By Thomas Stensitzki, Exchange Master

By Thomas Stensitzki, Exchange Master

Writing your own transport agent for Exchange Server 2010 is not complicated or an unsolvable task to do.

This transport agent example is the outcome of a requirement to modify email attachments with a GUID based filename. Those filenames were not really usable for the recipients. Interestingly, the email subject contained the information of the content of the attachments. The emails were automatically generated by a SAP reporting application.

Without the new transport agent the original email looks like this: 

The automatically generated email contains two attachments (two different file types just for the sake of demonstration). 
The email subject contains the report date in dd.MM.yyyy format.

Task

The transport agent should perform the following actions:

By Andy Grogan, Exchange MVP

Ok, yes I know – I said that Part 8 was the last in this particular series – but then Microsoft went and released Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) for Exchange 2013 (on April 2nd) which left me feeling that if I did not cover this – then the LAB series was not properly completed. For those of you who are just joining us – you can find links to the previous parts below.

Part 1

We established our domain design, covered how to provision the Domain Controller for the LAB in Hyper-V and then how to install Windows Server 2012 on the Domain Controller.

Part 2

We went through the process of installing Active Directory Domain Services on the LAB domain controller using PowerShell.

By Andy Grogan, Exchange MVP

We are now in the final stretch in this series with this being the second to last part of creating a test lab from scratch with Windows Servers 2012 and Exchange 2013. I could in truth perhaps go on forever as there are loads of things that I have not covered. But that is the beauty of a test lab, once you have one that is up and running – it is yours to do with as you choose and that is what I hope that you will all do.

For those of you who are joining us at this stage you can find the previous 7 parts below.

Part 1

We established our domain design, covered how to provision the Domain Controller for the LAB in Hyper-V and then how to install Windows Server 2012 on the Domain Controller.

Part 2

By Andy Grogan, Exchange MVP

To recap – the previous parts (should you wish to read them, refresh or catch up) can be found below:

Part 1

We established our domain design, covered how to provision the Domain Controller for the LAB in Hyper-V and then how to install Windows Server 2012 on the Domain Controller.

Part 2

We went through the process of installing Active Directory Domain Services on the LAB domain controller using PowerShell.

Part 3

By Andy Grogan, Exchange MVP

We last left off in Part 5 which covered the Directory, organization and Exchange preparation-and then went on to install the relevant Exchange servers using the unattended setup feature.

In this part I would like to cover the steps to setup a Database Availability Group within the LAB. Now before we begin it is probably a good idea to cover a couple of concepts about DAG’s and how this configuration (sic. the LAB configuration) differs from what you might expect to place into production.

Whistle stop tour of Database Availability Groups

Ok, I don’t intend to go into any large level of detail here about DAG architecture – I just want to cover enough to understand what we are implementing in our LAB and how this would differ in a production environment.

By Andy Grogan, Exchange MVP

As a quick recap from what we have covered so far in this series:

In part 1 we established our domain design, covered how to provision the Domain Controller for the LAB in Hyper-V and then how to install Windows Server 2012 on the Domain Controller. Part 2 went through the process of installing Active Directory Domain Services on the LAB domain controller using PowerShell. Part 3 covered how you can install a very simple PKI infrastructure on the domain controller using Active Directory Certificate Services. These will be used in a later part to configure SSL for various parts of Exchange 2013. And last week we explained how to use PowerShell to provision Exchange server VM’s in the lab, and went through the pre-requisite software installation.

Now in Part 5 I will take you through the process of installing Exchange on the first Client Access and Mailbox Server art-MBXCAS-01 – this includes Active Directory and Organization preparation. I will then round off with explaining how you can then go onto complete the installation on the remaining servers.

By Andy Grogan, Exchange MVP

Previously, we have discussed:

• The conceptual schematic of what our test lab domain will look like.

• Established the specifications for each of the virtual machines that we would be using in the Lab.

• How to provision the Domain Controller for the LAB in on Hyper-V server on Windows Server 2012.

• Built the Windows Server 2012 O/S for the domain controller.

• Installed Active Directory on the Domain Controller using a Powershell Script.

• Installed Active Directory Certificate Services on the domain controller.

By Andy Grogan, Exchange MVP

In the previous two parts of this series I took you through building a Windows 2012 server on Hyper-V Server and then in the second part took you through the process of installing Active Directory Domain Services.

By Andy Grogan, Exchange MVP

In the previous part of this series (Part 1) I took you through to the point where you now have a basic Hyper-V guest which can be used as the domain controller for your Exchange 2013 Test Lab. In this part I would like to take you through how you can install Active Directory on that guest machine.