Moving Exchange Between OU's

I've had conversations in the past as to wether or not the computer account belonging to an Exchange 200x server can be moved between OU's. This can be the case if you add the server to the domain before creating the computer account. This causes the computer account to be created in the default computers OU. Another scenario is the restructuring of OU's either for security or Group Policy administration. Whatever the scenario is, the answer is that the Exchange computer account can be moved, but the System Attendant generates Event ID 9186 and Event ID 9187 errors. The KB article below explains how to resolve this.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;271335&sd=ee

Teo

Recommended Storage Group Configuration

Microsoft has come out with new guidance regarding the configuration of Storage Groups and database for Exchange 2003. The article below recommends that all 5 Storage Groups be created with a mailbox store in each one (if needed). This has changed from the old recommendation that a single Storage Group be filled with databases before creating other storage groups.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;890699

Exmon

Microsoft has released a tool that provides the ability to gather real-time data bout the user experience when connected to Exchange. This tool should be especially useful when establishing a baseline and troubleshooting.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9A49C22E-E0C7-4B7C-ACEF-729D48AF7BC9&displaylang=en

Remove delegated security

Once a user or group is delegated access, it's necessary to remove the access manually. Microsoft has released a tool that will undo the process that delegation goes through. DSRevoke.exe will traverse all the ACL's in the domain and remove access for the user(s) or group(s) specified.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=77744807-c403-4bda-b0e4-c2093b8d6383&displaylang=en

ADModify.net saves the day

In the team I work in, alot of scripting is done. Today, we had a problem whereby a script was not successfully adding the X400 addresses to user accounts. The "drop dead time" came and when for these modifications, and we were going to have to do them manually. Luckily, we top a minute to look at ADModify.net and saw that it can modify any AD attribute, even multivalued ones. The X400 address addtions happened immediately, and a huge headache was avoided.

ADModify.net can be found here:
http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/ADModify

And just so it gets indexed: Mass modifications of proxyAddresses multivalue attribute

Exchange 12 in 2006

"Andy Lees, corporate vice president of marketing for Microsoft's server and tools business, revealed the ship date Tuesday."

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.

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).

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/

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.

Tranfer relay settings

Today we had a situation where we needed to transfer about 900 relay settings from Exchange 5.5 servers to Exchange 2003 servers. We were able to do this by using a script called ipsec.vbs from the exalltools download. This download is available here.
For just ipsec.vbs
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=286d2818-08b3-496d-8b0d-c2b628a3ef16&displaylang=en
For exalltools
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e0f616c6-8fa4-4768-a3ed-cc09aef7b60a&displaylang=en