Hyper-V is released

Finally Hyper-V is relased. Download from http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v.
It should also be available on Microsoft Update on July 8, 2008
More and good info is at http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2008/06/26/wu-hoo-only-12-days-to-wu.aspx

Keep an eye open for more info about Exchange and Hyper-V within 60 days from now.

Exchange Web Services Windows Vista Gadget Sample Application

If you’re in to vista sidebar gadgets or want to know how to use Exchange 2007 Web services, this one is for you.

It’s a vista gadget that retrieves Inbox, Calendar, and Task information from a user's Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 mailbox.
Link for download is here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f9a0d33c-c894-4ea1-ad20-4e418c715175&DisplayLang=en

Default installation directory is “C:\Program Files\Microsoft\ExDevCenterDownloads\EWSVistaGadgetSample” and there you will find a document with lots of info about this gadget
Also see “C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\ExchangeWebServices.gadget” directory for the gadget HTML files

Testexchangeconnectivity website open

Microsoft has built a site for testing some Exchange 2007 functionality.
https://testexchangeconnectivity.com/
Be sure that you use a test account when entering credentials then sit back and enjoy the show.

Backup of Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008

With Windows 2008 there is no more NTBackup that you can use to backup Exchange 2007 server, and the windows team did not put in support for Exchange streaming backup in the new Windows 2008 backup software.

There is unsupported workarounds with copying DLL’s and use the old NTBackup, but that’s not the recommended way of doing it.

Thankfully Microsoft listened and acted on peoples requests and they will create an addon or whatever its going to be called to the Windows 2008 backup software that can be used for Exchange backups. It will also use the modern way of doing backup with help of the VSS framework.

The sad story is that it’s not downloadable at this moment, but the word is that it will be this summer.

IPV6 on Windows 2008 together with Exchange 2007 SP1

Exchange 2007 SP1 has support for IPV6 under certain circumstances. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb629624.aspx
Since most people don’t use IPV6 on there’s network I suggest that you disabled it (it cannot be uninstalled). This is done in 3 steps.
· Uncheck the IPV6 checkbox on your NIC settings.
· Edit the hosts file and disable the line “::1 localhost”, that is put a # sign at the front.
· And the last thing is to do is edit a registry value. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip6\Parameters\DisabledComponents and put in a DWORD with value of 0xffffffff
This will turn off IPV6 for everything except the loopback traffic and Exchange does not have an issue with that. For more ref. see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929852
You have to reboot your server after editing this registry value.

Doing all this will also resolve some other issues, the most famous one is the problem with RPCProxy component only listening on IPV4 and make Outlook Anywhere work again.

Remove proxyaddresses powershell script

A friend of mine approached me with a question about email addresses on his Exchange servers the other day. He wanted to remove some old SMTP addresses not used anymore and of course not doing this the manual way by clicking each recipient and remove the address, some sort of script was needed.
He is using Exchange 2007 so I figured a PowerShell script would do it. This is the PowerShell script I created. It can certainly be made more flexible and efficient, but this one still functions well.create a file “remove_proxyaddess.ps1” and edit line 6 and 13 to suit you environment

# Remove proxy addresses
# change the Get-Mailbox statement in line 6 to select only a subset of mailboxes
# change -like paratameter in line 13 to the domain you want to remove

#get mailboxes and iterate through
Get-Mailbox foreach {
# .emailaddresses returns array
# loop each email address
for ($i=0;$i -lt $_.EmailAddresses.Count; $i++)
{
$address = $_.EmailAddresses[$i]
# removes all addresses with test.com domain
if ($address.SmtpAddress -like "*@test.domain" )
{
Write-host("Remove smtp adress: " + $address.AddressString.ToString() )
# remove address in the array
$_.EmailAddresses.RemoveAt($i)
}
}
# save changes
$_ set-mailbox
}

Run script from Exchange Management console. Script will output info to the console so adjusting screen buffer size to a large value is a good thing so you can scroll through output and see what happened when running script.