FolderSync Failed - ActiveSync
If you are running the TestExchangeConnectivity.com test and pass the OPTIONS test but then fail the next FolderSync test, you may pull your hair out going over every detail of an already immaculate configuration. There's one thing you might not do, given that it's not in most common ActiveSync troubleshooting guides.

1. Run the IIS Manager tool

2. Get properties on "Default web site".

3. On the Web Site tab, click Advanced

4. In the "Multiple identities for this website" area, click on the default entry and choose Edit

5. Make these changes - IP address: (All Unssigned), TCP port:80, Host Header Value: empty

6. Click OK to close out.

7. Restart the IIS Admin Service.

Now go and test again and see if this was your silver bullet.  ¶ 2:14 PM 0 Comments

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  TrainSignal Video series on Exchange 2007
I guess I should have posted about this a few months ago, but last fall I spent a lot of time developing an Exchange 2007 video course for TrainSignal. The course ended up over 21 hours long, and I think I did a solid job on it.

The target audience is beginning Exchange admins and admins who have some Exchange 2003 experience but lack deep experience with Exchange 2007. The new version of Exchange is quite different from previous versions: the management experience is radically different, and the architecture has changed a lot too. One of the main things that is close to being the same is the database, but I've found that a lot of people who are administering Exchange servers don't know much about that anyway, regardless of what version we're looking at. So of course, I gave the database significant attention.

In this course, I created a fictional company, and the viewer and I are the consultants hired to implement a full Exchange 2007-based solution. In each video we have some objectives that have been given to us by company management, and we work through accomplishing those goals and testing them. Sometimes I take a bit of time out and go over some architecture so that we understand what it is we are doing, but the majority of the videos is spent working with the Exchange Management Console, working with PowerShell commandlets, and even working with GoDaddy, Digicert, DNS consoles, Active Directory and our router console to get things done.

One fun thing is that several of the people who have viewed the videos have actually contacted me to ask questions about configurations, and in some cases I've even worked on several projects with them. I like getting to know my audience.

Right now I'm working on another TrainSignal video that will cover more advanced Exchange 2007 backup and recovery topics. We'll be covering the difference between doing backups on Server 2003 vs Server 2008, we'll be looking at how to set up Data Protection Manager, and how to do several different types of restores, from mailbox to full server. We'll finish up with a detailed discussion of clustering options, but we won't actually be able to set up multi-server clusters. I did cover Local Continuous Replication in some depth in my original video, but full clustering coverage is beyond the scope of this upcoming video.  ¶ 10:45 PM 0 Comments

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  Test Exchange Connectivity Tool
Well, I've been sucking up lots of data during the last couple of months, working a lot with SBS 2008 and Exchange 2007. In April I attended Interact08, a conference covering Office Communication Server 2007 and Exchange 2007 down in San Diego.

There was a lot of good content for the future there, but one of the best things I walked away with was knowledge of this tool, and I'm excited to share it with you:

http://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/

It's a web application hosted by Microsoft and built by a couple of guys on the Exchange team, Shawn McGrath and Brad Hughes. It was built to assist troubleshooting Autodiscover, ActiveSync and Outlook Anywhere (that's RPC-over-HTTP for running on Exchange 2003 vernacular still). What the tool does is it methodically tests each step that's required for each of the services to work and tells you where the breakdown is. Trust me, for these technologies, that's huge. Using the "outlook /rpcdiag" method has been very limited in its usefulness to me, and the new tool is tremendous. I've probably used it almost twice a day for different clients to sort situations out that range from DNS records to certificate misconfiguration to permissions on the RPC virtual directory.

What I plan to do next here is to revisit the tool and tell you how to resolve some of the issues that the tool will alert you to. Not all of them are straightforward. For example, when you see that the "RPC Referral failed" or that the RPC ping didn't work, what's probably the issue? You do well to wonder, and I'll cover that for you soon.  ¶ 11:14 PM 0 Comments

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  Solutions and workarounds for Office 2007-related problems
Problem: Can't print selected text from Outlook

Diagnosis: Outlook 2007 handles text and printing differently. Outlook 2003 worked with IE (in the background) to print. Outook 2007 doesn't. Many people are complaining about this, and I don't blame them. Maybe it will be fixed in a service pack.

Solution: Open up the email so it has it's own window. From the Other Actions dropdown menu, choose View in Browser. When the new window opens, select the text you want to print and choose Print. Click "Selection" on the Printing screen. Since IE allows "selected text printing," this is the workaround.

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Problem: Can't "Save-As" Wordperfect in Word 2007

Diagnosis: This feature doesn't exist in Word 2007. There is no add-in to allow that functionality.

Solution: There are plenty of formats that WordPerfect 12 can open, and Word 2007 can save in many of them. Even saving in Word 2000 format will allow WordPerfect to open it. The "Save-as Wordperfect" in Word 2003 saved documents as Wordperfect 5.x and 6.x files, not a later version, so that wasn't a direct format conversion anyway. There's no real difference between saving files as WP 5x files and saving them as Word 2003 files. Both will open with WP12 in much the same way.

To make Word 2007 save all documents in the Word 97-2003 format that WordPerfect can easily read, do the following in Word 2007:
1) Click the Office button
2) Click Word Options at the bottom of the dropdown
3) Open the Save options
4) Beside "Save Files in this Format," select Word 97-2003
5) Click OK

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Problem: Can't insert hyperlinks to files on Share in an Outlook 2007 email.

Diagnosis: You're right. The option doesn't seem to exist in the same way, even though it exists in Outlook Web Access 2007. Seems to be somebody's half-baked idea of a security feature.

Workarounds:
1) Open the folder that has the file in it. Right click the file and drag it into the body of the email. When you let go of the mouse button, choose "Create hyperlink here" and it will build a file link for you. This is the easiest solution.

2) The links can also be created manually by typing file://F:\clients\1531\Agreement.wpd. If you copy the file path from explorer, all you need to type is "file://" and then paste the rest. If there is a space in the file path, you have to put the whole thing in brackets, like

<file//c:\program files\outlook\install.doc>  ¶ 5:16 PM 0 Comments

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  Sizing the SBS OS Partition
How big a partition should you use for the operating system on a Windows Small Business Server? Normally I wouldn't find this subject worth blogging about, but it's started to get my attention that this is a problematic area.

Because Dell and other vendors are shipping many of their servers with mirrored OS drives preconfigured at 16gb, many technologists are making it a point of pride to make that sufficient, when in fact, it isn't. Someone will ask in the newsgroups what size partitions they should use for the OS, and many otherwise highly proficient net admins are recommending that 16gb or even 10gb should be enough, "when managed well." Poppycock.

By saying this, they imply that if you can't keep your OS problem-free on a small partition, you simply aren't as good a server admin. That's like a person saying that careful drivers need never carry a spare tire, since a driver who is a good driver won't be running over things likely to puncture a tire, and then going on to give prospective drivers advice about how to avoid flats. There may be some truth to it, since, for example, I consider myself a good driver and have never had a flat in 20 years of driving, but it's still a bad recommendation.

In my experience, it's safer to go with at least a 40gb OS partition. Might that be a waste of the space I never end up using on that partition? Since when is the goal to fill up a drive? Sometimes there are things that happen out of ones control that makes it worth the possibility of "wasting" up to 20gb.

For example, one of my clients is a 20-user engineering firm. The technical lead there decided to install Axium's accounting software on the server. He left the default paths, and it was installed on C:. It was a complex install and he spent several hours working with their support to get it all working. A few weeks later it comes up on my radar when I begin to get disk space alerts. Sure, they should have asked before installing, but it wouldn't have been as big an issue if I'd had more than a Dell-default 16gb OS partition.

There are other sources of temporary ballooning. It's easy to end up with Symantec AV and its definitions on C if you aren't on the ball during the install, etc.

In any case, it's more often helpful to have a larger partition just to keep the free-space ratio high to handle file fragmentation more efficiently and keep ample room available for ShadowCopy's use.

My basic question to system configurers: why set yourself up for a failure? Give yourself some space to accommodate whatever less-than ideal install situations may get forced on you. Especially since 20gb costs less than a billable hour. Choosing to work with 16gb or less is a decision to make the likelihood of additional billable time more likely.

Making a larger OS partition is a customer-centric decision, and in my mind choosing a smaller partition is on the same motivational continuum as choosing to overclock a server. "Because you can."  ¶ 5:52 PM 0 Comments

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  Annual Small Business Server Community Survey
Kevin Beares, part of the team working to make the next version of Small Business Server a great product, needs feedback from the small business community in completing the annual SBS Community Survey.

This is an effective way to show the Microsoft SBS Product Team how important SBS User, News Groups and Blogs are to the SBS Community. Or are they? You let him know.

http://connect.microsoft.com/SBSCommunity/Survey/Survey.aspx?SurveyID=3232  ¶ 2:02 PM 0 Comments

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  Helping yourself
I was doing a server migration project this weekend and I ran into a problem with Exchange. I butted my head against the issue for half an hour, trying different configurations and logging options, then went to Google to find some answers.

I found a well-explained solution in a couple of minutes...but it was written by me. I'd researched it for someone else and posted it three years ago. I had no recollection of it whatsoever.

That's just weird, thinking about all the problems I've solved and then forgotten about. I think that if, for only the silliest of reasons, my brain was going to be preserved for science, it would have to include some strategic Google searches. There's a lot of data that's passed through my brain that doesn't seem to live there anymore.  ¶ 12:56 PM 0 Comments

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