Earlier today Exchange 2013 reached RTM status. This is a very exciting announcement and means that coding and testing is now complete. General availability is planned for the first quarter of 2013. In addition to Exchange, the new Office, SharePoint, and Lync have also reached RTM. For more information on the announcement, click here.
If you’ve decided to get you hands dirty with the Exchange 2013 Preview, the first thing you probably noticed when clicking on the start menu after installation is this:
Your eyes are not deceiving you, there is no shortcut to for the Exchange Management Console (EMC)… the reason for this is simple, it’s not there! Exchange 2013 bids farewell to the EMC that we have come to love since Exchange 2007 and introduces a new management interface called the Exchange Administration Center (EAC). EAC is the new web-based management console in Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 and it allows administrators to manage on-premises, online, or hybrid Exchange deployments. As one would expect, EAC makes use of roles based access control to ensure that specialist or support users are able to perform only the specific tasks which are assigned to them.
oh, before I forget, I should mention that all names in the screenshot are randomly generated fakes!
I can’t believe how quickly this year has gone, it is almost time for me to start packing my bags for another trip.. I'll be attending the Microsoft Exchange Conference 2012 (MEC) in Orlando, September 24th-26th. I am really looking forward to this great opportunity to learn about the product from the engineers who built it. There will be more than 100 sessions, some of the topics that will be covered in breakout sessions, keynotes and hands-on labs include:
Let me know if you are also planning to attend, it would be great to catch up!
My friend and colleague Greig Sheridan recently released a couple of handy client side tools for Lync. I think they are both really great and thought I would plug them for him! The first of these is called “Profiles for Lync”. Profiles for Lync is a multi-user account management application for Lync which allows you to easily switch between Lync profiles, this is really handy if you often connect to multiple Lync environments.
His most recent tool is called “Elyza”. Elyza is a auto-responding & remote control bot for Lync and has become my new demo buddy.. you never have to give her any notice, she is always available to chat to you.
To check out these handy tools, follow the links below:
After more than 2 years of the same I have decided to give my blog a new look. It is very much a work in progress for now, but hopefully it does not look too bad! I have once again decided against implementing any form of CSS or styling in my RSS feed as I think keeping it simple is the best approach for RSS.
I am very excited to let you all know that Microsoft has made the preview release of Exchange 2013 available for download.
This release has been highly anticipated, for more information about the Exchange 2013 preview, click here. In addition, the Office 2013 preview was also announced. Exchange 2013 preview documentation has also been updated on TechNet.
Watch this space for news and information about what you can expect to see in Exchange 2013!
I came across an interesting issue when using the Exchange Hybrid Configuration Wizard in a multi-namespace environment recently. Autodiscover was configured and working correctly for Outlook and EAS clients but the wizard would not complete successfully and would generate the following error: “Federation information could not be received from the external organization…” as seen below:
After some investigation, I discovered that this problem was related to Autodiscover. Typically in an on-premises Exchange 2010 deployment, there are a number of different ways to configure Autodiscover when using multiple namespaces. These are:
Option 1 - Single SSL Certificate that is valid for all DNS names (SAN Certificate)
Pros:
Cons:
Option 2 - Single-name SSL Certificate with DNS SRV Lookup
Pros:
Cons:
Option 3 - Single-name SSL Certificate with HTTP redirect
Pros:
Cons:
While these will all work and have their pros and cons, I would usually always use ‘option 1’ listed above unless there is a good reason not to. In this particular instance, the Autodiscover was configured using ‘option 3’ and even though Autodiscover worked fine for clients, the Hybrid Configuration Wizard did not seem to like this configuration.
The Office 365 documentation does not go into a great amount of detail about multi-domain Autodiscover configuration and says: “Configure the Autodiscover public DNS records for your existing SMTP domains to point to an on-premises Exchange 2010 SP2 Client Access server” which is technically what had been done. The reason this caused a problem is because unlike Outlook or EAS clients, Office 365 does not use the Autodiscover discovery process and instead makes a direct connection to https://autodiscover.domain.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.svc/wssecurity for each domain being used and does not obey the web redirect that had previously been configured.
In order to solve this problem, we purchased a new SAN certificate and reconfigured Autodiscover as described in ‘option 1’. In short, this is the only way to configure Autodiscover if you plan to implement an Exchange Hybrid Deployment. Additionally, if you are not using split DNS and have an internal DNS zone that is different to your external DNS (eg. domain.local), you need to ensure that the relevant external Autodiscover records are resolvable internally as well.
As a side note, if you are using ISA/TMG to publish EWS/Autodiscover, you need to create a separate rule without authentication delegation for the following paths:
If you have a Exchange Hybrid deployment configured and attempt to create a new remote move request you may receive an ”Exception has been thrown by the target of invocation” error similar to the one below.
Here are a few things you can check in order to help troubleshoot this error:
One of the downsides of using Exchange 2010 voicemail is that if you live in an English speaking country other than the United States (en-US) you have to set your Exchange language pack to en-US if you would like to make use of the Exchange voice mail preview feature. This has been a source of constant debate around our office as we have quite a multinational team. There are a few of us who don’t actually mind the American sounding prompts/greetings/etc.. but then there are those who do. In a attempt to keep everyone happy my friend and colleague Greig Sheridan decided to investigate and found quite a neat workaround.
Basically, what he has done is set the Default language of the Dial Plan to en-US, and then changed EVERY other reference to the language back to en-AU. The end result is that the only time you hear a greeting in the American accent is when you dial the Subscriber Access number, before you’ve logged-in. Read all about it on his blog. For a direct link to the post, click here.
I came across this error recently while running the Hybrid Configuration Wizard on Exchange 2010 SP2. It caught me out a little and as it turns out the fix is quite simple. It seems the wizard does not recognise certificates that begin with anything other than “CN=”. In my particular case I was being tripped up by a certificate beginning with “E=”. What made this even more confusing was that the certificate causing the problem was installed, but completely unrelated and not actually the one I was using to configure my Hybrid Exchange environment.
It seems this is a known bug and was fixed in Update Rollup 1 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2. I can confirm that after installing the update, it all worked as expected.
For more info and to download Update Rollup 1 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2, click here