Tag Archives: Exchange 2013

2013/11/25 · 16:10

Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 3 released

I thought it might be fun to write an annotated version of the Exchange team blog post announcing the availability of CU3 for Exchange Server 2013. So here goes…

The Exchange team is announcing today the availability of our most recent quarterly servicing update to Exchange Server 2013.  Cumulative Update 3  for Exchange Server 2013 and updated UM Language Packs are now available on the Microsoft Download Center.  Cumulative Update 3 includes fixes for customer reported issues, minor product enhancements and previously released security bulletins.   A complete list of customer reported issues resolved in Exchange Server 2013 Cumulative Update 3 can be found in Knowledge Base Article KB2892464.

Translation: “We’re getting the hang of this cumulative update model. Notice that we gave you a list of bug fixes in this release, just like y’all asked for last time, although we’re not saying that this is a comprehensive list of every bug fixed in the CU.”

We would like to call attention to an important fix in Exchange Server 2013 Cumulative Update 3 which impacts customers who rely upon Backup and Recovery mechanisms to protect Exchange data.  Cumulative Update 3 includes a fix for an issue which may randomly prevent a backup dataset taken from Exchange Server 2013 from restoring correctly.  Customers who rely on Backup and Recovery in their day-to-day operations are encouraged to deploy Cumulative Update 3 and initiate backups of their data to ensure that data contained in backups may be restored correctly.  More information on this fix is available in KB2888315.

Translation: “Backups are sooooo 2005. Why are you even doing them instead of using Exchange native data protection? DAGs and JBOD, baby. Just make sure you have at least 3 database copies. But if you are, well, take another backup right quick to make sure you can restore later.” [ Note that I am manfully resisting the urge to ask how this issue slipped through testing. –PR]

In addition to the customer reported fixes in Cumulative Update 3, the following new enhancements and improvements to existing functionality have also been added for Exchange Server 2013 customers:

  • Usability improvements when adding members to new and existing groups in the Exchange Administration Console
  • Online RMS available for use by non-cloud based Exchange eployments
  • Improved admin audit log experience
  • Windows 8.1/IE11 no longer require the use of OWA Light

Translation: “Who doesn’t like new features?  We promised to deliver new features on-premises, and we did, so yay us! However, notice how we avoided saying ‘on-premises’, instead using the clumsy ‘non-cloud based’ term instead.”

More information on these topics can be found in our What’s New in Exchange Server 2013, Release Notes and product documentation available on TechNet. Cumulative Update 3 includes Exchange related updates to Active Directory schema and configuration.  For information on extending schema and configuring the active directory please review the appropriate TechNet documentation.   Also, to prevent installation issues you should ensure that the Windows PowerShell Script Execution Policy is set to “Unrestricted” on the server being upgraded or installed.  To verify the policy settings, run the Get-ExecutionPolicy cmdlet from PowerShell on the machine being upgraded.  If the policies are NOT set to Unrestricted you should use the resolution steps in KB981474 to adjust the settings.

Translation: “Because we love you and want you to be happy, we’ve included a schema update to keep your Active Directory looking shiny and fresh. Remember, we can push schema updates in CUs now. Sorry if this means your organizational change control process means you have to delay installing the CU for months while you wait for the change to be assessed and approved.”

Our next update for Exchange Server 2013, Cumulative Update 4, will be released as Exchange Server 2013 Service Pack 1.  Customers who are accustomed to deploying Cumulative Updates should consider Service Pack 1 to be equivalent to Cumulative Update 4 and deploy as normal.

Translation: “CU4 will be so awesome that it’s really a service pack, if you like service packs, but if you don’t, then it’s not. Because every CU can include both features and fixes now, we have lots of flexibility to choose when to deploy features. Part of the reason we changed the servicing model was to get people away from the ‘wait for SP1’ attitude, so if SP1 is really just CU4, that helps show there’s no reason to wait.”

Reminder:  Customers in hybrid deployments where Exchange is deployed in-house and in the cloud, or who are using Exchange Online Archiving with their in-house Exchange deployment are required to maintain currency on Cumulative Update releases.

Translation: “Surprise! Since you can’t control what release your Office 365 tenant is running, if you’re in hybrid mode (or want to be), you now must commit to remaining on the current CU. If that’s a problem because of schema changes, well, good luck with that. I suppose if enough people complain we might start pre-announcing which CUs will contain schema changes so you can plan ahead.”

Overall, I’m looking forward to seeing CU3 be widely deployed. It seems to be a stable and solid release based on my experience with it. The new features will be welcome, and I am heartened to see the team continuing to hit their release cadence.

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2013/11/20 · 13:18

Exchange 2013 SP1 coming in early 2014

Microsoft today announced that Service Pack 1 for Exchange 2013 is coming in “early 2014”. The announcement has a few interesting nuances:

  • The Edge Server role is coming back. Not by popular demand, as far as I can tell; I presume this is being introduced to pacify a few large, noisy customers who are using Edge, because I haven’t seen any signs that customers are demanding it. I would not expect to see significant feature improvements or investments in this role, either in SP1 or going forward.
  • S/MIME for OWA support is coming. This has been known for some time; as yet we don’t know the specific details of which browsers will be supported.
  • SP1 will require a schema update. I will have more to say about this in the very near future.

Interestingly, SP1 is essentially CU4: it is applied in the same way as other CUs, and if you skip SP1 and install CU5 later on, you’ll get all the fixes and features included in SP1. The Lync team is doing the same thing with their CUs; the old rule that only service packs could include new features is dead and buried.

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2013/11/19 · 11:14

iOS 7 Exchange ActiveSync problems revisited

Back in September I posted an article about a problem that occurred when synchronizing iOS 7 devices against Exchange 2010 SP2. The wheels of justice grind slowly, but Microsoft has released a KB article and accompanying hotfix that describe the symptoms precisely.

I also got an odd report from a large enterprise customer; they had several hundred iOS 7.0.2 devices, all on Verizon in one specific region, that were having synchronization problems. The issue here turned out to be a network configuration issue on Verizon’s network that required some action from them to fix.

Now you’re probably starting to see the value in solutions like those from BoxTone…

 

 

 

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2013/09/18 · 06:30

Keeping up: Office 365 OnRamp changes

Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Clients, Connectivity, and UM (colloquially known as “the book”) is now in production! I’ve reviewed all the page proofs, corrected the few composition and layout mistakes I found, and returned the proofs to the editorial staff so they can turn PDFs into paper. It’s pretty exciting, although thanks to my tardiness the book won’t be ready in time to be sold at Exchange Connections (about which, more tomorrow.) However, I’ve been assured that Tony’s book on Mailbox and HA will be available there.

About a month ago, I wrote this in the Office 365 chapter:

One of the difficulties inherent in writing about cloud services is that they can change rapidly and often. The screen shots of Office 365 in this chapter reflect its appearance and function as of late 2013, but it’s likely that some of the underlying Office 365 code will change, so don’t be surprised if what you see on screen doesn’t exactly match what you read here.

As if to reinforce that point, today Microsoft has changed the OnRamp tool that you use to assess your organizational readiness for Office 365. The readiness review portion of the tool seems to have disappeared, leaving the checklist portion (which is similar in intent to the Exchange Deployment Assistant, another topic covered in the chapter). I haven’t found where the readiness review went, but I’m fairly sure it still exists somewhere in the maze of Office 365 tools.

The moral of this story? Although Microsoft likes to mock Google’s habit of suddenly introducing changes to end users without warning, they are starting to develop the same habit, except it mostly affects administrators. I hope this particular change was just a slip and not a harbinger of the way toolset changes will be handled in the future. (The secondary moral: man, it’s going to be a challenge to keep up with Office 365 updates in anything I write in the future!)

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2013/09/07 · 02:56

Do mailbox quotas matter to Outlook and OWA?

Great question from my main homie Brian Hill:

Is there a backend DB reason for setting quotas at a certain size? I have found several links (like this one) discussing the need to set quotas due to the way the Outlook client handles large numbers of messages or OST files, but for someone who uses OWA, does any of this apply?

Short answer: no.

Somewhat longer answer: no.

The quota mechanism in Exchange is an outgrowth of those dark times when a large Exchange server might host a couple hundred users on an 8GB disk drive. Because storage was so expensive, Microsoft’s customers demanded a way to clamp down on mailbox size, so we got the trinity of quota limits: prohibit send, prohibit send and receive, and warn. These have been with us for a while and persist, essentially unchanged, in Exchange 2013, although it is now common to see quotas of 5GB or more on a single mailbox.

Outlook has never had a formal quota mechanism of its own, apart from the former limit of 2GB on PST files imposed by the 32-bit offsets used as pointers in the original PST file format. This limit was enforced in part by a dialog that would tell you that your PST file was full and in part by bugs in various versions of Outlook that would occasionally corrupt your PST file as it approached the 2GB size limit. Outlook 2007 and later pretty much extinguished those bugs, and the Unicode PST file format doesn’t have the 2GB limit any longer. Outlook 2010 and 2013 set a soft limit on Unicode PSTs of 50GB, but you can increase the limit if you need to.

Outlook’s performance is driven not by the size of the PST file itself (thought experiment: imagine a PST with a single 10GB item in it as opposed to one with 1 million 100KB messages) but by the number of items in any given folder. Microsoft has long recommended that you keep Outlook item counts to a maximum of around 5,000 items per folder (see KB 905803 for one example of this guidance). However, Outlook 2010 and 2013, when used with Exchange 2010 or 2013, can handle substantially more items without performance degradation: the Exchange 2010 documentation says 100,000 items per folder is acceptable, though there’s no published guidance for Exchange 2013. There’s still no hard limit, though. The reasons why the number of items (and the number of associated stored views) are well enumerated in this 2009 article covering Exchange 2007. Some of the mechanics described in that article have changed in later versions of Exchange but the basic truth remains: the more views you have, and/or the more items that are found or selected by those views, the longer it will take Exchange to process them.

If you’re wondering whether your users’ complaints of poor Outlook performance are related to high item counts, one way to find out is to use a script like this to look for folders with high item counts.

Circling back to the original question: there is a performance impact with high item count folders in OWA, but there’s no quota mechanism for dealing with it. If you have a user who reports persistently poor OWA performance on particular folders, high item counts are one possible culprit worth investigating. Of course, if OWA performance is poor across multiple folders that don’t have lots of items, or across multiple users, you might want to seek other causes.

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2013/08/31 · 05:28

Microsoft Certified Systems Master certification now dead

I received a very unwelcome e-mail late last night:

Microsoft will no longer offer Masters and Architect level training rotations and will be retiring the Masters level certification exams as of October 1, 2013. The IT industry is changing rapidly and we will continue to evaluate the certification and training needs of the industry to determine if there’s a different certification needed for the pinnacle of our program.

This is terrible news, both for the community of existing MCM/MCSM holders but also for the broader Exchange community. It is a clear sign of how Microsoft values the skills of on-premises administrators of all its products (because all the MCSM certifications are going away, not just the one for Exchange). If all your messaging, directory, communications, and database services come from the cloud (or so I imagine the thinking goes), you don’t need to spend money on advanced certifications for your administrators who work on those technologies.

This is also an unfair punishment for candidates who attended the training rotation but have yet to take the exam, or those who were signed up for the already-scheduled upgrade rotations, and those who were signed up for future rotations. Now they’re stuck unless they can take, and pass, the certification exams before October 1… which is pretty much impossible. It greatly devalues the certification, of course, for those who already have it. Employers and potential clients can look at “MCM” on a resume and form their own value judgement about its worth given that Microsoft has dropped it. I’m not quite ready to consign MCM status to the same pile as CNE, but it’s pretty close.

The manner of the announcement was exceptionally poor in my opinion, too: a mass e-mail sent out just after midnight Central time last night. Who announces news late on Friday nights? People who are trying to minimize it, that’s who. Predictably, and with justification, the MCM community lists are blowing up with angry reaction, but, completely unsurprisingly, no one from Microsoft is taking part, or defending their position, in these discussions.

As a longtime MCM/MCSM instructor, I have seen firsthand the incredible growth and learning that takes place during the MCM rotations. Perhaps more importantly, the community of architects, support experts, and engineers who earned the MCM has been a terrific resource for learning and sharing throughout their respective product spaces; MCMs have been an extremely valuable connection between the real world of large-scale enterprise deployments and the product group.

In my opinion, this move is a poorly-advised and ill-timed slap in the face from Microsoft, and I believe it will work to their detriment.

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2013/07/16 · 10:40

Microsoft releases new OWA apps for iPhone, iPad

Well, this is gonna be fun: Microsoft just released a new native mail/calendar/contacts app (which they’re calling “OWA”) for the iPhone and iPad. A few quick notes:

  • It is only supported with Office 365 wave 15 mailboxes. It may, or may not, work against on-premises Exchange 2013 mailboxes. (Update 130716 1509: Microsoft has in fact committed to on-prem support, but haven’t said when.)
  • It is a native app, with separate versions for iPhone (iPhone 4 and later) and iPad (iPad 2 and later). Both versions require iOS 6. Making a native app rather than just a bound web control means that the app can include some other cool features.. including gesture controls and voice control.
  • It supports Information Rights Management (and, yay, reading signed S/MIME messages). Oh, and it supports delegate access too. Oh, and online Personal Archives… and shared calendars, too!
  • No support for public folders, I’m afraid.
  • It uses Exchange Web Services, not EAS; to the Exchange CAS and mailbox roles, OWA on a device looks almost exactly like OWA in a browser.
  • VOTING BUTTON SUPPORT YES REALLY WOO HOO.
  • It has full offline functionality, powered by a local sqlite database.
  • When you request a remote wipe, the wipe request removes the app and all the data from its device but leaves the rest of the device untouched. This is a huge feature.

Of course, I’ll have full coverage of the app (and how to administer and manage it) in the clients chapter of Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Clients, Connectivity, and Unified Messaging. Until then, grab the client and play with it! I was able to download, install, and use it on my iPad3 without any trouble, but the App Store refused to allow me to download it to an iPhone 4. Stay tuned…

 

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2013/07/05 · 10:32

Does Test-OutlookConnectivity work?

I’m going to have to go with “no, it does not” as my answer, but you can try it for yourself.

First off, the cmdlet documentation says you can specify a probe type, but not what the probe types are. This is an unfortunate oversight, considering that you can’t use the cmdlet without it. However, a little more digging turns up a troubleshooting article that says you can do it like this:

[PS] C:\>Test-OutlookConnectivity -ProbeIdentity 'OutlookMailboxDeepTestProbe' -MailboxId paul@betabasement.com -Hostname betabasement.com

Sadly, when I do that, all I get is an error:

WARNING: Could not find assembly or object type associated with monitor identity 'Outlook.Protocol\OutlookMailboxDeepTestProbe\PAO-EX01'. Please ensure that the given monitor identity exists on the Server.

This duplicates results reported by fellow MVPs Paul Cunningham, Brian Ricks, and others; I’m mentioning it here to help make the community aware of the issue, in the hope that it will soon be fixed in CU2. If you’ve been able to get it to work, please let me know in the comments.

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2013/06/26 · 09:22

TechEd Europe, day 1

TechEd Europe opened on Tuesday, while I was still in transit. I missed the keynote, which is pretty much par for the course. I think the last TechEd keynote I attended was the 2005 version that included BattleBots.

My first assignment for the day was working in the Ask the Experts area. That’s not necessarily what it’s called, but that’s what we all call it. ATE is my favorite part of attending conferences such as TechEd and MEC because you never know what kind of questions you’ll get from attendees. They range from very simple to incredibly complex and environment-specific. The interpersonal dynamics are fun too, because different attendees have different attitudes towards the product and their experience with it: some positive, some negative, and some befuddled. I always enjoy meeting live customers and finding out what kinds of challenges they face, and ATE is the perfect venue for it. (I have a separate post planned in a day or two summarizing the questions I’ve gotten while I’ve been here.

DSC 1277

After working ATE, I went and had a delicious lunch of grouper in some kind of salsa. It was certainly better than the normal convention-center food. And speaking of better, the event staff here has been fantastic– uniformly cheerful and helpful.

After lunch, I went to find the speaker’s lounge. Along the way I noticed a sign for the prayer rooms, something I’ve never seen at TechEd before. I considered going there to work on my demos, but good sense won out and I went to the lounge instead. While there I found the same problem I’d noticed at TechEd in the US: my demos didn’t work. The code they run attempts to do an Exchange Autodiscover connection to autodiscover.robichaux.net, which a) should work from anywhere because b) it’s hosted by Microsoft. However, it didn’t, and I couldn’t figure out why, so to do my New Orleans demos I tethered to my cellphone and used the network. I had the same problem here, sad to say,and I assume it’s because there is some upstream proxy or router stripping out a header that my code needs… but darned if I know what, and I didn’t have time to run through Fiddler to see. I decided instead to download NetShade, which fixed the problem pronto. 

Demos done, I went back to the show floor to walk around. There I had a great talk with Kemp Technologies’ Bhargav Shukla, who is one of my fellow MCM instructors (though he teaches both Exchange and Lync). Among other interesting topics, I learned that Kemp has a prototype load balancing appliance for Windows Azure– not a device that goes on-premises and directs some traffic to an Azure network, but an actual VM that runs on Azure and does load balancing natively there. Microsoft isn’t quite sure how to package and sell Azure objects that are not applications, but I’m confident that they will figure it out. Bhargav also let slip that Kemp is in the process of adding PowerShell support to their load balancers, which marks a first as far as I know. It speaks well of them as partners in the Microsoft ecosystem when they embrace Microsoft’s technologies in such a comprehensive way. (The other takeaway from our talk: I’m jealous of the two days Bhargav spent driving a motorcycle around metro Madrid!)

I also got to meet Ed Wilson of Microsoft, the original Scripting Guy. He offered me the opportunity to write a couple of guest columns, and I eagerly accepted. Look for more news on that soon.

In the evening of the first day, TechEd historically holds a reception n the expo hall where attendees can mix and mingle. We had a great turnout at the combined Exchange/Office 365 booth; I gathered several good questions from attendees that I’ll be writing about a bit later. The energy of TechEd Europe is always quite a bit different from the US show; it’s smaller, so it feels less formal and less rushed. The exhibitor mix is different, too. Even large companies such as Dell and Intel which have a presence at both places typically send different staff. Microsoft is no exception; in addition to many of the folks I’d seen in New Orleans, Nathan Winters and a host of other European and UK Microsoft staff were on site.

I finally got back to the hotel about 9:30pm after a short but slightly confusing ride on the Madrid metro system. This seemed late, but of course by Continental standards it wasn’t even dinner time yet. I took care of some administrative baloney with my bank and mortgage companies, then remembered: someone had suggested I visit Madrid’s old post office (better known as Palacio de Comunicaciones). Although  I could have taken the metro again, it was nearly 11 before I left my room and I was in a hurry, so I took a taxi there, shot a ton of pictures (my favorite is below) and then taxi’d back.

DSC 1303

I noticed on the return that the area around the Melía Castilla has a surprising number of tall, slender, very attractive women just loitering on the street. I have no doubt that they are there to serve as tourist guides for anyone who is lost and needs help. Madrid is lucky to have so many fashionable ambassadors in such a convenient location, but since I knew where I was going I was able to make it back without any of their help.

After all that activity, I was pretty well exhausted, so I checked in to tell the boys goodnight and hit the rack– though it has many other charms, I can say that the hotel beds at this particular hotel are not unlike sleeping on a brick sidewalk. Then it was time to get up and get ready for day 2!

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2013/06/25 · 06:29

TechEd Europe: day 0

As I started writing this, I was in the back of a Delta MD-80 heading to Atlanta, thence to pick up Delta flight 109 to Madrid. The process reminds me in many ways of the first real set of international business trips I made, back in 2000-2002; Many aspects of the travel world have changed since then, but some have not.

For example, I have two laptops. Back in the day, I carried a ThinkPad for running Windows apps and a Powerbook for everything else. Now I’m taking my MacBook Pro because I need it to do demos in my TechEd session and my Dell-issued laptop because I need it for Dell work. All of the attendant weight, volume, and hassle constraints that come about from dual-wielding laptops are the same as they ever were.

Then there’s my cell phone. I have carried a Nokia 920 running Windows Phone 8 as my daily phone since November of 2012, and I am very happy with it. Unfortunately, AT&T wouldn’t SIM-unlock it for me, so I won’t be able to use it with a local SIM in Spain. That meant I had to dust off my iPhone 4, which is SIM-unlocked. I started using it last night and found it to be terribly clunky and slow compared to the 920. I don’t mean the data speed itself is slow, although it is; the phone UI itself is terribly slow compared to the 920. However, I like having iMessage available to chat with the many, many iOS users among my friends and contacts, and I am also toting my Pebble, which is completely unsupported and therefore essentially useless with Windows Phone. (Side note: I am eager to see what kind of Windows Phone announcements come out at Microsoft’s Build conference this week; I’m looking forward to more details on Nokia’s Amber and on Windows Phone Blue, or 8.1, or whatever it’s called now). So on balance, I’d have to say that the taking-a-US-cell-phone-to-Europe story is pretty much unchanged as well.

Delta surprised me with what’s known as an “operational upgrade,” or op-up, on the Atlanta-Madrid leg. That is, I didn’t buy a business class ticket, and I was not eligible for an upgrade based on my fare class, but Delta wanted to make more room in coach for paying passengers, and they had some empty business-class seats, so they moved me. I certainly wasn’t going to complain; this is the first time I’ve ever gotten an op-up and I was glad of it. I slept almost the entire way in the seat pod; by mashing buttons you can convert it into a narrow flat bed that ends up just about at floor level. The experience was oddly like sleeping in a mummy sleeping bag– the pod is only about 12″ at the footwell, and since I wear a size 13 shoe it was a bit of a tight fit.

We arrived on time at the Madrid airport, and I took a taxi to the hotel that Microsoft arranged for speakers, the Meliá Castilla. It’s gorgeous: very stately and European. Apparently it is near a bunch of nifty stuff but I was only there long enough to take a quick shower and catch a shuttle to IFEMA, the large conference center where TechEd itself is being held. I worked a shift at the “ask the experts” area and got a few good questions; more to say about that in another post. Then it was off to the speaker lounge to check my demos for tomorrow’s session. More to follow… 

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2013/06/25 · 06:13

Exchange 2013 Inside Out early access versions on sale

For a limited time, O’Reilly and Microsoft Press have the “early access” editions of Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Connectivity, Clients, and Unified Messaging and Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability on sale for $19.99 each. This is a fantastic deal given that you get early electronic access to the books– I am still in the midst of working on my book, but you can get access to parts of it now to learn what you need to know, well in advance of its official on-sale date. The deal is good until 0500 PDT on July 3, so you have a bit of time to take advantage of it. (Note that the sale doesn’t apply to the bundle that includes both the print book and the early access electronic edition).

 

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2013/05/14 · 10:25

Exchange 2013 Inside Out enters “early release” period

NewImage Lately I have been busy working on Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Clients, Connectivity, and Unified Messaging. More precisely, I’ve been dividing my time between performing technical review on Tony’s book, Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability, and writing new content for my book. It’s all Exchange, all the time! To be more precise, right now I am about 55% done with the book: the chapters on unified messaging, Lync integration, message hygiene, client management, and mobile device management are done, and I’m working on the transport chapter now. That leaves me with chapters on CAS, load balancing, and Office 365 yet to do– certainly enough to keep me busy!

Microsoft Press is offering an early access program for these books (and a number of others). If you buy the ebook now, you get immediate access to the parts of the book that have been completed (meaning they’ve been through at least the first part of the editorial pipeline), with access to the remaining chapters as they’re finished. When the entire book is released in its final form, you get an electronic copy of it as well. I’m excited to see Microsoft Press offering early access to the book, because all signs point to gathering interest in the practical aspects of deploying Exchange 2013– something both books talk about quite a bit. We are targeting the final version to cover SP1 when it’s released, so there will be updates to the early access versions as well.

Now, back to writing!

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2013/04/20 · 17:36

Exchange OWA IM integration and Lync trusted application pools

I am a bit ashamed to say that I wasted most of a day on this, but I’m posting this in the hopes that I can help someone else avoid the same mistake I made.

I just spent about five hours troubleshooting why I couldn’t get Exchange 2013 Outlook Web App to display IM and presence data from a Lync 2013 standard edition server. I had carefully followed the integration steps in the documentation, including the part that says this:

If you have installed the Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging Call Router service and the Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging service on the same computer then there is no need to create a trusted application pool for Outlook Web App. (This assumes that the server in question is hosting a SipName UM dial plan.

So, having read that, I didn’t set up a trusted application pool or trusted application… and IM didn’t work.

I fussed with certificates. I read a ton of documentation. I swore. I drank too much diet Coke. I ran OCSLogger and found errors about an unknown peer. “AHA!” I thought. “There must be an error in the docs and you really do need to create a trusted application pool.”

So I created the pool and the trusted app. Two quick lines of PowerShell, a quick login to OWA, and voila:

NewImage

As much as I would like to claim that it was a documentation error, this was pure fail on my part: the problem was that my Exchange 2013 server doesn’t host a SIP dial plan, so Lync doesn’t automatically add it to the Lync known servers table. It will have a SIP dial plan when I get to the next section of this chapter, but that’s a post for another day.

So, in summary: yes, you do need to create a trusted application pool and application for your Exchange servers even if they are multi-role unless they are hosting a SIP dial plan. 

Now, time for another diet Coke…

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2013/04/09 · 08:50

MEC 2014: Austin, 31 March-2 April 2014

This is pretty darn exciting: Microsoft has announced the official date and time of the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) in 2014. It will be held in Austin, home of at least one of the original MECs (the first one, maybe? I wasn’t there so I’m not sure) from 31 March to 2 April 2014. 

I am sure that nothing bad will come of Microsoft’s decision to include April Fool’s Day as part of the conference. Nope, not at all.

On a personal note, I am excited that the conference will be in Austin. It’s one of my favorite cities, and I’ll be making side trips to see family (Hi, Lee Anne!) and friends while there. I also believe that we should have an Exchange-themed visit to the Salt Lick BBQ. Stay tuned for details!

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2013/04/02 · 10:10

Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 1 released

I don’t have time to write a lengthy post detailing the changes and improvements in CU1, so go read this and this instead. Pay particular attention to the section in the Exchange team blog post about mailbox sizes. Happy installing!

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