Exchange Hosted Services at Microsoft is a new technical whitepaper from Microsoft IT Showcase.
"The Microsoft Information Technology (Microsoft IT) group required a reliable and cost-efficient solution to increase protection against spam, viruses, and other messaging threats. Microsoft IT implemented Microsoft® Exchange Hosted Services to meet these needs."
If you want to know why is spam a big problem for Microsoft, look at the following picture:
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"Spam submission attempts have increased at Microsoft over the past five years by more than a factor of 10 and almost tripled from 11 million to 28 million submission attempts in the fiscal year of 2007/2008, as indicated in Figure."
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The November edition of TechNet Magazine is now available online or, if you prefer, you can download as an HTML Help .chm file for offline reading.
Although there's a column about messaging - Exchange Queue & A: Outlook Anywhere and IPv6, the Remote Connectivity Analyzer, and More - the rest of this issue is pretty much about System Center (Operations Manager and Configuration Manager in particular).
Enjoy your reading.
The latest* Unified Communications technical rollup covers the following topics:
- News/Blogs
- Downloads
- Events/Webcasts
As usual, this information is posted every month at the Technical Rollup blog.
*UPDATE: The October 2008 Technical Rollup Mail - Unified Communications was also posted today.
I was planning this for some time now and I finally did it!
If you're a fan of Microsoft Unified Communications (and also the movie Trainspotting), check my new blog: UCspotting - http://blogs.technet.com/ucspotting/.
The blog will be dedicated to the whole UC platform, which includes Office Communications Server and Exchange.
I hope you like it.
Ross Smith IV announced at the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog that the Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator has been updated to version 16.0.
According to the updates tracking page at the You Had Me At EHLO blog, these are the Bug Fixes / Enhancements:
- The changes introduced in v15.6 in the Storage Design worksheet introduced a logic error where the recommended RAID Configuration / Server would recommend a null configuration when you selected "--" for the database disk type in Configuration 3. This has been corrected to ensure that only enabled disk configurations are considered when making a recommendation.
- Validation logic was added to the custom database size input factor to remind you that you need to enter in a value greater than 0.
- Fixed various input factor comments.
- Fixed RAID-0 calculations for the database and log configuration options 2 and 3. In previous releases, the RAID-0 values for these configurations were utilizing the RAID-1/0 data points.
- Updated the backup and restore rate input factors to indicate that these only apply for steaming backup calculations. Also added validation logic to disable the input options when VSS backup methodologies are chosen.
- Fixed the streaming backup rate calculations to include all transaction logs generated in a day (user generation + move mailbox). Previous releases only considered user log generation.
- Updated the text and note for the "Additional I/O Requirement" field to indicate that the input value is per mailbox server.
- Added streaming restore calculations for both full database restore and incremental / differential backup restore to the Backup requirements worksheet.
- Added the following note to the Storage Design worksheet - Important: This tool should only be used for storage modeling purposes. Please consult with the storage vendor regarding storage design and follow recommended storage design testing processes. The example configuration provided within this calculator is just that, an example, and as such, each input option needs to be evaluated as to how it will affect your design.
To get the detailed instructions on how to use it, read Exchange 2007 Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator.
Exchange MVP Jim McBee has recently posted on his blog the links to download all the presentations he made in the past Connections conferences:
Are you still using Microsoft Outlook 2003? If yes, you might be interested in this Update for Outlook 2003 (KB924423).
Brief Description
This update provides holidays for the Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 calendar for the years 2007 through 2012.
Overview
You can get specific information about this update in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article Description of the Update for Outlook 2003 (KB924423).
Note: Users of Indonesian, Malay, Urdu, and Vietnamese language versions of Microsoft Office 2003 can download and install office2003-KB924423-fullfile-enu.exe. Refer to the Instructions section below for details.
Instructions
Note: Administrators should refer to the Administrator resources section.
Installation instructions
If you have Microsoft Outlook 2003, do one of the following:
- Install Update for Outlook 2003 (KB924423). To do this, follow these steps:
- Download the .exe file by clicking on the Download button at the top of the page, and then save the file to your hard disk drive.
- office2003-KB924423-fullfile-enu.exe: You should download this file if you have access to your original product CD-ROM. You might need to provide the installation source during patch installation if you have previously updated your product.
- It is recommended that you quit any programs you are running.
- In Windows Explorer, double-click the .exe file that you saved to your hard disk drive, and follow the instructions on the screen.
Administrator resources
Administrators working in managed environments can find complete resources for deploying Office updates in an organization on the Office Admin Update Center. On that site, scroll down and look under the Update Resources section for the product version you are updating.
The download for this update is available by clicking on the Download button at the top of the page. You can double-click the executable package to begin installation, or extract the patch files (MSP files) by using a command line. The command line and instructions are included in the Knowledge Base article (197147): Command-Line Switches For IExpress Software Update Packages.
See the Microsoft Knowledge Base article Description of the Update for Outlook 2003 (KB924423) for further information about this update.
The October edition of TechNet Magazine is now available online or, if you prefer, you can download as an HTML Help .chm file for offline reading.
Virtualization, virtualization and more virtualization, that's the story of this issue.
So, maybe now it's a good time to review Microsoft official policy about virtualizing Exchange servers: Microsoft Support Policies and Recommendations for Exchange Servers in Hardware Vir