Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista Service Pack 2

Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2008 and Vista is now released.
Take a look here for more information http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd262148.aspx

The good thing is that the Exchange 2010 Beta can be installed on a Windows Server 2008 SP2.

Happy patching

Monday, April 27, 2009

Exchange 2007 books

For you people out there that is still interested in learning Exchange 2007 or studying for one of the Exchange 2007 exams.
Technical Specialist, http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exams/70-236.mspx
IT Proffesional, http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exams/70-237.mspx and http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exams/70-238.mspx

I recently read two books, “MCITP Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-237): Designing Messaging Solutions with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007” (http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Books/10937.aspx) and “MCITP Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-238): Deploying Messaging Solutions with Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007” (http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Books/10938.aspx) that have a lot of information about Exchange 2007.
They are written as a study guide towards the exams, so they begin with instructions how to build your own lab environment followed by lessons and now and then also practices. I like this format since it gives the reader some theoretical knowledge and then they practice on it, this also needed if you want to really learn and pass the exams. I recommend that you take your time and use your lab do the practice tests thorogfully.
Both books have a lot of words and content, and if you really read and give it some thought you will learn a lot, but if you only read it fast from cover to cover you will probably not pick up that much new knowledge.

The overall impression is that those books are well written with an easy language to understand, they also have a lot of content to read through but on the other hand, Exchange is a big product with a lot of features.

Keep on reading.

Friday, April 17, 2009

More Exchange 2010 resources

This link http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd185494.aspx provides a lot of information about Exchange Server 2010

You will most likely bang your head against your keyboard a couple of times when playing around and try to do things.
Exchage 2010 forums is a good place to get help and provide help to peers http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchange2010/threads

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Exchange 14, sorry. Exchange Server 2010

For you that have been waiting on the next version of Exchange Server, you can stop waiting and instead read and download it from http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010.
And yes the name will be Exchange Server 2010.
There is so much new cool and good stuff in there so start reading the help file and follow the link above for more info.

Direct download link is http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1898ed2c-2f88-48ac-824e-d3d20fad77d7

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Exchange monitoring tools

Ever wanted to know what users doing to your Exchange server? If you're a serious admin you should want to know.
Most common is to use performance monitor to monitor all kinds of statistics and how much pressure there is on your Exchange server. You can for sure see how many users and how much load they generate on your server, this is all good but you cannot see what individual users are doing to your server which is really nice in case you need to troubleshoot for example performance issues.
Luckily there exists tools out there that monitoring MAPI clients in real time (well almost anyway) and the best thing is that they are free of charge.

Microsoft has one tool called "Microsoft Exchange Server User Monitor" or ExMon for short.
It has been around for a couple of years. It can monitor Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 and in the latest version even Exchange 2007.
Read more about the tool on Technet http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb508855.aspx and the download link is http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=9a49c22e-e0c7-4b7c-acef-729d48af7bc9

Unfortunate there seems to be something wrong with the download and you will not get the latest version that works with Exchange 2007, but I can only guess that this little glitch will be corrected shortly.

Recently I came across an almost identical tool "ExInsight for Microsoft Exchange".

You can read more about it and download it from http://www.bitrunes.com/

Both tools has there advanteges so there is no number one, they simply have different featue sets.

Friday, April 3, 2009

AOL and OCS 2007 R2 edge problem

Some people have problem to get the federation with AOL going when they use OCS 2007 R2. This problem is now resolved. Check out this article on how to configure your x64 windows to make the federation work.
http://blogs.msdn.com/scottos/archive/2009/04/03/resolved-ocs-2007-r2-pic-fails-against-aol.aspx