The goal of this blog post is to build some familiarity and understanding of how Exchange uses WMI in representing the Status and Monitoring node in Exchange System Manager. What is the Monitoring and Status tool? The Monitoring and Status tool Read More

Scott Roberts posted about this update going live over on the WSUS Product Team Blog. Short version: An update that applies to the S/MIME control in Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 SP2 has been released to the download center. This update resolves a critical Read More

Seeing that we have seen some support calls on this already, we wanted to highlight a KB article that was written about the above mentioned issue. The article in question is: Meetings are unexpectedly moved one hour ahead in the last week of October in Read More

I've been asked to provide an overview of the user logons performance counters. To understand these counters, I need to define logons, connections and sessions first. Please note that the terminology for these three terms has been used differently in Read More

Have you tried the "Exchange Mail Flow Troubleshooter" in Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant v1.0 (ExTRA)? This is a new troubleshooter that you can use to troubleshoot common mail flow problems you see on Exchange servers. It is designed to identify Read More

What do Microsoft Support Engineers look for in the results of the MPS Reports diagnostic tool?   The Microsoft Product Support Report (aka MPS Reports) is arguably the most used diagnostic gathering tool used by Support Engineers to diagnose and Read More

This blog post is a troubleshooting tip to tackle messages sitting in the Messages awaiting directory lookup queue of your Exchange 2000 / 2003 server. Also known as the Pre-categorization queue, "Messages awaiting directory lookup" queue is the queue Read More

* TLA = Three Letter Acronym   In September 2004, we released the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA).  We followed up on this success in November 2005 with the Performance Troubleshooter (ExPTA) and the Disaster Recovery Analyzer (ExDRA).  Read More

Dave Goldman posted a very interesting post on his blog a little while ago, talking about how mailbox quota limit messages can impact Exchange server performance. He goes into different ways to customize the mailbox quota messages, how the process Read More

CALL TO ACTION   A change in Exchange permissioning behavior may impact mobile communications and other add-on applications for Exchange. Shared and resource mailboxes may also be affected.  By evaluating in advance whether this change will Read More

We've seen a few issues recently where members of DGs (Distribution Groups) in mixed-mode Exchange 200x and 5.5 seem to randomly and mysteriously disappear. We thought we'd share one known root-cause and also show you how to prevent the problem while Read More

Recently we have been seeing several issues in Support Services where Event ID 623 is being logged on the server. The symptoms include "Users unable to access their inbox", "Email backing up in the local delivery queue" and "Email awaiting directory lookup". Read More

This is my 4th blog post on the subject of Exchange 2003 Auto Accept Agent. If you want to see previous posts, you can see them here: one, two and three.   The listings of Mailboxes that are registered on any given server are currently homed in Read More

Hi All, I thought I would introduce myself to the BLOG-O-Sphere, my name is Scott Roberts and I'm a Software Developer in Test for the Exchange Sustained Engineering team. One of my responsibilities on the Exchange team includes being part of a team Read More

This release of ExPTA includes the following:   1.    Perfmon data collection:  Collect performance data to log file or analyze previously collected logs.  ExPTA can collect for durations between 5 minutes to 8 hours. Collection Read More