Exchange Center

Understanding the details of user mailbox access is very important to knowing what is going on within an Exchange environment. Being able to proactively audit mailbox access has become critical to the technology world we live in today due to the constant threat of security vulnerabilities. Environmental threats can come from inside or outside of our organizations.

So, what kind of information can you obtain if you are auditing user mailboxes?

Have you ever needed to change your Default Role Assignment Policy in Exchange 2010 through Exchange Management Shell? An example of when you might want to do this is to prevent users from creating organizationally visible distribution lists through Outlook Web App. Recently I realized that there may be a problem with the Set-RoleAssignmentPolicy command that can be used to set your users default role assignment policy. Here is what was experienced.

As an Exchange administrator, backup and recovery of your databases is an important aspect of your environment.  There should be defined and streamlined processes in place for your environment as it relates to this topic.  Why is this important?   You may have an end-user that cannot find that very important message they received a couple of weeks ago or the data may be important for that legal investigation that unexpectedly came up.

Have you encountered an instance where Exchange cannot deliver mail to a destination on the Internet? This is becoming more and more common. You may question why this is happening in the first place and why it’s becoming more common.

So, you have server-side applications that are internal to your environment and require a mechanism in order to send email, but the system itself cannot use a mailbox account due to application limitations. What do you do? In this case you will likely setup relay connectors on your Exchange servers. Before you set these up however, there is one key question to ask.

Will I allow my users to relay internally, externally, or both?

One of the largest challenges many organizations face is how to secure email.  Industries such as healthcare and financial have government regulated policy to adhere to such as HIPPA and Sarbanes Oxley.  So how do we ensure that our users are not sending out information they shouldn’t be from their desks or mobile devices? Also with the emergence of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) securing company data is become even more important than it has in the past.

What is ExFolders?

ExFolders is a Microsoft tool that can connect to Exchange 2010 public folders through a GUI and is separate from the Exchange Management Console. This tool has replaced the old PFDavAdmin public folder administration tool that was used with older versions of Exchange. Microsoft has added some backward compatibility within ExFolders and has configured it to work with Exchange 2007, but it must be run from an Exchange 2010 server.

After some recent Exchange troubleshooting I decided to do a small write-up on an attribute most people working with Exchange know about, the infamous exchangeLegacyDN.

For those involved with Exchange migration projects or managing Exchange environments, at some point you probably have experienced a situation where individuals ended up with duplicate items in their mailbox. Duplicate items can be caused by many things, but most common are:

Many customers nowadays are running a virtualized Exchange environment, utilizing Database Availability Groups, load balanced Client Access Servers and the works. However, I also see environments where it is up to the Hypervisor of choice on the hosting of virtual machines after a (planned) fail-over. This goes for Exchange servers, but also for redundant infrastructure components like Domain Controllers or Lync Front-End servers for example.