Overview

This two-part blog series will outline some of the recovery options available to administrators in the event that one or more public folders are accidentally deleted from the environment. The first part will explain the options, while the second part will outline the architectural aspects of public folders that drive the options.

Introduction

In older versions of Exchange, mailbox and mailbox database recovery was a long, complicated process involving backups, recovery servers, and changes to Active Directory. Successive versions of the product have introduced more and more functionality around recovery (recovery storage groups/databases, database replication, etc.), and we're now at the point where restoring a mailbox is a seemingly trivial operation, and restoring a mailbox database is almost unheard of. But mailboxes aren't the only data stored on Mailbox servers in Exchange Server 2010, and the procedure for restoring public folders and public folder databases differs greatly from the mailbox procedure.

Review of Recovery Options

The first two recovery options are detailed either in TechNet or elsewhere on the Exchange team blog site, so I'll simply list them here and then move on to the real purpose of this blog.  The recovery options for public folders and public folder databases in Exchange Server 2010 are as follows, from the easiest to the most complex:

1. Recover deleted folders via Outlook (detailed in http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd553036.aspx).

   Note: Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2 fixes an issue where users were unable to use Outlook to recover deleted public folders. This is another reason to upgrade your Exchange Server 2010 systems to SP2 at the earliest opportunity.

2. Recover deleted folders via ExFolders (http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2009/12/04/3408943.aspx).
3. Recover folders via public folder database restore.

The first option is the easiest and most obvious - if an end user accidentally deletes a folder, he or she should be able to undelete that folder using Outlook. Failing that, an administrator should be able to use ExFolders to recover that folder. But what if these options won't work in your situation? What if the end user didn't realize he or she deleted the folder, and a month has passed? Or what if your organization has changed the retention settings for deleted public folders, and essentially eliminated the dumpster?  How do you recover public folders in this case?

Recovery Options

At the heart of public folder recovery is a painful truth: you can't delete a public folder from the organization and recover it by simply restoring an older version of a public folder database. If you restore a public folder database from backup and place it back into production, you’ll see the public folders only until the server receives replication messages. Because the public folder hierarchy – the list of all folders in the environment – no longer includes the folders which were deleted, the target server has copies of folders which, from Exchange’s perspective, don’t exist. As soon as that public folder database receives a hierarchy update, it will see that those public folders aren’t present in the hierarchy, and the store will delete the public folder again. Since you can’t edit the hierarchy via the Public Folder Management Console (or even via adsiedit.msc), you can't manually add that public folder back in. So, given this limitation, how do we recover that public folder?

Consider the following points:

• If you don't replicate every folder to every database, you would need to delete all current databases and then recover from backup any database that contains unique content.  This only works if you have recent backups, of course, and would also require that you export any content generated since that backup, since you’re going to delete all of the existing databases. The deletion is necessary because if a restored public folder store receives hierarchy replication from one of the existing public folder stores, the whole exercise is for naught.
• If you do replicate all folders to all stores in the environment, you can delete all stores and just restore one database, then replicate the content from that database out to the other servers. Again, this depends on all databases having duplicate content, and you must delete all existing databases before restoring the one from backup.
• You can restore a backup of the public folder database to an isolated Exchange environment, connect to the public folder database with Outlook, export all content to a series of PSTs, create new folders in the production environment with the same names as the deleted folders, and then import all of the content. This is obviously a somewhat manual process, and most administrators aren't going to want to do this.

Recommended Recovery Procedure

Thankfully there is a much easier process which can be performed in-place and with a minimum of fuss.

1. Select one of the existing public folder servers in the environment. [Using an existing server simplifies the process a bit.] You will isolate this system from its replication partners, so choose a system that doesn’t serve as the source for a lot of content which needs to be replicated.
2. Using Registry Editor, set the value of the Replication registry key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\<servername>\Public- <GUID of Public Store>) to 0 (zero).

   Note: You may need to create this DWORD key if it doesn’t already exist. Further information on the Replication registry key is available in the article, “Replication does not occur for one Exchange server in the organization” (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/812294). This registry key also applies to Exchange Server 2007 and 2010.

3. Restore the public folder database in place using your normal restoration procedure.
4. Using an Outlook client, log onto a mailbox which uses the restored public folder database as its default public folder store (this is necessary in order to see the restored folders). If you don’t have a mailbox database which uses that public folder database as its default, either create a new mailbox database (recommended) or change an existing mailbox database to use the newly-restored public folder database.
5. If necessary, click the Folders icon at bottom left of the Navigation screen, and then expand the public folders node.
6. Copy each of the folders you wish to restore to another location within the public folder hierarchy. If you’re restoring an entire hierarchy, you can simply Ctrl-click and drag the root folder to make new copies of all subfolders. Although the new folders will have similar names to the originals, the underlying folder IDs (FIDs) are different.
7. Once you’ve created copies of all of the folders, verify that the replica lists include all desired targets (and reconfigure as appropriate).
8. At this point, it’s now safe to reintroduce that server into the production environment. To do so, dismount the public folder database, delete the Replication registry key (or set it to 1), and then remount the database.
9. As soon as hierarchy is replicated to the server, the original folders will once again disappear, but the copies of the folders will be replicated to all replication partners.

You may need to add mail-enabled public folders back into distribution groups, as their SMTP addresses will likely be different from those on the original folders. End users will also need to recreate public folder favorites in Outlook.

Summary

Recovering from accidental public folder deletion can be difficult, especially if you don’t take hierarchy replication into account. By restoring into an isolated environment, and then cloning the folders to be restored, you can work around this limitation and restore the missing content. In the next blog entry, I’ll explain the underlying architecture of public folders (including replication, change numbers, and the replication state table) to show why these steps are so necessary.

John Rodriguez
Principal Premier Field Engineer
Microsoft Premier Support

I’m very happy to be able to announce we have just made available for download a guide to help those of you intending to migrate from Exchange in /Hosting mode to Exchange 2010 SP2 installed without use of the /hosting switch.

Like the previous HMC to Exchange 2010 SP2 guidance, it contains a white paper and some PowerShell scripts. The white paper describes the migration process, and the scripts provide a starting point for your own migration toolkit. Of course the exact migration steps and methodology you will need to follow will depend upon what you have deployed, but we hope what we have provided will help you with your efforts and provide you some useful tools and information.

Check out the Migrating From Exchange Server 2010 in Hosting Mode to Exchange Server 2010 SP2 documentation.

We know any cross-forest migration can be tough, and there are also companies out there that provide migration tools and consulting, so if you feel you need more help than the guidance provides, or if you need some form of longer term co-existence, you may want to look at those offerings.

Finally, as discussed several times on this blog, building a multi-tenancy solution is a complex undertaking. We still very much are recommending that you look at existing solutions available in the market today and/or look at engaging solution integration partners to help with your solution. There are several solutions listed on our web site, and more coming, so before trying to re-invent the wheel to build your multi-tenant offering, look at what the market can offer.

Good luck with your migration!

Greg Taylor
Principal Program Manager (though not as awesome as Ross) 
Exchange Customer Experience

• ActiveSyncReport script
• Download

The Exchange support team relatively frequently receives cases where mobile devices using Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) protocol send too many requests to Exchange server resulting in a situation where server runs out of resources, effectively causing a ‘denial of service’ (DOS) attack. The worst outcome of such a situation is that the server also becomes unavailable to other users who may not be using EAS protocol to connect. We have documented this issue with possible mitigations in the following KnowledgeBase article:

2469722 Unable to connect using Exchange ActiveSync due to Exchange resource consumption

A recent example of this issue was Apple iOS 4.0 devices retrying a full sync every 30 seconds (see TS3398). Another example could be some devices that do not understand how to handle a ‘mailbox full’ response from the Exchange server, resulting in several tries to reconnect. This can cause such devices to attempt to connect & sync with the mailbox more than 60 times in a minute, killing battery life on the device and causing performance issues on server.

Managing mobile devices & balancing available server resources among different types of clients can be a daunting challenge for IT administrators. Trying to track down which devices are causing resource depletion issues on Exchange 2010/2007 Client Access server (CAS) or Exchange 2003 Front-end (FE) server is not an easy task. As referenced in the article above, you can use Log Parser to extract useful statistics from IIS logs (see note below), but most administrators do not have the time & expertise to draft queries to extract such information from lengthy logs.

The purpose of this post is to introduce everyone in Exchange community to a new PowerShell script that can be utilized to identify devices causing resource depletion issue, help in spotting performance trends and automatically generate reports for continuous monitoring. Using this script you can easily & quickly drill into your users' EAS activity, which can be a major task when faced with IIS logs that can get up to several gigabytes in size. The script makes it easier to identify users with multiple EAS devices. You can use it as a tool to establish a baseline during periods of normal EAS activity and then use that for comparison and reporting when things sway in other directions. It also provides an auto-monitoring feature which you can use to receive e-mail notifications.

Note: The script works with IIS logs on Exchange 2010, Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2003 servers.
All communication between mobile devices using EAS protocol and Microsoft Exchange is logged in IIS Logs on CAS/FE servers in W3C format. The default W3C fields enabled for logging do vary between IIS 6.0 and 7.0/7.5 (IIS 7.0 has the same fields as 7.5). This script works against both versions.

IIS Logs

Because EAS uses HTTP, all EAS requests are logged in IIS logs, which is enabled by default. Sometimes administrators may disable IIS logging to save space on servers. You must check whether logging is enabled or not and find the location of log files by following these steps:

IIS 7

1. In IIS Manager, expand the server name i.e. ExchangeServer (Contoso\Administrator)
2. In the Features View, double click Logging in the IIS section.

IIS 6

1. In IIS Manager, right click the web site name (for most it should be Default Web Site) and choose Properties
2. Click on the Web Site tab.

What are mobile devices responsible for in communications with the server?

Before we delve into the specifics of the script, let's review some important requirements for mobile devices that use EAS to communicate with Microsoft Exchange.

• When a mobile device is returned an unexpected response from server, it's up to the device to handle the response and retry appropriately at a reasonable interval. Additionally, devices are responsible for handling timeouts that happen outside of IIS, which may be caused by network latency.
• With each request a device sends to IIS/Exchange, it should also report the User-Agent.

What will you see when you use this script?

The script utilizes Microsoft Log Parser 2.2 to parse IIS logs and generate results. It creates different SQL queries for Log Parser based on the switches (see table below) you use. A previous blog post Exchange 2003 - Active Sync reporting talking about Log Parser that touches on similar points. The information in that post still applies to Exchange 2010 & 2007. Since that blog post, additional commands were added to EAS protocol), which are also utilized by this new script while processing the logs.

Here's a list of the EAS commands that the script will report in results:

Sync, SendMail, SmartForward, SmartReply, GetAttachment, GetHierarchy, CreateCollection, DeleteCollection, MoveCollection, FolderSync, FolderCreate, FolderDelete, FolderUpdate, MoveItems, GetItemEstimate, MeetingResponse, Search, Settings, Ping, ItemOperations, Provision, ResolveRecipients, ValidateCert

For more details about each EAS command, see ActiveSync HTTP Protocol Specification on MSDN.

In addition to these commands, the following parameters are also logged by the script.

1. User
2. User Name
3. Device Type
4. Device ID
5. User-Agent
6. sc-bytes: This is only available if you have enabled this tag in IIS logging.
7. cs-bytes:This is only available if you have enabled this tag in IIS logging.
8. time-taken (in milliseconds): This is only available if you have enabled this tag in IIS logging.
9. Total number of requests or requests by Device ID
10. Total number of all 4xx status codes
11. Total number of all 5xx status codes (for more info, see KB: 318380 for IIS 6.0 & KB: 943891)
12. 409 status codes: 409 (Conflict) - A collection cannot be made at the Request-URI until one or more intermediate collections have been created. The server MUST NOT create those intermediate collections automatically (Ref: RFC 4918)
13. 500 status codes: After device sends OPTIONS command, it’s possible to get a 500 response back from server with ‘MissingCscCacheEntry’ error. This can happen as a result of an issue with the affinity where you have an Internet-facing CAS array proxying a request to an Internal CAS array. When the Internet-facing array sends the request to the Internal array, a CAS server will answer with the first 401. In the next communication, the request is handled by a different CAS server in the Internal array. Resolving the affinity issue with the Internal CAS array is the solution.
14. 503 status codes: The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a Retry-After header. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD handle the response as it would for a 500 response.

    Note: The existence of the 503 status code does not imply that a server must use it when becoming overloaded. Some servers may wish to simply refuse the connection. (Ref: RFC 2616)

15. 507 status codes: The 507 (Insufficient Storage) status code means the method could not be performed on the resource because the server is unable to store the representation needed to successfully complete the request. This condition is considered to be temporary. If the request that received this status code was the result of a user action, the request MUST NOT be repeated until it is requested by a separate user action. (Ref: RFC 4918)
16. 451 status codes: Exchange 2007/2010 returns an HTTP 451 response to an EAS client when it determines that the device should be using a ‘better’ CAS for EAS connectivity. The logic used to determine ‘better’ CAS is based on Active Directory sites and whether a CAS is considered ‘Internet-facing’. If the ExternalUrl property on the Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync virtual directory is specified, then that CAS is considered to be Internet-Facing for EAS connectivity. (Ref: TechNet articles Exchange ActiveSync Returned an HTTP 451 Error and Understanding Proxying and Redirection)
17. TooManyJobsQueued errors: For more info on ‘TooManyJobsQueued’ please refer to KB: 2469722 referenced above
18. OverBudget: A budget is the amount of access that a user or application may have for a specific setting. A budget represents how many connections a user may have or how much activity a user may be permitted for each one-minute period. (Ref: TechNet article)
19. Following subset of Common Status Codes: InvalidContent, ServerError, ServerErrorRetryLater, MailboxQuotaExceeded, DeviceIsBlockedForThisUser, AccessDenied, SyncStateNotFound, DeviceNotFullyProvisionable, DeviceNotProvisioned, ItemNotFound, UserDisabledForSync

What can you do with this script?

You can process logs using this script to retrieve the following details:

1. Hits by user/Device ID (users/devices with maximum number of requests sent to server)
2. Hits per hour/day (helps in determining the frequency of requests sent by user/device, time value is entered in seconds)
3. Hits by device with specified threshold limit (here you can specify a limit for hits/requests, i.e. all users who are sending 1000 requests per hour/day, etc.)
4. CSV export of results
5. HTML report of results
6. E-mail reports for monitoring (CSV/HTML formats)

Prerequisites:

Please make sure you have the following installed on your machine before using this script:

• Log Parser 2.2.
• Windows PowerShell 2.0 (installed by default on Windows 7 & Windows 2008 R2)

Script Parameters ParameterRequiredTypeDescription ActiveSyncOutputFolder Required System.String CSV and HTML output directory ActiveSyncOutputPrefix Optional System.String Prefixes string to the output file name CreateZip Optional System.Management.
Automation.SwitchParameter Creates a ZIP file. Can only be used with SendHTMLReport CreateZipSize Optional System.In32 Threshold file size. The Default is 2MB. Once this has been exceeded the file will be compressed. Requires SendHTMLReport and CreateZip to be true Date Optional System.String Specify a date to parse on. Enter date in the format: MM-DD-YYYY DeviceId Optional System.String Active Sync Device ID to parse on DisableColumnDetect Optional System.Management.
Automation.SwitchParameter Disables the ability to add additional columns to the report that users may have enabled, Example: time-taken

Note: If you are running against multiple files that may have different W3C headers this switch should be used. Help Optional System.Management.
Automation.SwitchParameter Outputs switch descriptions ReportBySeconds Optional System.Int32 Generates the report bases in the value entered in seconds Hourly Optional System.Management.
Automation.SwitchParameter Generates the report on a per hourly basis HTMLReport Optional System.Management.
Automation.SwitchParameter Creates an HTML Report HTMLCSVHeaders Optional System.String

IIS CSV Headers to Export on in the –HTMLReport.

Defaults: "DeviceID,Hits,Ping,Sync,FolderSync,DeviceType,User-Agent"

IISLogs Required System.Array

IIS Log Directory.
Example.- IISLogs D:\Server,'D:\Server 2'

LogParserExec Required System.String Path to LogParser.exe MinimumHits Optional System.Int32 Minimum Hit Threshold value where the report will generate on CSV and HTML SendEmailReport Optional System.Management.
Automation.SwitchParameter Enable Email reporting SMTPRecipient Optional System.String SMTP Recipient SMTPSender Optional System.String SMTP Sender SMTPServer Optional System.String SMTP Server TopHits Optional System.Int32

Top Hits to return.
Example: TopHits 50, This cannot be used with Hourly or ReportBySeconds

How do you use the script?

Below are some examples (with commands) on how you can use the script and why you might use them.

Hits greater than 1000

The following command will parse all the IIS Logs in the folder W3SVC1 and only report the hits by users & devices that are greater than 1000.

.\ActiveSyncReport.ps1 -IISLog "C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC1" -LogparserExec “C:\Program Files (x86)\Log Parser 2.2\LogParser.exe” -ActiveSyncOutputFolder c:\EASReports -MinimumHits 1000

[In above command, script ‘ActiveSyncReport.ps1’ is located at the root of C drive, -IISLog switch specifies the default location of IIS logs, -LogparserExec switch points to the location of Log Parser executable application file, -ActiveSyncOutputFolder switch provides the location where output or result file needs to be saved, MinimumHits with a value of ‘1000’ is the script parameter explained in the above table]

Output:

Usually if a device is sending over 1000 requests per day, we consider this ‘high usage’. If the hits (requests) are above 1500, there could be an issue on the device or environment. In that case, the device & its user’s activity should be further investigated.

As a real world example, in one case we noticed there were several users who were hitting their Exchange server via EAS a lot (~25K hits, 1K hits per hour) resulting in depletion of resources on the server. Upon further investigation we saw that all of those users’ requests were resulting in a 507 error on mailbox servers on the back-end. Talking to those EAS users we discovered that during that time period they were hitting their mailbox size limits (25 MB) & were trying to delete mail from different folders to get under the size limit. In such situations, you may also see HTTP 503 (‘TooManyJobsQueued’) responses in IIS logs for EAS requests as described in KB: 2469722

Isolating a specific device ID

Here the following command will parse all the IIS Logs in the folder C:\IISLogs and will look for the Device ID xxxxxx and display its hourly statistics.

.\ActiveSyncReport.ps1 -IISLog " C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC1" -LogparserExec “C:\Program Files (x86)\Log Parser 2.2\LogParser.exe” -ActiveSyncOutputFolder c:\EASReports –DeviceID xxxxxx -Hourly

Output:

With the above information you can pick a user/device and see the hourly trends. This can help identify if it’s a user action or a programmatic one.

As a real world example, in one case we had to find out which devices were modifying calendar items. So we looked at the user/device activity and sorted that by different commands they were sending to the server. After that we just concentrated on which users/devices were sending ‘MeetingResponse’ command and its frequency, time period & further related details. That helped us narrowing the issue to related users and their calendar specific activity to better address the underlying calendaring issue.

Another device related command & error to look for is ‘Options’ command and if it does not succeed for a device then the HTTP 409 error code is returned in IIS log.

Isolating a single day

The following command will parse only the files that match the date 12-24-2011 in the folder W3SVC1 and will only report the hits greater than 1000.

.\ActiveSyncReport.ps1 -IISLog "C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC1" -LogparserExec “C:\Program Files (x86)\Log Parser 2.2\LogParser.exe” -ActiveSyncOutputFolder c:\EASReports -MinimumHits 1000 –Date 12-24-2011

Output:

With the above information you can identify users sending high number of requests. Also, within the columns, you can see what kind of commands those users are sending. This helps in coming up with more directed & efficient troubleshooting techniques.

What Should You Look For?

When analyzing IIS logs with the help of script, you should look for one specific command being sent over and over again. The frequency of particular commands being sent is important, any command failing frequently is also very important & one should further look into that. We should also look & compare the wait times between the executions of certain commands. Generally, commands taking longer time to execute or resulting in delayed response from server will be suspicious & should be further investigated. Keep in mind though, the Ping command is an exception as it takes longer to execute and you will see it frequently in the log as well, which is expected.

If you notice continuous failures to connect for a device with en error code of 403 that could mean that the device is not enabled for EAS based access. Sometimes mobile device users complain of connectivity issues not realizing that they’re actually not entering their credentials correctly (understandably it’s easy to make such mistakes on mobile devices). When looking thru logs, you can focus on that user & may find that user’s device is failing after issuing the ‘Provision’ command.

Creating Reports for Monitoring

You may want to create a report or generate an e-mail with such reports and details of user activity.

The following command will parse all the IIS Logs in the folder W3SVC1 and will only report the hits greater than 1000. Additionally it will create an HTML report of the results.

.\ActiveSyncReport.ps1 -IISLog "C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC1" -LogparserExec “C:\Program Files (x86)\Log Parser 2.2\LogParser.exe” -ActiveSyncOutputFolder c:\EASReports -MinimumHits 1000 -HTMLReport

The following command will parse all the files in the folders C:\Server1_Logs and D:\Server2_Logs and will also email the generated report to ‘user@contoso.com’.

.\ActiveSyncReport.ps1 -IISLog "C:\Server1_Logs",”D:\Server2_Logs” -LogparserExec “C:\Program Files (x86)\Log Parser 2.2\LogParser.exe” -ActiveSyncOutputFolder c:\EASReports -SendEmailReport -SMTPRecipient user@contoso.com –SMTPSender user2@contoso.com -SMTPServer mail.contoso.com

We sincerely hope our readers find this script useful. Please do let us know how these scripts made your lives easier and what else can we do to further enhance it.

Konstantin Papadakis and Brian Drepaul

Special Thanks to:
M. Amir Haque, Will Duff, Steve Swift, Angelique Conde, Kary Wall, Chris Lineback & Mike Lagase

• PST Capture
• Download
• Documentation

Ask and ye shall receive, mateys!

As we announced in July, we are always looking for new ways to make your work easier - especially when your work involves ending PST proliferation. Today, we are happy to announce that PST Capture is now available as a free download.

PST Capture helps you search your network to discover and then import .pst files across your environment - all from a straightforward admin-driven tool. PST Capture will help reduce risk while increasing productivity for your users by importing .pst files into Exchange Online or Exchange Server 2010 - directly into users' primary mailboxes or archives.

In addition to all the positive feedback you have given us regarding the Archiving, Retention, Legal Hold and Discovery capabilities of Exchange, you made it clear that PST import is an important area for us to focus on moving forward. As we looked at the best ways to address this challenging need, we saw the great work that ISV partner, Red Gate, has done with their stellar solution. We determined that acquiring this product from Red Gate as a starting point was the best strategy to ensuring a quality product for you.

We put Red Gate’s tool through further feature development and a rigorous testing process that included beta testing with customers, passing through our internal product security gates, and overall quality assurance. It’s now ready for prime time and available as a free download here! For even more insight, watch the video below

And thus, we offer you PST Captarrrrrrrrrgh - or PST Capture, for those more refined than I.

As always, keep the feedback coming!

Ankur Kothari

Red Gate creates ingeniously simple software tools used by more than 500,000 IT professionals worldwide. The company works to uplift the market it serves through free web community sites, technical publications and conference sponsorships that reach millions annually.

Earlier today the Exchange CXP team released Update Rollup 6 for Exchange Server 2007 SP3 to the Download Center.

Note: The post title erroneously referred to Update Rollup 3. It has been updated to reflect the correct rollup number.

This update contains a number of customer-reported and internally found issues since the release of RU5. See KB 2608656: Description of Update Rollup 6 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3' for more details.

We would like to specifically call out the following fixes which are included in this release:

• DST Cadence Release for Dec 2011 - Exchange 2007
• 22656040 An Exchange Server 2007 Client Access server may respond slowly or stop responding when users try to synchronize the Exchange ActiveSync devices with their mailboxes
• 2498852 "0x80041606" error message when you perform a prefix search by using Outlook in online mode in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 22653334 The reseed process is unsuccessful on the SCR passive node when the circular logging feature is enabled in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 22617784 Journal reports are expired or lost when the Microsoft Exchange Transport service is restarted in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 2289607 The week numbers displayed in OWA do not match the week numbers displayed in Outlook for English users and French users in an Exchange Server 2007 environment

General Notes:

For DST Changes: http://www.microsoft.com/time.

Note for Forefront Protection for Exchange users  For those of you running Forefront Protection for Exchange, be sure you perform these important steps from the command line in the Forefront directory before and after this rollup's installation process. Without these steps, Exchange services for Information Store and Transport will not start after you apply this update. Before installing the update, disable ForeFront by using this command: fscutility /disable. After installing the update, re-enable ForeFront by running fscutility /enable.

Exchange Team

The key takeaway from my last post on this topic was that the Resource Booking Assistant never allows double booking of a resource room calendar as a result of a recurring meeting request (please see Automatic Processing of Recurring Meeting Requests with Conflicting Instances).

Since there are times that an administrator may want to allow double-booking, we offered two workarounds that I’d like to address in a bit more depth. I'd also like to offer a third one that wasn’t mentioned before:

1) Send Follow-Up Nonrecurring Meeting Requests to Double Book

Recall that if a recurring meeting series is accepted individual conflict notifications will be emailed to the organizer in addition to the acceptance email for the series. The organizer can use those declined-instance emails as a reference for following the first of our workarounds, which would be to send additional non-recurring meeting requests to double-book the intended resource room for each declined instance.

This method, though laborious, allows fine control over when a resource is double booked and when not.

Suppose on the other hand an administrator follows the second workaround, and hands control to a trusted delegate instead of the Resource Booking Assistant? A delegate has the human discretion to allow all recurring meeting conflicts to double book by accepting an entire recurring meeting series. It also turns out a delegate can selectively decline any number of conflicting instances while accepting the series, something the assistant cannot. The question came up about how exactly they can do this, so let’s take a look:

2) Allow a Delegate to Double Book Resources

The request policy on a resource mailbox can be configured to require delegate control over resolving recurring meeting request instance conflicts. But how exactly do they use that power? What might the process look like, and what tools can they use carry it out? The best functionality for this is in Outlook 2010.

Let’s go to an example. Say we have a resource room, called Green Room, which is managed by a delegate named Howard. As meeting requests for the Green Room come in Howard accepts them for the room calendar. Presently there’s a meeting scheduled for 2PM on Wednesday, and another for 3PM on the following Thursday.

Now a new recurring meeting request with the Green Room as the room resource goes out to several recipients. The room’s request policy requires Howard to approve all meeting requests, so this new one gets forwarded to him. We see that the recurring meeting request is for four instances, Tuesday through Thursday, from 2:30PM - 3:30PM each day. Outlook helpfully points out (highlighted in yellow and also below the Calendar Preview) that two of the four instances conflict with the existing appointments:

If Howard wishes to accept the entire series, and allow double booking he can just accept the whole thing. But what if he wants to decline one conflict, but allow the other? Howard can click on the arrow next to “Conflicts: 2” and get a preview of each area of the calendar where conflicts overlap with an existing appointment.

He does so, and sees the first conflict is with the Wednesday, 2PM Catalog Review meeting:

The second is with the Sales Presentation meeting on Thursday:

Suppose Howard wishes to decline the double booking on Thursday, but let the Wednesday conflict get booked? To decline the Thursday instance he can simply double-click on the item in the Calendar Preview section of the forwarded meeting request.

That action will open up a view for that time from the Green Room’s calendar. Howard can then right click on the instance that he wishes to decline, go to the Decline menu item, then select an option to decline just this occurrence:

Now that Howard has determined which instance to decline and which to allow he can simply go back to the original forwarded meeting request, and accept the series. This will accept all the remaining instances while preserving the manually declined instances:

So to summarize a delegate's power in this area, they can use the conflict notifications provided in Outlook 2010 to quickly decline (or accept) individual occurrences of a recurring meeting request.

3) Send a Series Update Without Changing Details

There is a third known way of working around the Resource Booking Assistant’s refusal to double book a room due to a recurring meeting request. Thanks to feedback from a customer relayed to me by my colleague Patriciu Seliceanu, we now know that a meeting organizer can simply send an update for a recurring meeting but without changing any details. The amazing result is that conflict instances declined before are then accepted. This workaround of course requires that conflicts be allowed for single-instance meeting requests, which by default is enabled in virtue of the AllowConflicts attribute set to "True" for calendar processing settings.

The update to the recurring meeting works because each recipient receives not another recurring meeting request, but an update meeting request (with no actual changes) for each individual instance. Since Exchange sees much the same as the single-instance meeting requests from workaround method 1 above it allows double-booking for each updated instance. This may save a bit of labor over the steps required in item 1 of this list, such as when the number of conflicts is high, and assuming every conflict should be double booked.

In conclusion, there are a number of ways to work around the safety mechanism inherent in the Resource Booking Assistant which prevents recurring meeting request from double-booking a resource mailbox. The most robust and powerful of these is the intrepid delegate with Outlook 2010 at their fingertips and Exchange 2010 at the ready. Please note though that for the majority of cases, you should not even have to worry about doing this, as in most cases, the default behavior is the correct one.

Thanks to Tom Kern for his help and counsel, and to Patriciu Seliceanu for method 3.

Jesse Tedoff

Some of sharper readers of our documentation talking about schema changes that Exchange makes (see Exchange Server Active Directory Schema Changes Reference, November 2011) have noticed that in Exchange 2010 SP2, we have added several things that sound very related to what’s traditionally known as “custom attributes” in Exchange. Specifically:

For object class ms-Exch-Custom-Attributes we added:

• ms-Exch-Extension-Attribute-16 to 45
• ms-exch-extension-custom-attribute-1 to 5

There have been some questions regarding this; namely – are all of those for you to use? Does this mean that you now have all of those attributes to modify to your heart’s content? What’s the difference between all those things anyway?

Here’s the scoop:

For a while now, Exchange provides 15 custom attributes. Those are still there and you are free to use them as you used them before. They are known as CustomAttribute1 to 15 (or can also be referred to as ms-Exch-Extension-Attribute1 to 15). For more on those, please see this. So nothing has changed with those.

New! In Exchange 2010 SP2, we have added five new multi-value custom attributes that you can use to store information for mail recipient objects. They are the ExtensionCustomAttribute1 to 5 (also can be referred to as ms-exch-extension-custom-attribute-1 to 5). For the list of CMDlets that support those, please see this.

New! Finally, we have also added ms-Exch-Extension-Attribute-16 to 45. Those are not exposed to various CMDlets and Exchange management UI, because they were added for future use. As such, we cannot recommend that you use non-Exchange tools to edit their values because we might use those attributes in the future for various Exchange features. If and when we add management tools access to them, we will definitely let you know!

Nino Bilic

To follow on from the recent blog post where I covered changes to hosting scenarios in Exchange Server 2010 SP2, we have been working on some documents to help our hosting customers migrate to SP2. The first of those is for those customers coming from the Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) 4.5. We have just published a paper and a set of scripts to help you with migration.

Check out Migrating Exchange from HMC 4.5 to Exchange Server 2010 SP2. It contains a white paper and PowerShell scripts. Together they provide the recommended and supported migration path from HMC 4.5 to Exchange 2010 SP2. The steps in the guide may also be helpful when migrating from non-HMC environments that have configured some form of multi-tenancy.

Coming soon will be a guide to help you migrate from Exchange /hosting mode to Exchange 2010 SP2 installed without the /hosting switch.

I hope this helps you with your plans to migrate to Exchange Server 2010 SP2.

Greg Taylor