Outlook 2010's Group Calendars are very similar to those found in Outlook 2007 and it is possible to view multiple users' calendars in one place using the free/busy information in Exchange. This is very helpful if you do not have the rights to view a person's calendar but still want to see if someone is available in conjunction with other people and resources when planning meetings. I will provide the steps in setting this up below.
- In outlook 2010, click on your calendar.
- From the Home tab, Select Calendar Groups.
- In the drop-down list, click one of the following-
- To create a new group calendar, click Create New Group Calendar, and continue to step 4.
- If you have multiple Calendars open ( For example: You are viewing other peoples calendars along with your own), you can save the the calendars in the current view as a new calendar group in the navigation pane by clicking Save as New Calendar Group.
- To display team calendars in the navigation pane, click Show Team Calendars. Team calendars contain calendars for your manager, direct reports, and peers as determined from information in Active Directory.
- In the Create New Calendar Group dialog box, type the name for the grouping, and click OK.
- In the Select Name: Global Address List dialog box, find the individuals or resources you wish to add to the grouping. Click the Group Members -> button to add them (or double click their name). You can add multiple people or rooms by finding another person and clicking the button again.
If you have a server-side distribution list (For example - a mail-enabled group, not a LISTSERV list or a personal distribution list), you may find that group and add it.
- When you are done adding the people and rooms click OK and the calendar group is saved in your navigation pane. In it, you can see each of members or resources availability. If the individual or resource room doesn't allow people or a specific set of people to view the free/busy information, you will not see any details listed.
- To add more people or resources, right-click on the calendar group in the navigation pane and click Add Calendar. Choose one of the following methods to add the calendar-
- From Address Book
- From Room List
- From Internet
- Open Shared Calendar
- To delete a calendar group, right-click the calendar group in the navigation pane and select Delete Group.
This topic came up after a recent Microsoft Exchange Upgrade from 2003 to 2010. I wanted to share this information to help with people new to Outlook 2007/2010. SkyByte Consulting works with many of our clients to provide server upgrades, Blackberry Enterprise Server support and many other services.
San Fransisco, CA: Microsoft on Tuesday provided another glimpse at changes coming with the next-generation of Windows software that powers most of the world's computers.
Microsoft is making major improvements to a key Windows Explorer file management program to enhance how it interacts with the coming Windows 8 operating system, according to Windows division president Steven Sinofsky.
"Windows 8 is about re-imagining Windows, so we took on the challenge to improve the most widely used desktop tool in Windows," Sinofsky said atop a blog post detailing Explorer modifications.
"Windows Explorer is a foundation of the user experience of the Windows desktop and has undergone several design changes over the years, but has not seen a substantial change in quite some time," he added.
A control "ribbon" for commands was added to make them more easily accessible to people other than "power users" familiar with Windows Explorer shortcuts.
Engineers set out to "return Explorer to its roots as an efficient file manager and expose some hidden gems" in the form of handy commands many people may not know, according to Alex Simmons of the program management team.
Microsoft in June provided the first sneak peek at the successor to Windows 7, a next-generation operating system designed to work on both personal computers and touchscreen tablets.
Sinofsky demonstrated some of the features of the operating system code-named "Windows 8" at a D9 technology conference hosted by All Things Digital.
"Laptops, slates, desktops -- all can run one operating system," Sinofsky said.
"Windows 8" builds upon many of the features in Microsoft's latest mobile operating system for smartphones, Windows Phone 7, including the use of touch "tiles" instead of icons to launch and navigate between applications.
Microsoft has promised to reveal more features of Windows 8, which uses Internet Explorer 10 as a Web browser, at its developers conference in Anaheim, California, opening on September 13th
Nothing new has been released yet regarding new Windows Server 8 information and if Active Directory upgrades will need to be to unlock the potential for Windows 8 on current corporate network infrastructure.
In this blog post I will explain how to fix the error 0x8004010F when Microsoft Office Outlook 2003/2007/2010 clients fail to download the offline address book (OAB). You may receive the following error message: "Task ‘Microsoft Exchange’ reported error (0x8004010F): ‘The operation failed. An object cannot be found.
This issue may occur when Outlook 2003/2007/2010 is started on a client that is not a member of a domain. The service connection point is not available to deliver the offline address book, and Outlook tries to locate the Autodiscover service by using Domain Name System (DNS). For Outlook to locate the Autodiscover service by using DNS, there must be a host record in DNS for the Autodiscover service that maps the entry point, or public IP address, to the Client Access server where the Autodiscover service is hosted.
Resolution
To resolve this issue, add a host (A) record in DNS for Autodiscover.domain.com and point to the Exchange 2003/2007/2010 server that has the Client Access server role. For example, if the user’s primary SMTP address is
user@yourcompany.com, the host (A) record you need to add is: autodiscover.yourcompany.com A <xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx>.
This post can also relate to network security, server upgrades, or Active Directory upgrade. SkyByte Consulting can assist you with any of your Microsoft Exchange related needs.
After a recent Microsoft Exchange upgrade I had some clients that could not connect to the server via their Outlook 2003 client, but the 2007 and 2010 clients could connect just fine. The error message on the 2003 client read "Unable to open your default e-mail folders. You must connect to your Microsoft Exchange computer with the current profile before you can synchronize your folders with your offline folder file."
After looking into the issue I found the solution. The reason Outlook 2003 clients were failing is because of the new way Exchange 2010 handles MAPI connections.
- All MAPI clients connecting to Exchange 2010 server connects to the mailbox through the CAS Server.
- A new service named Exchange RPC Client Access is introduced in 2010 CAS which handles all MAPI connections.
- All MAPI clients connect to the mailbox server directly in Exchange 2007.
Now that we know about the RPC Client Service running on the 2010 CAS server, login to your Exchange 2010 server and pull up the elevated power shell prompt and run Get-RpcClientAccess | fl
Look at the output and locate the "EncryptionRequired : True" This is the default setting. The same is also the case with the Outlook 2003 and 2010 clients profiles. Encryption between Outlook and Exchange is enabled by default, which explains why these clients can connect to Exchange 2010 without any issues. Outlook 2003 profiles don’t have encryption enabled by default.
To fix this on the Outlook 2003 clients, do the following.
- Open the exchange connection properties.
- Click the security tab.
- Check the box at "Encrypt data between Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Echange Server"
- Click Apply
- Click Ok
Once I check the box for Encrypt data, I could then open Outlook and it opened my mailbox. You can disable th 2010 CAS encryption requirement by running "Set-RpcClientAccess –server servername –EncryptionRequired $false"
This is highly not reccomended though!
If you have an entire network of Outlook 2003 clients though you can enable encryption using group policy.
This article can relate to the following Active Directory upgrade, e-mail security solutions, and server upgrades.
Installing Exchange 2010 SP1 can be a challenging task. Microsoft requires a metric ton of prerequisites prior to install. Recently after patching exchange 2010 with SP1, I found OWA was no longer working properly and displaying a blank page. I tired several steps to fix OWA including recreating the virtual directory per Microsoft's recommendations. Unfortunately Microsoft's white papers didn't give any hints to this problem before hand. Fortunately I found this solution:
Issue - After installing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 SP1 out of the box successfully, owa no longer works and displays a blank page:
https://xxx.yyy.local/owa/auth/logon…l/owa&reason=0Solution 1 - Open Power shell (Run As Administrator) copy and paste the following commands to add the HTTP over RPC service.
1. Import-Module ServerManager
2. Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework,RSAT-ADDS,Web-Server,Web-Basic-Auth,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-Metabase,Web-Net-Ext,Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console,WAS-Process-Model,RSAT-Web-Server,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web-Digest-Auth,Web-Dyn-Compression,NET-HTTP-Activation,RPC-Over-HTTP-Proxy -Restart
Solution 2 - If you want to do this via GUI rather than via the PowerShell command, then navigate to Server Manager->Features->Add Feature, select to install the “RPC over HTTP Proxy” feature.
These will install the needed feature, and all dependent features, which will resolve the “blank OWA page” issue.
This post may also relate to Microsoft Exchange Upgrade and or Microsoft Server Virtualization with Exchange server.
Recently SkyByte Consulting performed a Microsoft SQL upgrade for a client's Microsoft Great Plains ERP system. The original SQL server was decommissioned and replaced with a new Dell PowerEdge R710 server running Microsoft Server 2008 R2. In addition to hosting SQL, this server also hosted user home directories for approximately 25 users. The entire users' directory was copied to the new server using Robocopy, an advanced utility that transfers large folder structures while retaining NTFS and ownership permissions for the entire folder hierarchy.
All home directories for this system were configured in Active Directory under the user's profile tab. After the new Users directory was established and the correct permissions were set, the home directory mappings were pointed to the new server. We began testing user logins for several workstations and immediately noticed the changes were not being reflected on the workstations. We noticed the computers were responding very slowly, and would hang quite frequently due to the old server being unavailable. While we don't enforce user home directories in Group Policy, we double checked to confirm this wasn't the cause. We also questioned whether or not this was a network security policy setting since it was occurring on all OS's including Windows XP, Vista and 7 throughout the office. Under normal circumstances, you should be able to change the location of your My Documents under the properties, however, we could not. We finally realized logging into a workstation with a different username, all mappings would be correct, so this was a locally user driven problem.
The solution was a few simple registry edits to change the home directory paths for: My Documents, My Pictures, and My Videos. For XP, Vista, and 7, the home directory location lies in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive under Software>Microsoft>Windows>Current Version>Explorer. The two folders to look for are "Shell Folders" and "User Shell Folders".
There are several values you will need to change which include: Personal, My Pictures, My Video, and My Music entries. For a server mapped home directory, the string entry should be a UNC path like this:
\Servernameshareusername. In this case, we simply needed to change the server name for each string that needed the update. After rebooting the computers the changes took effect. While no user files were lost during this, I strongly recommend having a backup available of the users files and folders before performing any changes.
Recently I had the opportunity to upgrade our existing OCS 2007 environment to Microsoft's new Lync Server 2010. Microsoft has been on a mission to re-invent some of their products. At times those product improvements came with a name change, and it was time for Office Communications Server (OCS) to have its own overhaul. Microsoft has officially changed the name of Office Communications Server to Lync Server 2010. Former CEO of Microsoft Bill Gates had a vision to use software to improve how people communicate, and Lync was it's realization.
The new communications server has a ton of new features and a fresh look. Some of the new features include:
- Sense
- Pictures of Contacts
- Improved screen sharing and document sharing capabilities
- Redesigned interface
- Improved IP Phone system compatibility
- And much more
My first impressions of Lync 2010 are very positive. Installation of the server wasn't very difficult, but wasn't exactly smooth either. Lync didn't require any major server upgrades, Microsoft SQL upgrades, or major network infrastructure upgrades. You will have to perform some relatively easy tasks which are built into the installer for Lync. Some of those tasks were a few Active Directory Upgrades and Network Firewall Security setting changes. The installation did integrate well with my clients email server which I had recently performed a Microsoft Exchange Upgrade to version 2010 SP1 on. Lync ties in with Exchange to create a bridge with unified communications. This is something that in recent years Microsoft has really been trying to improve upon.
Finally after installing the server software and checking communications it was time to test the clients. My client had been running OCS 2007 R2 previously, and one of the nice features of Lync is that you can use the OCS 2007 R2 clients with Lync 2010. It's not as nice and does have some limited functionality, but will work for basic IM functions. The new Lync client ties in seamlessly with Microsoft's new Office 2010 line of products.
All in all I would recommend trying Lync. If you migrating from OCS 2005/07 or installing your companies first communications solution this should work for you. Has your company shown interested in having this product installed within your environment? SkyByte Consulting can assist you with every aspect of this solution from planning and purchasing to implementation and roll out.
Recently SkyByte won a project to install a new VMware Vsphere 4.1 Virtualized server cluster utilizing a NetApp SAN. An important prerequisite to the VMware project was an active directory upgrade from the client's current single server SBS 2000 domain controller to the latest Server 2008 R2 Active Directory. Our new client had grown out of it's single DC SBS many years ago but they never found a consulting company that was confident enough to tackle a production upgrade to 2003 Active Directory much less to 2008 R2 Active Directory.
SkyByte designed an Active Directory Upgrade plan to solve their network growth problems. The company had 100+ desktops authenticating logins, running login scripts, and serving DNS, WINS, and multiple DHCP scopes. SkyByte used VMware virtualization technologies to spin up multiple servers on new Dell physical server equipment. We first upgraded the domain to 2003 levels and after successful replications we upgraded the new 2003 domain to 2008 R2 levels. Ultimately the upgrade was a complete success and was done during business hours with NO company downtime. SkyByte also architected new levels of redundancy into the clients network by putting the main 2008 R2 DC on a physical server and two others on the VMware cluster. This choice assures that the domain would not be lost in the event of a VMware cluster or SAN failure. The customer now has multiple 2008 R2 domain controller servers for DNS, DHCP, login authentication. These upgrades have paved to way to other network enhancements coming soon. Namely SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010.
SkyByte has over 16 years of experience in advanced IT system design and architecture. We have implemented many complex active directory upgrades over the years. We apply a strong emphasis on network security for all our projects. SkyByte has performed business continuity risk assessments and DR planning for many businesses around the US.
After receiving my new HTC EVO from Sprint I was eager to get my corporate emails flowing in. I went to perform the mail setup and entered all of the info for our Exchange server then selected the data I wanted to sync. I selected finish and was then presented with an error stating - "Error Failed to create the account. Please try again later."
I was 100% sure that my exchange server was working properly because we had just completed an Microsoft Exchange server uprade and I had been testing Blackberry Enterprise Server Support and iPhone users and they were working properly. After looking around on the Internet I found that I wasn't the only person with this issue. I found that there are 2 very common issues and mine was the Active Directory fix. I did list both fixes below just incase others need one or the other.
SSL Certificate Fix:
A little further digging and I discovered that this was down to a security setting people use on their Exchange server which forces mobile ActiveSync users to specify a PIN number on their phone to add an additional layer of security on the phone. It seems the Android built in Exchange support can't deal with sending back your encrypted password. So, if you use SSL with your web-facing Exchange server, you won't be able to connect without either turning off the mobile users password policy requirement, or I assume, using a certified web certificate. Neither turning off SSL or turning off the password policy is a particularly good idea, and would violate most network security policies. The best option would be to ask your IT admins to arrange for a web certificate. In the interests of covering all the options for this guide though, I'll detail the method of excluding specific users from the password policy.
- Open Exchange System Manager
- Expand Global Settings and then right click on Mobile Services and choose Properties
- Click the Device Security button
- The "Enforce password on device" tick box is the culprit here, but it's better to turn it off for one specific user rather than the whole domain, so push the Exceptions button
- Push Add and select the user you want added to the exception list
- Push OK three times to get back to Exchange System Manager and you're done
AD Security Permission Fix
I looked at the Windows Event logs and saw a bunch of errors – the one in particular that cracked this case for me was the event id 1053 for MSExchange Activesync. It basically said that the account didnt have permission. But how? My account is a Domain Admin! That was the problem! The Domain admins group is an AD Protected Group and it will never work. Here is what you do to fix that issue.
- Log onto Domain Controller
- Start AD Users and Computers
- Click on View – Advanced Features
- Double-click on the user who’s account wont work with ActiveSync
- Go to the security tab and then select the advanced button
- Select Exchange Servers, and tick the Include inheritable permissions toggle then Apply and OK.
- Reconfigure your phone and walk away reading you emails
Recently we had performed an Active Directory Upgrade on our domain, so I made sure that this was done for my user account as well as what was done above in the SSL Certificate fix. Make sure that either of these 2 fixes won't violate you network security policy.
Recently Ive been working on some Exchange 2007 to 2010 upgrades and I would like to share some of my experiences. It is no easy task to upgrade a companies email system. Planning is key to making a successful migration. Here are some key things to help plan your Microsoft Exchange Upgrade to 2010 or 2010 SP1.
- Assess your network infrastructure and decide if you need to acquire a new server or just require some server upgrades. Remember Exchange 2010 only runs on 64-bit versions of Server 2008 and R2. This also means you will need a 64-bit processor in your server.
- Do you currently use virtualization in your network infrastructure? If so you can virtualize your exchange server or servers using Microsoft Hyper V Server 2008, Vmware Vsphere Installation, and other server virtualization systems.
- Download and read the Planning for Exchange 2010 and also the Deploying Exchange 2010 information on Microsoft's Technet site.
- Does your current network infrastructure design support an edge configuration, or will you be just installing a single server setup?
- If you are upgrading you can only upgrade from Exchange 2007 R2. This may require you to upgrade your exchange 2007 server to R2. If your running Exchange 2003 you will have to perform a migration.
- If your running an older network infrastructure like Server 2000 and earlier, it will require an Active Directory upgrade.
- Do your current email security solutions support Exchange 2010?
- When you finalize your plan also perform a business continuity risk assessment focusing on electronic communications for your business, and update your information Technology disaster recovery plan to include the new Exchange 2010 mail server or cluster. These are very important parts of the process that many neglect to do.
Hopefully these tips and suggestions will make your transition to Exchange 2010 a little easier. SkyByte Consulting has significant experience with Microsoft Exchange upgrades and Exchange migrations. We can also assist with Blackberry Enterprise Server migrations and upgrades or secure connectivity with Droid or iPhones.
SkyByte is a security based service and solution provider dedicated to the delivery of secure data communications, risk management, data integrity and corporate privacy. SkyByte offers a wide array of IT consulting services such as the design and maintenance of firewalls, VPNs, LANs, WANs, VMware server virtualization, messaging systems and secure wireless networks.
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