This blog post discusses several top issues seen to date by the Microsoft Exchange Product Support Team regarding the Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) feature introduced in Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1. We wanted to share this information as it can be used as a preventative measure as well as for resolving issues you may have experienced. It is understood that this will not cover all that can possibly go wrong, but it should give you some good pointers in some situations that you might have seen.

Read more at source: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/05/28/448929.aspx

There is a new post about the new features of ISA Server 2006 SP1 in the ISA Server Team blog. One of these upcoming features will be the SAN Certificates support.

This Service Pack introduces new features and improved functionality for ISA Server 2006 Enterprise and Standard Editions. The new features focus primarily on enhanced troubleshooting mechanisms designed to help you identify and resolve ISA Server configuration issues. Also included in this package are the updates we’ve promised for so long, such as SAN certificate support.

Read more at source: http://blogs.technet.com/isablog/archive/2008/05/2...s.aspx

An interesting post was posted at Communications Server Team about Enhanced Presence in OCS 2007.

What is Enhanced Presence?

OCS 2007 allows its client applications to publish and subscribe to Enhanced Presence information. The enhanced presence infrastructure includes categories and containers. State, note, contact information, or calendar data (e.g. Free/Busy) are examples of categories. Containers are logical buckets into which the clients publish the categories of presence information.

A user can control what presence information other users see. For example, if userA@fabrikam.com places userB@fabrikam.com in his Public container, userB can see only userA’s name, e-mail address, and basic contact information. If userA places userB in his Personal container, userB can see detailed information like additional phone numbers, location etc.

Read more at source: http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2008/0...4.aspx

Large message size: effect of transport database cache size on throughput.

Background

Recently one of our support engineers came to us requesting performance data for a client deploying Exchange 2007 SP1 (E2K7 from now on).

The client wanted to know what level of steady state throughput was achievable by a Hub Transport server receiving 4 widely different average message sizes:

• 25KB
• 1MB
• 5MB
• 10MB

We had some of the data but needed to complete the table, so we employed the test bed used to measure transport performance for E2K7 and E2K7 SP1.

Read more at source: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/05/16/448901.aspx

Exchange 2007 SP1 has a default transport database cache size of 128MB. This size doesn’t allow as much dynamic growth as may be necessary on Hub servers with higher than normal message rates, or when an unexpected load from increased message size comes into a server. To better allow for cache growth, the new guidance is to increase the DatabaseMaxCacheSize value from 128MB to 512MB on Hub servers with 4 GB or more memory installed.

Read more at source: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/05/14/448890.aspx

The ability to continue to provide a full service to your user community in the unlikely event of the loss of a datacentre is an increasingly common requirement. The use of Continuous Replication (CCR and SCR) with Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1 is an obvious choice in providing data availability and site resilience. One advantage to this approach is that the reliance on expensive storage replication solutions is eliminated. In addition, a disaster recovery scenario is managed from within one team rather than several teams. In most cases the messaging team can manage the restoration of service without the intervention from the storage team, or from a remote 3rd party hardware vendor for example. The use of Exchange Server data replication as opposed to storage replication solutions also gives us more options to use PowerShell scripts to assist administrators in simplifying and controlling service and data recovery and application-based replication is generally superior in assessing the health of the data being replicated than hardware or storage-based replication.

Read more at source: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/05/12/448867.aspx

An interesting post from the Outlook Team blog about the Data File checks and Outlook client.

When Outlook doesn’t shutdown cleanly, your Outlook Data File (either a .pst or .ost file) can be left in an unverified state that can cause one of the following errors to appear the next time you boot Outlook:

“Outlook cannot open the data file filename until it has been checked for problems.”

“Microsoft Office Outlook’ exited without properly closing your Outlook data file ‘drive:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.ost’. ‘Microsoft Office Outlook’ must be restarted. If this error message recurs, contact support for ‘Microsoft Office Outlook’ for assistance.”

“The data file filename was not closed properly’. This file is being checked for problems.”

Read more at source: http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/archive/2008/05/08/d...u.aspx

The Exchange Server documentation team is pleased to announce updates to the Exchange Server content.

To see what content has changed for Exchange Server 2007 with Service Pack 1, take a look at Exchange Server 2007 Documentation Updates.

To see what content has changed for Exchange Server Analyzer, take a look at Exchange Server Analyzer Topic Updates.

In particular, we would like to highlight the following new or updated topics:

• Exploring Windows Mobile 6.1 and Exchange ActiveSync Mailbox Policies: On April 1, 2008, Microsoft announced the release of Windows Mobile 6.1. All the new policy settings in Exchange 2007 SP1 are fully supported by Windows Mobile 6.1. This article summarizes the various enhancements to Exchange ActiveSync in Exchange 2007 SP1, and also gives you information about the supported policy settings for the different versions of the Windows Mobile operating system.
• Understanding Client Throttling: RPC Client Throttling is a new feature in Exchange Server 2007. It helps to prevent client applications from affecting overall server performance, allowing administrators to better manage the end-user performance experience
• White Paper: Outlook Anywhere Scalability with Outlook 2007, Outlook 2003, and Exchange 2007: This white paper provides an analysis of the scalability of the Outlook Anywhere feature for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, and Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, and an analysis of expected client network traffic between enterprise e-mail clients and Exchange Server 2007 SP1 in non-Outlook Anywhere scenarios.

Read more at source: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/05/07/448837.aspx

Source: http://blogs.technet.com/eileen_brown/archive/2008...8.aspx

Yuri Diogenes has blogged about how to troubleshoot an OWA publishing rule on ISA Server 2006.

Sometimes troubleshooting publishing rules can be really challenging. The main reason for that is because of the thin line between the published server and the edge firewall (in this case ISA Server). Where is it broken? Is my ISA Server not allowing the connection from outside or my published server that is not answering the request from ISA Server?

The sequence of articles written by Jim Harrison about RPC over HTTP helped to clarify how the protocols works and also to troubleshoot the main issues that happen when publishing Outlook Anywhere through ISA Server 2006.

Read more at source: http://blogs.technet.com/isablog/archive/2008/04/2...6.aspx