What is DomainPrep? Why does Exchange recommend running DomainPrep on the Root Domain if there are no Exchange servers or users in that domain? I have been asked these questions so frequently I thought I’d do a post on it. I know DomainPrep is Read More

We recently added a new page to the Exchange community website, that has pictures and bios of our MVPs: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/community/mvp/default.mspx Several of the Exchange MVPs also run Exchange blogs, see the details on the above page Read More

Active/Passive configurations are enforced in clusters with more than two nodes (more than two Exchange nodes in Exchange 2003). This means that the scaling and monitoring limitations required for two-node Active/Active do not apply to clusters with Read More

One problem we encounter almost on a weekly basis is general performance problems. Most performance problems we have seen lately have been related to either inadequate disk configuration or MAPI restrictions. Mike Lee has already explained the bit about Read More

A few of us were sitting around at lunch the other day coming up with silly/stupid slogans for Exchange, and we came up with what we thought were some pretty funny ones[1], and decided that it would be a fun “in-joke“ for the Exchange crowd Read More

I wrote this a while ago... I have been ask by many people on how to do it, hope it is helpful: First, install Microsoft ActiveSync 3.7: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/resources/downloads/pocketpc/activesync37.mspx  Then, install the Pocket Read More

For those of you who implement Full-Text Indexing, aka Content Indexing; you may be aware of the MSDN article that talks about how to customize Full-Text Indexing to index additional properties: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wss/wss/_exch2k_customizing_full-text_indexing.asp.  Read More

Working within protocols for several years, one of the most invaluable tools that we have in our toolbox is the Network Monitor (one of the tools in the Microsoft Systems Management Server, Microsoft Windows 2000 Server, or Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Read More

Summary An IIS SMTP server can be configured to silently delete or archive messages as the end point in a message route for a test lab.  IIS SMTP archives messages by default for alias domains and uses performance counters to track statistics.  Read More

The Exchange server and the client (that evolved into Outlook) were originally (circa 1992) based on the MAPI standard (stands for Messaging Application Programming Interface). Broadly this can be divided into the MAPI data model, and the MAPI object Read More

I’m not quite sure where I’ll go with this blogging attempt…  I have a million ideas but when I start writing I hate them all… so I’m just going to scribble down some things I find interesting in my day to day work Read More

Something that comes as a surprise to many Exchange administrators is that the Exchange System Management (ESM) tool does not use DSAccess to discover the DC it will talk to.  Instead it discovers the DC it will use on its own, using ADSI to Read More

If there's one thing that's true of all busy Exchange servers, it's that they generate massive amounts of disk I/O. There's a joke around here that Exchange is the world's biggest hard disk diagnostics program.   Typically, your disks will be the Read More

Now - this is one of those things that should be easy and obvious. How do you figure out what version (or build) a specific MMC snap-in is? For example - how do you find out if the ADC management MMC snap-in or ESM MMC snap-in have been updated to SP3 Read More

It is possible while installing the Active Directory Connector (ADC), or while running an Exchange setup forestprep action, to be greeted with this incredibly generic error message:  “Extending the schema in the Active Directory failed.  Read More

As companies adopt Outlook 2003 cached mode for their users, the OAB becomes increasingly important. When Outlook 2003 users open the GAL or use name resolution, the OAB is used instead of making requests to a Global Catalog server. The OAB itself consists Read More

In Exchange 2000, we introduced a new feature called IFS.  IFS stands for “Installable File System”.  This uses a little known and even less used feature of NT that allows the OS’s file system (like NTFS or FAT) to be replaced. Read More

This is a group blog written by folks from the Microsoft Exchange server team. We are developers, testers, program managers, technical writers and product support engineers who work with Exchange. At the end of each blog entry, you'll see the author's Read More