Chris’s Blog

Just a short post, hope this will help someone by making Exchange 2010 even easier to deploy. Open Powershell with elevated rights and run the following 3 cmdlets:

• Import-Module ServerManager
• Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework,RSAT-ADDS,Web-Server,Web-Basic-Auth,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-Metabase,Web-Net-Ext,Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console,WAS-Process-Model,RSAT-Web-Server,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web-Digest-Auth,Web-Dyn-Compression,NET-HTTP-Activation,RPC-Over-HTTP-Proxy –Restart
• Set-Service NetTcpPortSharing -StartupType Automatic

Microsoft yesterday published Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-024. This security update resolves one publicly disclosed vulnerability and one privately reported vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange and Windows SMTP Service. The more severe of these vulnerabilities could allow denial of service if an attacker sent a specially crafted DNS response to a computer running the SMTP service.

KB976323 provides detailed information on the security update for Windows SMTP Service, for Exchange Server specific information, see the following links:

• For Exchange 2000 Server see KB976703 or download here
• For Exchange Server 2003 SP2 see KB976702 or download here
• For Exchange Server 2007 SP1 see KB981407 – Update Rollup 10 or download here
• For Exchange Server 2007 SP2 see KB981383 – Update Rollup 4 or download here
• For Exchange Server 2010 see KB981401 – Update Rollup 3 or download here

The Microsoft Exchange Team yesterday announced the upcoming release of Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1). As one would expect, SP1 will include fixes and tweaks including a roll-up of the roll-ups released to date. There will also be several feature enhancements, here is an overview of some of these:

• Improvements to the Multi-Mailbox Search: search preview, search result de-duplication & annotation of reviewed items.
• Outlook Web App: Improved reading experience, users will also be able to share their calendars to anonymous viewers via the web (assuming you enable this), the reading pane can be placed on the bottom or the right side.
• Mobility: Support for send-as, full implementation of conversation view, and more..
• Several new management UI enhancements including: RBAC role management in ECP, Configure MailTips in ECP, Configure Transport Rules in ECP, Configure Database Availability Group (DAG) IP Addresses and Alternate Witness Server in EMC, Recursive public folder settings management (including permissions) in EMC

While these are all great feature improvements, I thought I would call out the two that I am very excited about. There are two things that always come up when I talk to customers about Exchange Server 2010 and the integrated archiving capabilities. The first is the lack of ability to provision a user’s personal archive to a different mailbox database from their primary mailbox. The second is that users are unable to access their personal archives from Outlook 2007. The good news is that SP1 will enable the support of both these. Thanks guys!

Exchange 2010 SP1 is due for release later this year.

Microsoft have announced official support for the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 member server role on a server that has a Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system installed. Now for the fine print.. the following scenarios are currently not supported on Windows Server 2008 R2:

• Group Chat will not function in a Windows 2008 R2 forest or when Group Chat member servers are joined to a Windows 2008 R2 domain. Some issues with changes in Windows 2008 R2 require a Group Chat Client and Group Chat Admin Tools hotfix, scheduled for mid-April 2010.
• Deploying Group Chat on Windows 2008 R2 is currently not supported.
• Upgrading the operating system to Windows Server 2008 R2 for an existing installation of OCS 2007 R2 is not supported.
• Installing 32-bit OCS 2007 R2 administration tools on 64-bit Windows 2008 R2 is not supported.Development with Speech Server 2007 Developer Edition and deployment of the Speech Server 2007 role are not supported on Windows Server 2008 R2.

For more information, see KB 982021