Microsoft on Evan Hoffman

Autodiscover mysteriously stopped working (Exchange 2010)

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:30:30 +0000

I had Autodiscover working for months but recently it just stopped. I’m not sure why, but it may be related to removing the last Exchange 2003 servers from service recently. Maybe some setting got wiped from AD when I uninstalled Exchange 2003 (as per the procedure Microsoft gives). Basically what was happening was that the email address field was being autopopulated by the user’s UPN rather than their email address. Since we have a single label domain, the UPN isn’t a valid email address, and autodiscovery fails.

Microsoft Office 2007's awful user interface

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:48:49 +0000

Office 2007 is pretty old by now, and I know much has been written on the move from a “normal” looking app to the “Ribbon” UI. I personally hate the change and feel Microsoft just changed the UI as a way to make the application look “different” so that people will look at it and go “oooh, shiny!” and not feel as bad about being forced into another $400 upgrade of a word processor. Sure, Excel’s row limit was finally raised beyond 64k, and I’m sure there were some other tweaks, but .docx? .xlsx? Yet more file formats, ensuring most businesses will feel compelled to upgrade. If your clients are upgrading, you’re going to have to.

Microsoft Office 2007's awful user interface

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:48:49 +0000

Outlook 2007 & Exchange 2010 Autodiscover SSL certificate error annoyance

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:51:54 +0000

One of the more annoying side effects of migrating my mailbox to Exchange 2010 has been the nagging of Outlook 2007’s Autodiscovery feature. Now, every time I start Outlook I get hit with a certificate error for autodiscover.domain.com. Now, autodiscover.domain.com is a CNAME to mail.domain.com, which is the OWA URL for the CAS. The SSL certificate is valid - but it’s valid for mail.domain.com. I could buy a SSL certificate from GoDaddy for $12.99 (an insanely great price, btw) for “autodiscover” but that would also require using another IP address on the CAS (since you can can only bind one SSL certificate to an IP:port pair), and that seems like a waste of an IP address.

When single-sign-on isn't.

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:09:22 +0000

I’m looking into training courses for Exchange 2010, and to add a course to “My Learning,” which I guess is the equivalent of a shopping cart, I had to sign in with my Live.com ID. I have a Live.com ID because you need one to see your MS licenses and download ISOs, etc. It’s not as seamless as Google’s ID but it seems to work ok most of the time. But here’s an instance where it sucks:

When single-sign-on isn't.

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:09:22 +0000

Exchange 2010 and Set-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory Identity

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:43:21 +0000

I don’t really know why I put this blog up, but generally I write stuff here after I muddle through some ridiculous problem that may have ended up being easily resolved, but whose solution was hard to find. That’s definitely the case with this post. Currently I’m in the middle of moving my company’s email from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010. Microsoft has provided some pretty good documentation on how to do this, but they do assume a certain level of familiarity with the product. For example, I probably spent 30 minutes trying to run Exchange cmdlets in Powershell before I realized there’s a special shell just for Exchange, the Exchange Management Shell.

Hygiene Management?

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:55:39 +0000

I’m installing Exchange 2010 and in the docs it shows a bunch of groups that get created in the AD Schema during the domain prep part. After running prep, I looked to see if the groups were there, and sure enough they were (yay). What caught my eye was that one of the groups is called Hygiene Management. I thought maybe this was an Easter Egg from MS, but apparently it’s just the name of the group of people who can manage the Exchange antivirus/antispam features. Still funny though.

Generate a report of Exchange mailbox sizes broken out by department and location

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:44:44 +0000

I found a script a few months ago that generated a CSV report of mailbox size, which included the Mailbox Name (usually the user’s name), size in Kbytes, number of items, which server it’s on, etc. This was very helpful, but I wanted to see which department within the company used the most space on the mail server, and the department wasn’t one of the pieces of data included in the report. It took a while but I figured out how to do LDAP lookups in vbscript and was able to add that info, so the report now has the user’s department, office location, and quota limit in it as well as the other fields. This makes it very easy to do a PivotChart in Excel to generate a pie chart of the size by department. The script is attached - change the extension to .vbs to run it. You’ll need to plug in your Exchange server and domain controller where the placeholders currently are.

Moving an Exchange 2003 server to another location with minimal risk and disruption?

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 01:38:51 +0000

So our Exchange server is located in our office building. This made sense at the time because that’s where the users are. Over time though, this has proved problematic for a few reasons. Primarily, our office is certainly not a datacenter and doesn’t offer the amenities of one - clean, reliable power, and redundant cooling. In an average year we lose power probably 10-15 times, often for an hour or more. The rest of our production environment is hosted in a top-tier datacenter, so after a while I started to wonder why our Exchange server wasn’t there, and making plans to move it there. Oh, and did I mention I’m not an Exchange admin in any sense of the term? I just inherited the Exchange server about 2 months ago.