In Office 365 migration batches are the preferred method of establishing mailbox migrations to Office 365.  When a migration batch is established the users included in the batch are represented as migration users within the service.  Within the context of each migration user is where we track the migration process.  One of the data points…

In support you often have interesting cases come across your desk – and sometimes the questions and situations presented are odd.  On occasion you look at some of them and are like that’s impossible…and that’s what happened here. In this escalation, the customer was reporting that when they would remove a user from an Office…

In the last few weeks I have worked several escalations from customers inquiring about inconsistencies with the mobile phone attribute.  In almost all cases inconsistencies were noticed in the Exchange Online contact card where mobile phone listed did not match on premises. When directory synchronization is enabled on an Office 365 tenant a set of…

Recently I had the opportunity to work on an Exchange 2010 Database Availability Group installation where nodes were installed in multiple data centers.  Although not uncommon to have nodes installed in multiple data centers what was uncommon was the number of data centers and their geographical dispersion  – in this case 5 different data centers. …

There are some installations that utilize a single node cluster hosting a clustered mailbox server for Exchange 2007.  It may become necessary to perform an upgrade of the solution to a different service pack.  This process can introduce some issues as the upgrade and upgrade processes assume that there is a second node in the…

When using continuous replication in Exchange 2007, an operation that sometimes needs to be performed is a database seed.  This operation is typically performed as part of enabling replication, and infrequently it is performed as part of the process for recovering from divergence. Seeding is most often performed with the Update-StorageGroupCopy cmdlet. During seeding, an…

Recently I have been asked how a file server / file share cluster can be utilized to host the file share witness directory for an Exchange 2010 Database Availability Group.  I think it is important to note that this is not a recommended deployment.  With Exchange 2010 changing the witness directory is as simple as…

http://blogs.msdn.com/ntdebugging/archive/2010/04/22/etw-storport.aspx A fantastic new way in Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 to gather information on how your server is performing with your storage…

Occasionally I have an opportunity to work with our Exchange MVPs.  Neil Hobson, one of our Exchange MVPs, has recently started a series on how to test SCR in a production environment.  If you have the time I would suggest checking it out! Part 1:  http://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2007/high-availability-recovery/testing-scr-production-environment-part1.html   Part 2:  http://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2007/high-availability-recovery/testing-scr-production-environment-part2.html   Look for parts 3…

In Exchange 2010 after a database availability group (DAG) has been created it is necessary for administrators to add database copies to members.  This is generally accomplished using the add-mailboxdatabasecopy command. When add-mailboxdatabasecopy is run, if the copy is successfully created an online seeding operation automatically occurs.  The online seeding operation that occurs utilizes the…