This blog captures thoughts of a very idle mind. I make no guarantees about what is posted here. You may be lucky and find something interesting or then again, you might not. If you’re interested in receiving updates, you can click on the “Subscribe” button above and you will then receive new blog posts as they occur.
For those that care, I let people know about new posts through linkedin.com, which in turn updates the world via Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter at 12Knocksinna.
I never really had much time to blog about interesting topics or anything else when I was working at HP, but since I retired from full-time corporate life in March 2010 I have more time to contemplate issues such as the evolution of email (especially Microsoft Exchange Server), travel in Ireland, France, and elsewhere, and rugby refereeing, all of which are topics that I like to write about. I still do some consulting to help companies figure out issues of a strategic nature – not being very technical, I can’t really solve all the deep and dark technical issues for companies, but I have a great ability to ask annoying and pertinent questions.
I recently completed my Exchange 2010 book for Microsoft Press. Guaranteed to send anyone to sleep after two pages or less and covering the ins and outs of Exchange 2010 SP1, the book is now available at Amazon.com and all good online booksellers… see Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out
A bundle of the Exchange 2010 Best Practices book and my Exchange 2010 Inside Out book is also available from Amazon.com.
Through the excellent technical editing done by Paul Robichaux, many hints and tips provided by the development group, and the collective effort of the production team, I think that is the most technically accurate and complete volume on Exchange 2010 SP1. Printed copies of the book have been available since December 1, 2010.
From October 2010 on I had the chance to work with Paul Robichaux and Brian Desmond, two other Microsoft MVPs for Exchange Server, on the “Maestro” series of seminars about Exchange 2010. The seminars were great fun; many interesting people came along and we had the chance to delve into the inner workings of Exchange 2010 SP1 in a way that I haven’t been able to do much in the past. Of course, I was very involved with the HP academies for Windows 2000, 2003, and 2008 and Exchange 2000, 2003, and 2007, but only as an executive sponsor and not as someone who actually has to get up and deliver insightful technical content that helps people to understand the topic at a level that you can’t find in the Exchange help file or online at TechNet, enormously improved as these resources have become over the last few years. The series have now come to an end and no more seminars have been scheduled. However, we never say never and perhaps the team will come together again to run more events after Exchange 2013 has been released.
I continue to write for Windows IT Pro Magazine (you can click here to find my list of articles that have appeared in Windows IT Pro magazine over the years). Indeed, as and from August 2011 am writing a blog for Windowsitpro.com that covers topics relating to Microsoft Exchange Server. The advent of the Exchange Unwashed blog (for such is its name) means that I’ll be publishing less Exchange content in the future in this blog, but I shall leave everything that has appeared to date intact for your reading.
The Exchange Unwashed Blog on WindowsITPro.com
I’m also an MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) for Exchange. This video explains all about the MVP program.
Apart from that, I’m also busy with rugby where I act as a TV Match Official (TMO – see this good BBC article for information about what a TMO does during a rugby match) for international, Heineken Cup, and RaboDirect Pro12 games. And sometimes I even get out the whistle and referee again… mind you, refereeing is a struggle now for knees, ankles, and other assorted parts of the body.
Have fun!
Tony
Click here to see my list of good technical books
Hi Tony,
Have you considered to enable rss or atom feeds on your blog? It will make it easy to follow it.
Cheers,
Lars
http://en.wordpress.com/features/rss-2/ explains how to get a feed from any wordpress blog. Looks like all you need is http://thoughtsofanidlemind.wordpress.com/feed/
Hi Tony,
I understand that you and Paul Robichaux will conduct 2 “Mastering Exchange 2010″ training sessions in October.
My company is currently working with Exchange 2003, and we are going to impliment Exchange 2010. Currenty the physical server is on its last leg. And we are drastically running out of space, due to bad size policies and basically bad management (I have only been there for 4 months). Therefore we plan to impliment exchange 2010 in the next month.
I would really love to attend your training, but I fear that by the time of your training we would have already implimented exchange 2010 (or would be in the advanced stages) .
Are any of you having a similar a training session in September or you know of a reputable training instutuion?
Hi Shane,
Paul and I are certainly open to the idea of running another event in Europe but the logistics just don’t make it possible to do so in September. Sorry!
Maybe you can juggle your dates and come over to Boston ready to have your implementation plan challenged with some of the thoughts that we would lay on the table?
TR
Hi Tony,
I am please to say that I have registered for the course and I’m really really looking foward to it. Hoping to emerge from the training as an Exchange Pro
!!
Good stuff. The more that come along the merrier! I think that we’ll have a good crowd in both Boston and Anaheim and I am really looking forward to the experience. The only problem that we have is too much material! I shall be struggling to get through it all, but I guess that’s a good problem to have.
TR
Glad to see your mind isn’t that idle since leaving HP, Tony. Greetings from a “bad-penny” that turns up from your e-mail past and I’m glad to see you continuing in the limelight.
Thanks for the advice about rugby for my cousin’s son. He is now playing for Biarritz’s junior team in south-eastern France.
Drop by and see us if you’re in Valbonne.
Cheerz, Geoff.
Hi Tony,
great book! As ever since your first book about Exchange 5.5. And I don’t usually retain IT Books, but yours are all in one row. And it was nice to meet you at the long gone Exchange Conference in autum 2000 in Nice.
Bernd
Hi Bernd,
Thanks for your note. My first book was actually about Exchange 4.0 way back in 1996 but you seem to have formed a nice collection of everything published since! And MEC in Nice has many happy memories…
Cheers,
Tony
Hi Tony; do you happen to have a guide on how to move mailboxes and calendar items from gmail “apps for domains” to exchange 2010? I have MAPS and want to learn exchange the “easy” way…by installing SBS2011.
(You’d think that after 22 years in the IT industry as an admin I’d have learned something about exchange by now, but I guess now is better than never!) Currently we have about 5 gmail addresses that I’d like to move in-house, so it should be fairly straight forward.
Thanks!
Hi Bill,
I don’t have any magic to move Gmail to Exchange 2010. I guess you could connect Outlook to Gmail via IMAP and drag and drop messages to a PST and then import them into Exchange…
TR
Thanks Tony; that method was suggested on another site, and your advise sounds like confirmation to me. I’ll try it that way!
Hi Tony,
Great blog, mixing a couple of topics I’m interested in e-mail and rugby. Not your usual happy bedfellows but it works well.
I followed your link to the Exchange 2010 Maestro Seminars above but it just says I don’t have access to the content on the Windows IT Pro site. I wondered if you are able to blog the details of the London seminar?
Many thanks
John
Hi John,
Glad that you like the blog. As to the London seminar, I believe that the folks at Penton Communications are busy looking for the right location for the event. The last I heard, we are looking at a mid-June 2011 date. Stay tuned for more information.
- Tony
Tony, I purchased your book last week from Amazon (hard copy…who would pay more for Kindle edition when you get free access to e-version through Safari?). Thank you so much for giving 400-level information that MS doesn’t even document. I have a piece of helpful info for you related to command editing in PowerShell. On page 97 you talk about the F7 key and how it executes immediately, and how using the up/down arrows can be more convenient when wanting to edit the command before executing it. But you can do this with the F7 functionality by selecting the command you want and then pressing the right arrow key (instead of Enter). This adds the command to the prompt without executing it so you can edit it before pressing Enter.
Scott
Hi Tony,
Just a note of appreciation. I was quite happy to see I was not the only one running on a laptop. I setup a 2008SP2 & Exchange 2010 environment on my laptop with a domain of mine at home to study for a job I really want at MS. I moved to Western WA 4 years ago working my way toward a job here where I would enjoy myself and have a great challenge and a team of people I enjoy working with. Typically reading is not my absolute favorite method of learning as real world experience is a much higher impact. Thankfully Exchange Sever 2010 inside out is great for me to read keeping me moving and interested I can hardly get through it without needing to jump to the laptop to look into it and discover more.
I enjoy the approach in the book personally. Hopefully I will see you in the future developing myself further into my dream job.
Thank You
Paul.
Hi Tony,
I’m working with a customer advising them about the mailbox that is created during the setup of the mailbox role in Exchange 2010. As you know, the account used during setup is mail-enabled and now the customer wants to know if it’s safe to disable that mailbox. On your book, you explain:
““RBAC relies on mail-enable accounts to manage its role definitions, which is why the account that you use to install the first mailbox server in n Exchange 2010 organization is authomatically mail-enable” ……“ accounts that are not mail enable still cannot run EMS or EMC”.”
I’ve been testing and starting Ex2010 SP1 administrative tasks are successfull using non-mail-enabled accounts. Could you provide me more details about your statement on the book? I’m assuming this is because of the RTM requisite to be mail-enabled in order use ECP? Please let me know.
Thanks in Advanced.
PS: Congratulations for your book. It’s a great source of information.
Pablo.
Hi Pablo,
Thanks for your kind words about the book.
EMS and EMC both rely on RBAC to establish the scope of work that a user can do with Exchange and do this by establishing a session that loads in the PowerShell cmdlets authorized by the user’s roles. ECP is different and Microsoft changed it in SP1 to permit some tasks to be performed by accounts that are not mail-enabled. See the bottom of page 235. This allows for administrative accounts who don’t have a mailbox to perform some tasks… but of course, you’ll need to access EMC or EMS to perform some common tasks such as setting up mailboxes, so ECP is really only suitable for certain administrative roles such as help desks,
TR
Tony, thanks for the quick reply! I’m trying to advise a scenario with mail-disabled administrators, so this is my last question: Could you mention any admin task that requires to be performed by a mail-enabled administrator in SP1?
Regards.
Create a new mailbox?
Assign Send As or Send As Behalf Of permissions…
- Tony
Hi Tony,
I really enjoyed your book and it was really useful during my studies for the Exchange MCITP exams.
I am running into an scenario for which we haven’t been able to get a straight answer yet in order to solve the problem. We want to Block Unauthorized Devices (iphones,droids,tablests, etc.) from accessing OWA and caching corporate emails. We would like to use AS but we need to find a way to stop this type of unauthorized connections from happening.
We have an opened discussion at:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchangesvrgeneral/thread/3f94fe7c-8962-4703-b433-b01268520685
If you have time we would strongly appreciate your opinion about this one.
Thank you!
To be clear, we’re discussing the need to stop users running a web browser on their phones to use the basic version of OWA to access their mailboxes. The technical answer is that there is no equivalent of ActiveSync device policies (which is what you’d need to block on the basis of device family or type). However, I suspect that this is a case where technology should not be used to address a problem that is simply bad user behaviour. If people are compromising corporate security by connecting to resources with unauthorized devices they should be warned about the consequences of this action and then penalized for a subsequent offence with disciplinary action, including (in my book) the loss of any ability to connect a mobile device by blocking their access to OWA (HTTP).
You can argue that Microsoft should provide granular access to HTTP for mobile devices but I think that’s seeking to use technology to address an edge case. The vast majority of mobile access is through ActiveSync, which is designed for that purpose. OWA is designed for web browser access. OMA is being reintroduced in Exchange 2010 SP2 to provide a simplified browser access for mobile devices that cannot connect with ActiveSync, but I don’t believe that OMA comes along with the kind of granular access policies that you need.
TR
I have a “simple” question that I cannot find the answer to anywhere I’ve looked. Perhaps you’d be a sport and perhaps answer it?
All I want to know is: How does Exchange 2010 store attachment files sent to multiple recipients? For example, I send an email with an attachment to 5 people. Is that attachment stored for each recipient (i.e. 5 times), or is a single instance stored and the 5 recipients simply get a pointer to the stored attachment.
Would greatly appreciate any help/pointers/clarifications. Thanks!
Simple answer to a simple question. Exchange 2010 made a change in its database schema so that all items belonging to a mailbox (messages and attachments) are stored in tables specific to the mailbox. In previous versions, Exchange used tables that were shared between the mailboxes in a database. The loss of the “Single Instance Storage” (where pointers are used to shared content) was felt to be a good thing because of the way that databases are used today. For more information, you can see Exchange 2010 Inside Out.
TR
Much appreciated, thank you!