Exchange Cookbook

Some Vista irritations

I've been using Vista daily for a while now, and on balance I like it quite a bit. However, there are some things that irritate the dickens out of me, mostly because I haven't figured out to escape them. I'm going to keep a running list in the hope that either people will suggest solutions, or that I'll attract enough other people who have the same problems to gain critical mass.

Connecting and disconecting VPNs. I like the way XP and Mac OS X both do it: you get an icon in the system bar, and you can directly click it to disconnect. With XP, to connect I can hit Ctrl+Esc, T (for "Connect to"), and be connected to my primary VPN. In Vista, there doesn't seem to be an equivalent, except for putting a shortcut on the desktop.
Bonus annoyance: after you close a connection, you get a dialog telling you it was closed, which you must dismiss.
The center scroll feature of the TrackPoint doesn't work. Update: this was because I didn't have the correct driver. Lenovo will be releasing full versions of all their Vista drivers at the end of January; the prerelease versions I have work quite well.
There's not yet a working version of Verizon Access Manager, so I can't use the spiffy integrated EvDO modem. Update: still no love on this. I've seen Keith Combs' instructions on how to get the KPC650 working, but that approach doesn't work for the internal modem because you can't activate it without VZ Access Manager, which doesn't see the card.
I'm having fits with one particular client's VPN implementation; I can usually connect, but I can't reach most of the internal sites I need. If I connect at the same time from my XP machine, the connection is rock-solid, so it's clearly a Vista oddity. Update: Turns out this is a Vista bug, slated for a QFE sometime in the future.

How to programatically mail-enable an Exchange public folder

KC http://blogs.technet.com/kclemson/archive/2006/08/21/448401.aspx on her blog: set two attributes via MAPI and you're done.

Using PowerShell over SSH

Matt Michie explains how to use PowerShell over SSH-- very cool, given that there won't be secure remoting in the version of PowerShell that should RTM later this year.

Script to find EDB and STM file sizes

Michael B. Smith posted a cool script on his blog today: it finds all the EDB and STM files on Exchange servers in your organization, then tells you how much disk space they actually take up. If you've ever wondered how much disk space your Exchange data is consuming, now you can find out.

Finding and removing empty DLs

From prolific Exchange MVP Glen Scales, this script will identify empty DLs or DGs and let you remove them.

Bulk-enabling or disabling Outlook Mobile Access users

From TechTarget's Exchange Tips web site, this script lets you enable or disable OMA for multiple users at once.

Goodbye, Monad; hello, PowerShell

Microsoft announced this week that they were renaming the Monad shell environment to "Microsoft PowerShell", which IMHO is kind of an odd name. Most people, I daresay, associated the "Power" prefix with Apple. At least it's not a super-duper-long name that tries to tie in to a bunch of other products. In line with this name change, the Monad team blog has a new home too: http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell, and MS released release candidiate 1 of the PowerShell environment. However, I haven't gotten around to updating the category names for this blog... too bad.

Monad event log monitoring

The Monad team blog has a useful Monad script for intelligent event log analysis. The simple way to do it is to say

get-eventlog Application | where {$_.EventID -eq -1018}

but this gets the same set of events every time you run it. The team's script uses a checkpoint file to keep track of the last search it did, and it has a few other nice features as well.

Find store GUIDs

From new Exchange MVP Bharat Suneja: a script to find the GUID for a mailbox database. You need this if you want to raise the size limit for a store in the Standard Edition of Exchange.

New Monad category

I've added a new "Monad" category; I'm sure you can guess why! As we get closer to the release of Exchange 12 beta 2, I'll be posting more Monad-oriented scripts here.

Book signing in Orlando

Paul, Missy, and I will all be speakers at this spring's Exchange Connections 2006 conference, held at the Walt Disney Swan Hotel in sunny Orlando this April 9-12. Not only will the three of us have 8 sessions of Exchange goodness to share with you, a bunch of other smart folks such as Kevin Laahs, Jim McBee, Kieran McCorry, Mark Minasi, Sue Mosher, Tony Redmond, Steve Riley, and Scott Schnoll will also be presenting Exchange, SharePoint, and Windows programming.

O'Reilly has arranged for Paul, Missy, and I to have a book signing at the conference bookstore. Come find us at 3:30pm on Monday, April 10th!

SP2 updates to the Cookbook

One of the projects I have on my mental plate to tackle during the holiday season is taking a look through the Cookbook and making note of any guidance that needs to be updated thanks to the release of Exchange 2003 SP2.

I already have two new recipes mentally running around my head: how to configure SenderID (which, coincidentally, is a talk I'll be giving in April at Exchange Connections Spring 2006), and how to raise the database storage limit from 16GB in Standard Edition. There is some good guidance out there on the net for these topics already, but it would be a nice exercise to squeeze them down into typical cookbook recipe format.

While I'm at it, are there any other things you think we should have included but didn't? While it's way too early to even be thinking about a second edition of the book for Exchange 12 (which is going to change a lot of the recipes pretty drastically, thanks to the power of Monad!), I still want to provide some nice value through this blog.

Mildly broken link on p8

Missy caught this one. On p8, there's a link to "http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=library/en-us/e2k3/e2k3_welcome_to_exchange.asp". The correct link is actually http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnanchor/html/exchangesvr.asp. Sorry about that.

The Secret Sauce

When I heard that Tom and Missy were planning to talk about the Cookbook at Exchange Connections, I was eager to go heckle them at their session Secret Sauce: Best Recipes from the Exchange Cookbook. Instead, they ended up dragging me up on the stage with them to help present the material. Tom, Missy, and I had fun, and we got a lot of good feedback from the audience. All the theater in high school paid off, it seems! Somehow, we never quite managed to get Paul, Tom, Missy, and myself all in the same room at the same time -- three out of four was the best we could do. Next time, darn it.

For those of you who were at the session and haven't downloaded the slides (or even if you just want to see what Tom and Missy cooked up), you can get the Powerpoint slide deck here. Please use this link rather than the one Missy handed out at the show, because this one goes off of 3Sharp's web server and won't cause Missy's site to have a ton of traffic.

Thanks!

Devin, Missy, Tom, and I just got back from Exchange Connections. Thanks for buying out the bookstore's entire stock of the book (we were one of only 2 titles to sell out), and thanks for all your feedback on the first edition of the cookbook! Although I couldn't be at the "Secret Sauce" session, Tom, Missy, and Devin did a great job as evidenced by the number of people who told me so at the show.