Outage! My Blog Will Be Offline This Weekend

Today evening I will be moving my blog to a self hosted one which eventually will break all the email notifications from my blog although RSS feeds will still continue to work.

I wanted to thank all my subscribers of my blog who read my content. If you wish to continue receiving notifications via email you may want to resubscribe to my blog email notification once again. I will post back when the migration is complete.

Thanks you for your support.

Milind

Exchange Server 2010 Checklist

Few months ago someone in our discussion group had a requierment of an automated way to make sure that exchange servers health state should be checked automatically and a report should be sent to support team.During the discussion, we recieved a lot of ideas and many sample codes to do so. The largest piece of code was written for Exchange 2007. I perosnally used this script at many customers to automate the daily / hourly checklist part of their operations team but since a lot of them have already upgraded to Exchange 2010 the old script become almost useless due to changes in architecture of components of Exchange Server 2010. With said that, quite a considerable number of modifications were needed in the origional code.

I recently posted the latest version of the script that was customized by me to meet some of exclusive requirements. You can download the script from Microsoft Technet Gallery – Exchange Server 2010 Checklist

Yet, I really wanted to thank the person who wrote this entire stuff. That was really so cool.

Features:

• Provides a detailed report of your Exchange Server 2010 Critical components in an HTML email.
• Provides color coded statuses so that faulty components can be identified easily.
• Emails can be sent to multiple people.
• Script can be scheduled to run using scheduled task.

PARAMETERS:
        -ServerName (required)
                Must be an Exchange 2010 server. This script should be run locally on the mentioned server.

        -Path (required)
                This is the folder identity where the generated report will be saved.

        -CompanyName (required)
                Name of your company E.g. “Contoso Inc.”

        -SMTPServer (required)
                Hub Transport Server name or IP address. Any SMTP relay that can accept the email will also work.

        -From (required)
                Sender’s email address.

        -To (required)
                List of recipient(s). You can pass a comma seperated values here. For more than one recipients use {user1@domain.com, user2@domain.com}

        -JournalMailbox (optional)
                The mailbox identity to get mailbox statistics.
For many mailboxes use user1@domain.com,user2@domain.com

Please do provide your feedback in case you liked / disliked it or you would like to see some new features added into it. Download and Enjoy

Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2 is available for Download

Microsoft has released SP2 for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 today. The service pack is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28190

With release of SP2 a long awaited feature of Address List Segregation will now be available instead of using Exchange in Hosting Mode. A lot of other fixes are included in this release.

Download your copy and Enjoy!

Changing From Display Name of Full Mailbox Notifications

I am sure almost everyone of us have seen this at least once in the lifetime

One of our old days techies had this requirement of changing the From display name that is used by agents sending notifications about your mailbox size when it reaches the quota. Although you cannot edit the sender email address in this case you can indeed change the Display Name of this notification sender.

CAUTION: Steps involved in this post include using ADSIEDIT, wrong modifications to attributes can cause service stoppage. You should also check Microsoft’s supportability for this change.

Changing this includes changing the display name of the object in your transport configuration.

1. Open ADSIEDIT
2.  Navigate to CN=Transport Settings,CN=<Org Name>,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=domain,DC=int
3. In the right hand side pane locate the object named CN=MicrosoftExchange329e71ec88ae4615bbc36ab6ce41109e
4. Right click on the object and select properties.
5. In properties dialog box of MicrosoftExchange329e71ec88ae4615bbc36ab6ce41109e locate the attribute displayName
6. Select displayName, click Edit button and enter the Display Name of your wish in the Edit Dialog box.

That is all you need to do. Users will see the name that you entered in the dialog box after you modify this and the AD replication completes.