Thursday, February 24, 2005

Entourage causes excess Exchange 2003 transaction logs

I found this in one of the mailing lists I subscribe to:

There is no external KB article at this time, as far as I know. The hotfix readme shows the KB article as http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=889525, which doesn't exist. The hotfix number is the same -- 889525.

I am running Exchange 2003 SP1, don't know if one is in the works for Exchange 2000.

Thursday, February 10, 2005

KANA and Exchange SMTP Communication

We've finally resolved a problem we were having with our Kana software and our Exchange 2003 migration. The issue began when we replaced our Exchange 5.5 SMTP servers with Exchange 2003. Messages that would normally come in fine from our Kana web form began comming in garbled. At first we thought it could be the message format. Playing with the message format settings revealed that if we set the content type to plain text and the character type to ASCII then the message body would come in fine except for the xml code. At this point we were getting the xml code that was normally in the message body as an attachment.

What we were able to resolve is that by still having Exchange 5.5 servers as bridgehead servers, our messages where being spun through different protocols (SMTP to RPC to SMTP again). When we tried to use only SMTP communication the messages came in fine. We tested and verified this by putting the mailboxes that were receiving KANA emails directly on the SMTP servers (no more RPC communication).


Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Reprint of a great AD book

I just read that the book "Inside Active Directory" has a second edition comming out. I thought the first book was great and went into great detail about the inner workings of AD. The second book is going to cover the changes to AD in Windwos 2003. I would definately recommend the material to anyone who deals with AD on a day-to-day basis. It is however, too in-depth for just basic administration of accounts.

Here's the authors website:
http://www.kouti.com/

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Copy Exchange 5.5 Distribution Lists

There are many tools and scripts out there to copy multiple DL's (Distribution Lists) from one 5.5 org to another org (AD). However, if you come across a situation where you only need to copy one Distribution List here is a quick method. You can basically log into the Exchange Org using Outlook 2003 and choose the DL from the GAL. Then expand the group membership and copy all the members to the AD screen that you would use to create a new DL in AD.