Posts Tagged ‘Exchange 2007’
Synchronization with your WP failed – could also be iPad, or Windows Mail
Wednesday, January 30th, 2013
I saw this message over the course of this week coming into my mailbox. No one else in the company was affected just me. I saw it on an Exchange 2007 server that was running on SBS 2008.
It also came back in a number of other formats including
Synchronization with your WP failed for 3 items
Synchronization with your iPad failed for 3 items
Synchronization with your WindowsMail failed for 3 items
The body of the message went on to show
as well as the appointments it had failed to synchronise.
I could not figure out what it was at first and then realised that the appointments in question all had a new status of “Working Elsewhere” which is new to Office 2013. All this started when I upgraded to Office 2013 and then started to use these new status to describe that I was working on a customer site vs just out of the office.
I figured that these devices or ActiveSync does not know how to handle the new status and therefore it gives the error. Once I reverted my appointments back to Out of office, it worked just fine.
Tags: Exchange 2007, Office 2013, SBS 2008
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
Useful Powershell commands for Exchange
Monday, May 7th, 2012
Here’s a few useful commands I regularly use in Powershell for Exchange management.
How can I list all users mailboxes on a given server?
Get-Mailbox –servername SERVER1
How can I list a users mailbox size?
Get-MailboxStatistics –identity “Wayne Small – SBSfaq.com” | select TotalItemSize
How can I list all users mailbox size on a given server?
This is a little more tricky – here’s a site that I grabbed a script from which did it very nicely.
Tags: Exchange 2007, Exchange 2010, Exchange Server, Powershell, Powershell Tips
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How can I tell what Exchange Version I have?
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
I stumbled across this gem last week and thought I’d share it with you. Using the tables listed here you can figure out what version of Exchange Server you are running.
You can use the Get-ExchangeServer powershell command to find the Exchange 2010 and 2007 versions, but you will need to use the GUI in Exchange 2003.
Tags: Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, Exchange 2010, Exchange Server, SBS 2003, SBS 2003 R2, SBS 2008, SBS 2011, SBS 2011 Standard
Posted in FAQs | No Comments »
Microsoft pushes Office 365 to everyone
Wednesday, July 13th, 2011
I was writing this blog post over the weekend and downloading Update Rollup 4 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3 and could not help but notice, that Microsoft is now pushing Office 365 to you even when you go to patch your Exchange server. They really are desperate to get you to move to the cloud even if it’s not the right thing for your business. See the screenshot below for the advert for Office 365.
Tags: Exchange 2007, Office 365, Patches, Service Packs, Update Rollup
Posted in Blog | 3 Comments »
How to install Exchange 2007 SP3 Rollup 4 on SBS 2008
Monday, July 11th, 2011
Microsoft last week released the latest Update Rollup for Exchange 2007 SP3. This is Rollup 4 for Exchange 2007 Service Pack 3 (SP3) and contains a host of fixes that have been released since SP3 for Exchange 2007 was released. Microsoft made the announcement here. The complete list of fixes for the patch is available here. Microsoft also advised that they will be releasing Update Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3 in August 2011 which is good guidance for when you need to apply this next.
Ok – so how do we apply Rollup 4 for Exchange 2007 SP3 on SBS 2008? Well first up – I’ve applied this to my test server first – and from what I can see there’s been no side effects. The next test for me is to apply it to my production environment, and then later in the week I’ll apply it to customer environment.
To install Rollup 4 for Exchange 2007 SP3, you must of course have Service Pack 3 for Exchange 2007 installed first. If you don’t then check out this blog post I did a while back on this subject.
Next you need to download Update Rollup 4 from Microsoft – the direct download link is here – of course you will want the x64 version. Download it and save it to the desktop.
Once on the desktop – make sure that your users are disconnected from the server – I normally do my patches on a Sunday night if I can – that way I’m ready to assist on Monday morning should there be any issues.
Make sure you have done a backup of the server before you apply the patch and also I normally disable any Antivirus Software as well so that it can’t get in the way.
Right click on the download and select Apply.
You will get the GUI that does some pre-requisite checking first – nothing to do here except wait for it to do it’s thing.
Opps – forgot I needed to run this from an administrative command prompt. Select OK to clear this box
Start a Command Prompt with Administrative Privileges and then run the Update Rollup from that prompt.
Ok –so it’s running better this time…
Select Next to continue.
Yes – you really mist accept the license terms and then select Next to continue.
Now the fun part… in the past, Exchange waits until after it’s gotten everything done then it stops the services and compiles the .NET assemblies – this means that users are off the air for longer than they need to be. Starting with this Rollup, the Exchange Team now have the update do the compilation of the .NET assemblies BEFORE it goes to stop the services etc. This should result in less downtime for the users…. I say it SHOULD result in less downtime 
Nothing to do at this point but wait… and wait… oh and wait.
Ok – that took about 8 minutes on my production Hyper-V server – but it’s done with that. Select Next to continue.
Now it’s busy stopping services – at this point your users may notice emails queuing in their outbox and the Outlook client will go into it’s disconnected state – that is to be expected.
Ok – we’re copying files now… good progress.
Now it’s doing more compiling – the thing I like about this screen is that it SHOWS what it’s doing – note the name of the DLL it’s working on – I’m sure that will make life easier should it stall during the installation. Well done Exchange Team.
Almost done now – and I guess it’s a good sign!
Woohoo – all done. All up it took around 40 minutes on my virtualised SBS 2008 server to apply this.
Now of course for the obligatory restart of the server
Once it’s back up – of course you are going to test it out to ensure that everything is working fine (which it was on my server).
Tags: Exchange 2007, Exchange Server, SBS 2008, Service Packs
Posted in FAQs | 2 Comments »
How can I display my users and their mailbox sizes on SBS 2008?
Thursday, February 24th, 2011
In SBS 2003 or Exchange 2003 you could do this easily via the Exchange management console. However on SBS 2008 or Exchange 2007, you can’t see that same information there.
To be able to display your users mailbox sizes you need to use some powershell scripts to do that.
- Logon to the SBS 2008 server as your administrator account.
- Open the Exchange Management Shell from the Exchange 2007 program group
- Run the following command get-mailboxstatistics | sort-object totalitemsize -descending |ft displayname,totalitemsize,itemcount
- It will display your users, their mailbox size and the number of items in their mailbox as per the sample below.
DisplayName TotalItemSize ItemCount
———– ————- ———
Wayne Small 6405451283B 146801
Wayne Archive 2701259499B 344795
sbsadmin 343827053B 621
MSPSS 321101808B 576
Wayne Small – Smallfamily 192929645B 4317
Accounts 87181801B 845
Administrator 8326865B 1206
SystemMailbox{1B8F90DE-… 369231B 402
Microsoft System Attendant 0B 0
Tags: Exchange 2007, SBS 2008
Posted in FAQs | 1 Comment »
Exchange 2007 SP3 Update Rollup 2 available for Exchange 2007 and SBS 2008
Monday, December 20th, 2010
Microsoft this week has released more update rollups for Exchange 2007 – if you are up to date with your patching on your SBS 2008 servers then the one that interests you most is Exchange 2007 Service Pack 3 Update Rollup 2. Wow – what a mouthful. You can find out more about what’s in this patch here, but the key thing is that it fixes the broken files links for SharePoint in OWA that were broken with the Service Pack 3 for Exchange 2007.
You can download the patch directly from Microsoft here or it should appear in your SBS 2008 security console as highlighted below where you can approve the update for deployment to your SBS 2008 server
I approved the patch and it downloaded to my SBS 2008 server. Windows Update prompted me to install the patch later that day.
Installation took around 15 minutes on my SBS 2008 server and it ran through without any errors. Now whilst the patch did not ask for a reboot, I have this “thing” where whenever I make major changes to the system like this, I prefer to reboot it and then test things out. That way I know for sure that the patch has applied successfully and not broken anything major.
Now that I’ve applied this patch to my own servers today and so far no issues – I’ll monitor it over the next few days before applying it to client sites.
Tags: Exchange 2007, Patches, SBS 2008, Update Rollups
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Exchange 2007 SP3 Deployment issues
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
This issue will only affect you if you have multiple Exchange 2007 servers in your network. Microsoft have the release notes for Exchange 2007 SP3 here. In that they highlight that you should upgrade any Internet facing Client Access server first – which I did for one of my clients. I then upgraded the other server in their main office to SP3… each of the clients server has the CA, MBX and HUB roles on it. What we found was that OWA now fails for any users with mailboxes on the remote Exchange 2007 servers because they are not at SP3 level. You get the following error message.
"OWA is not currently available for the user mailbox that you are trying to access. If the problem continues, contact technical support for your organisation and tell them the following: The Microsoft Exchange Client Access server that is proxying the OWA requests is running an older version of Microsoft Exchange than the Client Access Server in the mailbox Active Directory site."
Mircosofts’ guidance on the issue is that you should upgrade your CA servers first, HUB servers second and then your Edge and lastly your Mailbox servers. They provide NO guidance on if you have multiple roles on each server… I can tell you from experience – you need to upgrade ALL of them right away or else you will have things like OWA not working at all… bummer. I’ve now killed OWA for 450 users without warning… you can bet the clients IT manager is not happy with me even though I read all the proper documentation… it will be a late night tonight for sure and I just hope it will go well.
Microsoft fail once more to realise that this is a massive task for clients and they fail to provide clear guidance on the issue of multi server roles/deployments.
Tags: Exchange 2007, Service Packs
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How to install Exchange 2007 SP3 on SBS 2008
Monday, August 2nd, 2010
I posted a while back about Exchange 2007 SP3 being released. This weekend I finally got the time to do the upgrade myself. It went through seamlessly. Here’s the procedure I used.
Make sure you have a backup of your server and that you have tested that it can restore.
Download the Exchange 2007 SP3 from Microsoft – here – you will want the 64bit version.
Stop all Antivirus Services – if you are using Trend – here’s the list that I stopped. If when you try to stop the services you find that the stop option is greyed out – check out this FAQ.
Extract the Exchange 2007 SP3 to a folder location on your server.
Locate the setup.exe and Run As Administrator. Select Install Microsoft Exchange Service Pack 3 from the Install section of the screen.
Setup will go through some prequalification checks to ensure that you have all the right things ready for the service pack installation. If there is a problem it will show you as per the screen below.
Ok – so my readiness check failed – showing that the DataCollectorSvc was using some of the files that Exchange 2007 SP3 will need to replace. A little digging with Task Manager shows that this is the Windows SBS 2008 Monitoring Data Collector Service
There is no such service per se in the Services MMC – it is in fact called the Windows SBS Manager Service.
I stopped the Windows SBS Manager service and clicked on the Retry for the Readiness checks and it’s all good to go once more. Select the Upgrade button and we’re on our way. Sit back, make yourself a cuppa coffee or tea or go have lunch. This will take a while.
Ok – after 35 minutes now, my upgrade is complete with no errors
Now to restart the services we stopped earlier – don’t forget now 
Once the services have restarted, do some testing. I tested the following;
- Email in and out
- OWA access from a remote site
- ActiveSync from my HTC Windows Mobile phone
All looks ok – so the last thing to do is to do a server reboot. The Exchange services pack didn’t ask for a reboot, but I make it a best practice that after anything major like this, to do a reboot. This way if there are any issues relating to the service pack I will know about them sooner than later.
Update December 20, 2010: You will want to check out this blog post also for information on Update Rollup 2 for Exchange 2007 SP3
Tags: Exchange 2007, SBS 2008, Service Packs
Posted in FAQs | 18 Comments »
Exchange 2007 SP3 on SBS 2008
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
Word is out that today Exchange 2007 SP3 was released. It’s “compatible” with SBS 2008, however you really need to read this KB before you install it so that you can ensure you don’t have problems. Basically if you have ForeFront Security for Exchange installed, you need to disable it for the duration of the service pack – the KB includes instructions on how to do this. Also if you HAVE NOT RUN the Internet wizards on SBS 2008 then after the service pack, you WILL HAVE PROBLEMS. Below (from the KB) are the instructions on how to fix it.
Here are the known issues from the KB article above
Known issues that may occur after you install Exchange Server 2007 SP3
After you install Exchange Server 2007 SP3, you may be unable to access the following Web sites:
- https://sites/owa
- https://sites/remote
Note This issue occurs only if the Internet Address Management wizard has not already been run on the computer.
To resolve this issue, edit the bindings for the SBS Web Applications site to select the correct certificate. To do this, follow these steps:
- Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
- Expand server_name.
Note The server_name placeholder represents the name of the server.- Expand Web Sites.
- Right-click SBS Web Applications, and then click Edit Bindings.
- Click HTTPs port 443, and then click Edit.
- Under SSL certificate, select the Sites certificate.
For those of you that recall the issues with Exchange 2007 SP2 on SBS servers, you will recall that we had to wait for an additional SBS patch before installing Exchange 2007 SP2. I have it on good authority that this is included in Exchange 2007 SP3 and therefore we can reliably install SP3 on top of SBS 2008 provided we’ve already run the various SBS 2008 wizards as mentioned above.
Have I tried it yet – No. I’ll be leaving it till the weekend when I can plan some downtime, do my backups etc.
Tags: Exchange 2007, SBS 2008, Service Packs
Posted in Blog | 3 Comments »