Exchange 2003

Microsoft Direct Push Technology

Hi folks, so I wanted to talk a little bit about push technology as it relates to mobile devices. This is something that RIM has had for a long time with it’s BlackBerry devices. This was one of the major things that set RIM apart from the competition.

For example, push technology is when you get a new email or a new calendar appointment and the server side pushes down the changes to your mobile device without your device having to continously poll the server for changes.

Microsoft introduced this tech to Microsoft Exchange 2003 with service pack 2, and it also exists in Microsoft Exchange 2007. No longer do you need to worry about polling the server for changes, instead you can get instant updates as they happen thanks to push technology.

Unfortunately your older Microsoft based phones will not support this as you require newer Microsoft Windows Mobile software which is usually only supported on newer devices. The new Palm Pre for example also supports this technology and is poised to be quite the phone based on all the hype I’ve been hearing. It will be very interesting to see what portion of the market share Palm can steal from the iPhone and the BlackBerry Storm!

-RP

SSL and Migrating Public Folders in Exchange 2003

The other day I ran into an interesting problem with public folders. Someone was trying to run the pfmigrate.wsf utility (the same utility I mentioned in my blog) and they couldn’t get the script to recognize the public folders. The tool said that there were 0 public folders to migrate.

When they tried to view the public folders in the Exchange System Manager they received an SSL error. This is because someone has tried to require ssl on the public folders through IIS. This usually happens when someone is configuring SSL on their Exchange server for SSL access for their Outlook Web Access server or for RPC over HTTPS. They end up selecting all the sub folders in the default web site and apply SSL to everything. This adversely affects the public folders.

If you remove SSL from the sub folders you don’t need SSL on and then go back and try to run pfmigrate.wsf again it will work. You will also be able to view the public folders without an error in Exchange System Manager again.

 -RP

Migrating public folders to a newly installed Exchange Server

When migrating your mailboxes to a new server you can’t forget the ever important public folders. Public folders aren’t just for shared folders that you create on your own but they also include the required system public folders which allow Exchange to operate.

When migrating to a new server you absolutely need to migrate these public folders otherwise you will run into a whole host of issues on the new server and your users will be quite upset with you. Now you could just go to each public folder individually and setup replication, but that would take forever and a day, especially if you have tons of public folders.

 Instead you should use a script called pfmigrate.wsf. It’s located in the exdeploy folder on your Exchange installation CD. This script will allow you to easily replicate the public folders to your new server and then after replication is complete you can easily turn off the replication.

Full instructions can be found here.

 -RP

Problems moving disabled Exchange 2003 mailboxes to a new server…

Here’s an interesting problem that will come up for you from time to time when doing Exchange server migrations. If you go to move mailboxes using the mailbox migration wizard built into Exchange, you’ll find that the wizard will fail on moving any mailboxes that have had their Active Directory account disabled. This can be a problem especially if you still want to keep that e-mail in your new Exchange server because you plan on re-enabling that account at a later date.

The reason this happens is because when you disable a mailbox you might lose the msExchMasterAccountSID attribute off of the account. To fix this you can just regenerate this attribute. It’s fairly easy to do. Just go into the account in the Active Directory Users and Computers console and go to the properties of the account. Then you can go to the Exchange Advanced tab and click on Mailbox Rights. In there you will find the SELF object listed as one of the users and then just add the Associated External Account permission to it.

 This will fix the problem however you will have to wait for a long time before you can move the mailboxes again. According to Microsoft you might have to wait up to at least 2 hours before the mailboxes will be ready to move due to directory replication and Exchange cache refresh latencies. But then once you wait and come back, you will see that the mailboxes move like a charm.

This doesn’t help you however if you have a billion disabled mailboxes to move. Going into each mailbox individually and modifying it could literally take forever and a day. So instead Microsoft has a way for you to do it for large amounts of disabled accounts. You can find their instructions here in their knowledgebase article. Happy migrating!

-RP

Assigning the proper permissions for besadmin on BlackBerry Enterprise Server

Sometimes the problems administrators run into with BES are simply due to improper permissions. The besadmin account (the BlackBerry administrator account) requires certain permissions to do it’s job correctly.

More often than not we find out that someone has been mucking around with the permissions or they just weren’t set correctly in the first place and this causes an issue with BlackBerry devices sending and receiving e-mail.

BlackBerry has some nice directions on their web site on how to setup the appropriate permissions. You can find them here.

 -RP