In a few hours I’ll go offline and switch to family mode and enjoy the Christmas days. Looks like we have the whole package here in Demark this year. Plenty of snow and all

Merry Christmas everyone.

See you in 2010!

Cheers,

Henrik Walther
Technology Architect/Writer
MCM: Exchange 2007 | MVP: Exchange Architecture

The last couple of years a lot of Exchange administrators/consultants have been more than confused/frustrated, when it came to which Microsoft identity management (MIIS, IIFP, and ILM) solution had support for provisioning Exchange 2007 objects.

When Exchange 2007 RTM was released, we could use MIIS 2003, IIFP 2003, and ILM 2007 to synchronize Exchange mailbox users from an Exchange legacy organization to an Exchange 2007 organization as contact objects, but none of them had native support for Exchange 2007 provisioning.You could use one of these versions for synchronizing Exchange 2007 users as mail-enabled contacts, but it required that you either customized the GalSync agent or performed a semi-manual post step when users had been replicated. This was because these versions depended on the recipient update service (RUS) to perform two required tasks. RUS was responsible for setting the LegacyExchangeDN and ShowInAddressBook attributes on the mail-enabled contacts in the target organization. But since Exchange 2007 no longer uses RUS, you had to run the Set-MailContact cmdlet against the synchronized contact objects in the Exchange 2007 organization. See this KB article for a detailed explanation on this topic.

Then ILM 2007 FP1 was released and brought native support for Exchange 2007 provisioning to the ILM 2007 product (with ILM 2007 FP1 you could even provision Exchange 2007 Mailboxes if you wanted). This basically worked by installing the 32-bit version of the Exchange 2007 Management tools on the ILM server, and GalSync would then call the Update-Recipient cmdlet as part of the provisioning process.

Now that Exchange 2010 RTM has been released, we face a new issue. Yes correct! We don’t have any 32-bit version of Exchange 2010 Management tools at our disposal, which means we cannot install the Exchange 2010 Management tools on an ILM 2007 FP1 server since ILM 2007 only exists in a 32-bit version. Also, the next generation of ILM (now under the Forefront umbrella and therefore renamed Forefront Identify Management 2010 or FIM 2010) still is in a release candidate 1 status and doesn’t include support for Exchange 2010 provisioning yet (will be included with FIM 2010 RC1 update 3 which will be released early Q1 2010).

Since Exchange 2010 provisioning won’t make it into FIM 2010 before RC1 update 3 and since FIM 2010 RTM won’t release in the near future (expect around end Q1 2010), what do we do if we want to synchronize Exchange users form one Exchange organization to an Exchange 2010 organization as using ILM? Well, the ILM team has come to the rescue once again, because an ILM 2007 FP1 hotfix adding support specifically for Exchange 2010 is just around the corner. This hotfix will eliminate the requirement of installing the Exchange Management tools on the ILM server itself, and instead take advantage of the new remoting features included with PowerShell 2.0. More specifically, it will connect to a remote Exchange 2010 server and run the Update-Recipients cmdlet directly on the specified Exchange 2010 server.

When the hotfix has been installed on an ILM 2007 FP1 server there will be a minor UI change to the GalSync UI, so you can select Exchange 2010 provisioning and specify the URI to an Exchange 2010 server as shown below.

If you are planning to synchronize to an Exchange 2007 organization, this hotfix will not be of interest to you, as Exchange 2007 cannot take advantage of the remoting features in Windows PowerShell 2.0. It’s also worth mentioning that if you have a mix of Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2007 SP2 in the target Exchange organization, you can still use ILM 2007 FP1 with the Exchange 2007 SP2 Management tools installed on the ILM server itself.

Cheers,

Henrik Walther
Technology Architect/Writer
MCM: Exchange 2007 | MVP: Exchange Architecture

My latest article for TechNet Magazine has been published:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee8357...0.aspx

The old InterOrg (IORepl) tool doesn’t work directly against Exchange 2010. Well, here’s the deal. You will be able to configure the tool and get public folder data to replicate, but free/busy info will not.

This is important to bear in mind if you think you at some point in time need to provide free/busy sharing between Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2003 (or earlier) orgs. In that case, you need to point InterOrg at a legacy server (Exchange 2007 or 2003) located in the Exchange 2010 organization.

So I guess we have one more reason to introduce an Exchange 2007 server before we deploy the first Exchange 2010 server in a new Exchange 2010 org. Or keep a legacy server around if you’re doing an upgrade (formerly known as a transition) from Exchange 2003 or 2007 to Exchange 2010.

Will this issue be fixed? Well time will tell. There is a bug opened for this, but we all now the Exchange Product Group is busy with Exchange 2010 SP1 and many other things

Thanks to Nino Bilic for this tip.

Provides unique approach to preventing Email outages.

[Orange, CA – Thursday, 19 November 2009]

ENow Inc, innovative leaders in the development of software and authors of the award-winning Mailscape V4.4, announced today the formal launch of Mailscape V4.5.

Mailscape is a complete systems management tool that combines all the key elements for Exchange monitoring, reporting and administration into a single, affordable solution. The highly-anticipated launch of V4.5 delivers customizable reporting that gives administrators complete flexibility in not only how they create reports, but also how they disseminate the information. Traditional reporting products only allow you to email a report, resulting in static data, but with Mailscape V4.5‟s Personalized Dashboards, each key role in your organization can have access to only the reports they need to see via our one-look dashboard that automatically self-generates.

In addition, our proactive monitoring capabilities go beyond traditional tools that only monitor basic components, such as service availability and uptime. Mailscape V4.5 performs regular health checks of all the vital components in your messaging system, such as mail flow, OWA, and BlackBerry, to ensure they are functioning optimally.

“One of the many challenges faced by the reporting industry is developing software that is customizable enough to meet the unique needs every organization has,” remarks Curtis Blake, ENow‟s Chief Technology Officer. “The beauty of our solution is that it gives you that customization, yet remains simple enough so that everyone can use it without training.”

“The graphical display of data makes it easy enough that the Help Desk can quickly diagnose the cause of a problem and take a more active role in monitoring the system. Plus, the customizable reporting makes it easy to create very complex queries,” states Lasse Pettersson, Exchange MVP. “Overall, Mailscape is a very impressive solution, and one that sets itself apart from the competition.”

Learn more about Mailscape V4.5 at www.enowinc.com

Mailscape V4.5 is available now through ENow‟s global network of value-added resellers and distributors.
About ENow Inc

ENow is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in high-end Exchange consulting and the development of software to simplify Exchange system management. The company‟s flagship product is an innovative utility called Mailscape that provides administrators with a „one-look dashboard view‟ of the entire Exchange environment.

For More Information
Tel +1 877 TRY ENOW
Email info@enowinc.com
Web www.enowinc.com

So if you don’t already have the beta, please go there and download the bits while they are fresh.

Should also be ready on the public beta side very soon now.

But Office 2010 beta bits cannot be downloaded just yet…

http://officebeta.microsoft.com/en-us/msproducts/h...6.aspx

Henrik Walther
Technology Architect/Writer
MCM: Exchange 2007 | MVP: Exchange Architecture

I guess a lot of you folks have been waiting for this date

Go get the bits here.

If you have a TechNet or MSDN subscription, you can download from there as well.

Cheers,

Henrik Walther
Technology Architect/Writer
MCM: Exchange 2007 | MVP: Exchange Architecture

During the Exchange 2010 beta period we had a single forum where you could post your Exchange 2010 related questions. Well, we have now expanded the Exchange 2010 forum, so it has categories and matches with the other Exchange forums.

Check it out here.

Cheers,

Henrik Walther
Technology Architect/Writer
MCM: Exchange 2007 | MVP: Exchange Architecture

Many of you know that the OWA 2010 Premium experience will be available with IE 7+, Safari 3+, and Firefox 3+.

But bear in mind that only Safari on Mac will provide the OWA Premium experience. Safari on Windows will provide the OWA Light experience due to too many one-off issues with that browser/OS combination).

So those of you who saw OWA Premium demo’ed in a Firefox browser most likely watched a demo/session/webcast where Firefox was installed on Windows right? Well, today I was a little bored and wanted to try out OWA 2010 in Firefox on a Linux box. So I fired up Ubuntu Desktop and tried it out. It worked very well (see below).

Cheers,

Henrik Walther
Technology Architect/Writer
MCM: Exchange 2007 | MVP: Exchange Architecture