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Research In Motion has released new guidance for the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) service account after upgrading to Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1.  While BES does not yet formally support SP1, it can work with a few changes to the custom Throttling Policy created for the BES service account.  Please note that, while BES can work with Exchange 2010 SP1, you must strongly consider RIM’s current support statement before completing an upgrade to SP1.  It is strongly encouraged to wait for formal support from RIM before upgrading a production Exchange 2010 environment to SP1 if BES is a critical application in your environment.
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Being able to drag and drop emails and attachments from Outlook into a SharePoint folder is one of the things that’s clearly missing in SharePoint and Outlook 2010.  The lack of this functionality is a non-starter for any law firm that wants to manage emails and is considering SharePoint as their DMS.  There’s a number of good solutions from third-party vendors to address this shortcoming, including Colligo, MacroView Wisdom, Accola DMS4Legal, and some other products that we’ve been beta testing.  But what if you don’t want to spend any additional money, and are looking for a real basic solution?  Here’s two ways to keep it simple, and be able to get your email and attachments into SharePoint…
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I’ve worked with a few clients that, for various reasons, have modified the FQDN of the SMTP Virtual Server.  By default, an SMTP Virtual Server will respond to an EHLO with the FQDN of the server itself (e.g. NYMAIL01.client.local) but some clients have adjusted this to something entirely different (e.g. SMTP.client.com).  Most of the time, clients have changed this to mask the name of the underlying server responding to SMTP.

While modifying the FQDN of the SMTP Virtual Server certainly does mask this, the actual internal IP address of the server is still listed in the e-mail message headers and, as such, the identity of the server isn’t actually masked.  Furthermore, if a hacker were to compromise a perimeter firewall, not knowing the exact name of the server providing SMTP services will not deter much.
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Client throttling is a feature of Exchange 2010 that restricts simultaneous connections and processor utilization on a per user basis so that a single user or rogue process cannot exhaust precious resources on the Exchange server.  However, if not configured properly and adjusted to meet an individual environment’s needs, client throttling can lead to end user frustration and the inability to complete work functions.  Microsoft’s TechNet article here describes client throttling and details for each configurable parameter.  The most common issues associated with client throttling that I’ve seen in client environments are related to delegate mailbox access and third party integrated applications, which I discuss below.
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Once you have moved all of your mailboxes to Exchange 2010 and properly decommission your Exchange 2003 (move public folder hierarchies, transition mail flow, move OAB generation, etc.), you may see MSExchange Store Driver event ID 1020 errors like these:

The store driver couldnt deliver the public folder replication message “Hierarchy (PublicFolder@client.com)” because the following error occurred: The Active Directory user wasn’t found.

These errors likely coincide with some public folder replication issues but, more importantly, can also result in NDRs when messages are sent to mail-enabled public folders!  This issue occurs because, even if you properly decommission Exchange 2003, the Servers containers within your legacy Exchange 2003 Administrative Groups still exist within Active Directory, albeit empty.  Exchange assumes that, if a Servers container exists (even if it is empty), a System Attendant object will also exist somewhere inside of it but, if all of your Exchange 2003 servers have been decommissioned, those System Attendant objects actually do not exist.

This issue has been recognized as a bug within Exchange (see the MS Exchange Team Blog article here) and a fix a scheduled for an upcoming Update Rollup release (perhaps Update Rollup 5).  In the meantime, you can safely delete these empty Servers containers via ADSI Edit but make sure that these containers completely empty before doing so.

For more in my series on Exchange 2010 Notes from the Field, please click here.

One of my earlier Exchange 2010 deployments was at a client that had modified the default inheritance settings of Active Directory such that default security permissions did not apply to some Organizational Units (OUs).  This prevented ActiveSync from creating necessary objects and setting necessary attributes to provision iPhones for these users against their Exchange 2010 mailboxes.  Similar issues occur if you attempt to configure an ActiveSync device for a mailbox associated with a user that is a member of certain privileged groups within Active Directory (e.g. Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins, etc.).

To resolve this issue for the specific case at my client, we simply needed to enable inheritance on the OUs or users where it had previously been disabled.

Resolving this issue for members of privileged groups is a bit more complicated.  Basically, the lack of inheritance is by design for users that are members of privileged AD groups.  Every hour, a background process runs on domain controllers to apply the permissions assigned to the AdminSDHolder template object to all members of privileged groups.  You can review the permissions that will be applied by launching Active Directory Users and Computers, enabling Advanced Features within the View menu, and then reviewing the security permissions of the AdminSDHolder object within the System OU.

The true solution is to provide administrators with separate administrative-only accounts (e.g. JohnAdmin.admin) that are members of the required AD groups and have these administrators use normal, non-privileged accounts (e.g. JohnAdmin) for e-mail functionality.  In some environments, this may not be possible and, as a result, you have two workarounds.  First, you could modify the permissions on the AdminSDHolder template object to include the required Exchange permissions.  I don’t recommend this since you would be modifying a fairly important and engrained aspect of Active Directory for what should be a few isolated users.  Instead, you could temporarily enable inheritance on your administrative users and, as long as you configure these users’ ActiveSync devices before the next application of AdminSDHolder permissions, it will work just fine.  Once an ActiveSync device is provisioned for the user, these special Exchange permissions are no longer required.

For more information on AdminSDHolder, the associated default permissions, and instructions for modifying these permissions, please refer to http://policelli.com/blog/?p=136.

For more in my series on Exchange 2010 Notes from the Field, please click here.

In some cases, you may encounter an issue where you move a mailbox from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 and, while the move request completed, you receive a warning stating “failed to cleanup the source mailbox after the move.”  All of the content is successfully moved, appropriate attributes are updated to point to Exchange 2010, and all new messages are delivered to the Exchange 2010 mailbox.  However, you will see disconnected mailboxes for the affected users in Exchange 2003 System Manager and you cannot purge the disconnected mailboxes.

The issue can be caused by search folder problems in the Exchange 2003 mailbox and similar issues were fixed in Exchange 2007 via Service Pack 2.  Microsoft describes ways to purge the disconnected Exchange 2003 mailbox at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;930363 but the workarounds involve either a number of manual steps or reducing your mailbox retention settings to 0 days and allowing normal Exchange online maintenance to purge the mailboxes.  The latter would also purge any legitimately deleted mailboxes that you may want to retain for some period of time so the safest workaround may be to just wait for your normal online maintenance procedures to purge the mailboxes for you (30 days by default).

For more in my series on Exchange 2010 Notes from the Field, please click here.

Named properties are a legacy mechanism by which Exchange reserves a property ID in a limited addressable space for use by applications.  The history of and issues with named properties are discussed in detail at the MS Exchange Team Blog here but the important note is that, with the explosion of Internet e-mail and numerous applications requiring Exchange to allocate named properties for debatably useful reasons, the number of named properties in Exchange can grow quickly toward predefined quota thresholds.  At this point users could be prevented from sending e-mail from Outlook.

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Every so often, you may encounter issues with DAG name and/or IP address resources going offline in your DAG Failover Cluster with the following (or similar) error code:

Cluster IP address resource ‘Cluster IP Address’ cannot be brought online because the cluster network ‘Cluster Network 2′ is not configured to allow client access. Please use the Failover Cluster Manager snap-in to check the configured properties of the cluster network.

Since all end user client connectivity occurs through the CAS role, this is generally not a user-facing issue but integrated applications that depend on the DAG name for connectivity would fail to connect in this case.  The most common example of an application that could potentially be affected is an Exchange-aware backup application.

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If you read Microsoft’s documentation and guidance regarding DAG design, you will note guidance that the greater number of DAG members that you have, the better.  This is because, with more DAG members, you can increase your resiliency in the event of member failures.

For example, with two, three-node DAGs, each DAG can sustain only a single member failure and still remain online.  Since a three-node DAG requires two voting members for quorum, two simultaneous voting member failures would result in a loss of quorum and the DAG going offline.  However, a single, six-node DAG (stretched across sites if desired) can sustain three simultaneous voting member failures before going offline.  Since a six-node DAG would require four online voting members, you could have three Mailbox server members online plus your Witness Server and sustain simultaneous failures in the three other Mailbox server members without losing quorum.
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