Essential Exchange

Most companies have a set of primary Internet domains (Exchange accepted domains) that they use to assign to users. However, a constant is that most companies also assign a secondary email address that has a domain which is identical for all of their users. That is true in my environment, and in that...

Every major Exchange release comes with updates to the Active Directory schema. In this case, "major release" means new major version (at RTM), every service pack, and (probably) every Cumulative Update with the new servicing model introduced for Exchange 2013. Each update is unique to that...

I'm working with a client that has - over an extended period of time - accumulated thousands of security groups, most of which are mail enabled for use by both Exchange and for setting rights on various objects. Becasue they use embedded groups (that is, placing a group as a member of another group...

One of the traditional issues associated with cleaning up an Active Directory Directory Services (AD DS) domain in DNS is to ensure that duplicate names in DNS are removed (this is typically an issue caused by not having DNS Scavenging enabled, or by having hosts forcefully removed from the domain and...

I've been working with a company that is in the process of setting up a remote datacenter for disaster recovery. They brought me in to help design their Exchange cross-site resilience, and I've been helping them with a few other things too. Primary connectivity between the primary datacenter...

In September of 2005, I wrote a blog post named " Sending an e-mail to users whose password is about to expire ". Written in VBScript, it was one of my most popular blog posts of all time. I still have clients of mine that use it and I get occaisional email questions regarding it. However,...

At Exchange Connections 2011 in Las Vegas, Greg Taylor of Microsoft made a comment about some schema changes coming in Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2, that were enabling potential future feature content. This led to interest on my part to investigate those changes further. It's worthwhile to note that...

I spent eight hours over the last two days figuring out an interesting - but weird - problem. Once I figured out the problem, correcting it was a simple matter. I'll just give you the problem description and then the solution. Hopefully it will save you more than a little time in the future. I have...

In October of 2008, I wrote the article adminCount, adminSDHolder, SDProp and you! This article discussed why membership in privileged groups could cause permissions challenges. You may want to refer to it before proceeding. With Exchange Server 2010, the overall situation has continued to get more restrictive...

In Exchange Server 2010, you cannot create a new Distribution Group that is not a Universal group. If your Exchange 2010 installation was upgraded from a prior release of Exchange Server, you may find Distribution Groups created in those earlier versions of Exchange that are not Universal. As I've...