Exchange Server Pro

Get-MailboxReport.ps1 – PowerShell Script to Generate Mailbox Reports

Paul Cunningham — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:05:54 +0000

One of the Exchange Server administration tasks I perform almost every day is creating mailbox size reports. There are a few different reasons that I create these reports, such as planning a mailbox migration project, responding to a storage capacity alert for a particular database, or providing a specific team of people with a report of their mailbox sizes.

Now it is pretty easy to get the sizes for Exchange mailboxes and to handle the formatting of the Exchange 2010 mailbox statistics so that they are easier to perform calculations on, but it gets a bit boring running those commands day after day.

Even worse, after running the commands to create a CSV report I still had to open that in Excel, remove the unwanted details, use Excel formulas to convert the values from bytes to megabytes, sort them into order, and so on. Again not difficult, just boring after doing it hundreds of times.

So I created a PowerShell script, Get-MailboxReport.ps1, to do all of the heavy lifting for me, and I’m sharing that script with you here.

Download the script file here: Get-MailboxReport.ps1 (downloaded 298 times so far)

Let’s take a look at how the script works. Here if a video to demonstrate:

I’ve included help information within the script itself so you can use Get-Help to discover how to run the script.

[PS] C:\Scripts\demo>Get-Help .\Get-MailboxReport.ps1

NAME
    C:\Scripts\demo\Get-MailboxReport.ps1

SYNOPSIS
    Get-MailboxReport.ps1 - Mailbox report generation script.

SYNTAX
    C:\Scripts\demo\Get-MailboxReport.ps1 [-database ] []

    C:\Scripts\demo\Get-MailboxReport.ps1 [-file ] []

    C:\Scripts\demo\Get-MailboxReport.ps1 [-server ] []

    C:\Scripts\demo\Get-MailboxReport.ps1 [-mailbox ] []

    C:\Scripts\demo\Get-MailboxReport.ps1 [-all] []

DESCRIPTION
    Generates a report of useful information for
    the specified server, database, mailbox or list of mailboxes.
    Use only one parameter at a time depending on the scope of
    your mailbox report.

RELATED LINKS
    For more script details, a video demo, or to give feedback please go to:

http://exchangeserverpro.com/powershell-script-create-mailbox-size-report-exchange-server-2010

REMARKS
    To see the examples, type: "get-help C:\Scripts\demo\Get-MailboxReport.ps1 -examples".
    For more information, type: "get-help C:\Scripts\demo\Get-MailboxReport.ps1 -detailed".
    For technical information, type: "get-help C:\Scripts\demo\Get-MailboxReport.ps1 -full".

Depending on which parameter you use the output will vary.

If you use the -mailbox parameter to query a single mailbox, then the output will appear in the console window. I don’t really see the need to output a single mailbox’s details to a CSV file.
If you use any of the other parameters, -server, -database, -file, or -all, the output will be written to a CSV file in the same folder you’re running the script from.

Once you’ve generated the CSV report you can open it with Excel and begin to analyze the data.

Download the script file here: Get-MailboxReport.ps1 (downloaded 298 times so far)

Change Log:

6/02/2012 – V1.0 – Initial version

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Update Rollup 6 for Exchange 2007 SP3 Released

Paul Cunningham — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:36:01 +0000

Microsoft has announced the release of Update Rollup 6 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3.

From the Microsoft Exchange Team blog:

This update contains a number of customer-reported and internally found issues since the release of RU5. See KB 2608656: Description of Update Rollup 6 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3′ for more details.

We would like to specifically call out the following fixes which are included in this release:

DST Cadence Release for Dec 2011 – Exchange 2007

22656040 An Exchange Server 2007 Client Access server may respond slowly or stop responding when users try to synchronize the Exchange ActiveSync devices with their mailboxes

2498852 ”0×80041606″ error message when you perform a prefix search by using Outlook in online mode in an Exchange Server 2007 environment

22653334 The reseed process is unsuccessful on the SCR passive node when the circular logging feature is enabled in an Exchange Server 2007 environment

22617784 Journal reports are expired or lost when the Microsoft Exchange Transport service is restarted in an Exchange Server 2007 environment

2289607 The week numbers displayed in OWA do not match the week numbers displayed in Outlook for English users and French users in an Exchange Server 2007 environment

Update Rollup 6 can be downloaded here.

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Google Discontinues Message Continuity

Paul Cunningham — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:29:55 +0000

Google has announced that they are discontinuing Google Message Continuity.

Google Message Continuity (Source: http://www.google.com/postini/continuity.html)

Originally launched as a disaster recovery and business continuity solution for Microsoft Exchange customers it received a lukewarm reception from Exchange admins, and according to a Google blog post did not see significant uptake.

In December 2010 we launched an email disaster recovery product for enterprise customers that use Google’s cloud to back up emails originally sent or received in an on-premise, Microsoft Exchange system. In the time since we launched, we’ve seen hundreds of businesses sign up for it. By comparison, in that same time, we’ve seen millions of businesses move entirely to the cloud with Google Apps, benefitting from disaster recovery capabilities built directly into Apps. Going forward we’ve decided to focus our efforts on Google Apps and end support for GMC.

Exchange Server 2012?

Paul Cunningham — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:47:27 +0000

Microsoft today announced that they have reached the Technical Preview Program milestone for “Office 15″ development. Office 15 is the current name of the next generation of Microsoft Office products and services (including server products).

During the Technical Preview Microsoft works with a selection of customers under strict non-disclosure to test their products in real world situations so that the final product releases can be improved.

According to the announcement by PJ Hough, CVP of Development, Microsoft Office Division:

With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio.

With the Technical Preview program underway Hough lets us know that:

…everyone will have the opportunity to try the Office 15 public beta later this summer.

Assuming Microsoft is able to release a beta of Exchange 15 by August this year, what does that mean for for a possible RTM in 2012?

Brian Winstead put forward his theory in his Windows IT Pro column back in October 2011:

If the Exchange team follows the pattern of previous releases, I’d expect them to release a public beta for Exchange 15 by mid-year 2012, perhaps as early as April or May, and if all goes well, the final version would be out by the end of next year. As for the final name, for the past couple of releases, they’ve looked forward and applied the year after the actual release year. So, Exchange Server 2007 was released at the end of 2006, and Exchange Server 2010 came at the end of 2009. My suspicion is they would avoid the bad luck omen of taking that route if they release in 2012 and might just stick with Exchange Server 2012.

I tend to agree that it is unlikely we’ll see a “2013″ naming for the next generation of Office products.

Exchange Server 2010 was released as a public beta in April 2009, and reached RTM slightly less than 6 months later. So a “summer” beta release of “Exchange 15″ followed by some hard work by Microsoft could see an “Exchange 2012″ RTM perhaps around late November.

Read Microsoft’s “Office 15″ announcement here:

“Office 15″ Begins Technical Preview

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Avoid Running Out of Transaction Log Disk Space on Exchange Servers

Paul Cunningham — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 12:45:12 +0000

Paul Robichaux’s recent Windows IT Pro column contains this passage:

If you don’t know when you’re about to run out of disk space on the log LUN, you’re totally doing it wrong. It leaves me slack-jawed with astonishment that in 2012 we still have administrators who suffer unplanned downtime due to log volumes filling up because of poor design or problems with backups. Stop the madness! Check your backups regularly and use monitoring, be it however primitive, to ensure that you don’t have this problem.

Paul is referring to this post on the MS Exchange Team blog, which mentions that:

…the number one reason why our Premier customers open Exchange 2010 critical situations is because Mailbox databases dismount due to running out of disk space on the transaction log LUN.

Either I missed that post when it was published a few months ago or I glossed over it and it didn’t catch my attention enough.

I’ve been stung by transaction log disks running out of space, even as recently as last year. I work in a very large Exchange environment where backups and storage monitoring are performed by two different teams, both of them outside of my team.

That puts us in the situation where failed backups, combined with either a storage monitoring problem or a human error in the escalation processes can (and has) caused a log volume to fill up. Another situation that can arise is when new servers are provisioned, our help desks begin putting mailboxes on them before they’ve been added to the backups.

Which is why I wrote this script to check the Exchange database backups and alert my team when they have not been backed up in the 48 hours or more. In fact that script is a better version than the one we run in production (I haven’t ported over the improvements I later made at home to the original).

Ever since we put it in place that script has alerted us to numerous situations before they could evolve into disasters.

Setting it up as a scheduled task to run daily is a job that will take you less than half an hour. I highly recommend it, not just because I wrote the script, but because it adds a valuable layer of protection to your environment.

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Exchange 2010 Boot Camp Update

Paul Cunningham — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:32:12 +0000

I wanted to give you an update on how things are going with the Exchange 2010 Boot Camp. Since I last mentioned it here I’ve been overwhelmed by the response. At last count 831 people from all over the world have registered their interest in this online training. To me that is just amazing.

So, here are a few new bits of information about the Exchange 2010 Boot Camp.

I’m going to open up registrations on Thursday 26th at 10:00am AEST (that’s GMT+10:00). An email will be sent out to everyone who registered their interest.
The first set of registrations will be limited to 50 people. Don’t panic if you don’t get in the first time, I’m just limiting it in case of any technical issues with the website or other bits and pieces involved.
If all goes well for a few days I will open up registrations again and send another email to let you know.

In the mean time I’ve created this quick video to show you what the site looks like right now, so you know what to expect.

If you still haven’t registered you can head over to the Exchange 2010 Boot Camp site now and join the waiting list.

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Register Your Interest for the Exchange 2010 Boot Camp

Paul Cunningham — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:00:35 +0000

Update: over 700 people have now registered their interest. If you’d like to skip the back story and register as well just scroll down and fill in the email signup form below.

Earlier today I tweeted a brief message to see if anybody was interested in an Exchange 2010 online training course that I’m calling the Exchange 2010 Boot Camp.

There was a very strong response with a lot of people immediately expressing their interest.

So I’ve already begun making preparations to create the training, but I need to know a little bit more about the people who are interested in attending so that I can design the right lessons for you. Even if you are a complete beginner I want to try and deliver training that will be useful for you.

The Exchange 2010 Boot Camp will be:

free to attend
delivered 100% online, so you can do the lessons from anywhere in the world at the times that suit you
delivered using videos/webinars, written lessons, and forums for interaction such as Q&A

If that sounds interesting to you and you’d like to know more please enter your email address in the form below to register your interest. You’ll be sent a brief survey to help me understand your training needs, as well as announcements when the boot camp is ready to start.

If you have any questions please feel free to ask in the comments below or get in touch with me using the contact form.

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Happy Holidays from Exchange Server Pro

Paul Cunningham — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:34:29 +0000

2011 is coming to an end, and Exchange Server Pro will be going quiet for a few weeks while I take a break to enjoy the holidays. I will still be watching for questions in the comments or forums, but won’t be posting new articles until January.

I hope you’ve gotten value from Exchange Server Pro this year, and I look forward to delivering even more useful content in 2012. Thank you to everyone who emailed, commented or tweeted your feedback to me throughout the year.

I also wish you all a safe and happy holiday.

See you next year!

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Exchange 2010 FAQ: Are Wildcard SSL Certificates Supported?

Paul Cunningham — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 06:36:11 +0000

Question: can I use a wildcard SSL certificate on my Exchange 2010 server?

Answer: Yes, you can.

Often people ask me whether wildcard SSL certificates can be used with Exchange Server 2010, because they have heard that they are either unsupported, not secure, or just not recommended.

What is a wildcard SSL certificate? From Microsoft TechNet:

A wildcard certificate is designed to support a domain and multiple subdomains. For example, configuring a wildcard certificate for *.contoso.com results in a certificate that will work for mail.contoso.com, web.contoso.com, and autodiscover.contoso.com.

The attractiveness of wildcard SSL certificates is that they are usually cheaper than other types of certificates, and they make some Exchange Server configurations easier to manage.

Support for Exchange 2010 and Wildcard SSL Certificates

The support question is a relatively easy one to answer. Yes they are supported from a vendor perspective. One clue for this is that wildcard SSL certificates are an option in the Exchange 2010 new certificate wizard. Microsoft does not make a habit of including options in Exchange Server that will lead you down an unsupported path.

However they are not supported for all scenarios. For example:

wildcard certificates can’t be used in conjunction with OCS 2007 (eg for secure communications for UM/OWA integration)
wildcard certificates are not supported for older mobile devices such as Windows Mobile 5.0

Security Implications for Exchange 2010 and Wildcard SSL Certificates

The security question is also relatively easy to answer. The common assumption is that wildcard SSL certificates are less secure than other SSL certificates.

Microsoft’s own documentation even references “security implications”.

…many customers are uncomfortable with the security implications of maintaining a certificate that can be used for any sub-domain. A more secure alternative is to list each of the required domains as SANs in the certificate. By default, this approach is used when certificate requests are generated by Exchange.

Verisign/Symantec describes some of those implications here:

Security: If one server or sub-domain is compromised, all sub-domains may be compromised.

Management: If the wildcard certificate needs to be revoked, all sub-domains will need a new certificate.

However, put those concerns in the context of your Exchange organization. If you’re using a wildcard SSL certificate to secure a single, internet-facing Client Access server then the above issues do not create much concern.

On the other hand if you’re deploying a large, global Exchange organization with multiple geographic entry points for various services, or those services spread over many services, then those issues are of greater concern.

Summary

So in conclusion, yes Exchange 2010 supports wildcard SSL certificates and no they are not necessarily less secure than other certificates.

However, do your due diligence and make sure that the specific support and security scenarios that do exist will not adversely impact your own Exchange 2010 deployment.

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Error: Outlook Was Unable to Recover Some or All of the Items in this Folder

Paul Cunningham — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:13:26 +0000

While attempting to restore items from the Outlook recoverable deleted items you may encounter the following error message.

Outlook was unable to recover some or all of the items in this folder. Make sure you have the required permissions to recover items in this folder, and try again. If the problem persists, contact your administrator.

The error may occur when you attempt to recover a folder that contains a large number of sub-folders or mail items in it.

On the Exchange Server you may see a corresponding Application event log entry similar to this:

Log Name:      Application
Source:        MSExchangeIS
Date:          11/14/2011 12:57:59 PM
Event ID:      9646
Task Category: General
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      exchangeserver.domain.local
Description:
Mapi session "3bbea118-07e3-4746-b7bf-0e5b65e28314" exceeded the maximum of 500 objects of type "objtFolder".

This can occur due to the default limits configured on the Exchange Server for the number of items that can be opened by a single MAPI session. In the example above the MAPI session was trying to open more than the default 500 allowed objects of type “objtFolder” (in other words, Folders).

The solution is provided by Microsoft in this support article, which refers to Exchange Server 2003 but applies to later versions as well.

Open Regedit and navigate to \\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\ParametersSystem
If the key “MaxObjsPerMapiSession” does not already exist, right-click on ParametersSystem and create a new key of that name.
Create a new DWORD value with a name matching the object type in the event log error on your server (eg “objtFolder” in this example)
Set the DWORD value to a decimal value higher than the default. For the case above I first tried 1000, then 10000 when that did not work.
Wait 15-30 minutes for the registry change to take effect, then retry the Outlook operation.

You may find that you need to try gradually increasing the value until you can successfully recover the items in Outlook. You may also find that after you’ve removed one limit that another object type’s limit may also suddenly come into play, so always check your event log for new errors identifying additional object types that you may need to add a registry value for.

After you’ve successfully recovered the Outlook items revert the registry keys to their default values (listed in the Microsoft support article above) to prevent issues with server resources in the future.

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Exchange Server Pro

Get-MailboxReport.ps1 – PowerShell Script to Generate Mailbox Reports

Related posts:

Update Rollup 6 for Exchange 2007 SP3 Released

Related posts:

Google Discontinues Message Continuity

Related posts:

Exchange Server 2012?

Related posts:

Avoid Running Out of Transaction Log Disk Space on Exchange Servers

Related posts:

Exchange 2010 Boot Camp Update

Related posts:

Register Your Interest for the Exchange 2010 Boot Camp

Related posts:

Happy Holidays from Exchange Server Pro

Related posts:

Exchange 2010 FAQ: Are Wildcard SSL Certificates Supported?

Support for Exchange 2010 and Wildcard SSL Certificates

Security Implications for Exchange 2010 and Wildcard SSL Certificates

Summary

Related posts:

Error: Outlook Was Unable to Recover Some or All of the Items in this Folder

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