Essential Exchange

The authors of the upcoming "Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services Resource Kit" asked me if I wanted to write a script for them for a section named "From The Field". I said sure! I based the script on one I wrote a long time ago, which you can access here . So the readers have the...

On Exchange Server 2007, especially post service pack 1 (I ran into this problem while installing service pack 1 update rollup 2), it appears that some of the assemblies (that is, parts of the various Exchange programs) are "signed with Authenticode". This is basically a public/private key...

Exchange has caught a lot of crap for publishing the fact that it doesn't work in branch office locations where only Windows Server 2008 read-only domain controllers (RODCs) are available. Exchange simply requires read-write domain controllers. It's a fact. However, it's been a poorly kept...

If you want to write client applications to run on computers that use MAPI or CDO (for example, web servers) and you don't want to install (or can't install) either the Outlook client or the Exchange management tools, then you need to install the MAPI/CDO libraries. These were released just last...

This weekend I had the opportunity to upgrade the hardware for one customer. The special thing about this upgrade is that the customer is running SBS 2003; and the goal was to replace the SBS 2003 server. SBS is Microsoft's Small Business Server, which is created for small companies that have from...

Yesterday (Thursday, 2008-04-17) was the last day of the 2008 MVP Summit. Over one-half of the MVPs attending were from countries other than the United States. It was interesting to hear the dozens of languages being spoken around me this week. Very little of what was covered during the Summit is not...

I and 4,000 MVPs from around the world have accumulated in Seattle/Redmond this week. Where do we all go? To the bar, of course! Last night, a few Exchange MVPs and the odd PowerShell MVP were sitting around discussing stuff I can't talk about here, when another MVP came to join us (who happens to...

Even though I get pretty hot under-the-collar sometimes when Microsoft removes for-free functionality (Exchange backups on Windows Server 2008, for example), there are some great tools that Microsoft provides for-free that are just as good as their for-pay alternatives - and more tightly integrated with...

Recently on a mailing list, several folks expressed some confusion about the scaling that Perfmon (Performance Monitor) does in its graphs and how it affects the data. The answer is: it doesn't. The scaling is used only to make the graph fit in the Perfmon window. The values contained in the Last...

Sometimes, you need to step back and take a different look at a problem. When you are "in the weeds", you can't necessarily see the forest for the trees. Exchange Server is a networking application. Now, before you say "duh!", think about it. If your network is having issues,...