Paul's Down-Home Page

I’ve seen several queries in various fora about using Entourage with Exchange 2007. I’ve been using it for a while and have had absolutely no problems. There are a couple of issues to be aware of, though.

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My main man Dave Goldman just released a new version of his extremely useful oabinteg tool. Oabinteg is very useful for identifying problems with the offline address book generation process; I used it (along with some helpful suggestions from Dave) to pinpoint a problem with OABs with Exchange 2007 against an Office 2003 client running on Vista RC1. Most admins find that OAB generation just ticks along in the background, never calling attention to itself; however, it never hurts to run oabinteg to see what’s happening under the covers.

Last fall, I had a lot of fun writing a “top 10” list of availability principles and tips for Exchange. Part of the fun was that I got to work with fellow Exchange MVPs Ben Winzenz and Chris Scharff, along with some other cool folks at MessageOne. The list came out as a nifty little pocket guide, printed on heavy glossy paper with a slick cover. MessageOne was giving them out at various trade shows. Turns out that now Windows IT Pro is making the guide available too as a download (registration is required.) You might also find some of these other whitepapers interesting, too.

I thought I’d blogged about this before, but apparently not. I’ve gotten a few questions at roadshow events about how the Exchange Unified Messaging server role scales. Now, it’s not entirely fair to ask scalability questions about products that are still in beta because the answers are almost guaranteed to change (and hopefully for the better). However, in discussions with Microsoft’s Michael Khalili, I understand that the current guideline is that a single server should be able to handle 80-100 concurrent calls (the direction doesn’t matter, whether inbound or outbound). If you co-locate the UM role on another server, you may be able to handle fewer calls, but as with so many other scalability questions, the ultimate answer is “it depends”.

Observationally, I’ve been able to easily handle 4-5 concurrent UM calls on a 32-bit VM running as a UM / mailbox / CAS / hub transport server. I’m sure once Microsoft IT rolls out Exchange UM across the company they’ll be publishing one of their nifty “IT Showcase” white papers that describes in detail what their architecture looks like.

Update: forgot to mention Michael Wilson’s excellent post on the number of users you can put onto a UM server.

Two years ago, I wrote a Troubleshooter Q&A about turning on read receipts in OWA. I just noticed the reader comments, which aren’t very nice; they complain that I didn’t actually include a description of how to do it for Outlook. (In fairness, if you search for “Outlook force read receipt” my article comes up near the top.)

So, the answer: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Preferences\ReadReceipt, a REG_DWORD, controls this. Set it to “1” and Outlook will request a read receipt for every outbound message. Problem solved!

I was working on a project that involved a unified messaging server, and I wanted to find out which users had been enabled for unified messaging. I thought this would require me to use the get-user cmdlet and search for a particular attribute, but it turns out to be easier than that. All I needed was get-UMmailbox. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work as documented– I was expecting get-UMMailbox to give me a list of only those mailboxes that were enabled. However, I only wanted the enabled ones, so a quick get-ummailbox | where {$_.UMenabled -eq $true} promptly gave me what I wanted:

Ryan IM’d me to ask where the Exchange SMTP pickup directory went in Exchange 2007. Good question; it did indeed move, as part of the overall move away from the IIS core services that Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 used. The Exchange 2007 pickup directory defaults to c:\program files\microsoft\exchange server\transportRoles\pickup. (Note the space in “Exchange Server” and the lack of one in “transportRoles”). Drop your message in there and away you go. You can also use the Set-TransportServer cmdlet to set some pickup-related parameters, including where the directory is and what size messages it can accept.

Did you know that you can get the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) to use per-server gateway thresholds? If not, don’t feel bad; lots of other admins don’t know that either. Evan Dodds blogged this in September 2004; he recently mentioned that he wasn’t aware of any other place that this setting was documented, so I decided to give it a freshness bump because there are still lots of people who apparently don’t know about it.