Exchange Management Shell, ExBPA, and the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

Just to set the record straight: Entourage 2004 works fine with Exchange 2007 public folders.

If you’ve read the Exchange docs (or the Exchange team blog, or any of the zillions of places that reported this), you might be forgiven for being confused. The docs say that public folders are “de-emphasized”, a fancy way for saying that Microsoft is hoping you’ll start using SharePoint instead. The docs also say that OWA 2007 doesn’t support browser-based access to public folders (a regression from Exchange 2003, and a mistake IMHO, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

The Exchange team posted a blog entry explaining the details of what they meant by “de-emphasized”, but it doesn’t mention Entourage. As Exchange 2007 draws more attention, I’m seeing more people asking questions about Entourage and Exchange 2007.

The answer comes in two parts:

• Entourage uses WebDAV to access public folders (and mailboxes, for that matter) on an Exchange server. WebDAV is fully supported for public folder access in Exchange 2007. It works great; I use it daily with three different Exchange servers.
• OWA 2003 includes its own code that uses WebDAV to access public folders. There is no equivalent code in OWA 2007, so it can’t display public folder contents. If and when MS adds such code to OWA 2007, that will have no impact on Entourage because Entourage doesn’t use OWA to render public folders, it uses WebDAV.

Hopefully this will help clear things up somewhat, but (as John Welch has repeatedly said) it would be great to see an official statement from MS on this.

Wow, Matt Stehle may have just become my favorite Microsoft employee. He’s posted a long list of Exchange Web Services samples, some of which are very interesting (this is my current favorite since Entourage can’t do it yet).

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007