Mailbox Database Seed Status

Seeding large mailbox databases can potentially take a long time. Although it is something that usually does not need to be monitored, it is always good to keep an eye on it to see how it is doing. The Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus cmdlet gives us all the information we need for this.

Usually I use this cmdlet in the following format to ensure the mailbox database copies on a particular server are mounted and/or healthy:

Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus -Server "server_name" | Sort Name

But we can use it to get further details for a particular mailbox databases (the following output has been shortened to only include the most relevant information for this tip):

[PS] C:\>Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus “MDB01\EXAIO” | FL

Identity : MDB01\EXAIO
DatabaseName : MDB01
Status : Seeding
MailboxServer : EXAIO
ActiveDatabaseCopy : EXMBX01
ActiveCopy : False
ActivationPreference : 3
IsLastCopyAvailabilityChecksPassed : False
LastCopyAvailabilityChecksPassedTime :
IsLastCopyRedundancyChecksPassed : False
LastCopyRedundancyChecksPassedTime :
ActivationSuspended : True
ContentIndexState : FailedAndSuspended
ContentIndexErrorMessage : Reseeding of the index is required.
ContentIndexErrorCode : 22
CopyQueueLength : 718053
ReplayQueueLength : 0
ReplicationIsInBlockMode : False
ActivationDisabledAndMoveNow : False
AutoActivationPolicy : Unrestricted
ReplayLagStatus : Enabled:False; PlayDownReason:None; Percentage:0; Configured:00:00:00;
Actual:00:00:00
DatabaseSeedStatus : Percentage:33; Read:95.19 GB; Written:95.19 GB; ReadPerSec:23.65 MB; WrittenPerSec:23.67 MB
DiskFreeSpacePercent : 60
DiskFreeSpace : 434.7 GB (466,730,405,888 bytes)
DiskTotalSpace : 717 GB (769,869,737,984 bytes)
DatabaseVolumeMountPoint : E:\Mount\edb09\
LogVolumeMountPoint : E:\Mount\edb09\


If we are particularly interested on the progress of the seed operation, we can filter the above output to only include what we want:

(Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus “MDB01\EXAIO”).DatabaseSeedStatus

Analyze Mailbox Items Class or Type

The purpose of this script is to go through every single item in a mailbox and produce a report listing the class (or type) of each item and how many items of each class were found in the mailbox:

Processed 52 folders and 19163 items.

Name Value
---- -----
IPM.Appointment                          194
IPM.Appointment.ReadiManagerMeeting      2
IPM.Contact                              164
IPM.Note                                 16911
IPM.Note.Exchange.ActiveSync.MailboxLog  2
IPM.Note.Microsoft.Conversation          1616
IPM.Note.Microsoft.Conversation.Voice    67
IPM.Note.Microsoft.Missed                2
IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Canceled            3
IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Request             43
IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Resp.Neg            3
IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Resp.Pos            20
IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Resp.Tent           2
IPM.Sharing                              120
IPM.StickyNote                           14

I created this script to have an idea of how items had been archived by EnterpriseVault across the users’ mailboxes (IPM.NOTE.EnterpriseVault.Shortcut class). The script reports on all item classes, but it can easily be changed to only look for a particular class, such as EV stubs for example.

To download the complete final script, please head on to the TechNet Script Gallery.

Office 365 Admin App for Windows 10

Microsoft has released the beta version of the Office 365 Admin app for Windows 10, which is available for both Windows 10 Desktop and Mobile!

This app gives admins the ability to administer Office 365 directly from their desktop. It supports notification integration with Windows 10 as well as Microsoft Partner scenarios, allowing admins to easily switch organizations if they manage Office 365 for multiple tenants. The mobile version has the exact same user experience making switching from desktop to the mobile app extremely easy.

To install it, search for “office 365 admin” in the Windows App Store and you should find it straight away. Click Install and, once installed, click Open: 

Alternatively, once installed, search for “office 365” in your start menu:

Simply add an account for an Office 365 tenant you want to manage:

Once logged in, the app’s dashboard provides some high level information about the service and the tenant itself:

We can search for all users provisioned in the tenant:

As well as perform a variety of actions on user accounts or gather further information about them:

We can check the current health of the Office 365 tenant:

Read any available messages:

And much, much more! Give it a try :)

Setting Distribution Groups Default OU in Exchange 2010/2013/2016

When creating a Distribution Group in the Exchange Shell or Console, we are given the option to choose which Organizational Unit (OU) in Active Directory (AD) we want the group’s object to be created in:

However, we do not necessarily need to choose an OU. We can tell Exchange where it should create all OUs by default using the Set-OrganizationConfig cmdlet. By default, no OU is selected which means Exchange will create all distribution groups in the Users OU:

Let us say we want all distribution groups to be created in the Exchange -> Distribution Groups OU:

 

Using the above cmdlet it is easy to globally set the default OU for any newly created distribution group from now on:

When creating a new distribution group now, we still get the exact same wizard with the Organizational unit field not populated. However, if we don’t choose any OU, the distribution group will now be created in the OU we set up above.

Distribution Group SendAs Denied

When trying to assign Send As or Receive As permissions to a Distribution Group in Exchange 2010, 2013 or 2016 using the Add-ADPermission cmdlet, you might get an error message saying Access is denied and insufficient access rights:

Active Directory operation failed on . This error is not retriable. Additional information: Access is denied.
Active directory response: 00000005: SecErr: DSID-031521D0, problem 4003 (INSUFF_ACCESS_RIGHTS), data 0
+ CategoryInfo : WriteError: (0:Int32) [Add-ADPermission], ADOperationException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : 5557AD82,Microsoft.Exchange.Management.RecipientTasks.AddADPermission

 

 

This is because, by default, Exchange Trusted Subsystem is not granted the “modify permissions” permission. This causes the Add-ADPermission cmdlet to fail with an Access Denied error.

To resolve this problem, add the modify permissions permission for the Exchange Trusted Subsystem to the organizational unit that contains the Distribution Group:

1.       Open Active Directory Users and Computers;

2.       Click View, and then click Advanced Features;

3.       Right-click the OU that contains the distribution lists, and then click Properties;

4.       In the Security tab, click Advanced;

5.       In the Permissions tab, click Add;

6.       In the Enter object name to select box, type Exchange trusted subsystem, and then click OK;

7.       In the Object tab, select This object and all descendants objects in the Apply onto list, locate Modify Permissions in the Permissions list, and then set it to Allow;

8.       Click OK.

 

Exchange Distribution Group Creation Report

For some organizations, allowing end users to create and manage their own Distribution Groups is a standard practice. It usually alleviates work from ServiceDesk or second/third line support teams and gives users more responsibility and freedom to perform their role.

While this is indeed a great feature, it is always important to have a good naming convention in place and ensure that users adhere to it. But no matter how much we tell users how they should be creating a distribution group, we all know there will be situations where the group is not created as it should have been.

In one hand, for IT to check every day all the groups users created would cause some overhead. On the other hand, leave them for too long and then it might be difficult to rectify a wrongly-created distribution group. So why not automatically generate a report when new groups are created for IT to look at? That way they do not need to keep constantly checking and it is quick and easy to make sure the newly-created groups are OK.

To download the script and the read the entire article, please go to MSExchange’s Exchange Distribution Group Creation Report article page.

Exchange Meeting Room Statistics

Room mailboxes have been available for a very long time now, and most organizations make extensive use of them for all their meeting room bookings. In certain cases, having statistical information about these rooms helps organizations plan or redesign their offices in a more efficient way. This information can show how often certain rooms are utilized, the average meeting duration, who tends to book more meetings, and so on.

In this article we will develop a script to provide us with some of this information and to serve as a stepping stone to gather further information depending on the reader’s particular needs. The end result will look something like this:

 

In this example, I only searched one meeting room called ITD – 16A – Small CF VC. For the month of December we can see that a total of 115 meetings were booked, out of which 55% are recurring meetings. The average meeting duration was 46 minutes, each meeting had an average of 8 attendees and there were slightly more meetings booked in the morning.

To download the script and the read the entire article, please go to MSExchange’s Exchange Meeting Room Statistics article page.

Determine Role Needed to Run Specific Exchange Cmdlets

Have you ever wondered what role(s) an account needs in order to run a particular cmdlet? This is important as most organizations follow the Principle of Least Privilege.

Let us say, for example, that we want a particular account to be able to run the Set-ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy cmdlet. What role(s) does that account need?! This is actually simple once we know which cmdlet to use to get this information.

For this example, all we need to run is:

Get-ManagementRoleEntry *\Set-ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy

Now we know that in order to run the Set-ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy cmdlet, we need to add the Recipient Policies role to the role group of the account we want to give access to.

Meeting Room Random Free/Busy Error MapiExceptionRpcServerTooBusy

The other day I was faced with an issue where one or more meeting rooms would randomly not show their free/busy information depending on how many meeting room I was querying at the same time in Outlook. If using Outlook on the Web (aka OWA), a few rooms would not have free/busy information available.

After some digging, I found the following two events logged in the Exchange server (the output has been truncated):

Log Name:      Application
Source:        MSExchange Availability
Event ID:      4009
Task Category: Availability Service
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      EXAIO
Description:
Process Microsoft.Exchange.InfoWorker.Common.Delayed`1[System.String]: Unable to open connection for mailbox SMTP:R_IT_01B_CF@nunomota.pt. Exception returned is: Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Storage.StorageTransientException: Cannot query rows in a table. ---> Microsoft.Mapi.MapiExceptionRpcServerTooBusy: MapiExceptionRpcServerTooBusy: Unable to query table rows.

Log Name:      Application
Source:        MSExchange Availability
Event ID:      4009
Task Category: Availability Service
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      EXAIO
Description:
Process Microsoft.Exchange.InfoWorker.Common.Delayed`1[System.String]: Unable to open connection for mailbox SMTP:R_HR_04B_CF@nunomota.pt. Exception returned is: Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Storage.StorageTransientException: Cannot open mailbox /o=ADIAEXCHANGE/ou=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)/cn=Configuration/cn=Servers/cn=EXAIO/cn=Microsoft System Attendant. ---> Microsoft.Mapi.MapiExceptionRpcServerTooBusy: MapiExceptionRpcServerTooBusy: Unable to make connection to the server.

The problem was that the RPC Pool limit was being reached. For each database we can have up to 32 concurrent RPC connections from the same client process. In my case, most meeting rooms were distributed across mainly two databases:

Count Name
----- ----
   83 MDB01
   51 MDB02
    5 MDB03
    3 MDB04
    7 MDB05
    5 MDB06
    4 MDB07
    1 MDB08
    1 MDB09

As you probably guessed, the resolution is to simply split meeting rooms across all databases (when possible). Once I distributed them so there is only 17/18 meeting rooms per database, this error no longer happened.

Create Shadow Copies on the same Active Directory Site

In the Transport High Availability in Exchange 2013 article we discussed, amongst other topics, Exchange’s Shadow Redundancy feature and how it generates redundant copies of e-mails before these being delivered to mailboxes and before Exchange acknowledging to the sending server successfully receiving them.

We also saw that in DAG environments, Exchange gives preference to creating a shadow copy of an email on a DAG member that is located in a different Active Directory (AD) site, if any. But what if we have a DAG that extends one or more AD sites but we want shadow copies to be created only within the same site? If we look at our Transport Config, we will see a ShadowMessagePreferenceSetting parameter (the following output has been truncated):

[PS] C:\> Get-TransportConfig | FL

MaxRetriesForLocalSiteShadow       : 2
MaxRetriesForRemoteSiteShadow      : 4
ShadowHeartbeatFrequency           : 00:02:00
ShadowMessageAutoDiscardInterval   : 2.00:00:00
ShadowMessagePreferenceSetting     : PreferRemote
ShadowRedundancyEnabled            : True
ShadowResubmitTimeSpan             : 03:00:00

The ShadowMessagePreferenceSetting parameters has three possible settings:

• PreferRemote: Exchange tries to make a shadow copy of the message on a server in a different AD site. If the operation fails, it tries a server in the local AD site;
• LocalOnly: a shadow copy of the message should only be made on a server in the local AD site;
• RemoteOnly: a shadow copy of the message should only be made on a server in a different AD site.

Please have in mind that this parameter is only meaningful when the primary server that is trying to make a shadow copy of the message is a Mailbox server that is a member of a DAG that spans multiple AD sites.

As such, if we want our shadow copies to be created within the same site, all we have to do is update the parameter to LocalOnly. However, when we try to do so we might get the following error depending if the other parameters still have their default values:

[PS] C:\> Set-TransportConfig -ShadowMessagePreferenceSetting LocalOnly

The value for MaxRetriesForRemoteSiteShadow must be set to zero for the LocalOnly shadow redundancy preference setting.

So what we need to do is to also update the MaxRetriesForRemoteSiteShadow parameter:

[PS] C:\> Set-TransportConfig -ShadowMessagePreferenceSetting LocalOnly -MaxRetriesForRemoteSiteShadow 0

ExMon for Exchange 2013/2016 Now Available

ExMon, also known as Microsoft Exchange Server User Monitor, has finally been updated for Exchange 2013 and 2016!

You can download the installation file here, as well as a PDF how-to guide on how to use ExMon.

Distribution Groups Statistics

As an Exchange Administrator, have you ever wondered if all those Distribution Groups are actually being used? Organizations running Microsoft Exchange Server are likely to have been running Exchange for a at least a few years and also likely to continue to do so for a while. After all those years, more and more distribution groups get created, some of them stop being used, some are simply forgotten, etc.

Maybe you got asked by the Audit department or by your manager for a list of the 20 most utilized groups, or maybe you are just curious. The good news is that as long as you have Message Tracking Logs enabled, you can easily get this information!

The easiest way to track messages sent to distribution groups is to list all the expansion events. When a user sends an email to a group, Exchange needs to expand that group in order to know who to send the email to. This gets registered with an EventID of EXPAND. Additionally, the RelatedRecipientAddress field in the EXPAND entry contains the PrimarySmtpAddress of the expanded group. And this is pretty much all the information we need.

Using the following cmdlet, we can get a list of all the emails sent to distribution groups on the 1st of January 2016:

Get-MessageTrackingLog -Start 01/01/2016 –End 01/02/2016 -EventID Expand | Select Timestamp, RelatedRecipientAddress, MessageSubject

But what we really want is to know how many emails were sent to which groups during a particular time. Not a problem! All we need to do is tweak the cmdlet above and add Group-Object:

Get-MessageTrackingLog -Start 01/01/2016 –End 01/02/2016 -EventID Expand | Group RelatedRecipientAddress | Sort Count –Descending | Select Count, Name

Do not forget to add Get-TransportService (or Get-TransportServer in Exchange 2007 and 2010) to get the logs across all transport servers if you have more than one!

If you are interested in getting the Top 20 most used groups, for example, this is also very easy:

Get-TransportService | Get-MessageTrackingLog -ResultSize Unlimited -Start 01/01/2016 -EventID Expand | Group RelatedRecipientAddress | Sort Count -Descending | Select -First 20 | FT Count, Name -AutoSize

Exchange Message Queue RiskLevel

When using the Get-Queue cmdlet to view configuration information for queues on Exchange servers, several properties are available for each queue such as DeliveryType, NextHopDomain, Status, MessageCount, LastError, Velocity, RetryCount, and many, many more.

Some of these properties have already been discussed in MSExchange.org articles and/or tips such as Exchange 2013 Queue Velocity. Another interesting one is RiskLevel:

So what is this Risk Level property? Well, according to the Queue filters TechNet article, “this property is reserved for internal Microsoft use, and isn't used in on-premises Exchange 2013 organizations.” As such, I am assuming on-premises customers do not need to worry about this. But just for information, according to the MSDN RiskLevel enumeration webpage, this property has four possible values:

• Normal: The associated message is normal risk.
• Bulk: The associated message is part of a bulk mailing.
• High: The associated message is high risk.
• Low: The associated message is low risk.

Unable to Download Offline Address Book

The other day I was troubleshooting an issue where users were not able to download the Offline Address Book (OAB). After some troubleshooting steps, I ran the Outlook AutoConfiguration Test and noticed that the URL for the OAB was not listed:

Looking at the properties of the OAB, I noticed that Global Web Distribution was disabled and Virtual Directories was empty:

So what do these two properties do exactly?

• GlobalWebDistributionEnabled specifies whether distribution occurs to all virtual directories in the organization. If the value of the GlobalWebDistributionEnabled parameter is $True, distribution occurs to all virtual directories in the organization, and we cannot add values to the VirtualDirectories parameter;
• VirtualDirectories specifies the array of OABVirtualDirectory objects. If this parameter is specified, Version4 of the OAB must be generated.

Because, for some strange reason, none of these properties was set, there was no virtual directory for users to download the OAB from.

Remember that in Exchange 2013:

• OAB files are not stored locally on the CAS;
• OAB files are generated and stored in the Organization Mailbox first and later copied to the %ExchangeInstallPath%\ClientAccess\OAB\ folder on the Mailbox server responsible for generating the OAB;
• CAS 2013 proxies all OAB download requests to the appropriate Mailbox server (the one above);
• Outlook receives OAB URL from Autodiscover and reaches designated CAS 2013 through OAB URL.

So, without OAB URL users simply do not know where to go to get the OAB! Depending on the environment, we now have two options. The first is to specify which virtual directory(ies) to use:

Or simply enable Global Web Distribution:

After resetting IIS (or recycling the OAB application pool), if we run the Outlook AutoConfiguration Test again we should see the OAB URL:

To further test the OAB, beside manually downloading it in Outlook, you can write down the OAB URL, paste it into the address box in Windows Internet Explorer, add /OAB.xml to the end of the path, and then press Enter. The following is an example of what the URL and response resembles:

 

https://mail.domain.com/OAB/6b7ccc1d-7313-453b-9870-5e4708068e95/OAB.xml

Outlook 2016 New Sync Slider Options

With Outlook 2013 we saw the introduction of the Sync Slider, which helps limit the size of OST’s by controlling how much recent mail was synchronized locally on the device. For Exchange accounts, this was 12 months by default, with the option to go down to 1 month or up to all mail.

In Outlook 2016, Microsoft added more sync options that allow for better storage management by only retaining this much mail on the device:

• 3 days;

• 1 or 2 weeks;

• 1, 3, 6, 12 or 24 months;

• All.

 

As before, this setting can also be adjusted using Group Policy.

Restricting Outlook Clients to Cached Mode

Some organizations prefer all Outlook clients to connect to their Exchange servers using Cached Exchange Mode (also known as offline mode) because clients in Online Mode can generate significantly more disk I/O traffic. Besides using Group Policy to control this from the client side, in Exchange 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016 we can force all clients to use Cached Mode at the server end by running the following cmdlet:

Get-Mailbox | Set-CASMailbox -MAPIBlockOutlookNonCachedMode $True

The Set-CASMailbox cmdlet is used to configure client access settings on a mailbox. For example, we can configure settings for ActiveSync, Outlook, Outlook on the web, POP3, and IMAP4. The MAPIBlockOutlookNonCachedMode parameters, which is available only in on-premises Exchange servers, controls access to the mailbox by using Outlook in online or offline mode. Valid values for this parameter are:

• True: only Outlook clients that are configured to use Cached mode are allowed to access the mailbox;
• False: the state of the Cached mode setting is not checked before Outlook clients are allowed to access the mailbox (both online and cached mode are allowed). This is the default value.

However, be careful with this setting! If there are Outlook clients currently configured in Online mode and you set this parameter to True, they will receive the following error message and will not be able to connect until they change their Outlook profile to Cached mode:

 

Prevent Users from Changing Photo in OWA

Using Outlook Web App (OWA, or Outlook on the Web as it is now known), users can change/update their photo using two methods:

1.    By clicking on the Display Name (Exchange 2013) or user photo (Exchange 2016) in the main OWA window and then Change:

 

2.    Using the options menu and then account followed by Edit information... in Exchange 2013, or “My account” section:

 

 

 

Some companies do not like the idea of users updating their pictures themselves. There are already many posts out there on how to prevent users from changing their photo in OWA. However, some posts only say to change the SetPhotoEnabled parameter to False for all OWA virtual directories:

Get-OwaVirtualDirectory | Set-OwaVirtualDirectory -SetPhotoEnabled $False

 

If we now click on our display name or photo, the Change button is now gone:

 

The problem is that this method might only prevents users from clicking their photo to change their photo! It is possible that users can still change it through the options menu:

The reason why this might happen is because this setting only applies to mailboxes if they do not have an OWA Mailbox Policy applied to them! If they do, then we also need to update this policy, whether it is the Default policy or not. In this case I am updating all policies and applying the default one just to my account for testing:

Get-OWAMailboxPolicy | Set-OWAMailboxPolicy -SetPhotoEnabled $False
Set-CASMailbox nuno -OWAMailboxPolicy Default

Now the change button is finally gone:

Exchange Web Services Editor

Using PowerShell, Exchange administrators can develop scripts to do almost everything. However, there are occasions where a script that uses Exchange Web Services (EWS) is required, may that be for an administrative task or to develop an entire application.

 

I have developed a few EWS scripts but I admit I am no expert on the subject. As such, sometimes I rely on a great tool that not many people are aware of, the EWS Editor. This tool has 3 main goals:

1.      "Demonstrate the Exchange Web Services Managed API functionality and simplicity to developers through its source code;

2.      Demonstrate the Exchange Web Services SOAP traffic used to perform actions initiated through an explorer user interface;

3.      Assist non-developers in debugging and understanding Exchange stores by exploring items, folders, and their properties in depth."

 

Each release of EWS Editor includes the distribution of the EWS Managed API it was built for. EWSEditor uses .NET Framework version 4.5 which can be downloaded here: .NET Framework 4.5. The latest version of EWS Editor (from May 2015) uses .EWS Managed API 2.2, which requires a minimal of .NET 3.5. EWS Editor can be downloaded from CodePlex.

 

EWS Editor is, in some ways, similar to MFCMapi, another great tool. It does not require installation and unlike MFCMapi it does not require Outlook profiles in order to access mailbox items as it does everything over EWS.

We can check mailbox items and their properties:

We can look into particular folders, its emails, attachments, properties (notice how all the property names are easy to read), etc.:

 

We can test and get information regarding AutoDiscover:

The tool comes with a multitude of EWS Posts examples that we can use to see how they are built or even post them against Exchange and analyze the response:

 

We can also check and/or set Out-Of-Office messages for users (assuming we have the right permissions to do so):

It even comes with a handy Distribution Group expansion tool that allows us to see exactly who is a member of a particular group:

Another great tool is the Debug Log Viewer where we can see all the EWS requests and responses for all the actions we do using this tool (in this case we can see the response from the Messaging group expansion above):

There are many, many other things we can use this tool for: