Exchange 2013 CU1: The software that RTM could have been (April 2): Yippee! Fireworks exploded when Microsoft released CU1 some six months after announcing the original release-to-manufacturing (RTM) version. Many bug were eradicated, some new ones introduced, and some functionality reappeared. On balance, a very good thing. But perhaps this is the software that should have been shipped as Exchange 2013 so that those who say that you should always wait for the first service pack (or cumulative update) before installing any Microsoft application weren’t proven right yet again.

Installing Exchange 2013 CU1 on DAG member servers – some care and maintenance mode required (April 4): Exchange 2013 includes a feature called Managed Availability that keeps engineers from having disturbed nights by automatically managing some problems that occur on servers. But it’s a strange beast and we have not fully learned how to cope with Managed Availability yet. One thing is for sure – you should put DAG member servers into maintenance mode before applying software updates (like CU1). It keeps Managed Availability happy. And happy software means happy administrators, or so the theory goes.

Managing groups with groups in Exchange 2013 CU1 (April 9): OK, not everyone will get excited by the reappearance of some functionality that was dropped in Exchange 2010. But I think it’s quite nice to be able to manage groups with groups. Feel free to disagree.

Microsoft announces MEC 2014 will be in Austin (April 9): Microsoft has been conducting a teaser campaign about the location for the next Exchange Conference. It turns out that they are returning to the location last used for MEC in September 1996, when Exchange 4.0 was all the rage and live was much simpler. Getting to Austin is a real pain for those who come from overseas and air fares are scandalously high, even now. I wonder whether the Microsoft people who made the choice of location consider travel costs and availability. Maybe not.

Individual fix for Exchange soft delete problem proves worth of support contracts (April 11): Exchange 2010 SP2 RU6 and Exchange 2010 SP3 both have problems with Outlook users working in online mode because some items won’t delete. A fix is available and it will come in an official release soon, but in the meantime those who have support contacts can get an individual fix, which proves the value of having such a contract. At least, it seems to…

Blocking OWA access for a user is a problem for Exchange 2013 CU1 (April 16): Another day, another bug. This time it’s Exchange 2013 CU1 and its inability to perform a trick that legacy versions all have down to a fine art. You can’t block a user from accessing Outlook Web App by running Set-CASMailbox. Oh dear!

Microsoft and Google War Over First Ajax Webmail (April 18): A hissy fit between Microsoft and Google is always interesting. In this case, Google claimed that Gmail was the first Ajax-powered browser email client. Not so, said Microsoft, who pointed out that Outlook Web Access (for that’s what it was called in those days) running with Exchange 2003 predated Gmail. Both sides think they are right. But does it matter now?

First tests of Exchange 2013 on Azure point to the future? (April 23): I liked the ingenuity involved in deploying some test Exchange 2013 servers on the Azure platform as I think that this kind of thing will become increasingly common as cloud platforms develop. It’s a logical progression to allow application servers to run in the cloud under your control instead of inside the Office 365 juggernaut. The only question is how long it will take for production-quality deployments to be possible.

MRMAPI, the Little Brother of MFCMAPI (April 25): I am very fond of MFCMAPI, as I think it reveals an awful lot about how Exchange works (and sometimes does not) internally. MRMAPI is less well known, but still interesting. Don’t take my word for it.

Why Exchange 2013 asks you to restart the Information Store after creating a new database (April 30): Exchange 2013 has a new memory model for the Information Store, a side-effect of the transition to the “Managed Store” away from the previous monolithic model. The current way of allocating cache to mounted databases is a tad inflexible. Hence the need to restart the Store. Fortunately, this should not be a daily occurrence. At least, not on most servers.

The blog rolls on in May 2013 and much more is discussed on WindowsITPro.com. See you there!

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The first thing to say is that sending money via email is not new. After all, companies have been using a form of email-enabled communication called EDI since 1996 or thereabouts. Of course, EDI is not based on messages exchanged between individuals. Instead, it is a mechanism that uses highly structured messages between companies. However, EDI documents are addressed and can be sent by email, so a comparison is, I think, valid. And wire transfers between individuals could also be considered in the same vein as they are also highly structured documents that are routed to beneficiaries based on addresses (bank account and routing numbers).

The big difference in this announcement lies in the sheer size of the Gmail installed based and the integration with Google Wallet. Even if you strip out all the “disposable” Gmail accounts used for different purposes (including spam), the number of people who use Gmail regularly is in the hundreds of millions. After Google rolls out the new feature worldwide (it is only available to U.S. residents initially and only if they are 18 years or older), that’s a lot of people who could send money to each other. And there’s goodness there as being able to send a family member or close acquaintance some money along with an email seems like a very nice feature.

The integration with Google Wallet is both an example of how Google is leveraging the different parts of their portfolio to gain synergy and a protection to users. Before you can send money from your Google Wallet, you need to provide Google with a credit card that presumably acts as some form of barrier to those who would seek to use Google Wallet for nefarious purposes. I originally added a credit card to my Google Wallet when I lived in the U.S. and can’t recall having to provide too much information in terms of proving my identity except the credit card data and an address. Perhaps Google performs some form of identity checking behind the scenes to validate the information but I certainly was unaware of this. It will be interesting to see how Google copes with European money laundering legislation here as it does not take much imagination to see how criminals might use cash transfer via email to move funds around, even if they will be restricted to transferring $50,000 per five-day period.

But you don’t need Google Wallet to send or receive money via Gmail as Google will allow you to send money via a credit or debit card (extracting a 2.9% fee per transaction). Not much detail is yet available as to how a recipient who does not have Gmail can access funds. Perhaps they will have to provide some bank details or, in some under-banked parts of the world, be directed to a traditional funds transfer agency such as a Western Union office.

The ability to send money to someone who is unknown (except as an email address) is where I see problems lurking. There are already plenty of examples where email is used to coax the unwary (or the stupid, depending on your perspective) to send money, the most famous being the “Nigerian 419 scam”. Today, it takes time and effort for the scammer to hook their victim, reel them in, and convince the victim to send funds via a traditional method. Will this new feature make it easier for a scammer to score? It just might…

The people who work at Google are very smart indeed. I am sure that they will do their very utmost to incorporate some intelligence to prevent their work delivering a bonanza to scammers. At least, I hope that they do!

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A real bargain!

I don’t pretend to understand how the publishing business works or how these prices are derived, but when you think about it, 3.4 cents/page is cheap. A fairer comparison might be to strip out the “overhead” from the page count by removing the index, table of contents, preface, and so on to arrive at the content-rich pages. In my case, I reckon this to be about 760 pages, or 3.6 cents/page. No much change there!

Given the amount of effort required to research, write, edit, review, index, and lay out a technical book and the relatively short selling window that exists due to the pace of change in technology, you’d wonder how the publishing business exists at all. What I can say is that writing technical books is not a fast course to riches, or even a slow course. It’s not a labour of love either, especially when yet another demand arrives from a copy editor to clarify text, write a better caption, finish a thought or any of the other ways that editors keep writers on the straight and narrow. In fact, writing might be considered masochistic at times.

In any case, things are going pretty well in terms of completing the books. We’re deep into the review and refinement process at present where text is verified for accuracy and tested to make sure that it’s complete and adds value. The editors want the authors to keep to agreed page counts while the authors want to stuff more content into the books, so an entertaining debate ensues. This is a serious business because costs expand in line with page counts and as discussed above selling prices are not high, so extra pages trim whatever profit is to be extracted from the exercise.

For the remainder of the summer we shall continue to drive towards completion while keeping a wary eye on what the Exchange developers are doing as they push out cumulative update 2 (CU2), expected in early July if they make their goal to release an update every three months. Updates include many bug fixes and functionality changes. Bug fixes don’t usually cause too many issues for writers but functionality updates definitely do. An example is the change made in CU1 where EAC and EMS now advise that the Information Store service has to be restarted on a mailbox server if a database is added (no warning is given when you remove a database). Clearly this is an issue that needs to be covered in any discussion about the new Managed Store, so that’s a change that affects book content.

There’s no way that we will catch every change that occurs in a huge product like Exchange as CU2 and maybe even CU3 evolve. Paul has the extra complication of having to track updates to clients and interfaces like Outlook 2013, ActiveSync, EWS, and Outlook Web App. OWA has already changed quite a lot since RTM so that’s a challenge for content.

None of this should be construed as real cause for complaint. After all, we took on the project in the full knowledge of the work involved to put books together. But a little groan from time to time relieves the pressure and lightens the load, so that’s my groan dune for now. I’m sure that something else will occur to cause me to grumble, but that’s in the future…

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Here’s the set of posts that appeared in March 2013. Some of these are now in the category of historical records, some will still be of interest if you haven’t seen the material before.

The Exchange Reports Codeplex Project (March 7): I’ve long said that Exchange is pathetic when it comes to generating reports that are of use to administrators. Microsoft’s attitude seems to be that this is an area best left to third parties. The Codeplex project is worth supporting because it provides a set of basic reports that are of use to pretty well every deployment.

EDA, PinPoint DNS, and a chat about Exchange 2013 (March 12). EDA is the Exchange Deployment Assistant, which was upgraded to cope with Exchange 2013. Still not perfect, but evolving over time to include support for different circumstances. PinPoint DNS is a useful technique to consider because of some upcoming changes in how certificates used to secure communications work. The chat refers to a session that I taped with Richard Campbell and RunAs radio. It was fun!

Why Exchange Online hates journal mailboxes (March 14). The cloud has limitless storage – right? So it must be a great platform for the accumulation of data that has to be retained for discovery searches. Or so you’d think… but Exchange Online disagrees and won’t let you use its mailboxes as the destination for journal messages.

Exchange 2010 Discovery Searches: What about users who leave? (March 19). You might be quite glad to see the back of some users and move swiftly to eradicate all trace of their presence within the organization, including their mailboxes. But what if those people had access to information that needs to be retained for regulatory or legal reasons? Well, then you’d need a process to retain their mailboxes for some time. Just what that process would be and how long you’d keep the data depends on your company.

101 Exchange Web Services code examples (March 21). Exchange Web Services (EWS) is the way that third party developers (and those who build the Microsoft Outlook 2011 for Mac client) gain access to the Store. Having a well-developed API is all very good, but some examples help to get the creative juices flowing. Here’s how to find some…

Preserving mailboxes when employees leave (March 26). Returning to the topic of how best to preserve mailboxes of users who leave the organization, we cover some practical steps that you can take to keep these mailboxes around to allow them to be accessible to discovery searches but not involved in day-to-day email.

Microsoft replaces OCAT with OffCAT (Office Configuration Analysis Tool) (March 28). Microsoft took a good tool (The Outlook Configuration Analysis Tool) and made it better by expanding its capabilities to deal with the other Office products. As it turns out, Outlook’s configuration is more complex than that of PowerPoint, but that’s no reason not to check what’s going on under the covers.

More soon about the April 2013 posts…

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Four hours after posting the report, I was contacted by a UK-based Microsoft escalation engineer. Coincidences do happen, but in this case I think that the public protest had the desired effect on Microsoft’s bunged up support processes. In fact, it’s depressing that posting a blog produced an escalation because it points to a problem in the support process. Normal customers who don’t blog won’t get the same response. It is probable that my visibility within the Exchange community as someone who writes extensively on the topic also assisted in the escalation process.

The good news is that at 22:30 on April 30 Outlook informed me that it had to restart because of a change made by the administrator (in fact, Outlook forced me to restart 3 times, for a reason that I haven’t quite figured out). I logged into my tenant and discovered that OWA used the Wave 15 interface and that all the administrative functions worked as expected. ActiveSync and EWS clients connected flawlessly to the upgraded service. The problem was solved 22 days after being first reported.

Joy! Something might have happened…

What have I learned from the experience? Here are some thoughts:

Microsoft front-line staff are just a filter. No surprise here because all major support organizations use front-line staff to filter incoming calls, solve the most obvious (and some that are not), and pass a certain percentage to second-level support via an escalation process. What surprised me about this case was how long Microsoft allowed the call to remain at the first level despite frequent communication back and forth with me. I asked repeatedly for updates but nothing happened. Clearly the internal escalation process did not function properly.

Microsoft escalation engineers know their stuff (at least, the person I dealt with did). Once the case was escalated things happened more quickly (as you’d expect). The focus was sharper, the questions more pertinent, and action occurred. Tools such as those described in KB2598970 collected information from my workstation to help detect the source of the problem. Communications were restrained and content rich. All in all, a much better experience.

Expect a delay if something has to change in the datacenter. Second level support can go so far with massive cloud systems. Their role seems to be to investigate problems, collect information, and then figure out what needs to be done. In this case a change needed to be made to my tenant domain. Unlike what might happen in an on-premises situation, senior support staff cannot take actions to user accounts (or their equivalents) because Office 365 is, by necessity, an extremely locked down environment where only specific people can interact with user data under controlled conditions. The upshot is that some delay is built into the system to have information fed back to the datacenter team and for them to respond. I like this because it shows that Microsoft is serious about protecting customer data – no shortcuts are taken to solve problems that might compromise data.

The service keeps on running even when back-end migration problems happen. I reported the problem in April 8 and it was resolved on April 30. Sounds bad. But all clients continued to function properly and access Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint during this period. An end user would not have known that anything was wrong. I think that this must be the situation with many Office 365 issues because if something really does go wrong then huge numbers of people are affected. In this case, a partial migration had resulted in a Wave 15 administration front-end attempting to talk to Wave 14 servers at the back-end. The different protocols involved caused the error. As it turns out, I’m told that the problem originated when my tenant subscription was changed last year and that this has uncovered a problem that Microsoft will now fix.

Document everything. This advice is often given to people who experience the joys of reporting a problem to support. You have to know and record your facts because you will be asked about them. Facts help identify where the problem might lie and how it might be solved. Write everything down, including the details of the interactions with the support team (time, date, and duration) as you might need to use this data to force an escalation.

The bottom line is that my Office 365 tenant domain is now back to full health. I am genuinely surprised that it took so long for Microsoft to solve the problem but am glad that things eventually worked out. It’s just a pity that it took so long to resolve and that escalation only happened after the incident was exposed to the full glare of publicity.

I doubt that many other tenant domains will be in the same situation. Office 365 has not really been around long enough for many companies to switch subscription types and Microsoft is now aware of the issue and will fix it. But I sure hope that the folks who run Office 365 support take action to improve their escalation processes so that other customers do not experience the same kind of extended case resolution as occurred here.

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Update 2 May: I was called this morning by a Microsoft customer support manager to discuss the problem and how Microsoft worked as the issue unfolded. I thought that the discussion was very open and helpful, which is always a good thing.

Earlier this year, Microsoft flagged that they were preparing to roll out the Wave 15 products to Office 365 tenants, who do not get to vote about when the upgrade happens. Instead, some process running inside Microsoft decides what date a tenant should be upgraded. So be it – you give up a lot of control when you sign up for a cloud service and trust that those running the service will do the right thing when upgrade time rolls around. In my case, the chronology of the service upgrade for my tenant domain was as follows:

5 March: received the initial notification proclaiming “We’re upgrading your Office 365 service in 2013”.

Well, I knew that the upgrade was coming, but it was nice to know that soon I would be using the Wave 15 products, especially Exchange 2013.

19 March: another note arrived saying “New features are coming to your Office 365 service soon”

Tension building now. I could not wait to use Exchange 2013 within Office 365. And then:

Tremendous! The Wave 15 upgrade is complete – or is it?

29 March: yet another note to say that “Your Office 365 service upgrade is done – sign in and explore”

Hmm… Not much had changed when I connected to Office 365. At least, not until approximately 18:00 on March 30 when I noticed that the Office 365 admin portal boasted the new Wave 15 branding, even if some errors were reported. However, OWA stubbornly displayed the familiar Wave 14 interface.

Errors reported by the Wave 15 Admin interface

The next change happened on April 2 when the Office 365 login page was updated to a much more colorful edition. Surely this was a sign that the elusive upgrade had completed? But no, OWA was still connected to Exchange 2010.

5 April: the Office 365 team invite me to “Tell us about your experience with the Office 365 service upgrade”

Of course I took the opportunity to provide feedback but could not find the appropriate space to tell Microsoft that whereas they might consider my service to be upgraded, I did not. Several other errors interrupted my attempt to provide feedback so I let the chance lapse. Life is too short to waste time on badly functioning feedback loops.

By now I was worried. Casting aside the mental excuse I had constructed that the migration process must be very complex and simply needed some time to complete fully, I noticed that errors were reported when I attempted to manage either Exchange or SharePoint. OWA on the other hand, continued to work beautifully as did Outlook and ActiveSync. I could therefore have simply ignored the issues but decided that now was the time to engage with Office 365 support.

My support call was logged on April 8. One of the aspects of being a very small consumer of a very large service is that you simply have to wait your turn to receive service. It’s not as if a Microsoft support agent is ready and willing to leap into action immediately, especially when you only have a Plan P subscription. Life is different for larger enterprises that pay considerably more for Office 365, but I suspect only marginally. They might have a local Technical Account Manager (TAM) to shout at when things go wrong, but once support calls enter the black box of Office 365 it’s hard to find out what the real situation is with any issue.

I received a call back on April 9. The agent was perfectly pleasant but possibly used to dealing with people who might not have quite as much experience with Exchange as I have. But then again, first line support staff tend to have to follow a scripted engagement with callers to ensure that all bases are covered. I, on the other hand, knew that the Admin side of Office 365 exhibited all the signs of Wave 15 branding whereas OWA stubbornly remained connected to an Exchange 2010 mailbox server. After 30 minutes or so and after running some PowerShell commands, the fact that the upgrade wasn’t complete was determined to the satisfaction of all concerned. Or at least, enough evidence existed to allow an escalation to the “server team”, who possess a more elevated position in the Office 365 support hierarchy.

For the record, this command proved that the update had not completed:

Get-OrganizationConfig | Format-List Name, Admindisplayversion, IsUpgradingOrganization

Name                    : xxxxx.onmicrosoft.com
AdminDisplayVersion     : 0.10 (14.16.190.8)
IsUpgradingOrganization : False

As you can see, the AdminDisplayVersion still reports version 14 where an upgraded tenant that runs the Wave 15 products would report something like 15.0.586.12 to indicate version 15. Interestingly, IsUpgradingOrganization is False, which normally means that an Office 365 version upgrade is complete.

To be fair to the Office 365 support agent, I explained that I was an Exchange server MVP and that I also wrote about Exchange on a reasonably frequent basis. This happened after she sent me a set of EHLO blog posts to explain the wonders of Exchange 2013, a topic close to my heart.

The news that something had broken in the tenant domain used by someone who might write about the experience must have filtered upward in the support organization as I was then contacted by the support agent’s manager later on April 9. I was asked whether I was happy with the progress of the support case, to which I replied that not much progress had been seen and I was awaiting developments.

I stayed in that mode until April 18, receiving intermittent messages from my friends in Microsoft Support to say that not much was happening. After ten days of waiting for a resolution, it seemed fair to look for an escalation, so I emailed the support manager to ask for her help to move things along. No response was received, so I emailed again on April 22, a full two weeks since the support case was logged. This elucidated a response and I was told that the server team had decided to escalate the case after a week of contemplating the situation.

Nothing much happened over the following two days, so I emailed the original support manager on April 24 to point out that the escalation seemed to be stuck and that the call was now open for sixteen days and was not helping to improve their call close statistics or customer satisfaction rate.

No one called me over the next two days, so I sent another message on April 26 to ask what was happening. Although my Office 365 tenant domain remained fully functionality from an end-user perspective, the loss of some admin functionality had begun to be a real concern. Microsoft responded to say that their server team was currently swamped with problems (ahem…) but that they would try to get the case moved forward. As I write, three days later, no one has been in contact to communicate the current status for the case.

As an ex-CTO for both Compaq Services and HP Services, I have some awareness of what happens in a support organization. Indeed, I even served some time on a European support team for Digital in the mid-1980s. It seems to me that this case has been poorly managed and that Microsoft should ask:

• Is their escalation process efficient? Why did their systems fail to escalate the incident automatically to the next level of support after a certain period? Surely their problem tracking systems identify cases that are still open and active after five, ten, or fifteen days?
• Is their communication with customers effective? Based on my experience, I do not think so. Good communication keeps people in touch and conveys information about progress.
• Are their support personnel sufficiently well-trained and are their front-line managers aware of the details of the technology that they support? Again, I find fault here. Everyone who I have spoken to has been easy to deal with without ever leaving me with a feeling that they understood the issue and knew what needed to be done to resolve the problem. Cloud systems can only function when they are standardized to a very detailed level. I imagine that this makes support easier than for on-premises systems when implementations are left to the imagination and competence of the local administrators.

I really wanted this migration to work because I have an interest in using some of the Wave 15 functionality. It’s sad that the experience has been so bad. If anyone in Microsoft Support would like to investigate and find out just what happened in this migration epic and perhaps even move the problem forward toward completion, the case number is SRX1202350062ID. After three weeks it would be nice to see a resolution.

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O’Reilly will also make some draft chapters available for the companion book, Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Connectivity, Clients, and UM, by Paul Robichaux. Paul has been teaching the Unified Messaging component of the Exchange Ranger training class for many years so it should come as no surprise that this book contains the best discussion about the topic that I have ever seen. For the record, to keep everyone honest, Paul is doing the technical edit for my book and I am doing the same for his. Apart from anything else, this arrangement makes sure that we see the content and make sure that there’s no overlap or duplication across the two books.

Getting back to the mysterious ways, it seems strange that Amazon has now published the availability of both books in their online store some six months before the final pages are printed. That being said, please do check out Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability and Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Connectivity, Clients, and UM. Paul has already commented that he can’t understand why Amazon has priced his book at $30.85 while mine costs $34.07. Apart from the obvious retort that mine is much more interesting than his (well, about $3.22 more interesting), Paul’s book is 600 pages while mine is 800. You definitely get more pages for your dollar with me while each of Paul’s pages contains premium content. Or something like that.

Given that we essentially have books ready, why wait until the October 22, 2013 date promised by Amazon? Well, we could rush the books out and have them available in the near future, but that removes the chance of learning just how Exchange 2013 actually functions in real deployments. Every day we learn more about the quirks of the product and these are the important facts that become the “inside out” referred to in the title.

In addition, Microsoft has a habit of updating the way that Exchange works as a version matures. We have already seen updates (such as the reintroduced ability for groups to manage groups) in Exchange 2013 CU1 and more are likely as CU2 and CU3 appear over the coming months. We want to track and report on these changes, insofar as is possible.

Hopefully you will enjoy the books. At least, that’s the plan.

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It’s important to recognize good service when you find it and this year we have rented cars three times from Citer/Enterprise at Nice Airport (NCE) and have received excellent service each time. The staff working at Citer have told us that their work practices have changed since Citer became part of the Enterprise Rent-A-Car organization in November 2011, so this might just be an example where an acquisition results in better customer service.

All is not perfect with the Citer experience as we have often experienced queues at their desks in the Nice Airport rental facility. Part of the reason for the delay in dealing with clients seems to be interminable phone calls made by the agents to all and sundry, seemingly a necessary part of the process to secure cars. But part of the delay is also due to the way that Citer staff walk customers to their car to check it out, explain how the car functions if necessary, and make sure that all existing damage is correctly noted. I’m sure that the Citer staff cover a lot of ground between rental desk and garage over the course of a day, but the impression made on customers is much better than the norm delivered by Citer’s competitors such as Avis and Hertz.

Another nice thing about Citer is that they offer many deals that include a second driver. Most of the other car hire firms that operate in Nice delight in

Citer’s current car fleet in Nice features a lot of Hyundais. We have driven a very nice i30 (it was brand new) but on the other hand, the last time out we had a tatty Lancia Delta that had suffered many dents and scratches in its 28,000 km rental career. I owned a Lancia Delta in 1982-83 and had fond memories of that car but its modern counterpart did not make the same impact and I doubt that we will choose a Delta again.

If you need to rent a car in Nice Airport in the near future, consider trying Citer. I usually use AutoEurope to find the best deals and scan down the (often) hundreds of packages to find the best one that’s available. Not that anything especially compelling will be available soon as the Cote d’Azur holiday season swings into full blast and car rental rates escalate.

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We’ll soon be making preview chapters available. These are chapters that are in the midst of the editing process. As such, they might contain errors. In fact, I’ll guarantee that they do because, despite several reviews, eradicating errors from text is an ongoing process when the software changes, as Exchange 2013 did recently when CU1 was released. Paul and I are attempting to keep the text updated as Microsoft upgrades Exchange but, as you can imagine, this is not particularly easy.

In any case, it’s nice to see the book entering the final stages. Much of the writing is now done. All that has to happen is updates, fact checking, revisions, indexing, more copy editing, fights with the editors about page counts: the normal kind of thing that happens to bring out a book.

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Happy Reading!

Tony