Category Archives: UC&C

Nathan Breskin-Auer has a great summary of the “light” version of Outlook Web Access 2007 at the Exchange team blog. I’m disappointed that there isn’t a Tasks module in OWA light, since I use both tasks and Macintoshes heavily.

I’m also disappointed that Microsoft isn’t going to certify OWA Premium for use with Firefox. This may seem odd, given that I’m not a huge Firefox fan. I understand that it’s a resource issue; the OWA team chose to spend their efforts on adding features instead of adding support for a browser that is lightly used (if at all) within their target customer base. However, not shipping Firefox support is bad for three reasons:

• it belies the power of OWA’s AJAX implementation, which would work well with any modern AJAX-capable browser.
• Microsoft’s competitors (including Domino Web Access, Zimbra, and Scalix) support Firefox
• The education / university market has lots of Firefox adoption, and it’s also a market that Microsoft’s trying to crack

Maybe for SP1? Of course, the program team’s answer is likely to remain the same: “when we see customer demand”. Fair enough.

As part of my grand unified communications adventure (more on which later), I needed to get reverse number lookup (RNL) working with LCS. RNL is a simple concept: when you get a phone call from extension 1001, you want your computer to identify the caller as John Smith, not as ‘1001’.

Communicator looks up numbers using one of two sources:

• the address book produced by the Address Book Service on the LCS server; this is generated daily from whatever you’ve got in Active Directory.
• contacts in the user’s local Outlook address book (or Windows address book)

When you place a call to a Communicator user, the PBX sends a CSTA message that includes a device identifier, like this:

<deviceIdentifier>tel:1001; phonecontext=pbx.litware.com</deviceIdentifier>

(or maybe <deviceIdentifier> tel:+16175552702;ext=52702</deviceIdentifier>

Communicator will try to match the device identifier against one of the numbers it can see in the address book or the Outlook contact. If it matches, it displays the caller info; if not, you just get the number. You can add this information manually, but the preferred way to do this is to put the callers’ numbers into a multivalued attribute called proxyAddresses. However, we were in somewhat of a hurry. The simplest solution for us was to add the “TEL” URI of the associated extension into the “home” phone number field of each user object. This would more sensibly be done by a script, but for our lab environment, which only has a handful of extensions, it was a quick solution.

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I’m a huge fan of the Exchange team’s blog because it includes a wealth of technical information that you can’t find anywhere else. They don’t waste a lot of time with marketing fluff, and the folks who post there run the gamut from product support to developers to product managers. The Unified Communications Group at MS recently launched their own blog, which I hope will live up to the same standard.

Since I’m used to seeing my byline in print magazines, I don’t usually get too excited about it. However, I was surprised (and pleased!) to see that the Solution Accelerator for Exchange Consolidation and Migration won an Honorable Mention in Windows IT Pro‘s Readers’ Choice awards. This is especially cool because it was a write-in nomination! Missy Koslosky, Devin Ganger, and I worked really, really hard on this guide, and it’s great to see that it’s been useful to people.

Argh. This bit me, even though I knew better. I set up a managed custom folder, created a folder policy for it, and waited patiently for the folder to appear in a user mailbox. It didn’t. Why? Because I hadn’t set a schedule for the managed folder assistant, that’s why. Fortunately, a quick run of start-ManagedFolderAssistant solved the problem.

Cool! EMC (perhaps you’ve heard of them?) is launching an expanded service offering to help their customers migrate applications and data from Lotus’ collaboration platform to Microsoft’s stack. If I get time, I’ll watch their webcast and see what’s what.

Jason Mayans, one of the Exchange 2007 team’s product managers, has a new blog in which he discusses (among other things) how the new calendaring and scheduling features in Exchange 2007 came to be. It makes for interesting reading.

As Ed pointed out, Jack Dausman has a couple of articles about Exchange storage, and I finally have cycles to respond.

First, I find it a little sad that there’s so much effort being expended to help Chris Bordeleau tune his Domino server in the absence of any real data. Where are Domino’s performance monitoring and load testing tools? Are there no equivalents to jetstress and loadsim? Surely if Chris could post some actual performance data values the folks at Ed’s place would be able to help him out more directly.

Now, on to Jack’s postings. The Storage Magazine article he cites is, sad to say, old news to experienced Exchange administrators: using an archiving tool against Exchange won’t shrink the database unless you compact it. There are relatively few reasons why you’d actually do a compaction in practice, though:

• you move a lot of mailboxes from one database to another, thus reducing the amount of data needed for the source database
• you do a first run of an archiving / vaulting tool that removes a significant amount of message data
• you’re running so low on disk space that you need to reclaim white space, even though you know the store will grow again.

You certainly don’t need to run a tool like GOexchange regularly, as I’ve said before. Most sites don’t ever need to run it at all; after all, there are very few companies where the amount of stored e-mail is shrinking (don’t I wish!)

As to a couple of Jack’s other points:

• He says that Domino supports larger mail files than other systems. I think we’re having a semantic disconnect here: Exchange supports very, very large mailbox databases, but it’s uncommon to see individual mailboxes much larger than 6 GB or so. That’s not because of any hard-coded limit; it’s mostly because of poor client performance with older versions of Outlook. The big killer here is actually the number of items, not the mailbox size.
• He mentions turning off transactional logging to increase performance on Domino servers. Exchange doesn’t let you turn off transaction logging for the simple reason that it’s a key DR capability. I’m not sure under what circumstances it would make sense to trade off a small speed boost for degrading your DR capability.

Jack and Charles Robinson represent (IMHO) the best of the Domino community: they deal in technical discussions, not infantile bashing, and they understand their chosen products well enough to have intelligent discussions about them.

At first I thought this was a joke, but apparently not: Sametime doesn’t support LDAP paging, so in very large Active Directory environments IBM tells you to increase the result page size on your servers. Haven’t they ever heard of LDAP paging?

I had this flagged for blogging, and now that I’m back from vacation, I’m finally getting around to clearing out some of my queue! Anyway, Neil pointed out that Microsoft has released the Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) courseware for their LCS 2005 course, 7034A: Implementing Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 SP1. If you’re interested in learning more about LCS, this is a good no-cost way to get an in-depth look at how it works and how to set up and manage it.

InfoWorld just posted a fairly comprehensive review of Exchange 2007 beta 2, and they liked what they saw.

Exchange 2007 requires the RC0 build of Monad. The currently available build of PowerShell (née Monad) is RC1. Although the Exchange 2007 release notes tell you to install the latest build of PowerShell, they don’t really mean it; beta 2 requires RC0. Nothing more, nothing less. You can get the RC0 build of Monad using the link on the Exchange 2007 setup splash page (which I couldn’t use because my VMs don’t have Internet access), or here, and install it. Don’t forget that the extension for scripts changes: it’s .msh in RC0 and .ps1 in RC1 and later.

Another error from the Exchange 2007 beta setup parade: after you remove a server, when you reinstall, you may get an error that says that “Default VoiceMessageOriginator contact already exists”. The trick to fix this is to launch ADU&C, turn on advanced mode, and open the Microsoft Exchange System Objects container. In that container, you’ll see an object called Exchange UM<GUID>. This object is used to represent the system as the sender of UM messages. You’ll need to remove it. (Microsoft is planning to change the way the sender object is created in future builds, so this is a beta-2-only bug.)

Exchange 2007’s setup program includes the ability to reinstall the Exchange binaries on a failed server. I had to use this today to replace a server VM that was mangled by a problem with our SAN controller; through no fault of anyone except a certain large SAN company, the VM was corrupt and couldn’t be restored. I rebuilt the base OS image, gave it the same machine name, and fired up setup /m:recoverserver. That seemed to work OK, reinstalling the hub transport and mailbox roles. Then I got an unexpected error:

Client Access Role ……………………. FAILED

The AD Object for virtual directory ‘IIS://EXCHANGE/W3SVC/1/ROOT/Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync’ on ‘EXCHANGE’ could not be created. This may be happening because it already exists in Active Directory. Remove the object from Active Directory, then re-create it.

I couldn’t find any documentation on how to fix this. That’s an awfully generic error message. However, I eventually found the suspect object living in the configuration NC of my AD: cn=services, cn=Microsoft Exchange, cn=orgName, cn=Administrative Groups, cn=Servers, cn=serverName, cn=Protocols, cn=HTTP. So, I removed it. All done? Not quite.

See, once you run with /m:recoverserver, the setup code writes a flag in each role (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\v8.0\roleName) that says “I’m in disaster recovery mode”. As long as that flag is present, you can’t install or remove server roles, so I couldn’t just run exsetup /m:install /r:clientaccess like you’d think. First, I removed the Action value under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\v8.0\ClientAccessRole. Next, I uninstalled the CAS role (which wasn’t really there anyway!), then I re-installed the CAS role. However, Exchange setup still thought the CAS role was installed, so it wouldn’t install it. I tried adjusting MSExchCurrentServerRoles for the server object, but I don’t think Exchange likes a value of “0”. Subsequent reinstalls complained that the Exchange Servers USG was missing. Rather than continue to tinker, I ended up removing the AD org object and reinstalling from scratch. I think the original virtual directory error is a bug, and I’m going to report it as such.

Update: this is now logged as bug 176356.