Administration

HTC Droid not synchronizing with Exchange 2010?

Last year Apple riled IT departments and security community when it was revealed that before the iPhone 3.1 OS release, iPhones had bee incorrectly reporting their policy compliance for encrypting device data (or as some critics said— the iPhone was lying about its policy compliance). See previous post iPhone OS 3.1 Security Changes and Exchange […]

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Social Engineering Attack Disguised As Mailbox Quota Message

Social engineering is all about psychological attacks— convincing a user to willingly divulge information is much more convenient, in most cases, than actually brute-forcing your way in. Attackers with very little technical sophistication (and perhaps some great social skills) can easily prey upon even the more vigilant users. I would’ve held on to my belief […]

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Outlook Spy 2.15 is Outlook 2010-compatible

Didn’t notice earlier— one of my favorite Outlook/Exchange tools is now compatible with Outlook 2010. Outlook Spy is primarily a tool for Outlook/Exchange developers, but Exchange administrators also find it useful. It allows you to look under the hood of mailboxes and messages. If you need to peek under the hood of Exchange mailboxes and […]

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Bulk mailbox creation: Import passwords from a file

Automating bulk mailbox creation required fairly advanced scripting skills in Exchange 2003/2000. Thanks to the Exchange Management Shell (aka “the shell”) in Exchange 2010 and 2007, this task is greatly simplified. It doesn’t require any advanced scripting skills and it can be accomplished by relative newcomers to Exchange Server with very little knowledge of the […]

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Export and Import Content Filter Words or Phrases

In Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2007, you can add custom words or phrases as good or bad words to modify the Spam Confidence Level (SCL) assigned to messages. Messages with a good word or phrase are assigned an SCL of 0 and bypass other antispam agents that fire after the Content Filtering agent. Messages with […]

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User Self-Service: Message Tracking from OWA

One of the things on top of my Exchange wish lists, and I’m sure on the Exchange wish lists of many Exchange folks, is allowing users to help themselves with common tasks such as managing Distribution Groups, and tracking the status of their own messages as I suggested in Message Tracking as part of OWA/Outlook […]

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Using Outlook’s Instant Search on Windows Server 2008

If you have Microsoft Outlook 2007 installed on Windows Server 2008 (perhaps because you’re also using a lab server as your workstation, or require Outlook for testing), when you start Outlook it complains about Windows Search service not being installed and that Outlook cannot provide fast search results when using the Instant Search feature. Figure […]

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ASN1 Bad Tag Error Installing an SSL Certificate in IIS 7

You’ve installed SSL certificates on previous versions of IIS more times than you care to remember. It’s no rocket science – you create a certificate request, request the certificate from a Certification Authority, get the certificate and complete your certificate request. Then there’s IIS 7. Modularized. Optimized. Secure. You follow the same procedure as you […]

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Exchange Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer: Test Exchange from outside the firewall

Exchange 2007 brought with it a number of Exchange shell cmdlets that let you test Exchange functionality (scroll down to the end of this post for a list of the test cmdlets). But how do you test Exchange services are actually available and usable from the Internet? Have you longed for an Exchange cmdlet like […]

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Internet Explorer 8 and OWA: Where Are The Images?

Internet Explorer 8 was released last week at MIX09. It’s likely many users may already be running either the RTM version or one of the earlier betas. IE 8 is more secure than previous versions (see Stay Safer Online for a list of IE8’s security features), including some of the default settings. Here’s one of […]

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