I attended the Microsoft Certified Master : Exchange 2007, rotation 2; prior to attending I had the good fortune to be able to talk to previous Ranger/MCM candidates within Microsoft, who helped prepare me for the program. I thought it would be a good idea to consolidate this information, along with my own advice for…
Reverse Number Lookup and Dealing with Legacy PBX
Working with customers I have come across a number of scenarios where the caller ID presented from the PBX is not in E164/DID (Direct Inward Dial) format. Some gateways allow for extensive manipulation of the caller ID, some less so. The good news is that in OCS 2007 R2 you can now easily solve the…
Updated : Exchange version powershell script
Further to my blog post on April 30th, I have updated the powershell script to output in a more usable manner and also detect more information about your exchange servers… ServerName TransportVer CASver StoreVer SERVER1 08.01.0336.000 08.01.0336.000 Not Installed SERVER2 08.01.0336.000 08.01.0336.000 Not Installed SERVER3 08.01.0336.000 08.01.0336.002 Not Installed SERVER4 08.01.0336.000 08.01.0336.002 Not Installed SERVER5…
Automating Exchange 2010 Pre-Requisites on Windows Server 20008 R2
Everyone knows its a good idea to automate your installations of Exchange. It provides a solid, repeatable process by which to deploy your infrastructure – and it takes less time – win/win!. One area that I have witnessed repeatedly over the last 12 months or so is organisations automating their OS build and Exchange build,…
How to retrieve the store.exe version from all mailbox and clustered servers in one step!?
Over the last 12 months I have had various occasions where I needed to quickly check the store.exe version installed on each mailbox server within the organisation. Seemingly there is no way to do this directly via PowerShell or Exchange cmdlets. Paul Flaherty has already written a great script to determine the SP and RU…
Shared Mailboxes
Exchange Server 2007 introduces many new and really well defined recipient types. One of them is the one my customer asked me about. The process to create a Shared Mailbox will create a disable Active Directory user as there is no point to have it – that is not the purpose of this recipient. On…
Is your E2K7 project in danger of being scrapped?
I’m guessing that over the next few months IT managers are going to be pushing their staff really hard to justify any spend. ..and projects to upgrade to Exchange Server 2007 are not going to be immune. Clearly to have any chance of getting the go ahead for your deployment of Exchange Server 2007 you…
How quick’s it going to take to backup and restore Exchange data with DPM?
One of the most often asked, and most difficult to answer, questions concerning Microsoft System Centre Data Protection Manager (dpm) is how long will it take to backup and restore data… As you’d expect the answer is ‘it depends’. So I thought I’d provide an example from my own experience which it might be useful…
Automating Jetstress…
One of the things I like about Jetstress is that it tends to identify failing or failed components before the servers go live. Its not all about how many IOPS a storage array can provide, sometimes its just as important to prove the stability of the infrastructure and not just its peak performance. So, we…
How to setup multiple AD site test VM’s to communicate without multiple NIC’s or RRAS
As Exchange technologies using multiple AD site infrastructures become more popular, Exchange PFE engineers have to build LAB’s spanning multiple AD sites using Virtual PC/ Virtual server or Hyper V. I always used to use multiple NIC’s and Routing and remote access service (RRAS) to get communication working between machines in different AD sites. I…