Tag Archives: Exchange 2010

2009/11/17 · 17:29

A real-life Exchange 2010 DAG success story

We currently have a two-node database availability group (DAG) protecting our mailbox databases. Over the weekend, a person or persons unknown shut down the physical server hosting one of the DAG members. No one, including me, noticed any difference— all our users continued to work normally.

Failover was completely seamless, and neither our Outlook nor OWA nor mobile users contacted me to complain. I only became aware of the problem when I was troubleshooting our back pressure incident.

Exchange 2010 rocks!

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2009/11/17 · 17:12

Exchange 2010 back pressure

So, over the weekend my users stopped getting mail from external senders. No one reported it until yesterday; I happened to be in Redmond teaching the MCM Exchange UM course, so I didn’t find out about it this morning. A quick check of the queues revealed that there was no mail backing up on any of the Exchange servers, so I sent a few test messages. The test messages never arrived. However, mail from internal users was arriving just fine. “Couldn’t be back pressure,” I reasoned, “because the server’s still accepting connections.”

I dug a little deeper and found that our Linux MX host had a ton of queued mail– all with “4.3.1 insufficient system resources” errors . Of course, that was a dead giveaway. I checked the system event log, found an event 15006 from Saturday night: low disk space had forced Exchange to stop accepting messages. After a little disk fu, the transport service again began accepting messages– but why was any mail arriving?

It turns out that Exchange 2010 back pressure handling has a major difference from Exchange 2007. In 2007, if disk space or CPU become a bottleneck, the transport will stop accepting SMTP connections. In Exchange 2010, it will still accept the connections, it just won’t accept the messages. There are also some nuances (explained here), too. For example, the transport will attempt to keep accepting messages from other Exchange servers unless resources get really, really tight; the first thing it stops doing is accepting messages from external servers.

Exchange 2010 can also throttle the flow of incoming messages as a back pressure reliever, but that’s a topic for another day…

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2009/08/30 · 17:18

First look: Snow Leopard and Exchange

Given that I’m in Palo Alto, and that probably half of my coworkers use Macs, it’s no surprise that I installed Snow Leopard today. I’m not going to review the OS, or even the Exchange capability, but here are a few notes based on my long-time Entourage use (and not a little time spent with Outlook 2010 over the past few months). Herewith my thoughts:

  • The first thing I noticed: Mail.app is smokin’ fast compared to Entourage EWS. I mean, we’re talking lightning. EWS has much improved sync performance compared to DAV sync, but Mail.app leaves it in the dust when it comes to scrolling, searching, and message rendering. I haven’t tried to compare the two programs’ sync speed (and probably won’t, since it’s mostly relevant when you set up a new account).
  • Speaking of setup: I was able to set up 4 Exchange accounts in about 10 seconds each: enter e-mail address and password, then let Autodiscover do the rest. EWS Autodiscover works well most of the time, but occasionally it will fail to detect an account.
  • By default, Mail creates a single unified Inbox view– exactly what I use in Entourage (and what I wish for in Outlook 2010). However, nowhere can I find where Mail tells me how many messages are in a folder, something I like to keep track of.
  • I like it that Mail.app uses the same sounds for sent and received mail that the iPhone does. On the other hand, I dislike the fact that you can’t change these sounds (on either platform). C’mon, Apple.
  • Ironically, older versions of Mail would hide some Exchange folders when you connected because Mail couldn’t handle them. Guess what? This version fails to hide some folders, such as “Conversation Action Settings” and “Quick Step Settings”, that Outlook 2010 creates as ostensibly hidden folders in your mailbox root. Oops.
  • Entourage seems to do a better job of masking temporary connectivity problems. When Mail.app decides that one of my servers is unreachable, it grays out that server’s entire folder tree and puts the little tilde-looking icon next to the account name. By contrast, Entourage will discreetly add “(Not Connected)” to the account name and leave it at that.
  • iCal… well, what can I say? I still don’t like it after all these years. Yes, it syncs with my Exchange calendars now, but its visual display is ugly compared to Entourage (especially for overlapping events), it’s lacking in features, and the task support appears to have been hastily bolted on.
  • I’ve never been a user of the Address Book app. Given the way this version works, I’m not about to start. Too much wasted white space and too many missing features. For example, want to see someone’s management chain? Too bad, Address Book doesn’t show that. Feel like searching the GAL? Sorry, no can do (at least not that I can find.)

There are other problems, too– no support for setting your out-of-office status, for example. In terms of fit and finish, there are lots of little grace notes that Entourage gets right but that Apple stumbled with. To show just one example, take a look at these two screen shots, one for each program.

Microsoft EntourageScreenSnapz001.png   iCalScreenSnapz001.png

IMHO, Entourage does a better job all around. It tells me that my machine and my appointment are in different time zones. It clearly shows the important data about when my test meeting’s invitees are available. Once you type in an invitee’s name, there’s no way to delete the event in iCal unless you remove all invitees first. Attempting to close the window gives you a chance to edit or send the invite, but not get rid of it altogether. (Bonus: thought it was interesting that Entourage could get and display Atalla’s status (OOF, in this case) but that iCal couldn’t, even though I took the screen shots on the same machine and more or less at the same time.)

More broadly I don’t like going back to the world of having three separate apps for PIM functions. It reminds me of Sidekick for DOS. I much prefer the Outlook/Entourage model of having several different (but related) data types in one place. What makes this worse is that there’s relatively little integration among the Snow Leopard apps. For example, if you’re looking at a contact in Address Book and want to send that person a mail message– too bad. There’s no way to do so. You can, however, right-click an e-mail address in Mail to open that address’ contact card.

Still more broadly, these applications are not very flexible or customizable compared to Entourage. For example, let’s say you want your message reading pane on the right. Too bad! There’s no way in Mail.app to customize it; you need WideMail or something like it, of which there is no Snow Leopard version (yet).

So, Snow Leopard delivers what Apple promised: basic Exchange integration. There are so many things that they’ve left out, though, that I remain disappointed, and I’m thinking that the Microsoft Mac Business Unit has a huge lead already as they move into full-scale development of Outlook for Mac

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2009/08/18 · 09:04

Exchange 2010 release candidate build now available

Great news from Michael Atalla on the Exchange team blog: the release candidate for Exchange 2010 is now available for download. The RC is feature complete, meaning that everything that will be in the final build has been implemented, though there may still be bugs. I can say that based on my experience with Exchange 2010 in the TAP, and a user of the Outlook Live service, it’s pretty darn solid. Check it out!

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2009/07/29 · 12:05

Exchange UM broadcast / distribution voice mail

Microsoft’s Dave Howe posted a great tip to his blog: how to allow users to send voicemail messages to multiple users. This is often called “broadcast” or “distribution” voicemail, because the sender specifies a single address that expands into multiple recipients– just like a conventional distribution group in Exchange. The process is pretty straightforward: you create a new AD distribution group for the target recipients, update the UM grammar files that Exchange UM uses for speech recognition, and start sending messages.

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2009/07/22 · 18:56

The lowdown on Exchange 2010 fax

You may have heard that Exchange 2010 won’t support inbound fax. I have yet to find an Exchange 2007 deployment that actually uses Exchange UM faxing for one simple reason: it’s inbound-only. If you have to do all the work of deploying an outbound fax solution anyway, the value of inbound fax support in Exchange UM is quite a bit lower.

Exchange 2010 won’t create fax messages itself. However, there’s a twist: you can outsource your fax over IP (FoIP) capabilities. Exchange 2010 will honor any existing Exchange 2007 UM fax configuration properties, and it will continue to recognize fax CNG tones. However, instead of answering the call itself, UM will look at a new configuration property defined on UM mailbox policy objects: FaxServerURI. If this property exists, UM  will try to hand off the call to the specified fax solution. The external fax solution will establish a fax media session with the sender, create a fax message, and send it to the UM-enabled user’s mailbox.

Messages created by this approach will look basically just like Exchange 2007 UM fax messages, and they’ll appear in the Fax search folder just as existing messages do.

The foregoing discussion might lead you to wonder who’s going to offer FoIP services that work with Exchange 2010. I haven’t seen a list yet. However, Concord Technologies sent out a press release at the Worldwide Partner Conference touting the fact that they’d be offering an Exchange 2010-compatible solution, so I guess we can count them in.

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2009/07/15 · 12:17

Meeting forward notifications in Exchange 2010

Back in May I wrote about meeting forward notifications and how Exchange 2007 processes them. This feature is largely unchanged in Exchange 2010, with one very nice exception. In the new OWA options interface, the Calendar tab sports a checkbox labeled “Delete notifcations about forwarded meetings”. If you check it, that has the same effect as running Set-MailboxCalendarSettings -RemoveForwardedMeetingNotifications $true on your mailbox.

  SafariScreenSnapz001.png

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2009/07/12 · 22:24

Z-Push considered harmful

So Devin posted about Z-Push, the cool-sound open-source implementation of Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) protocol. Here’s the problem: the Z-Push folks kinda forgot to buy a license for EAS, and I have a problem with that. After years of complaints that Microsoft wasn’t being open and sharing its protocols, they started to document the behavior of their protocols and offer some of them for licensing, EAS included. That’s good, right? It’s good enough for Apple, Google, and the many other companies that licensed EAS, anyway. However, apparently Zarafa wanted the benefit of Microsoft’s labors without being willing to pay for it, so they built their own implementation. I don’t think that’s fair, and I don’t think the technical coolness of Z-Push should obscure the fact that Zarafa is stealing something that isn’t theirs.

This is what I said in 2002:

Hey, Linux guys: if you want to beat Microsoft, do it by making something better, not by copying their investment.

What happened to Lemonade? How about Funambol? It’s not as though the FOSS world lacks for sync protocols; they just decided that Microsoft’s commercially successful, fully licensable protocol would better suit their needs, so they took it. It boggles the mind. It would be one thing if the protocol were fully open to all implementers, but it’s not. If you don’t like the licensing terms, build your own protocol– that’s not hard to understand, is it?

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2009/06/19 · 15:20

E-mail overload and enterprise attention management

Craig Roth has a great blog post up on e-mail overload and how “attention management” technologies can help reduce the burden on us puny humans. I thought I’d take a stab at describing how Outlook, Entourage, and Exchange 2010 implement attention management technologies. (You’ll probably want to refer to this map as you read the below points). I’ve taken Craig’s bulleted list and added notes about how Exchange + Outlook support (or don’t support) each proposed attention management feature.

  • Scheduled delivery: Outlook and Exchange have supported scheduled sending for some time; you can schedule a message to be sent “not before” a certain time, or just in the next send/receive. However, there’s no built-in way to schedule receiving. This would be fairly simple to implement via an Outlook plugin (or Entourage AppleScript) that switches the client to offline mode until it’s time to pick up new mail.
  • Maintain whitelists to bypass blocks and delays: this would be tricky to implement if scheduled delivery were implemented using my crude method of going offline, and I’m not sure how useful it would be anyway.
  • “Move to discussion” greys out “reply”: A “move to discussion” feature would be a great addition to Outlook, and (from Microsoft’s perspective) would be desirable as a way to drive people to SharePoint.
  • Automated routing and prioritizing: this is a wicked-hard problem. Microsoft’s solving it by letting you build workflows that manage e-mail, so that organizations can build workflows to handle incoming e-mail, IM, and voice traffic according to whatever rules make sense. This isn’t really an end-user-targeted capability, though.
  • Un-bury turning off or freezing of “toasts”: I prefer to work with toasts turned off altogether, but I understand that some people want them. Craig’s right, though, that it should be easier to toggle this functionality. One easy thing for Microsoft to do would be to integrate “do not disturb” mode in Communicator with the Outlook equivalent. This already sort-of-works (e.g. during a full-screen PowerPoint presentation you don’t get toasts) but it could be made better.
  • Enable e-mail hyperlinking: does anyone remember the Exchange 2000 Web Storage System? Every item in the store had its own uniquely addressable URL, but this turned out to be pretty much useless in the real world. This is less an attention management issue than an e-mail data management issue; there’s little storage penalty to forwarding messages once they already exist.
  • Enable role-based profiles: Craig’s idea is to provide a mechanism for defining standard profiles that control attention-related policies. Based on my experience, I think this would go over poorly, as most executives insist on having highly personalized workspaces. Regardless of what I think, though, Microsoft doesn’t provide a way to do this at present.
  • Enable sender tagged e-mails: this is one area where the tools available in Outlook and Exchange far outpace their actual use. I need to do a separate post on message classifications, retention tags, and all the other sender-tagging goodness.
  • Stop attachment abuse: Outlook already supports sending documents to a document workspace or shared library, although this feature is buried somewhat (and Entourage doesn’t have it at all, sadly).
  • Presence-enable recipient lists: Outlook already does this, in spades. The below picture shows a number of Outlook’s built-in presence capabilities, including automatic display of presence icons for presence-enabled users, enhanced status (like “away for XXX” or out-of-office messages), and click-to-communicate with multiple communications modes.
  • 200906191509.jpg
  • Enable group-based rules: Exchange and Outlook don’t currently do this, although you can simulate some aspects of it with query-based distribution groups. Honestly, though, this strikes me as only marginally useful; I’d probably rank it close to last in terms of which features I’d rather see first.
  • Turn e-mail into generic small-content tool: Not a bad idea, although I think you could use a much lighter-weight tool like the excellent Windows Live Writer to do this more easily.
  • Manage multiple inboxes: this is a tremendously useful feature of Entourage, which has long supported multiple Exchange accounts. Outlook 2010 is reported to support multiple Exchange accounts too; I’ll post a more detailed article on this once Microsoft releases publicly-available bits.
  • Provide inbox analytics: this sounds like the kind of cool but not-very-practical feature that analysts love 🙂 I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, but it’s not clear to me that having analytical data is actually going to change anyone’s use or misuse of e-mail.
  • Token systems: see previous bullet. What if you run out of tokens? Do you just quit work for the rest of the day?
  • Remind sender if no reply: I have to do this manually, either through CRM or a manual task, so I’d love a button that would automatically create a task to remind me to follow up if no reply is received by a certain date. This would be simple to script in either Entourage or Outlook.

There are a couple of Outlook and Exchange features that Craig didn’t mention that I think fit into his taxonomy. Chief among them is the new “Ignore” functionality in Outlook 2010 and OWA 2010; when you ignore a thread, the client silently creates a server-side rule to automatically delete messages in the same conversation, so that you just don’t see them. (An alternate name for this feature, the “mute button”, better describes it IMHO). It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft makes a move to include more attention management functionality in future versions of Office and Exchange. I bet they will, given MSR’s investment in this research area, but we’ll have to wait for Office/Exchange v.Next to see for sure.

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2009/05/14 · 15:23

TechEd, days 2 and 3

Tuesday, day 2 at TechEd, was one of the busiest days I’ve had in a while. I spent part of the morning preparing for my afternoon Interactive Theater session on Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online offering, then worked a three-hour booth shift, this time in the Protection and Compliance booth. I was a little surprised with the number of questions that centered on Active Directory Rights Management Services; lots of people wanted to know more about Outlook protection rules (the new feature that lets you push a policy to Outlook clients that requires them to apply specific RMS templates to certain messages) and transport rules for RMS application. We also had a few archiving and cross-mailbox-search questions too, although not as many as I expected going in.

In the afternoon, I held UNC01-INT, a live demo and chalk talk on the Business Productivity Online suite. It was fairly well attended; I’d guess that there were about 40 people in the room. Thankfully my demos all went well; I showed the Microsoft Online Customer Portal, which you use for signup, billing, and so on, as well as the “my company” portal and the BPO single-sign-on agent. For the web-based portions of the demo, I used Windows 7 RC with IE8, and it performed flawlessly– a good sign for the stability and utility of the release version.

The Business Productivity Online team scheduled a thank-you dinner at Ciudad for the people who spoke on BPO topics, and they were kind enough to invite me to join them. At my end of the table, I had a former commercial fisherman who was born and raised in Alaska, a man who worked two summers in college as a commercial fisherman in Alaska, and an avid fisherman from Seattle. You can probably guess what we talked about!

Wednesday was the big enchilada: UNC304, my talk on OCS deployment and management. However, before I could do that session, I had another turn of booth duty, this time in the deployment and management booth. I could distill the bulk of the questions I got into two individual queries: Is it true that you can do online mailbox moves in Exchange 2010, and if I’m using Exchange 2003 right now, should I move to Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010? These were popular enough questions that I’m working on separate posts for them.

The session itself went well, although I was in one of the cavernous 600-seat rooms, so it felt kind of empty. I demoed the OCS 2007 R2 topology planning tool and showed some screen shots of the new device management console (having neglected to bring a real device with me to manage!) Afterwards I got into a long discussion with some folks from the University of Florida about how their helpdesk might use OCS, plus I met Tyler Regas for the first time face-to-face. Following the session, I had to duck out and grab a taxi to the airport to catch my flight home.

One post-show update: in UNC304, I mentioned the client interoperability matrix for using multiple points of presence, or MPOP. Microsoft’s Peter Schmatz was kind enough to send along an updated link to the most recent matrix; it’s here.

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2009/05/11 · 19:58

Meeting forward notifications in Exchange 2007

Exchange 2007 has a nifty feature that can nonetheless be annoying: it generates tattle-tale messages that tell you when someone forwards a meeting notification. Say that Alice schedules a meeting with Bob, and Bob forwards the invite to Carol. When Exchange sees the forward, it generates a notification in Alice’s Inbox. (Or, in this case, Paul schedules a meeting with Anup, who forwards it to James).

VMware FusionScreenSnapz001.png One problem with this feature: you can’t turn it off! I’m not sure why the Exchange team designed things this way, but they did. However, there are two mitigations.

You can prevent Exchange from sending the messages to external domains with the set-remoteDomain cmdlet (Set-RemoteDomain -MeetingForwardNotificationEnabled $false will do the trick). This allows you to avoid spamming your correspondents with notifications when you forward a meeting invite internally.

You can also force Exchange to automatically move a user’s meeting forward notifications to her Deleted Items folder with Set-MailboxCalendarSettings -RemoveForwardedMeetingNotifications $true. If this switch were enabled on my account, when Anup forwards my invite to James, I wouldn’t see the forward notification.

(Note: I haven’t checked to see what changes, if any, Exchange 2010 makes to this area. More info once I’ve had a chance to do some digging.)

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2009/05/11 · 10:05

TechEd, day 0: my schedule

Actually, I’m a day late– I should have posted this last night, but I was too tired! I had an uneventful flight from DTW-LAX on a crowded but bearable NW A320, then a remarkably expensive yet reasonably safe taxi ride to the Sheraton Los Angeles downtown.

I’m in Los Angeles for TechEd 2009, where I’m presenting and working in the Exchange booth. Today I’ve got a couple of phone meetings with my 3Sharp posse, then a session in the “Anywhere Access” section of the Exchange booth from 1115 to 1445. Following that, I plan to attend a set of MVP deep-dive sessions that the product group is putting on, then I’ll be able to take a short break before having dinner with some folks from the Exchange product team.

Tomorrow things heat up: I have booth duty (this time in the “Protection and Compliance” area) from 0930 to 1230, followed by a session (UNC01-INT) from 1445-1600 in the Interactive Theater “Yellow 1” area on Microsoft’s Exchange Online offering. I plan to do a bunch of demos there, so if you’re interested in how Exchange Online works, stop by!

Wednesday I have booth duty again (0930-1230 in “Deployment and Management”), after which I’m doing a session (UNC304) on OCS 2007 R2 deployment and management. That should be fun, but I’ll be watching the clock (and trying hard to finish on time, something I rarely do) in order to make my flight home.

If you’re in the area, feel free to stop by and say hello!

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2009/04/30 · 11:27

Great MailTips introduction

I had planned to write a long, detailed post on MailTips, but… well, you know the old saying: “you snooze, you lose.” I was beaten to it by EJ, who happens to be the MailTips program manager at Microsoft. If you want to get a sense of what MailTips are and how they work, see his post at the Exchange team blog. However, note that MailTips require support in the client (OWA 2010 or Outlook 2010) and on the server. The public beta version of Exchange 2010 has the server support, but not the OWA support, so you won’t be able to test them yourself unless and until Microsoft releases a more recent server build to the public.

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2009/04/28 · 10:35

INTERACT 2009 keynote recap

Moz Hussein, Rajesh Jha, and Gurdeep Singh Pall delivered the INTERACT 2009 keynote. (I was liveblogging it, but couldn’t post it until after the event, then I forgot.)

Rajesh: software + services is a “very pragmatic, and I think in some ways, inevitable, part of every organization’s array of things to think about.” Every org has to decide what’s best for it based on constraints, goals, compliance requirements, etc. S+S means “no technology ultimatum” imposed by the vendor: you can move workload between the cloud and premises in whatever mix makes sense for you. “We think about 40% of organizations don’t offer e-mail or advanced communication services to their employees”– target for Deskless Worker Services. Experiences from running Exchange 2010 dogfood for Exchange Labs has provided great feedback, including accelerated innovation and stability.

Gurdeep: what’s OCS doing around services? “First and foremost, we’re letting Exchange go in and figure out our problems!” (this got a big laugh.) IM and presence being offered starting 15 April for Office Communications Online standard edition customers.

Rajesh: Consumer technologies aren’t manageable, but consumerization of IT is real– it’s happening. Every university, college, high school student is used to gigabyte mailboxes. Technology that works for the older generation may not be what you need to attract and retain the newer generation.

Gurdeep: “I’ll never forgive marketing folks for changing the INTERACT format.” (chuckles) Lots of change and transformation in the voice market, all going on with the backdrop of “the biggest economic event we’ll see in our lifetimes.” It’s both concerning and a great opportunity.

Moz: what does the economy mean for IT pros?

Gurdeep: a lot of things are out of our control. People deal with that in different ways. Within Microsoft, we discussed how to deal with this. Researched the Great Depression, including figuring out how many of the Fortune 100 survived and/or grew. Common thread: innovation and transformation (e.g. Sears transformed from exclusive mail-order to rural customers to a mix of mail-order and retail). Things to do: manage costs “like you’ve never done before”, but be careful not to eat away muscle– during a rebound, that’s when you’ll fail. #1 step typically is changing how you do things.

Moz: what does “unified” really mean?

Gurdeep: NYC is an amazing city. Latest discovery: you can buy great, amazing brand-name bags right on the street for real cheap! (laughs) What’s interesting: those were cheap imitations. Problem in this industry: we have expensive imitations in the UC space. After intro of UC technology, benefits have driven wide adoption of “unified” as a moniker, but lots of so-called UC systems are the results of acquisitions– multiple user experiences, multiple back-ends, complicated provisioning. Important for buyers to be savvy about what’s unified and what isn’t. Don’t be fooled by checkbox comparisons. How many distinct user experiences are users going to be subjected to? Video conferencing systems are semi-widespread, but why aren’t they used more? They’re too hard to use! MS focus on single directory, single set of components, single management experience provides a true unified experience. How did a billion people get on the Internet? Self-driven– you couldn’t intentionally train a billion people to do anything if you wanted to.

Moz: how are Exchange and OCS getting closer together?

Gurdeep: we’re already tied together in many ways: directory, common contacts, etc. “If you have Exchange 2007 deployed, then adding OCS 2007 R2, is much easier now than it has been in the past.” Still some areas of mismatch (like Powershell; Powershell support coming to OCS in the next release). As we move forward, we’re looking at other integration points, but “you cannot push this too far”– handling for different content types like voice and e-mail are fundamentally different.

Rajesh: my favorite OCS feature is that they’re going to be adding PowerShell, “giving everyone a unified way to manage. That’s a great example where we’re working towards giving you more common tools across workloads.”

Gurdeep: my favorite Exchange feature: 70% IOPS reduction from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007, then a further 50% reduction from 2007 to Exchange 2010.

Moz: how should people be approaching the architecture for UC?

Gurdeep: I have all these disparate systems for conferencing, video, etc. I made disparate decisions to buy them because they’re separate silos. Microsoft’s UC vision unifies all these things, but you can’t just throw away what you already have. First priority: develop an overall UC architecture vision to get a “magnetic north”. If you’re ready to resign your expensive contract for audioconferencing service, having an architecture helps you consider rolling out OCS for that– and once the infrastructure is in place, you can easily and quickly add new capabilities. IM and presence are core features that are easy to get up and running. For many of your users, ask the question: is that desk phone still necessary? Would you rather buy a $300 netbook or a $300 IP phone? Lifetime costs for phones are baked into the system– you have to discover and eliminate them. Simple rule: if you can get down to 1 of anything, likely you’ll be paying less for it. PBX industry is a lot like the mainframe industry: vertically integrated, single source. Once they sold you the mainframe, they had you! “Don’t buy the mainframe!” The decisions you make now will lock you in for the next 5-6 years. Don’t get locked in, and be savvy about the cost and changes that are there.

Moz: as you think about the role of the IT pro, what’s the to-do list for prospering in the current situation?

Rajesh: Very important to have a vision of where you want to go. Economic environment imposes constraints. Resource constraints can be a huge clarifying factor: we force ourselves to impose constraints and use them to make progress on longer-term plans. Admins lead by understanding their organizational goals and technologies, then driving changes.

Gurdeep: no one ever calls telecom managers to ask them to help move solutions forward– they call to yell that phones are down. Change in roles: have to figure out how to get ahead and move the business forward. Many examples: if the economic situation stays like this, companies will have to ask whether it makes sense to have expensive real estate.

Moz: we’re announcing Exchange 14 tomorrow. What 3 things do you most want to talk about?

Rajesh: Let me do 4! Super-excited about Exchange 2010. Available in public beta on 15 April. First key investment: important for us to keep the end user in mind. What we do to make them productive translates into cost savings. $650 billion/yr lost to e-mail interruptions (based on Basex): 25% of IW workday is responding to e-mail. We give you access from broad range of mobile phones and browsers, but we also provide tools to manage information overload. MailTips, voice mail preview, “ignore conversation”. Archiving and compliance improvements.

Gurdeep: having IM contacts built into OWA is a very cool feature too.

Q&A

What are some of the developer opportunities for this combined platform?

Gurdeep: taking a software-centric approach opens up a lot of opportunities. Developer opportunity really isn’t there on traditional PBX systems.Single biggest opportunity for transformation isn’t replacing voice with OCS– it’s to allow you to think across all the software in your enterprise with communications-enabled business processes (CEBP). A word of caution: enterprise developers speak a different language! Example: “MSExpense is a tool that we use so that when you spend money we cause you pain.” We’re working with the internal app developers to IM and presence-enable MSExpense so the app can use presence status to alert people and make routing decisions.

Rajesh: Mac Business Unit moving to Exchange Web Services for Entourage. We’re also trying to get RIM to move their services over to EWS instead of MAPI.

How is Microsoft using software + services?

Rajesh: We’re moving some of our internal users over to the services platform. We’re using the high availability and DAS work that we’ve been doing for customers internally as a proving ground.

What are some of the biggest blockers to software + services?

Gurdeep: go back to 1997– knowing what you know now, would you buy a mainframe? There are industries where software as an application can become a blocker.

Rajesh: if you have a good sense of where you want to be a few years out, that helps inform what you should do now.

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2009/04/26 · 11:28

Exchange 2010 database naming

The fact that Exchange 2010 includes database availability groups has some implications that you may not have thought of. Most of them, I hadn’t thought of either, which is why it’s great that there are smart people like Ross Smith IV (the original; accept no substitutes). Ross sent some suggested practices for Exchange 2010 database naming to TAP admins, and I wanted to share them.

Here’s the deal: in Exchange 2007 and earlier, mailbox and public folder databases are children of server objects. That means that you can uniquely identify a database by a combination of its name (which may not be unique throughout the forest) and its server name (which is guaranteed by AD to be unique). In Exchange 2010, the database is no longer “owned” by a particular server. Instead, it’s a member of a DAG, and it may actually become active on any server in the DAG at any time. That means that your database names shouldn’t include the name of the server. DAGs can span AD sites, too, so guess what: don’t use the AD site name (or the name of the physical datacenter) either. Otherwise the name of the database may not correspond in any way to where the database is actually active.

Finally, consider carefully whether you want to include the name of the organization or company. This has nothing to do with DAGs per se, but rather with the overhead of updating database names after a merger, acquisition, or rebranding. Unless, of course, you work for Contoso, in which case you should be OK.

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