Exchange 2010 Litigation Hold

A feature not widely used by Exchange administrators is Litigation Hold which was introduced in Exchange 2010 RTM. In some cases, there may be no need or regulatory requirement to implement it but, there are instances where users do not implement it due to lack of understanding of what exactly Litigation Hold is and how it differs from Single Item Recovery and Retention Hold.

Litigation is, simply put, the conduct of a lawsuit. When an employee or an organization faces a lawsuit or even expects one, it is required to keep all information related to the case, whether this is information on paper or most commonly, electronically stored. If all relevant information is not kept, the subject of the lawsuit might undergo further legal action, sanctions or fines.

Nowadays e-mail plays a very important role in these situations due to its vast use and it is crucial to keep every single e-mail message related to the case. But how do you prevent users from advertently or inadvertently deleting e-mails needed for the investigation? What about Messaging Records Management? Do you just temporarily disable it for all your Exchange databases? This is where Litigation Hold comes in, allowing administrators to easily:

• Preserve deleted or edited mailbox items (by users);

• Preserve automatically deleted mailbox items (by MRM);

• Search and capture items placed on hold;

All of this is easily achieved my simply placing a mailbox on Litigation Hold as you can see in this article in MSExchange.org.

Exchange 2010 Client Throttling Policies

Exchange 2007 introduced a feature called RPC Client Throttling to allow administrators to manage end-user performance by preventing client applications, such as Outlook for example, from sending too many Remote Procedure Call [RPC] requests per second to Exchange, causing the server to suffer in terms of performance. When Exchange determines that a client is having a negative effect on the server, it will send a "back-off" request to the client telling it to delay sending any additional requests for a specified time (maximum of 2000 milliseconds) in order to reduce the performance effect on the server.

In Exchange 2010, Client Throttling has been much improved, monitoring and controlling much more than just RPC requests. Its purpose is still to ensure that users are not intentionally or unintentionally straining Exchange and that users share resources proportionally.

In this article, we will explore Client Throttling Policies in Exchange 2010, what they are used for and how to change them if necessary.

For the full article, please click here: MSExchange.org.

Exchange 2013 Preview and Lync 2013 Preview

If you would like to try the new Preview editions of Exchange Server 2013 and Lync Server 2013 just go to the Office Preview website.

To check the requirements for both systems:

• Exchange 2013 System Requirements
• Lync Server 2013 Requirements

I’m just starting to install them so stay tuned for updates!!   :)

Multi-Mailbox Search Licensing

In Exchange 2010, Microsoft introduced the ability for discovery managers to search mailboxes across an Exchange 2010 organization using Multi-Mailbox Search. Along with Personal Archives, which allow you to eliminate the risk from PST files and store historical messaging data in Exchange; Legal Hold, which allows you to preserve data for eDiscovery, and Retention Policies, which allow you to manage email lifecycle, it has been one of the more popular features of Exchange 2010.

Multi-Mailbox Search required an Enterprise Client Access License (CAL) for each mailbox searched. We’ve heard your feedback on how you use this feature and the licensing requirements. Today Microsoft made a change to Exchange 2010 licensing so we’ll no longer require an Enterprise CAL for Multi-Mailbox Search.

Source: The Exchange Team Blog

Suspend Multiple Database Copies

If you are doing maintenance on a server and want to suspend all passive database copies on that server it is very simple and all you have to do is run:

Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus -Server "server_name" | Suspend-MailboxDatabaseCopy -Confirm:$False

Because we are not excluding the current mounted DBs (if any), the script will throw an error stating that “The suspend operation can't proceed because database "db_name" on Exchange Mailbox server "server_name" is the active mailbox database copy” - which is fine because it’s what we want.

If you want to suspend all passive copies of a particular database across all servers you can simply run:

Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus "db_name" | Suspend-MailboxDatabaseCopy -Confirm:$False

But what if you are reducing the number of database copies in your environment and just want to suspend the 4th copy of all your DBs across all your servers? In this case, we will have to use the following script:

$dbs = Get-MailboxDatabase

ForEach ($db in $dbs) {
  ForEach ($dbCopy in $db.DatabaseCopies) {
    If ($dbCopy.ActivationPreference -eq 4) {
      Suspend-MailboxDatabaseCopy $dbCopy.Identity -Confirm:$False
    }
  }
}

Hope this helps!

Troubleshooting Outlook Calendar Problems

If your users are experiencing issues with their Outlook Calendar, Microsoft released back in May a tool to help administrators in these situations, the Calendar Checking Tool for Outlook (also known as CalCheck).

This is a command-line tool that opens an Outlook profile on the local machine, opens the Outlook Calendar and checks permissions, free/busy information and auto booking, for example. The tool then checks each item in the calendar for any problems.

The calendar to by analyzed must reside on an Exchange Server and this tool does not work with IMAP, POP3 or any other non-Exchange mail servers.

To download it go to this link.

Microsoft MVP Award 2012

Yesterday, July 1st 2012 was a happy day for many people out there and I was one of them. I was in the middle of writing a new article for MSExchange.org when I received an e-mail from Microsoft saying I was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) 2012 for Exchange!     :)

This was the first time for me and I am really and truly honored to receive this award!

I want to thank everyone who reads this blog and my scripts on TechNet, my fellow MVP Ratish Nair from the great MSExchangeGuru.com, everyone on MSExchange.org, Cristina Gonzales (my MVP Lead) and Microsoft for this award and for the amazing product that Exchange is!

I promise to keep sharing everything I know and learn and to do even more for the community! I hope my articles and blog posts are useful and if you think there is anything I can improve or if you would like to see some particular topic on this blog, please just let me know!

According to About MVP:

“The Microsoft MVP Award recognizes exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who voluntarily share their high quality, real world expertise with others. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts representing technology's best and brightest who share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others. Worldwide, there are over 100 million participants in technical communities; of these participants, there are fewer than 4,000 active Microsoft MVPs.
(...)

As the most active, expert participants in technical communities, MVPs are recognized and awarded for their inspirational commitment to technical communities.

In order to receive the Microsoft MVP Award, MVP nominees undergo a rigorous review process. Technical community members, current MVPs, and Microsoft personnel may nominate candidates. A panel that includes MVP team members and product group teams evaluate each nominee's technical expertise and voluntary community contributions for the past year. The panel considers the quality, quantity, and level of impact of the MVP nominee's contributions. Active MVPs receive the same level of scrutiny as other candidates each year."


Thank you Microsoft!