250 Hello - Exchange 2013

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Exchange 2013 Support Lifecycle Dates And Status

Posted on 9th December 2013 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

When Exchange 2013 was released it heralded a different servicing strategy compared to Exchange 2007 and 2010 Rollup Updates (RU). Exchange 2013 uses Cumulative Updates (CU) to deliver the servicing updates to customers. As previously discussed, a CU is a different animal when it comes to the update methodology. CUs are larger, cannot be uninstalled and are a full product installation. This was… Read the rest “Exchange 2013 Support Lifecycle Dates And Status”

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6 Mistakes To Avoid With Exchange 2013 CU Command Line Installations

Posted on 5th December 2013 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

The syntax to install Exchange Cumulative Updates (CU) via the command line is pretty straight forward. However there are some common themes that still pop up in the TechNet forums, cases and customers that I speak with. So I wanted to discuss some of the issues that can and will arise. There are a range of issues in here from:

Setup can't continue with the upgrade because the PowerShell has open

… Read the rest

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DAC And Should I Enable DAC For DAG In A Single AD Site

Posted on 4th December 2013 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

Exchange 2010 introduced the concept of Datacentre Activation Coordination (DAC). DAC is a property found on a Database Availability Group (DAG). It still remains slightly mysterious to some folks out in the field, so its certainly worth bringing it back up for discussion.

Tim McMichael’s famous paper plate demo with lots of willing participants was one of my MCM 2010 highlights!

Typically we see t… Read the rest “DAC And Should I Enable DAC For DAG In A Single AD Site”

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Exchange 2013 RTM CU3 Released

Posted on 25th November 2013 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

Exchange 2013 RTM CU3 has now been released to the download centre.

CU3 includes fixes for customer reported issues, minor product enhancements and previously released security bulletins. A complete list of customer reported issues resolved in Exchange Server 2013 CU3 can be found in Knowledge Base Article KB2892464.

Note that the filename now reflects the actual CU!

There is also an accompanying KB … Read the rest “Exchange 2013 RTM CU3 Released”

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How To Check Exchange Rollup Version

Posted on 29th October 2013 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

Back with the first few releases of Exchange, product updates were made available via service packs. This continued into the Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 days. It seems like an eternity ago, and dinosaurs were still roaming the Earth, when Exchange 2003 SP2 was released in October of 2005 as a whopping 109 MB download.

Exchange 2007 moved to a different servicing strategy which added a predicti… Read the rest “How To Check Exchange Rollup Version”

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Quick Tip – Sending Multiple Test Emails Using PowerShell (AKA Mailstorm)

Posted on 30th September 2013 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

Mailstorm.exe was a utility to send multiple test emails to validate and test Exchange in the 5.5 timeframe, and was used on some of the Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) courses.

The utility is no longer used since relied upon a local Outlook install, and my fuzzy brain recalls issues with moving to "current" versions of Outlook such as Office XP.

This is no great loss as it is easy to send test … Read the rest “Quick Tip – Sending Multiple Test Emails Using PowerShell (AKA Mailstorm)”

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Exchange Support For Windows Server 2012 R2

Posted on 17th September 2013 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

Previously Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 were released to the TechNet subscriber download centre. Prior to Windows Server 2012 R2 being tested and validated by the Exchange Product Group, we had asked to pause deployments of 2012 R2 DCs into environments where Exchange was installed.

Exchange 2013 Service Pack 1, Exchange 2010 SP3 RU5 and Exchange 2007 SP3 RU13 were all released today, the 25… Read the rest “Exchange Support For Windows Server 2012 R2”

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Offline Defrag And DAG Databases, Oh My!

Posted on 23rd August 2013 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

Even though some of the very old KBs, which now refer to unsupported products, state that taking databases offline to run periodic offline defragmentation with ESEUTIL is not recommended some folks in the field still want to do this.

Previously when there was only a single copy of a database, running offline defragmentation would cause minimal impact, apart from the time required to do the defragm… Read the rest “Offline Defrag And DAG Databases, Oh My!”

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Exchange 2013 Security Update Available For MS13-061

Posted on 13th August 2013 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

Update 14-8-2013: The security update for Exchange 2013 has been temporarily removed due to an issue with the search infrastructure.

If you have installed it please refer to article “Update 2874216 breaks the content index in Exchange Server 2013”

Update 14-8-2013: Please see an update on the Exchange team blog.

Update 27-8-2013: Updated release of the security update for Exchange 2013 CU1 and CU… Read the rest “Exchange 2013 Security Update Available For MS13-061”

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Allow Users To Manage Distribution Groups Without Creating New Ones

Posted on 9th August 2013 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

In a previous post we discussed a scenario where users were delegated the capability to create Mail Enabled Contacts in Active Directory using a custom RBAC role. As part of the solution, we enabled the MyDistributionGroups Role. While this may meet the needs of most organisations it does introduce one issue where users who are assigned such a Role Assignment Policy can edit Distribution Groups the… Read the rest “Allow Users To Manage Distribution Groups Without Creating New Ones”