An interesting thing happened the other day. I had a client who was proceeding down the normal Hybrid deployment path. Exchange 2010 / SP3 / UR4 and just installed DirSync. However, they were now having production issues with their Exchange on-premises environment. The Transport Service on several Hub Transport servers were shutting down with multiple…
The Good, The Bad and the Cloud: Notes from an On-Premises Engineer
As a long time IT consultant/engineer, my primary work experience over the past 20 years has been with on-premises Exchange, Active Directory, Windows and Lync/OCS. However, with Microsoft and other hosted providers pushing more companies to go ‘cloud’ I thought I would give my perspective as a long time on-premises engineer. What I find fascinating…
Archiving Emails to the Cloud
Many of my clients are making the move to the cloud for reasons that are technological, policy driven and budget driven. Whatever the reason it is my job to help them assess and perform a wide variety of functions when it comes to email and Online accessibility (ADFS/DirSync). Creating a mailbox archive has many benefits…
Staged Migrations – Tips and Tricks
There are several built-in migration types for Office 365: Cutover, Staged, Remote and IMAP. For older Exchange Servers, Staged and Cutover are your only choices. IMAP is usually reserved for your on-premises non-Exchange servers or for a move from a hosted provider. I covered a cutover migration in my last article and in this article…
Cutover Migration – Field Notes
In my job as a consultant, I get all kinds of customers, assignments and problems to resolve. My latest project was to perform a cutover migration for a client that was migrating email for a subsidiary or recently acquired company into the cloud. They wanted a move that was quick, easy and painless. While I…
Complete DAG Creation via PowerShell
While working on a couple of other parts to this script (automating DAG member addition), I decided to write a script that allowed for a Point A to Point B build of an Exchange Server 2013 DAG. The requirements I used were relatively simple: Create a File Share Witness Create the DAG – FSW, name…
Exchange Server Updates Released!
The latest updates for Exchange 2010 and 2013 are now out and published by Microsoft. Cumulative Update 8 for Exchange 2013 and Update Rollup 9 for Exchange 2010 SP3 were released today. These updates do include what I would consider ‘The Normal’ in that we have fixes, features and schema updates in the update. Exchange…
Lab Setup Script – Part 6 – Advanced Features 3
In Part 6 of my Lab Setup Script series, I will cover these topics: Mobile Device Policy Configuration OWA Policies – all options OWA Virtual Directory OWA Virtual Directory Permissions Custom apps This one took a bit more to write as I did not realize the amount of coding it would take to put in…
OWA Mailbox Policy Configuration – With PowerShell!
More PowerShell and more things to configure! So now that I have Mobile Device Mailbox Policies out of the way and a few other OWA vDir configuration options, I am now on to configuring OWA Mailbox Policies using PowerShell. Similar to the Mobile Device Mailbox Policy and the OWA Virtual Directory scripts I have, this…
Exchange 2013 and Network Ports – Documented! (Somewhat….)
One of the missing pieces of Exchange Server 2013 Documentation has appeared on TechNet recently. The Network ports for clients and mail flow in Exchange 2013 page in TechNet is a very informative look into the inner workings of Exchange Server 2013. A fellow Exchange MVP noted that as of March 3, 2015 the EWS…
