All those who have applied Exchange 2010 SP 2 RU 1 in their Exchange environment, will see a problem for Exchange 2010 CAS to CAS proxy between Exchange 2010 SP2 RU1 to non-Exchange 2010 SP2 RU1 Servers, because Microsoft Exchange 2010 SP2 RU1 introduced a new method of user context cookie which is used in CAS-to-CAS proxying.

Problem:

All those customers, who are using CAS to CAS Redirection will not be affected with this change, but all you those who are doing CAS to CAS Proxy in between your Exchange Servers, where some of your Internet and NON-Internet facing CAS Servers are still not been updated for Exchange 2010 SP 2 RU1, will be suffered from this problem.

Resolution:
Update your Non-Exchange 2010 SP2 Servers with Exchange 2010 SP2 RU1 to fix this problem, or read more here

Cheers!

Microsoft Outlook is one of the software application, which remains open all the day on every desktop in the world, and sometimes Outlook configuration and its related issues takes time on the support side to fix, and make this support experience handy for the support personnels, Microsoft recently released Microsoft Outlook Configuration Analyzer, which is a nifty tool, first analyzer the user Outlook Profile, and then provide the analysis for the current configuration, and if it does find any error, it also tells you that how you can fix it.

You can download MOCAT from here

What does OCAT?

The Microsoft Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool (OCAT) is a program that provides a detailed report of your current Outlook profile. This report includes many parameters about your profile and highlights any known problems that it found in your profile. For any problems that are listed in the report, you are provided with a link to a Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article that outlines a possible fix for the problem. If you are a Help Desk professional, you can also save the report to file so that the report can be viewed in the Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool on another client where the tool is installed.

How to start OCAT?

To start the Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool, click the Microsoft OCAT icon on the Start menu. If you do not see the Microsoft OCAT icon on the Start menu, look for it under Microsoft Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool on the All Programs menu.

How to generate a report by using OCAT

After OCAT is started, click Start a scan in the left panel to generate a report of your Outlook profile.

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Note Microsoft Outlook 2003 is not a supported version of Outlook for OCAT. If you try to perform a scan on a client that has Outlook 2003 installed, you receive the following error message:

Error starting scan, please try again. If error persists, please send mail to ocatsupp.

This error message is shown in the following figure:

If Outlook is not running when you start a scan, OCAT displays the following notification.

For the most complete OCAT scan report, make sure that Outlook is running when you start a scan.

In situations in which you cannot keep Outlook running long enough to start a scan, you can still perform a basic scan. To do this, select Offline Scan in the Task drop-down list, and then click Start scanning.

Although an offline scan does not contain as many profile details as an online scan, an offline scan may still provide enough information to help you resolve any problems that you are experiencing with Outlook.

For an online scan, you may receive the following prompt to give OCAT access to information that is stored in Outlook. To give this access, select Allow access for, specify 1 minute, and then click Allow.

Note This prompt may not automatically take focus. To display this prompt, click the Outlook icon on the Windows taskbar.

After the scan is complete, click View a report of this configuration scan to display the report that is generated by OCAT.

Cheers!

I have seen this issue in some organization, where their Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Store (Mailbox Database) start growing unexpectedly large, although it is understood that since SIS (Single Information Storage) is not available in Exchange 2010, Exchange 2010 mailbox database grows twice as fast as the legacy Exchange version, but due to a bug in Exchange 2010, Mailbox Store grows unexpectedly fast and become bigger after the small time period.

Cause:
This issue can occur if the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service does not remove the deleted messages from the database.

Resolution:
To resolve this issue, install the following update rollup:

2645995 Description of Update Rollup 1 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2

You can also install this hotfix to overcome this problem.

Cheers!

Microsoft Exchange Server Team blog recently announced the availability of Exchange Client Network Bandwidth Calculator (Beta).

You can read more about Exchange Client network Bandwidth Calculator from here

Cheers!

Recently, we ran into a situation, where we figured out that our Windows Server 2008 SP2 based File Server is behaving quite slow, and Windows XP plus Windows 7 users are complaining like hell about its performance for opening, coping and editing files on the File Server over the Network link, so we started identifying the root-cause of the problem, and we saw in the resource monitor that the network usage is seems quite high, but there was nothing we did something for the Network itself, but rather we got to know about the KB, which fixes our problem for the File Server slow response over the network.

Problem:
Windows Server 2008 File Server slow response for copying, editing, and uploading files over the network.

Cause:
This issue occurs because of the file control block (FCB) resource being locked unexpectedly before the client sends the CreateFile and QueryInformation requests to the server. Therefore, the client cannot handle the Oplock break notification request that is returned by the server. This behavior causes Windows redirector to temporarily stop responding.

Resolution:
Install this KB on the file server and the clients to fix this slow response over the network copying and editing of the files on the Windows Server 2008 File Server.

To know more about the KB, open the KB link from here.

Cheers!

Microsoft Exchange GAL Sync between two Active Directory Forest

Note: Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 also provides out-of-the-box GAL Sync functionalities.

I hope this post will help you to make your GAL Sync easy between business partners and group-companies.

Cheers!

Microsoft Exchange Server ActiveSync Troubleshooting | Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync Reporting and Monitoring | Exchange ActiveSync connectivity issues due to Exchange resource consumption

With the extensive usage of E-Mails as an effective and efficient communication medium in the todays world, where it has been noticed that over the past years that, the fast growing need of providing and accessing E-mails over the SmatPhones (Cell Phones), has increased tremendously, where Microsoft ActiveSync protocol gave a handy way for both Cell Phone Manufactures, and the Enterprises, for providing E-Mails access to their corporate end-users on their Cell Phone. Microsoft ActiveSync protocol works hand-in-hand with Microsoft Exchange Server for allowing the end-users to access their fully-ready E-mail access on their cell-phones.

With the above short definition of ActiveSync, now lets focus on some of the common Active Sync issues, we face after the implementation or upgrading Microsoft Exchange Server, in past I posted a Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Active Sync connectivity blog article, which I faced after I transitioned my Exchange Server from 2007 to 2010, and which I found as one of the common issue, when people upgrade their Exchange Server from legacy Exchange versions.

In the this blog post, I will discuss couple of other ActiveSync issues, which might occur in your environment as ActiveSync connection time-out and failures, and along with these troubleshooting guidelines, we will also discuss about Microsoft ActiveSync Report Script, which is a new addition to Microsoft Exchange 2010 tools inventory, so lets start now

I will divide the ActiveSync troubleshooting steps into two domains, as follows:

Step I: IPhone (SmartPhone) Active Sync Users are not able to connect Exchange 2010 CAS Active Sync after Migrating from Exchange 2007 CAS Active Sync

Illustration: With the above link of step I for troubleshooting ActiveSync issues, you can fix the inheritable security permission on the user objects, which got migrated from the legacy Exchange version to its newer version, usually this problem comes for the user account, which are part of the administrative security groups.

Step II: Exchange ActiveSync connection failures due to Exchange resource consumption

Illustration: If the first step of troubleshooting ActiveSync, does not fix your problem, and if the below mentioned error entries are getting logged in your Exchange Server CAS/FE for ActiveSync, then you can follow the instructions provided in the KB-2469722, for troubleshooting the possible causes of your ActiveSync connection failures for the smart-phones.

Step III: Exchange ActiveSync Reporting Script

Illustration: Exchange ActiveSync Reporting Script provides you a handy way for troubleshooting and monitoring your Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync communication with verity of Smart-Phones available todays, this tool can also be used as a performance and resource utilization reporting tool, where it provides various fabulous reports related to ActiveSync. You can read more about ActiveSync Report Tool here, and can download it from here.

I hope this blog post will surely help you to fix and troubleshoot your Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync issues.

Cheers!

In past, I published a blog post as News: Microsoft Exchange 2010 PST Capture Tool Coming Soon!, and today, Im pleased to inform you that Microsoft has recently released a public version of this tool! You can  download this from Microsoft Download Centre.

This tool is a good addition to Microsoft Exchange Server tools inventory, and will surely help the organizations to make their environment PST free, where lot of other E-Mail Archiving Solution provider has always been projected importing PSTs into the Microsoft Exchange Information Store, while capturing and importing these PST files from the users machine over the network, as one of the hot and out-of-the-box feature of their Exchange E-Mail Archiving product, and was also something, which I feel that something as major was missing from Microsoft Exchange Native Online-Archive solution, but with the addition of this great tool, now Microsoft Exchange Administrators have been given a great piece of flexibility to get the user PSTs imported into the Exchange Server with less pain and more control.

How Microsoft PST Capture Works? – Check out the documentation here.

To know more about Microsoft PST Capture Tool, visit below URL:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/01/30/pst-time-to-walk-the-plank.aspx

Cheers!

Recently, I got to know that Microsoft TechEd Middle East event has been replaced by Microsoft Open-Door event, which will held on 12 13, March, 2012 at Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai.

So for what you are waiting for, go and get register yourself for two-days great learning and networking event in the town, register for Microsoft Open-Door UAE, click here

What is Open Door?

Open Door is Microsofts premier technical education event aimed at offering technology professionals and decision makers the chance to explore and connect with a broad set of current and soon-to-be-released Microsoft technologies, tools, platforms and services.

An all-encompassing 2-day event, Open Door is the perfect venue for customers and partners to engage and interact, while learning about Microsofts breadth of solutions, technologies and innovations.

Who is coming to Open Door?

Open Door will be attended by a wide range of Microsoft customers including IT professionals, developers and IT decision makers from small and medium-sized businesses, government institutions and large enterprises.

I’m also planning to visit, and if I get there, then you will probably see me around MVP booth.

Regards,