Exchange 2010

Exchange 2010: Remove a RBAC Role from a Role Group

Exchange 2010 ships with a great new security feature – Role Based Access Control (RBAC). Having worked on the RBAC architecture of another product in what seems like a previous life, I’m excited about the RBAC implementation in Exchange! I wanted to write a detailed article/post on RBAC, but given current time constraints, the longish, […]

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Microsoft goes open source with Outlook PST format

It seems with each passing day Microsoft gets closer to offering an openly documented and interoperable platform. Working with Exchange for a number of years, many customers notice that Exchange Server is a remarkably well-documented product, not only in terms of the feature documentation but also its protocols such as Exchange ActiveSync and Messaging Application […]

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Released: Microsoft Office 2010 Filter Packs

Microsoft has just released Microsoft Office 2010 Filter Packs. Filter Packs contain IFilters used by search search services such as Windows Search on Windows servers to index a particular file type. The Office 2010 Filter Pack contains the following IFilters: Legacy Office Filter (Office 97-2003: Word .doc, PowerPoint .ppt, Excel .xls) Metro Office Filter (Office […]

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Geek Out With Perry: New Video Series and Blog

It’s been over two months since I posted here! No, I’m not taking a break– at least not an intentional one, and hopefully will get back to posting regularly soon. Meanwhile, check out the posts on You Had Me At EHLO… (the Exchange team blog). And if you’ve been monitoring the team blog, you must […]

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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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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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Are Distribution Groups really being used?

Over the years, you end up creating a large number of Distribution Groups based on user demands. The regular departmental Distribution Groups such as Sales, Marketing, Engineering, and HR. The geographical ones such as AllUS, All-California, All-BayArea, and so on. The ones by employment status such as All-FTE for full-time employees, All-Contractors, and so on. […]

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Where are mailbox last logon, client IP address and other details in Exchange 2007 & Exchange 2010?

In Exchange Server 2003/2000, expanding a Mailbox Database (MDB) provides information about mailboxes in a database, last logon/logoff times and account(s) that logged on to mailboxes (see ‘Displaying Client IP Address in Exchange System Manager‘ for details). Figure 1: In Exchange 2003, the Logons node displays Store logon-related information. Click here to see a bigger […]

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Monitoring Exchange Server 2007 Performance: Perfmon counters and thresholds

Monitoring mission-critical services such as email is a necessity in most organizations. Whereas monitoring software like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager can use Exchange monitoring expertise and rules encoded in Management Packs and many third-party monitoring solutions ship with some embedded Exchange knowledge, if you’re setting up a monitoring system or creating a home-grown monitoring […]

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Exchange Quick Audit: mailboxes created in last 7 days

I remember writing plenty of scripts to report on different things such as user accounts created every week/month, user accounts modified, accounts disabled, etc. for SOX compliance. Some of those scripts used to be rather long, and in hindsight— involved a lot more lines of code than an administrator should have to write. Although I […]

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