Server Upgrades

In working with Outlook 2010, I had a client who had Exchange mailboxes that he needed to get rid of because they no longer needed. The user tried removing the mailbox from Outlook by simply launching the "Mail" (Outlook profiles) from control panel. When the user would re-open Outlook the account was still there. After some looking around it was found that the user had been given the "Manage Full  Access Permission" in Exchange 2010 to this specific mailbox. This was causing Outlook for some reason to hold on to the mailbox in the left pane.

In order to get rid of the mailbox the "Manage Full  Access Permission" had to be removed from the specified users on this function of the mailbox in the Exchange management console.  You can also use the Exchange Power Shell to perform this by using this command - Remove-MailboxPermission -Identity Mailbox -User -useraccessing Fullaccess

After removing the user from the full access permissions, Outlook was closed and opened back up and the users were then removed. It is unclear if this is issue is caused by a Microsoft Exchange upgrade or if this is just one of those little issues that slipped through the cracks on patching either system. SkyByte Consulting supports clients large and small with issues like this and many others. 

Last week I ran into a bizarre email sending problem which ultimately was caused by Microsoft Outlook 2010.  All of a sudden a user could no longer send email from their Outlook, but could receive.  The user would immediately receive this undeliverable bounce-back after sending any emails:
 

 
"Delivery has failed to these recipients or groups:
user@domain.com

You can't send a message on behalf of this user unless you have permission to do so. Please make sure you're sending on behalf of the correct sender, or request the necessary permission. If the problem continues, please contact your helpdesk."

This error is typically seen when a user attempts to send an email on behalf of another user without the proper permissions.  This was not the case, the user was trying to just send email as himself.  The first obvious check was if his Exchange permissions were set correctly.  The user was running a fairly new box, running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit with Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Business edition.  Their Outlook was connected to an on-premise Exchange 2010 server, and no other users on the network were experiencing this problem.  While we had performed a Microsoft Exchange Upgrade recently, he had been running normally for several months.  The next step I took was see if he could send from OWA, and he could.  Additionally, he could send from his Android phone connected to his Exchange account.

To confirm the problem was isolated to his machine as a possible network security or software issue, he logged in as himself on another similar machine, created an Outlook profile and was able to send email just fine.  So, the next step I took was recreating his Outlook profile.  Recreating the Outlook profile will resolve many Outlook abnormalities, unfortunately this time it did not help.  Then I backed up the user's profile, and recreated it.  To my disbelief, the problem remained.  My next step was to fully remove and reinstall Office, not a repair install.  This finally fixed the issue, and he was able to send email again.

1. In outlook 2010, click on your calendar.
   
2. From the Home tab, Select Calendar Groups.
   
3. In the drop-down list, click one of the following-
   
   
   1. To create a new group calendar, click Create New Group Calendar, and continue to step 4.
      
   2. 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.
      
   3. 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.
      
4. In the Create New Calendar Group dialog box, type the name for the grouping, and click OK.
   
5. 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.
   
6. 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.
   
7. 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-
   
   
   1. From Address Book
   2. From Room List
   3. From Internet
   4. Open Shared Calendar
      
8. To delete a calendar group, right-click the calendar group in the navigation pane and select Delete Group.

How many times have you not had sufficient space on your virtual server due to growing exchange data stores, SQL databases, or Data Protection Manager backups?  It can be a daunting task, in smaller networks, to have sufficient drive space on VM hosts. Using Microsoft Hyper V server 2008, I've setup test and dev machines and just hosted the VM files off on an external hard drive. 

In the past external hard drives running USB 1.1 and 2.0 were too slow to host a file such as a .VHD effectively. Within the last couple of years technologies like e-Sata and USB 3.0 have emerged as great choice's for an external interface. These newer external ports offer superior read and write throughput performance for hard drives. You can purchase expansion cards that give your server the ability to have these ports. In the case of e-Sata, you can also employ Raid setups using external drive housings that support raid 0,1,5,10 and others.

I've found that, depending on your virtualization hosts configuration, you can setup or relocate .VHD files onto an external drive. Also you could add an external drive to house all of your machine backups and images on drives up to 3TB in size. With the performance of both USB 3.0 and e-Sata you can create, deploy, and restore in a fairly quick amount of time. Non-essential or lightly used VM's could be hosted on a single external drive with higher use possible using an e-Sata Raid setup. This solution would be very easy to implement with many server virtualization systems and very inexpensive compared to upgrading the drives in a server.

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.

While attempting to configure Outlook Anywhere using RPC over HTTPs in Outlook, I ran across and issue where the Exchange server's hostname would not resolve outside of the office during setup.  When I attempted to configure Outlook Anywhere on the internal office network, it was successful.  Once Outlook Anywhere was configured properly internally, Outlook would connect outside the office.  However, important Outlook features such Calendar and Tasks were either limited or unavailable. 

This client of ours received a Microsoft Exchange Upgrade to Exchange 2007 running Server 2008 R2.  At first I thought it was either a configuration problem on the Exchange server, or a network security problem on their Cisco ASA firewall.  Using this extremely helpful Outlook and Exchange connectivity tool found here: www.testexchangeconnectivity.com, I was able to track down and resolve the issue preventing me from configuring Outlook Anywhere outside the office.

The test results showed the Exchange server could not be reached on port 6004.  After some research on the Microsoft TechNet Exchange library, I discovered the problem was related to connection requests defaulting to using IPv6 in Microsoft Server 2008.  The simple solution is to comment out IPv6 and add the IPv4 address and local hostname in the Exchange server's host file:

127.0.0.1 localhost
#::1 localhost
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx mailserver
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx mailserver.domain.local

Once this was saved to the host file, Outlook was able to resolve the hostname outside the office and all functionality of Outlook was restored!

I ran across an issue on a client's SQL Server 2005 Express instance. The problem was that at 4:01am every morning the SQL server would just shutdown with the event messages of

1. Service Broker manager has shut down.
2. SQL Server is terminating in response to a 'stop' request from Service Control Manager. This is an informational message only. No user action is required.
3. SQL Trace was stopped due to server shutdown. Trace ID = '1'. This is an informational message only; no user action is required.

After a week of trying to narrow down the issue I found that it was Windows Update automatically trying to install the SP4 update for MSSQL 2005 Express and failing. This failure would cause the SQL server to shutdown for the update, but not come back up. This shutdown was affecting programs like Blackberry Enterprise Server and also BackupExec which would then crash and need to have their services restarted after bringing the SQL instances back online. The fix for this issue was merely to disable the update and also for preventing future issues I disabled the automatic installation of updates.

This issue could relate to Microsoft SQL Server Upgrades and Blackberry Enterprise Server Support.

Updating Exchange Server can be a daunting task, but I have run into what seems to be a very common problem and would like to share my findings.

If your having problems with OWA after installing Microsoft Exchange Servers latest Update Rollup 2, I might have the answer for you.

Error -
Outlook Web App didn't initialize. If the problem continues, please contact your helpdesk.

Couldn't find a base theme (folder name=base).

Cause -
The update failed to update the OWA virtual directory or the command wasn't run as an admin in the Exchange Management Console.

Solution 1 -
1. Start an exchange powershell shell and run

2. execute this "C:Program FilesMicrosoftExchange ServerV14BinUpdateCas.ps1"

3. Open elevated command prompt and run "iisreset /noforce"

If this doesn't work try the next solution.

Solution 2 -
1. Goto Programs and Features and uninstall the Rollup 2

2. Start an Administrative Exchange Management Shell

3. Type the location of the update Roll Up 1 "Exchange2010-KB976573-x64-en.msp" or Roll Up 2 "Exchange2010-KB2425179-x64-en.msp"  (I.E. c:usersuserdownloadsExchange2010-KB976573-x64-en.msp)

4. Close the Exchange Management Shell and finish the patch.

5. Open elevated command prompt and run "iisreset /noforce"

Note: If you do not run the Exchange Management Shell as an Administrative prompt, you will get an error regarding a failed install.

Hopefully this fixes any potential issues you may run into after these updates. Skybyte Consulting can assist you with all of your various Exchange 2003, 2007 and 2010 needs.

This post may also relate to  Microsoft Server Virtualization with Exchange server and Microsoft Server Support.

Most Microsoft Office users are aware of the new file formats since the release of Microsoft Office 2007.  Each file extension now ends in "x", i.e. .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.  Microsoft thankfully released a converter tool to support the compatibility between older and newer Office platforms.  While this is a great tool, it is still recommended to convert all of your Office documents to the newest version to minimize any problems throughout your organization.

After a successful upgrade to Office 2010 from 2003, we recommended our client convert their files to the newest version since they rely heavily on Excel for their operations.  I downloaded the Microsoft Office Migration Planning Manager 2010, found here, which is a set of tools to help administrators during the transitioning phase.  Included with this bundle is the Office File Converter (ofc.exe), a very lightweight, but very useful command line driven batch converter tool.  Note this tool also requires the Office Compatibility Pack to be installed on your machine, even if you have Office 2007 or 2010 installed.  That can be found here.

Once I installed the compatibility pack, I extracted the contents from the Office Migration Planning Manager.  I browsed to the tools folder which contain the ofc.exe and ofc.ini files.  The .ini file is the control file that allows administrators to configure how the conversion will be performed.  You can configure many options such as converting files from one server but outputting the converted files to a new server.  This will save you timee if you are performing server upgrades. The tool automatically converts any previous Office file to the new version, quickly and efficiently.  

Since all I needed to do was one directory of about 900 Excel files, I simply copied the files to my local disk and ran the conversion. 

As an example, I edited the ofc.ini file to look like this:

[Run]
LogDestinationPath=C:2003 Office FilesLogs
TimeOut = 3
 
[ConversionOptions]
; FullUpgradeOnOpen: if set to 1, Word documents will be fully converted to the OpenXML format
;                    if set to 0 (default), Word documents will be saved in the OpenXML format in compatibility mode
FullUpgradeOnOpen=1
 
CABLogs=0
 
MacroControl=0
 
[FoldersToConvert]
fldr=C:2003 Office Files
 
[ConversionInfo]
SourcePathTemplate=***
DestinationPathTemplate=C:2003 Office FilesConverted


Once your .ini file is setup, you simply execute the ofc.exe file from a command prompt and the conversion will start.  If there is a syntax error in the .ini file you will know right away.  With my .ini file, the files to be converted lived in C:2003 Office Files and were to be outputted to C:2003 Office FilesConverted.  The entire process took approximately 5 minutes to convert 900 Excel files that were about 800KB each.

In conclusion, this is a great tool provided by Microsoft.  I highly recommend using it for batch converting Office files to the newest Office format.  SkyByte Consulting can provide you and your company with the support and knowledge that these major but very beneficial Microsoft upgrades require.  Call of email us today!

Are you users having problems with their options button in Outlook Web Access? I noticed that after performing a Microsoft Exchange Upgrade to 2010 SP1 RTM from 2007 R2, that when their users would hit the options button the page would simply just refresh. I dug around on the Internet and found the answer's. There are two possible fixes for this, and the second one worked for the problem I was having.

• Mirror the ECP and OWA virtual sites, authentication settings in IIS.
  
• Check the ECP Site and make sure its not redirecting to the OWA site.