Sumatra's Calendar Server Blog

Exchange Transaction logs - capacity planning

2012-01-18T18:58:00.000-05:00

Sumatra's enterprise customers ask me how much space they should allocate for transaction logs. I came across Ross Smith's Technet post. Ross suggests a formula to compute the transaction logfile growth:

For ever 100 messages, Exchange generates 20 transation logs.
According to another Technet article, "Understanding Mailbox Database and Log Capacity," each transaction log is 2MB.

All calendaring transactions are messages. Thus, to estimate the logfile size (in MB), sum the total number of transactions (generated through a macro in the Sumatra DB, M_ShowCounts) and multiply by (2/100).

Changing Google Calendar Notifications

2012-01-12T19:05:00.000-05:00

The New York Times has a good post today about changing your Google Calendar Notifications.

Migrating Group Calendar from Oracle Calendar to Exchange

2012-01-11T08:04:00.001-05:00

An interesting case came up the past few days as a site was migrating from Oracle Calendar Server to Live@ Edu.

They maintained a calendar in Oracle for users to post when they were In or Out and wanted to take this to hosted Exchange as a Shared Calendar.

Since the Designate model in OCS is very different from the Delegate model in Exchange, when you're converting the OCS export files, choose this option for the raw data from those calendars and then run an insertion. You'll get the results you desire.

Why this option? When events were added to the calendar by Designates in OCS they were OWNED by the Designates, and not the actual calendar. The above option normalizes that for an Exchange environment by making the events owned by the shared calendar.

Add Holidays to Resources in Exchange 2010

2011-12-27T07:00:00.000-05:00

Okay, okay. I know we wrote that the SuHoliday cmdlet would not add holidays to resources.

BUT -- if you use FULL ACCESS instead of Impersonate, the current download-able version works like a champ for this.

To try this out:

· Provision a service account (say, "exsu") that is NOT an Enterprise Admin

o Set impersonate RBAC for that account

§ new-ManagementRoleAssignment -Name:_suImp8Exsu -Role:ApplicationImpersonation -User:'exsu@cod.sumatra.local'

o Try to do an insert for a user AND

o For resources "cr101b" or "room 222"

Results should not be good, but NOW....

· Add fullaccess to that service account

o Get-Mailbox -filter {isResource -eq $true} -resultsize unlimited | add-mailboxpermission -user exsu -accessrights fullaccess -InheritanceType: All

o Add holidays for that room

Holiday Insertions in Live @ Edu

2011-12-23T08:53:00.000-05:00

Kudos to Rachel in Georgia for her holiday insertion into Live @ Edu.

She's used SuHoliday on over 8000 users. Thus far we think this is a record but we usually only hear from people when there are problems.

Also based on her experience and feedback we've added capabilities to our most recent version of the cmdlet, including:

Not setting reminders for holidays
Better logging
Default time zone handling
Memory handling improvements
Improved resilience when Exchange throttles your insertion

We're discussing when and how to roll this out to the main cmdlet download.

Zimbra to Exchange Migrations Field-Proven

2011-12-05T06:13:00.001-05:00

Just got the word from Portland, Oregon that our faster, simpler method for Zimbra to Exchange calendar migrations successfully migrated 800 Zimbra users' calendar, tasks, and contacts into Office 365 this past weekend.
We're considering this a success.
Yippee!

Sumatra Undo in Action

2011-11-18T07:00:00.000-05:00

Ever since high school film strips we've been convinced that visual aids are the most effective.

And ever since college we've been convinced that designing a software system without a back out strategy is just darned irresponsible.

So we combined both of these lessons in our video of Sumatra's UNDO capability in action.

Zimbra to Exchange Calendar Migration - The Video

2011-11-16T14:00:00.000-05:00

We've had a good response from one of our test sites on the faster, simpler Zimbra to Exchange calendar migration method so we did a video of the process to show you in real time how it all works.

Enjoy.

And if you want to see the full screen version, you can watch that off our website.

Faster, easier Zimbra ICS to Exchange migration

2011-11-07T18:18:00.000-05:00

One of the developing trends we've seen is sites moving out of Zimbra and into Exchange.

Imapsync is excellent for moving the email, but the calendars, tasks, and contacts are another issue.

While we've have a full-state migration solution for over a year, a lot of the folks who want to move want something simple, but still server-side, and oh, could we PLEASE keep meetings live?

It's a tall order, but as usual we deliver.

This is the basic screen:

In short what you do is export your Zimbra calendars, tasks, and contacts server-side (using either zmmailbox, cURL, or whatever you're comfortable with) in ICS and VCF format, then run this application against the resulting files.

With the proper credentials on your Exchange server (and yes, we have tested it against Office 365 and Live @ Edu), these will upload. Meetings will be re-proposed (so your users will see invitations in their inboxes come the Monday morning post-migration). The alternative is the full-blown Sumatra process which is overkill for many of you moving out of Zimbra.

Rather than our three step process (export, map user IDs in a database, and insert into Exchange), this is a TWO step process (export, import) with no intermediate mapping. So if you're changing a lot of user IDs going from Zimbra to Exchange, this is probably NOT the recommended process for you.

We're in test right now with this at a couple of sites and will let you know when it's ready for prime time. We'll give you the full documentation set and a video then too.

Get Time Zones for your users via PowerShell

2011-10-06T13:34:00.000-04:00

We recently released a cmdlet that bulk-inserts holidays in Exchange 2010 (see the Sumatra website or the Sumatra Blog).

A holiday is a simple all day calendaring event in Outlook. Yet simple calendaring events can be tricky! Consider: when your end users work in different time zones! If you force an all day event into one time zones, all users who are not in that time zone will see their holidays span multiple days. Not a happy scenario. What's the solution?

We wrote a script that uses Exchange 2010 "get-mailboxRegionalConfiguration" cmdlet to find the timezones. If used in conjunction with get-mailbox, you can output a file that has the user information plus the timezone. Problem solved!

This script produces a file that outputs PrimarySMTPAddress + TimeZone:

#Define your 'default' timezone (if none is set)
$myDefaultTimezone="Eastern Standard Time"

#Define the output file
$myOutputFile="userlist.txt"

#Define the list of User Accounts to process
$myMailboxList = get-mailbox -Filter {RecipientTypeDetails -eq "UserMailbox"}  select-object Identity,PrimarySMTPAddress

#If file exists, delete the file
$fileExists=test-Path $myOutputFile
if ($fileExists -eq "True"){del $myOutputFile}


#Loop through list and get
foreach ($t in $myMailboxList) {
    $priSMTP=$t.PrimarySMTPAddress
    $xi=get-mailboxRegionalConfiguration -Identity $t.Identity
    if ($xi.TimeZone -eq $Null) {$tt=$myDefaultTimezone} Else {$tt=$xi.TimeZone}
    write-output "$priSMTP $tt" >> $myOutputFile
}

write-output "Done!  see the file $myOutputFile"

You can also download getUserTimezones.zip

If you have another way, please share!

-Russ

Holiday cmdlet for Exchange 2010

2011-10-03T17:26:00.000-04:00

We've been inserting holidays server-side on Exchange for a while and after some feedback last year we started re-thinking how to accomplish this.

These are the files in the downloadable ZIP

We've written a PowerShell cmdlet we call suHoliday that inserts holidays server-side. We've run it through our internal testing against on-premises Exchange 2010, Live @ Edu, and Office 365, so now we think it's time to let it out into the wild and see what you folks can do with it.

The sample CSV file for US holidays

Your inserted holidays will look like this in a user's calendar:

If you want to download it and run it through its paces in your test lab, you may do so here. We just ask you to answer a few questions so we can keep track of where it's going. If it works for you consider making a donation of US$20 per instance. It'll make it easier for us to consider updates and new features for next year.

What's it do now?

Insert server-specific or user-specific holidays through 2012 with NO user intervention.

Customize for different state or national holidays.

Define Free/Busy status.

Script adding holidays at user provisioning time (e.g., by piping in from get-mailbox).

Support for multiple time zones.

Define All-Day Events or appointments at specific times.

Support international holidays / date formats. For example: 2012 UK Bank Holidays

Try it out and tell your friends.

Limitations (or, what do you want for free / ultra low cost?)

This only inserts holidays for the year 2012 (well, we give you a few weeks into 2013).
All inserted events have "Inserted courtesy of the Exchange Calendaring experts: Sumatra Development" in the agenda. (yep, even if you license it)
We support via electronic means, so keep an eye on our blog.

Advance Notice: Sumatra in SF Sept 30, Oct 1

2011-09-16T16:49:00.001-04:00

Sumatra (well, Zyg) is going to be in San Francisco on September 30 and October 1, Mainly he's there to go to the Opera, but since that always happens at night and his engaging wife will be working at Wells-Fargo, if any of our calendar-oriented acquaintances in the Bay Area are looking for some guidance, drop a line.

Propagating Changed SIP URIs to Existing Meetings

2011-09-08T07:08:00.004-04:00

One of our favorite sites contacted us about a problem they're anticipating. Knee-deep in solving said problem we at Sumatra wonder if anyone else has the same issue.

They're changing a number of SMTP addresses and want to change the associated Lync SIPs to match. Here's Microsoft's guidance on how to do that for Office 365. And a different take on scripting a solution. See Impact of Changing a User's SIP Address for a full discussion.

Changing the SIPs is not the problem, but the number of existing meetings with the old SIPs that are then left in your users' calendars IS a problem that requires updating.

So in this example of an existing calendar item, let's say riuliano became russ_iuliano, to keep end users from going bug-house you'd want to modify all the LiveMeeting URLs in existing calendar objects server-side and update them.

And this is the cue for Sumatra's ability to manipulate Exchange calendar data.

Does anyone else out there have the same problem?

More Weirdness in an Over-Loaded Google Calendar

2011-09-05T14:26:00.001-04:00

While experimenting to see if I could delete calendar items from a calendar and thereby finally clear an over-loaded test account I got this message:

"Oops"? Cute. Too bad I do not know any serious corporations that ask for cute.

The goal was to see if deleting items would get me below a threshold, or if the threshold was irreversible.

The weird thing is that once I got that message, previously-deleted objects began re-populating the calendar. Calendar zombies had risen from the grave!

Clearly there's a cache of the deleted items. I have no information on when, how often, or if it gets cleared in a single session.

There is also some interesting behavior with old items. To see this, load 10-15 years worth of calendar data and then travel back to some month in the year 2000. The following unobtrusive message will display while the data renders (and it seems to take a while):

So there's either some background mechanism shunting historical data into slower, longer-term storage, or the system is not really optimized for rendering arbitrary stretches of time.

Added on September 6, 2011:
A variation of the above: cannot load your data -- come back when it's more convenient for Google....

Unable to Delete All Data in a Google Calendar

2011-08-31T08:21:00.001-04:00

So let's say you're testing your calendar insertion (a prudent step which we not only endorse but require). You either have a large calendar or run several insertions to put in over 40,000 items. I suspect the problem starts with 32K objects, just because we are so suspiciously close to a magic binary number.
You go into your settings with the hope of deleting all data from your test account (and please make sure it is a test account):

You select Delete giving you this dialog box:

Where you promise you REALLY REALLY DO want to Delete all events, and click the Delete all events button.

Less than 60 seconds later you see the following dialog box and all your data is still in the calendar.

We do not seem to be alone. We posted this on Google Calendar's Help Forum (whose only value has been confirmation from another user with the same problem). None of our current clients are going to hit this limit unless they do multiple insertions without practicing calendar hygiene.

So practice calendar hygiene.

But we do want to get this out as a warning to everyone.

Shout out to the CalConnect Folks!

2011-08-24T10:38:00.000-04:00

A shout out of thanks to the CalConnect folks for putting us on their Blogroll.

Thanks!

Preliminary Google Calendar Upload Speed Tests

2011-08-18T12:01:00.003-04:00

We've made no secret about the molasses-in-Antarctica upload speed of EWS in Office365 and Live@ Edu.

So for an interesting comparison -- how long does it take to upload calendar data into Google Calendar?

In a test derived from real world data set (legacy Meeting Maker being the organ donor in this case) our current technology uploaded 13,651 appointments to Google Calendar in 9:12 (i.e., 9 minutes and 12 seconds). Just in case I happened to hit a low time for network traffic I ran the test again with additional loads on my PC and got all data inserted in 15:54 (call it 16 minutes).

Using the more conservative figure, this represents an average upload rate of about 853 calendar objects per minute into Google Calendar! The faster result gives 1480 objects per minute, but I doubt that is sustainable over the duration of a migration.

For those of you who do not understand why we get excited by these numbers: this is similar to the peak throughput we see inserting into an on-premises Exchange installation (you always hear us use the figure 850 calendar objects per minute for estimation purposes). Our timings on hosted Exchange come in at about 120 calendar objects per minute.

So Google Calendar is about ten times faster than an upload into Hosted Exchange!

Let me repeat that -- our early testing indicates that calendar uploads into Google Calendar execute an order of magnitude faster than an upload into hosted Exchange.

Now, let me point our a few things to beware of: these numbers may vary as our code evolves, but are in accord with the field experience of one of our test sites (which motivated this timing).

I have no idea what Google does right that Microsoft does not, given that both companies are in total control of their data centers, server code, and APIs. I do know that for purposes of migration speed Google Calendar kicks Exchange calendar's buttocks all the way to the curb and then slam dances its corpse into pavement pizza.

Since regular readers will know that your author does not believe in letting ANY of the guilty off without some sentence, I want to point out that as mediocre as Microsoft EWS documentation and support has been, it is light years ahead of Google's documentation of their calendar APIs which our team has taken to completely ignoring because it's led us down too many bad paths already.

And after inserting 40,000+ objects into Google Calendar, the Delete under Settings does not seem to work:

iCal Sharing in Exchange 2010 Sp1

2011-08-09T09:18:00.006-04:00

Sumatra is about to release a solution to migrate legacy calendar data to Google. A customer asked how his end users could read shared calendars from folks outside the organization (and who use Exchange for calendaring.)

We passed along this article, in which Steve Goodman wrote a superb post describing how Exchange 2010 Sp1 allows users to share calendars with non-Exchange users (e.g., Google, Zimbra) using public or encoded URLs. (And users can be alloweed to do this via OWA!)

And remember, this is calendar SHARING, not cross-server calendar synchronization.

Update Rollup 4 for Exchange 2010 - re-issued

2011-08-09T08:58:00.005-04:00

I was working offiste for the last two weeked and missed the story: Microsoft discovered a problem with Outlook 2010's interaction with Exchange 2010 server, and had to retract Update Rollup 4 for Exchange 2010 they released on June 22,2011. KB251545 described the problem: moving or copying public folders didn't work "as expected."

The release was announced on Technet. Here is the new link to download the rollup

BTW, Update Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 release remains "on-schedule" for release in August 2011.

First Field Migration into Zimbra 7 Accomplished

2011-07-27T01:59:00.000-04:00

We ran our first field migration into Zimbra 7 this weekend (out of a Meeting Maker legacy system).

We had early reports of problems with recurring meetings in Z7 migrations, but tested well in advance to make sure that did not happen. All is well.

Prevent ghost delegates: find (and remove) delegates before terminating user

2011-07-21T11:54:00.007-04:00

In a previous post, I outlined a process to find and remove Ghost Delegates from Exchange. (To recap: you turn a delegate a ghost delegate by deleting the account from AD without removing the delegate permissions in Outlook.)

In this post, I'll outline a process that avoids the ghost delegate problem (by finding and removing delegates BEFORE deleting the terminated user's account.) There are two steps: search AD, and then remove the delegates.

The hard part was finding all users that granted delegate rights to the "soon-to-be-deleted-account." I dredged up two "oldies but goodies:" LDIFDE and CSVDE to do a reverse-lookup for a terminated user using the "public delegate" fields:

PublicDelegates "What mailbox(es) did I give delegate rights to"
PublicDelegatesBL: "What mailbox(es) am I a delegate of"

Here are both commands:

LDIFDE.EXE -F delegateLDIFDE.TXT -D "OU=TestUsers,DC=myDC,DC=mydomain,DC=com" -L "name,mail,PublicDelegatesBL" -R "(&mail=termuser@mydomain.com)(PublicDelegatesBL=*))"

csvde -f delegateCSVDE.csv -s myDC -l "name,mail,PublicDelegatesBL" -r "(&mail=termuser@mydomain.com)(PublicDelegatesBL=*))"

Note: the LDIFDE command limits the scope of its work to the "OU=TestUsers;" csvde seaches the entire enterprise directory.

Here is an output from LDIFDE, in which we found all of PublicDelegatesBL of "Andre Admin" (it's just Big Boss):

Next, use Glen Scale's powershell code to confirm the terminated user is a delegate, and then remove that user from all accounts he was granted delegate rights. (The following commands were described in a prior post.) Step 7 is where the terminated user is removed as a delegate. I have shown how to display delegates and forwarding rules, just as an FYI.

set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -force
import-Module ./Messageops-Exchange.psd1
$myCred=Get-Credential -Credential myservice@mydomain.com
$newprofile=new-messageops.ewsprofile -identity:myservice@mydomain.com -exchangeversion:exchange2010_sp1 -casURL:https://mycas.mydomain.com -Credential:$myCred
Get-MessageOps.MailboxDelegateReport-p:$newprofile -id:bigboss@mydomain.com
Get-MessageOps.MailboxDelegateForwardingRules -p:$newprofile -id:bigboss@mydomain.com
Remove-MessageOps.MailboxDelegate -p:$newprofile -id:bigboss@mydomain.com -DelegateAddress:termuser@mydomain.com

Notes: the "terminated" user is termuser@mydomain.com; the account that granted delegate rights was bigboss@mydomain.com.

I've pulled the URLs and commands into a text file that you can download to simplify typing....

--Russ

p.s.: I tried Exchange Management Shell, using a new Exchange 2010 commandlet: "Get-MailboxFolderPermission." But it was difficult to do a reverse-lookup (i.e., find all users who grated the "terminated user" permissions: I had to type that user's display name correctly or got no hits.... Plus, this commandlet isn't available for Exchange 2007 customers.

Here is how to get Big Boss' permissions:
Get-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity bigboss:\Calendar

FYI, you can set accessrights, particularly editor rights, between "big boss" and "her admin," that you can't do if your end users access their Exchange calendars via OWA (only):

Set-MailboxFolderPermission -Id:bigboss:\Calendar -User:herAdmin -AccessRights:Editor

The Ghost Delegate Exorcist

2011-07-21T10:06:00.018-04:00

A Sumatra client called for help - a flood of NDRs were driving their Exchange server to its knees. The problem: a boss granted his admin delegate rights his calendar. Along with that, all calendar-messages were forwarded to to the admin. After the admin left the company, the admin's mailbox was deleted.

All was fine until someone invited the boss to a meeting. The boss received an NDR after the delegate forwarding rule sent that calendar message to the [now deleted] delegate. That NDR calendar message was sent back to the boss which got forwarded to the [still deleted] delegate, which generated another NDR......)

No big deal. They went into the boss' Outlook delegate and tried to remove the delegate, but couldn't -- Outlook reported the delegate was "(not found):"

The delegates are there but you can't delete them. Ghost delegates.....
The root cause: they didn't remove the delegate permissions and forwarding rules before they deleted the admin assistant's mailbox.

In this post, I'll talk about how to rid Exchange of those ghost delegates. In the next post, I'll talk about how to find and remove delegate permissions BEFORE you delete the terminated user's account.

For the curious, Glen Scales blogged about "How to deal with invalid delegates," and "Displaying delegate forward rules." Even better, Glen wrote some powershell code to exorcise our ghost delegate!

Here is what we did to remove the ghost delegates

Download and install the Exchange Web Services Managed API
Create a sub directory, and copy the Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices dll into the directory; Run Exchange Powershell (as administrator), and change to that sub directory.
Set the execution policy, import the module, and create a credential variable (using your service account):
Next, define an exchange profile (as above, we provide our service account with impersonation or full access permissions. See our blog post on impersonation in Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010), and point to our CAS server directly

$newprofile = new-messageops.ewsprofile -identity:mySVCacct@mydomain.com-exchangeversion:exchange2010_sp1 -casURL:https://mycas.mydomain.com -Credential:$myCred
See the list of valid and invalid (ghost) delegates and rules:

Get-MessageOps.MailboxDelegateReport -p:$newprofile -id:bigboss@mydomain.com

Get-MessageOps.MailboxDelegatesInvalid -p:$newprofile -id:bigboss@mydomain.com

Get-MessageOps.MailboxDelegateInvalidForwardingRules -p:$newprofile -id:bigboss@mydomain.com
Finally, remove invalid forwarding rules, and THEN remove the delegates (in that order!)

Remove-MessageOps.MailboxDelegateInvalidForwardingRules.unsupported -p:$newprofile -id:bigboss@mydomain.com

Remove-MessageOps.MailboxDelegatesInvalid.UnSupported -p:$newprofile -id:bigboss@mydomain.com

I've pulled the URLs and commands into a text file that you can download to simplify typing....

-Russ

Migrating Zimbra Calendar to Hosted Microsoft Exchange

2011-07-10T08:59:00.000-04:00

We've been getting a lot of inquiries lately from people wanting to migrate calendars out of Zimbra and into Exchange.

A few quick guidelines:

If you have more than 250 users it is cost-effective to use our full-scale migration technology. It's completely server-to-server, leaves end-users out of the loop, and has results as though you've been using Exchange calendaring all along.
For a few hundred users or under, try our Decaf option. Application here. Documentation here. It's a server-side ICS import to hosted Exchange, and right now it's mainly geared towards Oracle Calendar migrations, but we'll open it up to Zimbra users if we see enough demand.

Exchange 2010 to Google Calendar Server-Side Calendar Migrations

2011-07-04T12:16:00.000-04:00

You read that right.

Now that we finally have OAuth for Google working (one of our engineers described Google's documentation as having "duplications, contradictions and gaps in between." I describe it as a "mess") we're inserting calendar data server-side to Google with full-fidelity and no end-user intervention.

Yippee!

We've read the handwriting on the wall and see that there are sites out there looking to bring their calendar data from Microsoft Exchange over to Google and are not thrilled about having to use PSTs to do it (we don't blame you).

If you are contemplating such -- drop us a line. We want some feedback on how you'd like it implemented.

Our Office 365 Experience Thus Far...

2011-06-30T13:53:00.000-04:00

So we've been pretty good letting our readers know that migration performance into both Live @ Edu and Office 365 is about 14% the performance of on-premises Exchange. And then there's the problems with quotas.

That none of this has changed or been addressed through the beta period of O365 should not be surprising to anybody not under the influence of Prozac or electroshock.

In fact, despite bringing this to Redmond's attention, we've gotten zero feedback, seen zero progress, and expect zero results.

Now that Office 365 is out of beta and in the production, plan on all these nagging "problems" getting re-classified as "features."