Creating a Recurring Email in Windows Server 2008 Using Exchange 2010

On occasion, an organization may have a need to send a recurring email. In the case of one of our customers, there was a need to send a weekly notice to users that patches would be applied to the terminal servers overnight with a friendly reminder to save any work. To set this up is really quite simple. Here is how:

First, open the Task Schedule and choose Create Task. This will open the Task Properties window.

Task Scheduler ActionsOn the General tab of the Task Properties window, fill in a Description. Choose the user account from which you would like to send the email. Finally, choose “Run whether user is logged on or not” and “Run with highest privileges.

Task Scheduler Task PropertiesOn the Triggers tab, click New. Make selections as appropriate for the frequency and be sure to check Enabled.

On the Actions tab, choose “Send an e-mail” from the Action drop-down menu. Fill out the From, Subject, and Text of the message. Add any appropriate attachment and fill in the SMTP server address. If the Scheduled Task is being configured on your Exchange server, you can simply enter 127.0.0.1 for the SMTP server. Click OK to return to the Task Properties window.

Task Scheduler New ActionOn the Conditions tab, specify the conditions under which the task should run.

On the Settings tab, you should choose  “Allow task to be run on demand”.

After clicking OK to close all the Windows, right-click the task, and click Run to test. Ensure that the test email is received by the intended recipient(s).

In some instances, you may need to configure a Receive Connector on your Exchange server which allows anonymous relay. You can find a instructions for doing that on Microsoft’s website here.

Fixing a Corrupted Nickname Entry in Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook maintains a list of formerly used email addresses which is used for the automatic completion feature. If one of these “nicknames” becomes corrupted it can cause any emails to that address to bounce. If this happens, the proper way to fix itis is to delete the corrupted entry and retype the email address in the To… field.

How to remove a corrupted nickname cache entry

  1. Open a new email message.
  2. Type the first few characters of the nickname cache entry that you want to remove from the cache.
  3. When the entry appears in the list of suggested names, use the Up and Down arrow keys on your keyboard to move the highlight to the entry you want to remove.
  4. Hit the Delete key on your keyboard to remove it from the list.

Exchange Infostore will not start because of Vmhost time setting?

We recently had several clients whose exchange servers went offline for seemingly no apparent reason.  The servers were up and there were no connection or permissions issues, but we kept getting a strange error in the logs.

Error: Unable to initialize the Information Store service because  the clocks on the client and server are skewed.   This may be caused by a time change either in the client or the server,  and may require a reboot of that computer.   Verify that your domain is properly configured and  is currently online.

After investigation, we found that the Vmhost running the exchange server did not have the correct time set up.  We changed the time on the host (we actually enabled NTP to match the domain controller), and rebooted the exchange server.  The exchange server came up and the infostore started without error.  Everything was then fine in the world again.

Microsoft – Official PST to Exchange Import Tool

Microsoft has just announced they have released a tool that allow admins to automatically crawl users computers and import PST files into Exchange Online or Exchange 2010.

Download http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=28767

Thanks to the following blog for the info:
http://www.grouppolicy.biz/2012/01/out-now-official-pst-to-exchange-import-tool/

 

Exchange 2010 on VMware vSphere

Short article showing the impact of adding memory to the virtual machine running Exchange 2010 on top of vSphere.  As you will see there is quite an impact adding memory can have on the amount of disk I/O generated.  With the I/O numbers generated you certainly don’t need expensive EMC disk either!

http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2010/05/exchange-2010-disk-io-on-vsphere.html

The next link is to the first part of the series where they tested the impact of adding virtual cpu’s to the Exchange 2010 server(s).

http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2010/05/exchange-2010-scaleup-performance-on-vsphere.html

What is interesting in both cases is the amount of cpu and disk for 8000 users in both of these test is EASILY within the capabilities of VMware vSphere….so virtualize already!

New version of Exchange Server Profile Analyzer

Use the Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer tool to collect estimated statistical information from a single mailbox store or across an Exchange Server organization. The collected data can be used for such tasks as analyzing the performance and health of a server that has mailboxes, improving capacity planning models, and improving testing methodologies and tools.

32 bit – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=8F575F60-BD80-44AA-858B-A1F721108FAD&displaylang=en

64 bit – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C009C049-9F4C-4519-A389-69C281B2ABDA&displaylang=en