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Save The Date – End of Exchange 2010, Windows 7 and 2008 Mainstream Support – T Minus 6 Months

Posted on 24th July 2014 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

In a little under 6 months, multiple products will experience a support life cycle change. As indicated by the space shuttle being readied, the countdown has started and the dates are set. Make sure you are aware of what is happening on the 13th of January 2015.

2014 has already been a busy year for product transitions, with Exchange 2003, Office 2003 and Windows XP Pro all exiting out of extended… Read the rest “Save The Date – End of Exchange 2010, Windows 7 and 2008 Mainstream Support – T Minus 6 Months”

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VMware Issues With Exchange DAG

Posted on 21st July 2014 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

When resolving issues with on-premises Exchange sometimes the issue may be directly within Exchange, other times the root cause may lie outside Exchange. Depending upon the exact nature of the case we may have to investigate network switches, load balancers or storage. When Exchange is virtualized then the hypervisor and it’s configuration also may require attention.

This was the case with a rece… Read the rest “VMware Issues With Exchange DAG”

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Retrieving Packets Received Discarded Perfmon Counter From Multiple Servers

Posted on 18th July 2014 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

Whilst working on a customer’s Exchange 2010 DAG issue, I wrote a quick script to quickly grab some performance monitor counters from all of their Exchange servers. The issue that we were investigating was related to discarded packets when the VM was running on a certain hypervisor host. The customer had moved their Exchange VMs to a new host and after doing so they were experiencing cluster iss… Read the rest “Retrieving Packets Received Discarded Perfmon Counter From Multiple Servers”

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PFE Canada Is Hiring For Exchange And Office 365!

Posted on 17th July 2014 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

Want to grow and expand your technical, customer and soft skills? Do you dream of working with the product groups at Microsoft to influence future product updates? Want to have fun while delivering true mission critical support to top tier Microsoft customers? Then you are in luck!

Microsoft Canada GBS is looking for Exchange and Office 365 experts. Micros… Read the rest “PFE Canada Is Hiring For Exchange And Office 365!”

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AD FS 2012 R2 – An Error Occurs When BadPwdCount Not Set

Posted on 16th July 2014 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

AD FS 2012 R2 provides an interesting feature called Extranet Lockout Protection, where the intent is to protect AD accounts from malicious lockout from external access attempts. Previous versions of AD FS had no native mechanism to protect AD from such hammering attempts. For details on the feature please review this post.

One issue that can occur when extranet lockout pro… Read the rest “AD FS 2012 R2 – An Error Occurs When BadPwdCount Not Set”

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Outlook 2013 Distorted Display Issues

Posted on 8th July 2014 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

After a recent video driver update, my corporate Outlook client started to do some strange things. Within Office 2013, the screen output would be distorted. Menu bars were not painted properly until I mouse-over them again, or moved Office programs around. Other times the display would look corrupted and the navigation tree would not be properly rendered.

Update 16-7-2014: Adding link to Office 2… Read the rest “Outlook 2013 Distorted Display Issues”

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Exchange and AntiVirus Exclusions – Still A Critical Conversation

Posted on 30th June 2014 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

In a previous post we saw the Microsoft requirements for the exclusions that must be added to file system AV on Exchange servers. In a recent CritSit, basically an uber urgent support request where the customer is down or as good as down, I also got to examine some of the other causes for file system AV not being correctly configured for Exchange.

In the aforementioned post the majority of the… Read the rest “Exchange and AntiVirus Exclusions – Still A Critical Conversation”

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PowerShell Pipeline Perversion

Posted on 27th June 2014 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

Every so often I see folks run into issues with scripts/one-liners that they obtained from a blog or crafted themselves. One common issue is when they think the command is perfect and then when they go to dump the output to a file, the content is mince. **

Imagine your surprise when you open up the output file expecting pristine data, and it starts with:

#TYPE Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Interna

… Read the rest

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Exchange Scripting Agent – The Power Of Script

Posted on 24th June 2014 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

Exchange 2010 introduced a very interesting feature – the Scripting Agent. The intent for this component is to provide extensibility to the base management tools and ensure consistency for the execution of cmdlets in the environment. The feature is not enabled by default and you must manually enable it if you want to leverage the Scripting Agent.

If you are looking for a way to set default optio… Read the rest “Exchange Scripting Agent – The Power Of Script”

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How To Request Certificate Without Using IIS or Exchange

Posted on 17th June 2014 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

The blog post on how to integrate Office 365 with Windows 2012 R2 AD FS raised an interesting question from a reader (Hi Eric!) on how should he request a certificate for the AD FS instance since there is no longer an IIS dependency. This means that there is no longer an IIS console to generate a certificate request with. What to do?

You could generate a certificate request, complete it and then e… Read the rest “How To Request Certificate Without Using IIS or Exchange”