Yesterday as I was trying to install Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition, I got a pretty strange issue.

Everything worked well up till the ‘installing mailbox role’ phase – it seemed to fail pretty quickly when it got there. Subsequent retries also failed (quickly) with exactly the same error - ‘Access Denied’

A little bit of Googling uncovered that the ‘Setup’ for Exchange 2007 had to be run in ‘Compatibility mode’ for it to work correctly. Crazy I know, but it works.

Open a Windows Explorer to the DVD, right click on the setup.exe file and choose the Compatibility tab, then set it to Vista Service Pack 2 – now run it, and it should all work as expected.

It is official, dual booting is now dead – Boot from VHD is the new king.

On my flight to BoS2009, I was inadvertently reliving some nostalgic milestones from the past 10 nay 20 years.

I had my Windows 7 laptop, booted from a VHD (see Scott’s great post for some easy instructions on how to configure this) – the OS I had booted into was Windows 2008, I had installed the Hyper-V role and was running an install of Windows XP on a virtual machine at the same time was running a command line install of Exchange 2007.

If only I had brought my Windows 3.1 diskettes with me I’d have had a straight flush…. here’s how it looked…

One of the things I (for I read we) have been working on recently (at my day job) is looking at the ‘Store Compression’ feature in Exchange 2010.

Store Compression is a new feature in Exchange 2010 whereby some of the content of an email object is compressed as it is inserted into the Exchange Information Store (and decompressed on the way out – when it is being displayed to the user). The reason we were looking at this was we initially thought it might compete with our MaX Compression product – a seriously fab product that transparently compresses and uncompresses attachment data in both Outlook/Exchange.

Anyway, this isn’t a sales pitch – so…

I had one of the QA guys do some testing and a side by side comparison. From the results it seemed that our MaX Compression product still gives enormous savings – as significant as it did under Exchange 5.5 – Exchange 2007, so given the general perception that Store Compression compressed the whole email, I wondered whether the feature was actually implemented / enable in the Exchange 2010 beta. Checking with a few MVP colleagues it seems they had been assured it was… so a bit more digging was required.

After speaking to some contacts on the Exchange team at Microsoft, it seems that the Store Compression feature is in the beta (MVPs are never wrong ), but the feature does not compress the whole email object, as many people think – it just compresses some elements of the email object.

It turns out that, as you would expect, compressing and decompressing the whole email object (including attachments etc) as it goes in/out of the Information Store is way too processor intensive and in fact the design goal of the feature was not storage footprint reduction anyway – the original design goal was to reduce I/O throughput to the store so that the (bigger ?) goal of being able to use secondary storage for Exchange could be realized.

So, Store Compression actually only compresses the email headers and any text or html body text. This apparently gave sufficient reduction in the I/O to allow effective performance with secondary storage; it also gave a good balance of I/O optimization against CPU usage (for the overhead of compressing data).

This chart shows the kind of reductions that can achieved with MaX Compression (or any other method of compression attachments), even with the Store Compression feature of Exchange 2010 in action. The two products/features actually work hand in hand, each compression a different aspect of the email object.

More details of MaX Compression and Exchange 2010, how we tested, the results and conclusions can be found here or on the C2C Website.

The company I work for (C2C) are hiring.

We are looking for Technical Support Engineers to work in our Reading, UK office.

We'll consider any experience level as long as the individuals show commitment, determination to learn / succeed and have a passion for technology.

You might be right out of school / college, looking for your first step into an IT career, you might be an Exchange expert with many years of experience.
We can promise variety, leading edge technology, in depth technical problems to investigate and input into the product direction.

Want to apply ?, email us at hr@c2c.com

This week (so far) has been good - in terms of completing things, productivity and new products.

First off, Microsoft finally released PowerShell for Vista. No more having to 'play' on my old lab machine to get to grips with this stuff. There seem to be a number of people reporting failed installs(due to EFS encryption being disabled), just read the comments of the PowerShell blog announcement.

Next, we're just coming to the final couple of days of a 'Supporting Exchange 2007, Office 2007 and Vista SPRINT' at work (we use a form of SCRUM as our development process) - all is looking good and we have beta sites lined up.

Then, I noticed Eileen's (the most communicative Microsoft employee on the planet) post about Office 2003 to Office 2007 command references. An interactive demo from Microsoft when you can click the toolbars and menus of an Office 2003 application and it tells you how to find the equivalent command/function in Office 2007. I spent some time finding the 10 or so commands I'd been having difficulty with and increased my productivity.
Here's her post : http://blogs.technet.com/eileen_brown/archive/2007/01/31/old-to-new-reference-guides.aspx

Then late last night (again at work) we just completed our internal testing before sending our Archive One product for Microsoft Platform testing. We are testing against 5 of the 6 platform tests (we don't fit into the 'Managed Code' test category as we make extensive use of MAPI which basically requires C++ / Unmanaged code)

At work we are heavily into MAPI (we provide email archiving solutions).

MAPI is Microsoft's mainstream supported and recommended protocol for accessing Exchange. There are currently two main versions of MAPI - 'Exchange MAPI' and 'Outlook MAPI'.

Exchange MAPI is the version that is installed when you install Exchange System Manager (ESM) and is the recommended version to use for enterprise applications that work with Exchange.
Outlook MAPI is the version that is installed when you install Outlook - it is NOT recommended for enterprise applications.

Now, there are also two types of PST files - the original Outlook 97-2002 version and the newer Outlook 2003 Unicode version (Outlook 2003 supports both versions, but no other version of Outlook supports the Unicode version).

The problem is that the ESM version of MAPI does not support the 2003 / Unicode version of PST files either. This is real pain, meaning that we have to use the ESM version (if we want to go with Microsoft's best practices) for our application, but if we want to support the Unicode PSTs we need to somehow use the Outlook version (NOTE: Microsoft absolutely do NOT support both versions of MAPI installed on the same machine).

Apparently the new MAPI 2007 version (that will be downloadable for use with Exchange 2007) was initially slated to support both, but, I've since heard this will not be the case. So currently (and possibly in Exchange / Outlook 2007), the only way to work with Unicode PSTs is via Outlook MAPI.

The company I work for (C2C Systems) are a Microsoft Gold Partner this is great in that it gives us a whole bunch of licenses for internal use, it also gives us (almost ??) unlimited access to software for test, development and demonstration. The problem is :-

Demonstration licences are provided for customer demonstration purposes only – that is, licences to be used only by employees of the company with customer contacts. 
[extracted from the Microsoft Partner Programme document (v7.1)]

When you think about it, this is incredibly limiting - it means that someone from the company has to be present at the demonstration (in person or remotely)...

Now, our solution (Archive One, email archiving) works with Exchange Server, our normal demos are on a system with Exchange 2003 (aside: although we do work with Exchange 2007 already) meaning we need Windows 2003 and all the Active Directory baggage.

Virtual Server technology (in fact any virtualization technology) allows me to generate a number of Virtual Machine images and run them on one machine and hey presto I have a full demo / evaluation environment - the limiting factor is licensing - If I want to just give people (resellers and / or customers) copies of those images so that they can easily test / evaluate our solution then I have to license it (Win2003, Exchange 2003, WinXP etc)

I think Microsoft really missed a trick here - some kind of (slightly) crippled or trial version of the OS and apps, that partners can redistribute, would have been great - BANG - you have a easy way for everyone to roll out full demo environments of there software / systems.

As a customer I can grab the DVD (or download the images) and evaluate without having to go through the pain of putting together a bunch of servers, setting up a test environment yadda yadda...

As a partner I can grab the DVD (or download the images) and immediately go out and start demo'ing it to my customers (the same way that vendor does)...

Anyway, I'm trying to beat up the Virtual Server / Licensing team over this...

At the 2006 Microsoft Partner Program Awards, C2C (my employer) won the Customer Experience Award for outstanding customer service.

Read all about it here.

Mr Burford and I went to a TechNet evening at Microsoft last night. The topic was 'Exchange 12 Overview'

It proved to be very interesting, lots of good info. Below are some (sketchy) notes I made...

• Release date is likely to be late 06 / early 07.
• The installer will run Best Practices Analyser (ExBPA) by default - if you don't meet the prereq's the install will terminate.
• You cannot install EX12 into a domain / forest that has EX5.5 on it.
• Exchange 12 CTP is likely to be available on the March 06 TechNet and MSDN packages.
• Outlook 12 will have a 'autoconfigure' feature where you can simply enter your email address and password and it will find the server your mailbox is hosted on and do all the necessary configuration (Outlook profiles will not be needed - not clear if they are dissappearing or staying as an option). This autoconfigure is going to based / served from DNS. It may provide hooks for 3rd parties to load / configure their addins.
• ESM will use MMC version 3.1 (the same as MOM currently uses). This provide a treeview on the left, the content in the middle and then access to specific tasks / wizards on the right
• There will be 'Policy Rules' on the back end that all messages will pass through. This is a sort of ethical firewall - Bob is not allowed to send emails to Jane unless it has the word Emergency or the word Fire in the subject. This is along the lines of Inbox rules but everyone's email will pass through it.
• There will be a increase in the limit of Storages groups and Databases per group. 50 storage groups with up to 50 databases in each. Prefferred architecture is 1 DB per SG
• Disk and Memory are the current bottlenecks in EX2003. MS have seen this internally with 4K users per server, users that are a member of many Security groups put a much increased load on the server (ACLs for each user are cached in memory - lots of groups = more memory required to cache)
• Cached mode puts an increased load on the server as it open multiple MAPI connects per user concurrently.
• As they are using 64bit only this increases the memory addressable to 4 exabytes (??), but they reckon the 'sweetspot' for EX12 will be 32GB of memory.
• The will be increasing the amount of data cached from XX (something fairly small) to 5MB per user. The disk IO should also improve as it means the same data can be loaded in half the IO ops. They are also doubling the page size to 8K (for increased performance)
• OWA architecure is changing - these are now called Client Access Servers (CAS), they provide all access to mailboxes except MAPI (which can speak directly to a Mailbox Server). The CAS will generate all the HTTP / HTTPS etc that the user sees but it will speak to the users mailbox via MAPI.
• OWA is using AJAX (a technology that allows you to update webpages without having to submit the whole page, get the blank screen and wait for the refresh to happen - our new helpdesk app uses this also)
• All the MAPI client bits will be removed from the Mailbox Server service, so you will be able to install OL on a MB server and it is a supported environment (no MAPI conflicts etc)
• You will be able to access Sharepoint shared documents areas through OWA
• They will be able to define (virtual) folders in users mailboxes that have different retention policies. For example you will be able to set the retention policy for peoples Inboxes as 90 days and tell them anything that is legal related then move it into the legal folder where it will get a retention policy of 7 years. BUT - it relies on the user moving it into the folder. You can have multiple of these folders each with different retention periods.
• Full Text Search is switched ON by default, you will also be able to conduct multiple mailbox searches.

The other area was unified messaging (UM). I come from a VoIP / Multimedia call centres / telecoms background that were to some extent dealing with UM / intelligent voicemail platform. With EX12 this technology comes of age and becomes mainstream. They showed us a live working demo last night of someone calling into a VoIP gateway / PBX and accessing EX12. Here was the flow :

• EX12 : Please enter your account number and password
• User : [enters numbers]
• EX12 : Hello [firstname], tell me what you would like to do. For appointments say 'Calendar'... etc
• User : Calendar
• EX12 : Accessing your calendar, which day would you like
• User : Tuesday
• EX12 : First appointment for Tuesday 21st March is [appointment details]
• user : I will be 10 minutes late
• EX12 : [sends updates to all meeting attendees telling them you will be 10 minutes late]
• User : Clear my calendar
• EX12 : Clearing your calendar, how long for
• User : 2 hours [or 2 days]
• EX12 Would you like to recod a message to all the meeting attendees
• User : [records a message]
• EX12 : [Cancels all the meetings scheduled within the period by sending out cancellations with the recorded message attached]

It will also read text, emails etc to you. When someone leaves you a VM it arrives in your mailbox as a messageclass of 'Voicemail' (basically a message with a WAV or WMA file attached). You can listen to the audio (and jot down notes into the VM message object as your listening - e.g. writing down a phone number). If your viewing the message on your PDA or Phone via active sync or OWA you can have EX12 telephone your mobile and play the audio stream to you. Very cool stuff

For 'ad hoc' scripting of Exchange Server, you just cannot beat Dmitry Streblechenko's Outlook Redemption.

It is basically a set of COM objects (in a DLL) which wrap many of the Outlook / Exchange objects, saving you from having to put some C++ code together to get around the horrible 'Another application is trying to access Outlook' security messages (and requiring user interaction).

I had a quick 'squiz' at Dimitry's site and saw the 'SafXXXXItem' objects. I didn't think these would meet my needs so almost wrote my own wrapper for the 2 or 3 particular objects / calls I needed, when I spotted his Redemption Data Objects (RDO), giving full access to the GAL, Public Folders, Mailboxes etc. In the end it did everything I needed and I got my script running in no time (see functions below).

Function AddUserToFolder(byref oFolder, byval oUserID, byval oUserName, byref objSession)

        '*********************************************
        ' oFolder                    Public Folder object
        ' oUserID                    EntryID of the user (from the GAL) 
        ' oUserName                Name of the user (from the GAL)
        ' objSession                Session object
        '*********************************************
	Dim sTempUsername
	sTempUsername = ""
	Set objACL = CreateObject("MSExchange.aclobject")
	objACL.CDOItem = oFolder
	Set objFolderACEs = objACL.ACEs
	
	' delete the user if they exist already
	For each objFolderACE in objFolderACes
		sTempUsername = GetACLEntryName(objSession, objFolderACE.ID)
		if sTempUsername = oUserName then
			Log "Deleting User : " & sTempUsername
			objFolderACEs.Delete objFolderACE.ID
		end if
	next
	
	' add user if they did not exist
	Log "Adding user : " & oUserName
	Set objNewACE = CreateObject("MSExchange.ACE")
	objNewACE.ID = oUserID
	objNewACE.Rights = "&H7FB"
	objFolderACEs.Add objNewACE
	objACL.Update
	
	if err then
		AddUserToFolder = false
	else
		AddUserToFolder = true
	end if
	
	Set objACL = nothing
	Set objNewACE = nothing
	Set objFolderACEs = nothing
 	
End Function


Function GetACLEntryName(byref objSession, byval oACLEntryID)
	
        '*********************************************
        ' objSession                Session object
        ' oACLEntryID              EntryID from the folders' ACL
        '*********************************************
	Dim sResult
	sResult = ""
	Select Case oACLEntryId
		Case UDefault 
			sResult = "Default" & vbTAB & "Default"
		Case UAnonymous 
			sResult = "Anonymous" & vbTAB & "Anonymous"
		Case Else
			sResult = objSession.GetAddressEntryFromID(oACLEntryID).Name
			
	End Select
	GetACLEntryName = sResult
	
End Function

I'm a great fan of the excelllent and free RSS Poppper which aggregates all my chosen feeds into a mailbox folder in Outlook (Outlook is my main daily workspace, I do everything from there).

Yesterday, I found myself considering using Glen Scales' Public folder RSS Feed Event sink v2 to create an RSS feed from one of our company's shared Public Folders (PF) so that I could pull it directly into my mailbox via RSS Popper.

This kinda sounds a bit stupid but it gives me direct access (in a standard place) to all my chosen information - I can read the PF posts along side my other feeds.

The other option is to set my email in the Public Folder properties as a 'forward all to' in addition to having the posts delivered to the PF - either way I'm duplicating data and increasing the size of the exchange store....

Luckily I work for an email archiving company and we use our products inhouse, so I don't have to worry about exchange store size, we're also just about to release SIS (Single Instance Storage) so data will not duplicated either...

Blank entry, simply to list out the categories.