TEAMAS

Hi All We are now coming to the end of our Exchange 2010 upgrade project and everything has gone pretty well so far. From time to time our administrators are asked to complete searches in Exchange.  This could be for a number of reasons e.g Data Protection request or a disciplinary query. In Exchange 2007 we used to complete multi mailbox searches using a third party tool which would use MAPI to search every users' mailbox for items which matched our search terms.  This process was extremely slow (90 hours to cover 2000 mailboxes) and not particular reliable. In Exchange 2010 Microsoft released a feature called Multi-Mailbox search.  This allowed administrators to search all of the mailboxes using the search index which is built into Exchange.  This means the searches in Exchange 2010 are much much quicker.  It also means that this search will look at attachments which is excellent, although does create far more results to review. MSExchange Link for m...

During our Exchange 2010 upgrade project we noticed the monitoring on one server stopped working. We use a product called Solarwinds, this uses a combination of Powershell, WMI and SNMP to monitor services on hardware and software from around the business. We noticed that Solarwinds would return the following error message when polling this particular server Network connection failed. HResult: No data to return. Error: Unable to connect to the specified computer, or the computer is offline. After a quick search online we found the following Solarwinds KB It recommends restarting the WMI service on the server. We completed this but the issue remained. One of my learned colleagues kept searching and found that the Remote Regsitry service was set to Manual. He set it to Automatic and started the server. Immediately the polling began to work! So if you have this problem, check the Remote Registry service! Sam Cheers to John Manley for finding this! Google +

Hi! I have been off the radar recently, knee deep in an Exchange 2007 to 2010 upgrade project.  It is something I have worked with a huge amount in the past, but I have really enjoyed getting to know how Exchange works and designing a cool system for my employers. Exchange 2010 is such a great step forward.  We have moved all of the storage off the SAN and gone for 3 mail servers with DAS and JBOD.  So far it is working pretty well. Anywho, we needed to migrate around 2000 mailboxes from 2007 to 2010.  In our old 2007 environment storage groups were created based on a users first intial of their first name e.g.  Storage Group S would hold me Sam Owens.  This was fine, but clearly there are lots of people whose name who begin with J and S.  You guessed it, the storage groups were massively diverse and difficult to keep on top of. Also naming the storage groups in this way leads you to make assumptions.  I saw a number of users who were crea...

My company are in the process of upgrading our Citrix XenApp image to include hotfixes and new versions of software for Flash, Reader and the Citrix Online plugin. Currently we use plugin 12.1 which works pretty well overall.  The only real issue we see with this is connecting to other companies access gateway infrastructure if they are using Web Interface 5.3 using IE9.  We have a workaround for this, but fixing the problem would allow us to ditch a couple of servers. http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX126653 So we planned to upgrade the plugin to the latest version which supports PNA.  Version 3.4 is the latest versions available to download from the Citrix website. http://www.citrix.co.uk/downloads/citrix-receiver/legacy-client-software/receiver-for-windows-34-enterprise.html We installed it using the string I have discussed numerous times on this site.  This ensured that the receiver element was at a minimum. http://www.teamas.co.uk/2012/08/pna-remo...

The curiously named XenDesktop 7 was released this week, the fact that XenDesktop 6 does not exist was an interesting twist.  This was named project Avalon and now includes XenApp as part of the same stack rather than a separate architecture.  The latest release of XenApp was 6.5 and maybe Citrix decided to bring this in-line. Any way!  Citrix showed a demo of a flash offloading mechanism for iPad with XenDesktop 7 at Synergy and Citrix Mobility London.  This recognised that an iPad was being used and instead of just sending screenshots to the client it translates the video to H.264 and sends it to the iPad for local rendering.  The results in the demo were amazing and I couldn't wait to get my mitts on the code to test.  Unfortunately this feature didn't exist in the Tech Preview so I had to wait patiently for the full release to come out. Below is a comparison of XenApp 6.0 (2008 R2) and XenDesktop 7.0 (windows 8) watching a flash video of the ...

Citrix announced at the start of the year that Synergy Europe would be held in London this year.  This was great news for Citrix enthusiasts who couldn't convince their respective bosses that expenses for flights and hotels to Barcelona would represent a good ROI. Unfortunately Citrix cancelled this London event.  The reason is that Citrix wanted to host more events around Europe rather than having one flagship event. http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/04/04/announcing-our-new-expanded-citrix-conference-strategy-in-europe/ I attended Citrix Mobility London 2013 yesterday at the Old Billingsgate Market.  The venue was pretty nice and just the right size for the amount of people who attended.  The overall theme was "Work is not a place".  This makes sense as their technologies are allowing people to be very mobile and complete their work in most environments. The first session was run by Gordon Payne and demo god Brad Peterson.  They talked about Pr...

This is an overview on the pre-requisites, considerations and changes required in migrate from BES from working with Exchange 2010 over to Exchange 2013 with CU1.  The following was tested on a Windows 2003 mixed mode domain and forest functional level where BES Express had already been installed and configured. Update....when I wrote this article originally it was aimed at updating a current Blackberry server to work with Exchange 2013.   If you want to migrate your mailboxes over a period of time rather than moving them all at once, you should look to setting a separate BES server which points to the Exchange 2013 server whilst leaving your current BES server pointing to Exchange 2010.  In order to migrate the users from one independent database to another to you can the Blackberry Transporter Tool.  I found this tool to be excellent as it didn't require any interaction on the BB phones themselves;  As far as the end user was concerned, business as usual. ...