Exchange 2010 Beta1: Bunch of FAQs, Tips & Known Issues

http://exchangeshare.wordpress.com/2009/05/03/exchange-2010-beta1-bunch-of-faqs-tips-known-issues/

Exchange 2010 and Exchange Web Services - What’s New Webcasts

http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/24193645

Start service

We had a requirement to start a service if its stopped and this script helps to achieve the same
==============
Const ADS_SERVICE_STOPPED = 1
' get an ADSI object for a computerSet objComputer = GetObject("WinNT://computer name,computer")
' get an object for a serviceSet objService = objComputer.GetObject("Service","alerter")
' check to see if the service is stopped
If (objService.Status = ADS_SERVICE_STOPPED) Then
' if the service is stopped, then start it
objService.Start
End If
==================

Windows 7 Product key

Install Windows 7 without any product activation key.
After installation is completed, use the Windows 7 for 30 days and wait for the remaining days left to activate Windows counting down to 0, or almost zero.
When the activation grace period (or evaluation trial period) is almost expired or ended, log on to Windows 7 desktop, and open a Command Prompt window (i.e. type Cmd in Start Search and hit Enter).
Type any of the following commands into the command prompt, and then hit Enter:
sysprep /generalize
slmgr.vbs –rearm
rundll32 slc.dll,SLReArmWindows
slmgr /rearm
Reboot Windows 7 to enjoy another 30 days of free usage without worrying about activation nor even need to crack Windows 7.
When the activation grace period countdown timer almost running down to 0 again, repeat the ‘rearm’ trick to enjoy another 30 days of Windows 7 for free. User can run the rearm command for maximum of 3 times.

Free/Busy Information in Exchange

What is Free/Busy?

Users' availability information is stored in Exchange in a hidden system public folder. This information is used by Outlook and OWA to tell other users if they are free or busy (hence, the term Free/Busy information). Normally this information is displayed as color-coded blocked out areas in a user's calendar, as show above. If users have extended rights, they can right-click another user's blocked out time to view the subject of the busy time.
The Free/Busy information is posted as a single message that contains data for the entire Free/Busy duration. The default to publish is 2 month's worth of information, configurable in Outlook Options or via Group Policy. Every time the Free Busy information is updated, the message is overwritten.
Publishing Free/Busy Information

The way Free/Busy information is published to Exchange depends on the method used to update the user's calendar. The Outlook client is usually responsible for generating Free/Busy information. Outlook will read the calendar and generate Free/Busy every 15 minutes by default if the information has been changed. This schedule can be changed in Outlook options or via Group Policy. Outlook also republishes the Free/Busy information whenever Outlook is shut down.
So what happens when the user updates their calendar using Outlook Web Access (OWA) or some other non-MAPI client? In this case, Free/Busy information is updated by a background process called MSExchangeFBPublish (MadFB). This process runs under the System Attendant mailbox and updates Free/Busy every 5 minutes for OWA, OMA, and Entourage clients. When a change is made to the calendar, a Free/Busy message is submitted to the System Attendant mailbox on the mailbox server for the user. The MadFB process polls this mailbox and picks up that there has been a change. MadFB then publishes the user's full Free/Busy message to the Free/Busy folder overwriting the existing message.
Replicating Free/Busy Information

The short answer is don't do it. The only reason to replicate Free/Busy information is when you frequently have users accessing Free Busy information of users in another site, and those sites are separated by a slow or lossy network link. Replicating Free/Busy information introduces inherent latency and causes inaccuracy in the Free/Busy information. Users in one site may see information from a site that has not replicated yet.
Where is Free/Busy Information Stored?

Free/Busy information is stored in a system public folder. You can view all the Free/Busy information in the org by opening the following URL in a web browser: "http(s)://ServerName/Public/Non_IPM_Subtree/SCHEDULE%2B%20FREE%20BUSY/".
Here, you will see a folder under SCHEDULE+ FREE BUSY for each Administrative Group in the format, "EX:/o=/OU=". Each folder contains messages for each user. These messages are the Free Busy information for the user. The messages are formatted as, "USER-/CN=RECIPIENTS/CN=".
Free/Busy message placement is based on the user's legacyExchangeDN attribute in AD. For example, if my legacyExchangeDN is /o=CompanyABC/ou=Paris/cn=Recipients/cn=jsguillet", my Free Busy information will be stored in the "USER-/CN=RECIPIENTS/CN=jsguillet" message in the "/EX:/o=CompanyABC/ou=Paris" folder.
You are unable to view the contents of the message, but you can delete it. Doing so will remove all Free Busy information from Exchange until it is republished using one of the methods explained above. If Free/Busy information is not available to other users, they will see black and white hash marks across your calendar and Outlook will say that Free/Busy information is not available for this user.
How to Republish Free/Busy Information

On occasion Free/Busy information may not be published correctly in Exchange. There are many reasons that this can occur. Examples include errors in Public Folder replication (if Free Busy is being replicated, another reason to not do this), network errors, and incorrect shutdown of Outlook or Windows.
So how do you republish Free/Busy information? The easiest way to do this for individual users is to have them run Outlook with the /CleanFreeBusy switch:
Close Outlook
Click Start, Run, enter "start outlook /cleanfreebusy" and click OK
Outlook will start, generate the Free/Busy information from the Outlook calendar and republish it to Exchange within 5 minutes. It will overwrite any existing Free/Busy message or publish a new one if it doesn't exist.
While this is easy to do for one or two users, it isn't a good solution for all users in the enterprise since it requires user intervention.
Microsoft KB article 294282 details how to use Updatefb.exe to regenerate Free/Busy information from the calendar information contained in each user's mailbox. You run this utility under the context of a user or service account that has full mailbox access to the affected users. It reads a comma delimited file containing the alias and home mailbox server of each user (i.e., alias, mailbox1) and logs in as that user using Collaboration Data Objects (CDO). It then creates a single appointment for the user for today at 11:00pm. This marks the Free/Busy information as "dirty". It then logs off the MAPI connection, causing the Free/Busy information to republish to Exchange. Note that Updatefb will be unable to open disabled user's or hidden mailboxes, so be sure to exclude them from the CSV input file.
Updatefb.exe is an unsupported utility written by Microsoft and is only available through Microsoft Product Support Services. There are two versions of the utility, Updatefb.exe is the GUI version and CPPCDO.exe is a command line version. I have used it in several environments with no issues.
What About Exchange 2007?

Exchange 2007 uses an entirely new and different way to manage Free/Busy information, so the above does not apply in a pure Exchange 2007/Outlook 2007 environment. When using Exchange 2007 with Outlook 2007 Free/Busy information will no longer come from a Public Folder, but will instead use the Microsoft Exchange 2007 Availability Service. This web service will provide a direct look at the user's Free/Busy information without the need of a client publishing any data. Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007 can still use (and will still have) the Free/Busy public folder for backwards compatibility with older Outlook clients.

exchange 2010

Exchange 2010 introduces new features to help people better manage inbox overload and be more productive. Users have the freedom to access all their communications — e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging and more — from virtually any platform using secured connection methods, whether they are using Outlook on the PC, a mobile phone or a browser.
· Enhanced Inbox Experience
- Ignore Conversation. This e-mail “mute button” allows people to remove themselves from an irrelevant conversation, reducing unwanted e-mail and runaway reply-all threads.
- Conversation View. To reduce inbox clutter, Exchange 2010 provides an enhanced conversation view that streamlines inbox navigation by automatically organizing message threads based on the natural conversation flow between parties.
- MailTips. People can be warned before they commit an e-mail faux pas such as sending mail to a large distribution group, to recipients who are out of the office or to recipients outside the organization. This helps protect against information leaks, reduce unnecessary e-mail and limit accidental e-mail.
- Voice Mail Preview. Exchange 2010 further enhances voice mail functionality by delivering speech-to-text voice mail, allowing users to receive voice mail previews in their inbox.
- Call Answering Rules. Employees can create customized “Press 1 for …” call-routing menus that help them better manage incoming phone calls with Exchange voice mail.
- External Calendar Sharing. Exchange 2010 facilitates interaction with contacts outside the organization by making it easier to share calendars across organizational boundaries, while IT staff helps maintain security and control so organizational boundaries do not impede successful collaboration.
· Enhanced Outlook Web Access and Mobile Experience
- Multiple browser support. Outlook Web Access premium support is available for Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari in addition to Internet Explorer.
- Scroll feature in Outlook Web Access. The mailbox in Outlook Web Access allows people to scroll though messages without needing to advance though pages.
- Instant messaging. Outlook Web Access contains instant messaging and presence integrated into the client. Administrators may choose to connect this to Microsoft Office Communications Server or the Windows Live Messenger service. Users can see others’ status and set their own.
- SMS text messaging. Short message service (SMS) text messaging is available in Outlook Web Access, and it synchronizes to users’ inboxes, letting them back up, sync and send messages from the Web.
- Name cache. People entering an e-mail address using Outlook Web Access and Microsoft Office Outlook Mobile can see suggested names they have previously used in any of their clients.
- Reply/forward status. Outlook Mobile users can see which messages they have already replied to or forwarded, even if they did it on a different machine.
- Free/busy information. With Outlook Mobile-based devices, users are able to view their contacts’ free or busy status.

Flexible and Reliable
Exchange 2010 provides increased operational and deployment flexibility that helps companies save money by reducing operating costs and administrative overhead.
· Deployment flexibility and choice. Exchange 2010 provides organizations with the same enterprise-grade capabilities whether deployed on-premises or as a service from Microsoft and partners, or as a mix of both. Companies can choose the right deployment solution for their specific needs without interrupting or changing the user experience.
· Simplify administrative tasks with role-based access control. New features enable IT staff to delegate tasks to responsible users in a controlled way to meet the needs of the organization. Examples include these:
- Delegating privileges to human resources to update employee information
- Delegating privileges to the legal department for e-mail auditing
- Delegating privileges to employees to create their own distribution lists
· Improved performance and scalability options. Added support for a wider range of storage hardware increases the ability to deploy large mailboxes without impacting hardware budgets. Exchange 2010 further improves performance against lower-cost direct-attached storage, enabling organizations to dramatically reduce storage costs by up to 85 percent without sacrificing performance or reliability.
· Simplified high availability and continuous availability. Exchange 2010 provides a simplified approach to high availability and disaster recovery by maintaining up to 16 copies of the data and can provide automatic recovery from a variety of failures. A database-level disruption, such as a disk failure, no longer affects all the users on a server, which coupled with faster failover times (30 seconds) dramatically improves an organization’s overall uptime.
· Enhanced maintenance tools. Exchange 2010 eliminates the inconvenience of taking users offline while moving mailboxes between servers, thereby increasing productivity and minimizing server downtime during migrations and infrastructure upgrades. Transport servers have built-in redundancy to protect against the loss of messages in transit. These two items combined allow maintenance to take place anytime, even during business hours.

Protection and Compliance
Exchange 2010 delivers integrated e-mail archiving capabilities and enhanced information protection and compliance features, aimed at safeguarding information and meeting regulatory requirements.
· Integrated e-mail archiving. The new archiving capabilities make it easier to store and query e-mail across the organization using the Exchange software that organizations already know and use. Exchange 2010 enables organizations to move Outlook data files (PSTs) to an integrated archive while maintaining a consistent user experience.
· Corporate governance and compliance. Several built-in features simplify the prevention of information or security leaks, making it easier to maintain corporate and regulatory compliance. Tools such as the cross-mailbox search interface enable compliance officers and human resources representatives to conduct searches based on selected e-mail attributes across the entire mail infrastructure.
· Simplified communication confidentiality. In Exchange 2010, Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) policies can now be set centrally by IT staff, to automatically help protect messages based on sender, subject, content or other specified attributes. RMS restricts recipients’ ability to view, print or forward protected e-mail. Users can easily view and compose RMS-protected messages in Outlook and Outlook Web Access as well as on mobile devices and can instantly protect messages using “one-click” encryption.

Script to check if a service exist on multiple servers

We had a requirement where we had to check if a particular service is present on multiple servers using vbscript
******************************
Const ForReading = 1
Const SUCCESS = 0
stringInputFile = "C:\input.txt"
strService = "clipsrv"
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objectTextStream = objFSO.OpenTextFile(stringInputFile, ForReading)
arrServers = Split(objectTextStream.ReadAll, vbCrLf)
objectTextStream.Close
Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
On Error Resume Next
For Each strServer in arrServers
Set objScriptExec = objShell.Exec("ping -n 2 -w 1000 " & strServer)
strPingResults = LCase(objScriptExec.StdOut.ReadAll)
If InStr(strPingResults, "reply from") Then
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strServer)
If Err.Number <> 0 Then
WScript.Echo "FAILURE: " & strServer & " [WMI connection failed]"
Err.Clear
Else
Set objService = objWMIService.Get("Win32_Service.Name='" & strService & "'")
If Err.Number Then
WScript.Echo strServer & " FAILURE: " & strService & " [Service not found]" Err.Clear
Else
WScript.Echo strServer & " SUCCESS: " & strService & " [Service found]"
End If
End If
Else
WScript.Echo "FAILURE: " & strServer & " [ping failed]"
End If
Next
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