A question came up in the forums today about how to use the AD Powershell cmdlets to find objects with attribute values that contain a single space. It’s a good question and relevant because often your results can be skewed by such values when searching for attributes that are not NULL (a space character is… Read More »
You might come across a slight gotcha with SPF records if are using Exchange Online Protection (EOP) to provide protection for your on-premises mail environment and you don’t need to use EOP to scan your outbound (i.e. on-premises to Internet) messages. If this scenario is of interest to you, read on… You may be… Read More »
It’s sometimes interesting to know how old your AD forest is and when the various domains were created. I recently came across a really useful TechNet Blog with a Powershell snippet to do just this. My version shown below just has some slightly different formatting. # How old is the forest? Get-ADObject -SearchBase (Get-ADForest).PartitionsContainer `… Read More »
To be honest I’m only writing this one because I know I’ll get confused in the future and will want to refer to something authoritative. 🙂 There are two configurable values when considering how to change the Exchange Server 2013 Offline Address Book (OAB) generation schedule from its default of 1 day. These are: OABGeneratorWorkCycle… Read More »
If you have Send As permissions on another recipient object (e.g. mailbox, distribution group) you have the ability to specify that object’s primary SMTP address as your “From” address when sending from Outlook and Outlook Web App (OWA). How you achieve this in OWA is not immediately obvious, so here are some (hopefully helpful) screenshots. … Read More »
Let me start out by saying that I am not an Apple-hater. Nor do I have an irrational fear of their products [incredibly, there is a word for a fear of apples: Malusdomesticaphobia]. Generally, I find Apple’s products to be stylish and simple to use. So why would I find myself suffused with a feeling… Read More »
If you haven’t heard that extended support for Windows XP ended earlier this year you’ve clearly been in a coma. There are a number of well-publicised methods for finding out whether you still have XP machines in your environment. Here is my own humble (and spectacularly over engineered) Powershell offering. ######################################################### # # Name:… Read More »
There was in interesting discussion the other day on the ActiveDir.org mailing list. Someone asked how many values can be stored within the proxyAddresses mutlivalued attribute in Active Directory. The responses were reasonably consistent, with most people indicating that in Windows 2000 the number was in the range of approximately 800 to 850 and from… Read More »
I upgraded a client’s CAS servers recently from Exchange 2007 Service Pack 2 Update Rollup 5 to Service Pack 3 Update Rollup 13 in preparation for upgrade to Exchange 2013. Following the restart after the Update Rollup had completed I found I could not log into OWA. Instead I got a blank page with a… Read More »
When you install a new version of Exchange or apply a Cumulative Update certain AD attributes are updated to reflect the change. The updates are made in three different directory partitions (also known as naming contexts): Schema, Configuration and Domain. The following Microsoft TechNet article is a good reference for the different versions and the… Read More »