Essential Exchange

Originally published May 19, 2005 Have you ever done an address book lookup in OWA and wondered why only part of your address book was displayed? And for that matter, wondered how OWA made the choice as to which addresses it put into that list? By default, OWA will only return 100 results (try to find...

Originally published March 9, 2005 Recently, I've spent a great deal of time learning to deal with GUIDs and other somewhat arbitrary binary data within VBScript. While it isn't easy to figure out how, and the conventional wisdom says “don't do it”, after establishing some basic rules and...

Originally published January 24, 2005 (Note November 13, 2007: The most popular blog post I've ever made. A couple of these KB articles have been pulled. The basic truth hasn't changed - don't do a dcpromo after Exchange is installed.) While installing Exchange Server 2003 on a domain controller...

Originally published January 11, 2005 There are times (generally during a late-night debugging sesssion, it seems) when you want to ensure that ESM is connecting to a particular DC. If I was really motivated, I would have pictures here...but....sorry. :-) On a computer where the Exchange Management Tools...

Originally published December 30, 2004 Today I needed to know if all of my proxyaddresses (that is, the entries on the “E-Mail Addresses” tab in Active Directory Users and Computers) were unique. ADU&C prevents you from entering a duplicate manually, but it's possible for a script or for the...

Originally published July 29, 2007 ADModify is a tool that used to be only available from PSS directly (i.e., you had to place a call to get them to send it to you). It's a great tool for making global GUI-based modifications to your A/D, with a strong focus on those required for Exchange. It's...

Originally published on May 26, 2004. Beginning with Windows 2000, Microsoft began moving away from their proprietary WINS (Windows Internet Naming Service). WINS is responsible for name-to-IP-address mapping, and is in the process of being supplanted by DNS (Domain Name System). DNS has long been used...