Exchange Out of Office replies

I guess you are all familiar with the Out of Office Assistant in Exchange server. Whenever you activate it Exchange will send a messages to anyone who sends you mail that you are out of the office. I never really thought much about the internals of OOF Assistant, but a question from a customer prompted …

Outlook Web Access: There was an unknown error accessing the directory

While troubleshooting message delivery between two email systems, I received this error from Outlook Web Access: ————————— Message from webpage ————————— There was an unknown error accessing the directory.  If the problem continues, contact technical support for your organization. I was trying to send a message to contact in my Exchange organization representing a user …

Want to see the contents of the system partition on Windows 7?

On Windows 7 the system partition, the partition the computer boots from (I know, I know, the names are messed up.), is hidden from the user. It isn’t really hidden, it just isn’t mounted to a drive letter or directory. Windows really doesn’t need drive letters or mount points. It is just as happy to …

Tip for creating Outlook profiles

NOTE: Disregard the info in this post for now. It has come to my attention that this might not always work and therefore requires some more research. Sorry! With the introduction of Autodiscover in Exchange 2007 this might not be very relevant, but some users still use PRF files or the Office Customization Wizard to …

Licensing your Exchange 2007 Edge Server

One of the new roles in Exchange 2007 is the Edge server role. The edge server is an Exchange server that sits in your DMZ and receives and sends SMTP mail to and from the Internet. It also performs a lot of other task like spam checking, anti-virus (if installed) etc. The Edge server is …

Mismatched Email addresses causes recipients to be skipped during Offline Address Book generation

You might experience this error during an Offline Address Book generation cycle: Index : 94460EntryType : WarningEventID : 9327Message : OALGen skipped some entries in the offline address list ‘Global Address List’. To see which entries are affected, event logging for the OAL Generator must be set to at least medium.– Default Offline Address ListCategory …

What does the Protect object from accidental deletion setting in Windows Server 2008 Active Directory actually do?

Windows Server 2008 Active Directory introduced a setting called Protect object from accidental deletion on all directory objects: This was implemented to avoid accidentally deleting objects from the directory. OUs have this setting set by default. But what does it actually do? When this setting is set a Deny access control entry (ACE) is added …

Using IIS 7 URL Rewrite Module to simplify Exchange 2007/2010 Outlook Web Access URLs on Windows Server 2008/2008 R2

The default URL for Outlook Web Access i Exchange Server 2007 is https://<server FQDN>/owa. This URL is always an issue for end users who find it too long or complex. They either forget to use HTTPS in front of the URL, or to append /owa to the server name, or both. The first mistake results …

Reducing the size of a dynamically expanding VHD file

All Microsoft virtualization software allows you to manipulate virtual hard disk files (VHDs). The standard operations you can perform are listen in the table below. * To fixed of same size as source ** To dynamically expanding of same size as source What is missing here is the ability to shrink disks, either dynamically expanding …