Exchange Center

Eventually all good things come to an end and that’s no exception to our 3rd party certificates that allow access to Outlook Web App and other web-based Exchange workloads such as Active Sync or Outlook. This article provides a step by step process on how to update your Exchange 2010 certificates from start to finish. This article also assumes we are using a DigiCert wildcard certificate. Most of this work can be pre-staged before the actual implementation and is highlighted below. With that, let’s begin!

“True wisdom is knowing what you don't know”

It’s an old maxim that traces back to the time of Confucius, but it is still a nugget of wisdom serving as the cornerstone of strategic operations for modern IT environments.

Microsoft first introduced the Edge Transport role as one of the five Exchange roles in Exchange 2007 and offered it again in Exchange 2010. The purpose of the Edge server role is to provide a solution for customers who require inbound SMTP connections to terminate in the perimeter network (DMZ), rather than in the internal network. Since most inbound SMTP connections are unauthenticated, some security departments are uneasy at allowing these connections directly to internal resources (your Exchange servers). Edge transport servers allow these customers to deploy Exchange without having to buy an SMTP gateway appliance.

If you have ever been in a situation where you have lost a physical Exchange 2010 server from your DAG then this document is critical to your ability to recover this server.  Examples of how this could occur are through OS corruption, accidental overwrite or a true datacenter disaster.  Even if you haven’t been in this situation this article will provide the insight to what it takes to recover an Exchange server that had once been a beloved member of your Exchange 2010 DAG.

Are you attending TechEd North America in Houston, TX from May 12th – the 15th?  If so then choosing your sessions will be quite the challenge. The conference in its entirety has almost 700 sessions to choose from. If you are an IT professional attending in the “Office Servers and Services” track then your choices are narrowed down to 150 sessions covering Office 365, Office client apps, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Visio, Yammer, and Microsoft Lync. Of those sessions there are 58 to choose from covering Office 365 and Microsoft Exchange and only 4 days of conference to learn it all!

Update 02/13/2014: By popular demand, “Lost modified on:” field has been added which displays the date on which one of the settings on the virtual directory was last modified.

MEC 2014 was an educational event that provided great insights into all aspects of Exchange. If you missed the conference this article will cover learning aspects as they related to deploying Exchange On-Premise. Here are some of my takeaways from the conference on this topic.

Every mailbox object in Exchange has a series of fields called custom attributes.  These can be found by right-clicking on a mailbox in the Exchange Management Console, choosing properties and then clicking on the custom attributes button in the bottom right-hand corner of the window.

As an Exchange administrator you likely work in an environment that has public folders.  Public folders allow users centralized access to tasks, email, calendars, contacts and more.  Over the years Microsoft has worked to move away from this technology, but was not able to due to customer dependence on this functionality.  In Exchange 2013, they have redesigned public folder technology and have introduced Modern public folders.  These are built on traditional mailbox technology which should streamline the backup and recovery process.  Despite this many organizations are still running Exchange 2010, so there is still a need to understand how to recover data from the public folder databases within your organization.

As described in the Office 365 CON 2014 Virtual Conference sessions, “Stairway to heaven – Best practices for Hybrid Deployments”, it is very important that you validate your on-premises environment before getting started with the hybrid bits.

The reason why this is so important has to do with the many interactions between Office 365 [the cloud] and your on-premises environment. Let’s take a look at what components are at stake here.