TechNet Chopsticks is a webcast platform (based on Silverlight) from the MSDN and TechNet teams in Belgium. It has all kinds of technical stuff, provided by Microsoft employees, MVPs, User Groups and content from other events like TechDays.

Here are 3 interesting chopsticks that were added recently:

• 5 cmdlets to get you drawn into the power of Exchange Management Shell, Ilse Van Criekinge - In this chopsticks video, Ilse will show you 5 cmdlets that will allow you to administer and manage more effectively your Exchange 2007 environment. The following cmdlets will be covered in detail: Start-Transcript, Get-Mailbox, Get-MailboxStatistics, Move-TransportDatabase (PS Script), and Test-ServiceHealth.
• Fun with Regular Expressions for Office Communications Server - Part II, Johan Delimon - Office Communications Server 2007 and its tools use Regular Expressions for phone number manipulations and rules.
  You will see how you can build your own Regular Expressions from scratch. This first part will show you how easy it is to make regular expressions to capture and replace phone numbers.
• Data Backup & Recovery for Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, Files & Hyper-V – A Technical Overview of System Center Data Protection Manager, Karandeep Anand - We will provide an overview of DPM 2007, and deep dive of how DPM protects Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, Office SharePoint Server, and Microsoft Hyper-V/Virtual Server-using both near continuous protection to disk and long term archival to tape.
  DPM was one of topics covered during Virtualization road show and this is an excellent opportunity to follow up on the Backup capability for our Hyper-V offering.

Planning for Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 Deployments on the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 Family - Reference Architecture and Best Practices Guide is a technical whitepaper from Hitachi.

“The guide is intended for Exchange and storage administrators and IT managers concerned with the deployment of scalable, affordable and highly available storage solutions for Microsoft Exchange 2007.

Multiple factors influence Exchange Server 2007 performance and availability, leading to interactions that can constrain service levels. At the extreme, with improper planning, these interactions can significantly affect an organization’s overall business goals. This guide describes a variety of Exchange Server 2007 storage related topics and introduces methods for incorporating them into a successful overall architecture and subsequent implementation.

The solutions described in this guide are based on testing performed using both Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 as the base operating system and using Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1. This guide provides a consolidated view of the information required to make optimal choices when designing a storage infrastructure for Exchange Server 2007.”

You may also be interested in this one: Planning for Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 Deployments on Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 1000 - Solution Deployment Guide.

The good thing about these whitepapers is that they cover the general guidelines for planning and sizing an Exchange Server 2007, so they go way beyond a dedicated storage guide. Read them and you won’t regret it!

Live Webcast: Exchange Archiving: Avoid Journaling & Stubbing Traps and Stop the Domino Effect
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT / 5:00 PM GMT
Martin Tuip, Microsoft Exchange MVP and Sr. Technical Product Marketing Manager for Mimosa Systems, Inc.

Overview:
One of the functions of email archiving is to free up storage space on email servers. But unfortunately first-generation archiving methods of capturing and archiving the email information can cause significant problems. These first-generation solutions typically capture email and attachments from Exchange through journaling and replace them with a stub file or link. Stubbing frees up substantial disk space, but causes a new problem — slow and sluggish Exchange performance. And journaling only captures a subset of the information that is required by compliance regulations.

Join guest speaker Martin Tuip, Microsoft Exchange MVP and Sr. Technical Product Marketing Manager for Mimosa Systems, Inc., and moderator James Hilliard as they address these important topics and more:

• What stubbing is and why it isn’t an optimal archiving solution
• How to relieve pressure on your Exchange Server infrastructure
• Why you need more than just journaling
• How to capture everything you need without compromising performance
• Determine what solution is right for your organization

Understanding your technology options upfront will reduce the IT risks that come with choosing a less-than-optimal solution.

Microsoft has just released the October update for the Windows Mail Junk E-mail Filter.

“Install this update for Windows Mail to revise the definition files used to detect e-mail messages that should be considered junk e-mail or that may contain phishing content.”

The update is available through Microsoft Update or you can click the following links, according to your OS architecture:

• Update for Windows Mail Junk E-mail Filter (x32)
• Update for Windows Mail Junk E-mail Filter (x64)

As usual the update comes with the corresponding Knowledge Base article:

• Description of the definition updates for Windows Mail (KB905866)

Technorati : windows mail, junk email, spam
Del.icio.us : windows mail, junk email, spam

While reading the most recent SearchExchange newsletter, I noticed that there were a couple of nice resources about virtualization and Exchange Server 2007, so I thought it would be a good idea to blog about them:

Articles:

• How Microsoft’s new support policy for virtualized Exchange will affect you
• Virtualizing Exchange 2007 with Hyper-V
• Considerations for virtualizing an Exchange environment

Webcasts (free registration required):

• Is virtualizing Microsoft Exchange Server a good idea? - The question isn’t whether enterprises can virtualize their Exchange Server infrastructures, but rather, is it even a good idea? With the arrival of Hyper-V and Microsoft’s new licensing and technical support policies, many companies may be considering running Exchange Server in a virtualized hardware environment. From a server consolidation and storage standpoint, it makes sense, but what about cost and high availability concerns? In this webcast, Exchange MVP Richard Luckett examines the questions surrounding Exchange Server virtualization. He also compares third-party virtualization platforms and shares best practices for virtualizing both Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2007
• What every Exchange administrator should know about virtualization - Deploying Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 in a properly architected and configured virtualized environment can yield significant benefits such as the ability to consolidate hardware, pool resources, and improve disaster recovery and high availability uptime. Before architecting a virtualized Exchange Server infrastructure, however, there are a few things you should know.

A while ago I wrote a two part article about Managing Exchange 2003 with SCOM 2007. If you’re currently using the Exchange Server 2003 Management Pack, this might interest you: Exchange 2003 servers with build numbers higher than 6944 are not discovered by the Exchange 2003 Management Pack for Operations Manager.

The Operations Manager Product Team blogged about this small issue and has a resolution for it:

1. Copy the below XML into a file called Exchange.Server.Extended.Discovery.XML
2. Import the Management Pack into Operations Manager
3. Go to Authoring->Management Pack Objects-> Object Discoveries and set the scope to be Exchange 2003 Physical Installation and Exchange 2003 Role. There should be two new disabled discoveries, “Microsoft Exchange 2003 Discoveries for Higher Build Versions” and “Exchange 2003 ServerRole Initial Discovery Extension”.
4. Enable these discoveries for the Exchange 2003 servers with higher build numbers. Note - do not enable these discoveries for all servers.

Continue at source.

The Microsoft Filter Pack is available to download. This pack contains IFilters for some Microsoft applications, meaning that the Windows Indexing Service will index those specific formats.

Overview
This download will install and register IFilters with the Windows Indexing Service. These IFilters are used by Microsoft Search products to index the contents of specific document formats. This Filter Pack includes IFilters for the following formats: .docx, .docm, .pptx, .pptm, .xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb, .zip, .one, .vdx, .vsd, .vss, .vst, .vdx, .vsx, and .vtx.
Because Windows Desktop Search (WDS) consumes IFilters from Windows Indexing Service, the IFilters will be automatically registered and available for use by WDS.
To register these IFilters with a specific Search product, please see the associated KB article below:

• Office SharePoint Server 2007 - Office SharePoint Server 2007 registration steps
• Search Server 2008 - Search Server 2008 registration steps
• SharePoint Portal Server 2003 - SharePoint Portal Server 2003 registration steps
• Windows SharePoint Services v3.0 - Windows SharePoint Services v3.0 registration steps
• Exchange Server 2007 - Exchange Server 2007 registration steps
• SQL Server 2005 - SQL Server 2005 registration steps
• SQL Server 2008 - SQL Server 2008 registration steps

System Requirements

• Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003; Windows Vista; Windows XP

• This download works with the following programs:
  • Office SharePoint Server 2007
  • Search Server 2008
  • Windows SharePoint Services v3.0
  • SharePoint Portal Servicer 2003
  • Exchange Server 2007
  • SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008
  • Windows Desktop Search 3.1, Windows Search 4

How to Design a Mission-Critical Microsoft Exchange 2007 Infrastructure from the Ground Up is a technical whitepaper sponsored by EMC that you can download freely (registration required).

“Exchange 2007 is more than just a new e-mail system. Instead, it will be the platform for many organizations’ unified communication strategies for years to come, the backbone of their e-mail, voice, real-time communications and collaboration capabilities.
However, the move to Exchange can be risky if organizations do not follow best practices when planning the infrastructure that will support Exchange 2007. Organizations make take into account critical issues like performance, scalability, data backup and restore, disaster recovery and business continuity, archiving, legacy investments, energy consumption and a host of other issues. Decision makers must choose the right technologies and business partners in order to make the move to Exchange 2007 as inexpensive and as efficient as possible.
This white paper focuses on the specific practices and technologies that can make the move to Exchange 2007 successful, and discusses how EMC’s technologies and expertise can help organization to successfully move to Exchange 2007.“

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary
    Introduction
    Learn from others or re-invent the wheel?
Deploying Exchange 2007?
    What should you consider?
        Performance and scalability
        Data backup and rapid restores
        Disaster recovery and business continuity
        Host-based
        Network-based
        Storage array-based
        Archiving for cost reduction
        Archiving for regulatory and legal compliance
Other Things to Consider
    Consider your legal investments
    You’ll need a variety of technologies and practices
    Take advantage of available expertise
    Reducing energy use is more important than ever
    Planning for the future
    View things holistically
About EMC
    EMC Technologies are a key component
Summary

Microsoft released the October 2008 version of the standalone Exchange Server 2007 SP1 help file.

Brief Description
This download contains a standalone version of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Help.

Overview
The Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Help can help you in the day-to-day administration of Exchange. Use this information to guide you through Exchange Server 2007 SP1 features, tasks, and administration procedures.

The latest Unified Communications technical rollup covers the following topics:

• News/Blogs
• Downloads
• Events/Webcasts
• New KB’s

As usual, this information is posted every month at the Technical Rollup blog.