Thursday, March 23, 2006

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Seanda.blogspot.com gets a new look!

Posted on 3/16/2006 10:59:00 PM by with 1 comment

My First Blog Post was back on the 4th of October.... 2004!!! That's over a year that this blog has been in existance. And with this being the 234th post (I know, Susan does that in a day) I finally exit the 90's look and feel and push forward into the present day UI.

Yep, Square edges are out and Rounded corners are all the rave.

So, rounded corners you shall have. So, for all you RSS feeders out there, be sure to click on the track back for this one and check out the new look and feel. I still have some kinks to iron out (Google is right, I can't remove the search bar at the top... CURSES!), and I've got some painting issues (yes, painting is a dev term. It's the one you used to swear at when the Exchange server went down and Outlook 2000 just stared you blankly in the face, with a huge white square in the middle of it's UI. I can't say I miss those days)) to work out.

But for now, the look is new, it's fresh, and according to the Internet "Cool" squad, it's got rounded corners. 21st Century, here I come!

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

OneCare in SBS?

Posted on 3/15/2006 09:36:00 PM by with 2 comments

At Microsoft, we're encouraged to try as much as we can of our fellow teams products, even if it doesn't directly relate to our working area. Admittedly most people don't need encouragement to try new things. :)

One of our newest products is Windows Live One Care. Some folks have been wondering if it works in SBS environments. Of course it does! I'm actually running it on my client at work, which is joined to our server, and low and behold, I have the green check.

I was able to use or disable the client backup (I disabled it because everything on that client is re-directed to the server and it would have been redundant). My firewall is up and running and my automatic updates (provided to me by WSUS) show nothing but a green check.

So have fun, check it out and enjoy the safety!

Monday, March 13, 2006

ISA 2006 Beta!? Sweet, let's SBS'ize it.... or not.

Posted on 3/13/2006 03:08:00 PM by with No comments

Dear Early Adopters,

It has come to my attention that ISA 2006 Beta is available. Furthermore, it has come to my attention that people are antsy to get this installed on the Small Business Server 2003 boxes (hopefully not the production ones).

While I don't normally post "future" things on this blog, I figured now would be a good exception to that rule. I hope to continue to break this rule in the future, of course, within reason.

Anyways, back to the ISA 2006 topic. I'm not sure why Small Business Early Adopters are trying to install ISA 2006 on SBS as the feature set is limited for Small Businesses. As noted on the ISA 2006 website, most features are targeted towards large or enterprise customers and have no functionality or need in a small business: but as an early adopter myself, I know there are you guys 'n gals out there who just want to be first.

Well, I beat you. :o)

ISA 2006 cannot be configured by the Small Business Server tools. Those tools include:

  • Configure Email and Internet Connection Wizard - yes, the "fix everything wizard" will not work.

  • Remote Access Configuration Wizard

  • Change IP

These tools error out as they are not configured to work against the new API set provided by the ISA team.

Bottom line is the Beta of ISA 2006 does not work on SBS 2003. More information will be posted on the Windows Small Business Server 2003 F.A.Q. later this month on how much support will be provided for ISA 2006 on SBS.

Friday, March 10, 2006

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Making Calendar Requests More Visible in your inboxes

Posted on 3/08/2006 10:17:00 AM by with No comments

I personally like to keep no more than 30 messages in my inbox, it's somewhat of a todo list for me. However, I know this is only one school of thought.

Some folks like to keep tons of messages in their inbox, or perhaps they get so much mail, they can't possibly keep up with everything that comes into their inbox.

So, a lot of folks around here are using Outlook Search Folders to make sure they don't miss meetings with their overly busy inboxes. So, we're creating search folders to keep those calendar requests visible!

Here's how

  1. In Outlook, right click on Search Folders and choose New Search Folder

  2. Scroll to the bottom and choose Create a Custom Search Folder and choose Choose to define the custom criteria

  3. Give the search folder a friendly name, like Calendar Requests.

  4. Choose the Criteria by selecting Criteria

    • Select the Advanced tab.

    • Drop the Field dialog down, mouse over Mail Fields, and select Message Class.

    • Change Condition to is (exactly).

    • For Value type in IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Request

    • Choose OK, and OK again to add it to the list of criteria

  5. Click OK until you're back in Outlook

Great, so now you have a Search Folder, next you'll want to drag it into your Favorite Folders so you can see it easily.

Finally, your goal should be to keep this folder empty (aka, you have no outstanding meeting requests in your inbox, and they are all on your calendar). Thus you need to right click on the Calendar Requests folder and choose Properties. On the General tab make sure you select the Show total number of items, to make sure you always know if there is a calendar request, read or not.

Great! that's all there is to it, now you'll always appear on top of meetings and be the first to reply.

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

New Whitepaper: Deploying Windows Mobile 5.0 with Windows Small Business Server 2003

Posted on 3/07/2006 11:14:00 AM by with No comments
Yep, a second one today, The SBS/Mobility UA team rocks!

If you've got your hands on a Windows Mobile 5.0 device and your having problems getting it to work against your SBS 2003 server, you'll want to check out the Deploying Windows Mobile 5.0 with Windows Small Business Server 2003 whitepaper.

I've been told that one of our great MVPs also helped out with this document. Thanks Michael!

Enjoy the reading

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Using the Microsoft Exchange Server ActiveSync Web Administration Tool on SBS

Posted on 2/28/2006 09:54:00 AM by with 8 comments

By now you probably have a fleet of Windows Mobile 5.0 devices in the field, and you've been reading up on all the new security benefits that WM5.0 provides to your business, or your clients business. You get excited (as any good person would about solid security) and install the Using the Microsoft Exchange Server ActiveSync Web Administration Tool.

And that's when things seem to go wrong.

Not to worry! There is a solution for you!

First, open the IIS manager and ensure you still only have one default website. If you have two, then you should probably

  1. Un-install the web tool

  2. Copy down the IP address settings for the default website, and change them to All Unassigned

  3. Re-install the web tool

  4. Revert the IP address settings to what you had copied down before

Next, you'll want to check the ExAdmin virtual directory.

  1. Open IIS manager again (unless you never closed it)

  2. Check out the Directory Security in the Secure Communications tab, edit it and clear the Require secure channel (SSL) box.

Finally, we need to ensure the MobileAdmin virtual directory is running in the Exchange Application Pool

  1. Again in IIS Manager, expand default website and open the properties of the MobileAdmin virtual directory

  2. On the Virtual Directory tab, in Application Pool, select ExchangeApplicationPool

Phew! After all that you're good to go with mobile administration. Now you can again celebrate the best in mobile security using your SBS server as the centerpoint of that security.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Sync Errors from Mobile Devices in your Server Status Report

Posted on 2/08/2006 03:30:00 PM by with 17 comments

Ok, new tip for you. When you're the person that gets the Server Status Reports from the Small Business Server, and you notice a critical error that your boss (or person who pays your salary/bills) can't sync his mobile phone to the server, you may want to jump on it a little faster than I did.

Sure, I didn't get in trouble because I was actually doing the rest of my job, but it would have made his life easier.

What am I talking about? Daily I have seen the following exerpt from the Server Status Report on our Catfood server here at the office:

Now finally getting the chance to take a peak, I looked at the IIS logs located in %windir%\logfiles\w3svc I was able to determine that the phone was indeed logging into the server, but failing to synch. So the password wasn't an issue.

The goal was to get it fixed as quickly as possible. So we took the approach to remove the inbox from the server sync schedule, sync the phone, and then add the inbox back in, essentially resetting the inbox sync with the server. Problem solved, the phone now sync's perfectly, and there aren't any ugly red X's on my server status report.

... Now if I can just get people on the team to stop typing their password incorrectly, I might get a clean server status report!

Whoops, I just realized that the error above is a picture, so MSN and Google won't be able to find this post if you search for it. The error is "Unexpected Exchange mailbox Server error: Server: [] User: [] HTTP status code: [409]. Verify that the Exchange mailbox Server is working correctly."

Saturday, February 04, 2006

My First Swing Migration

Posted on 2/04/2006 11:20:00 PM by with 2 comments

This weekend was my first Swing Migration. I have to say that I'm impressed with the process. It's kind of nice not to have to touch all the clients after a migration.

We had a few minor snags, and didn't optomize the process as much as we could have, but we got through it and things are in good working shape again. If you haven't checked out the Swing Migration process, you should, it's worth the time, and along the way during the migration, you might actually learn something: I did.

So what problems did we have? Well, the first problem was we hit a replication problem from the production SBS server to the temporary DC. It must have been something in the steps that we missed, because after fighting for 5 hours to try to get it to work, we started over with a restored VPC image of the Temporary DC and things went much according to plan. In Jeff's first version of his documents he says to watch the event log to tell when replication is done. In speaking with Jeff and actually doing it myself, we discovered to use the command net share from a command prompt to look for the SYSVOL and NETLOGON shares to appear, some rebooting may be required. We can probably also blame the slow replication on the old server, it was fairly slow and had some hardware issues slowing it down even more! (Yes, it was definitely time to migrate!)

Once we got past this hurdle, it was smooth sailing, the replication from the temporary DC to the new SBS server was a snap! Following that install of SBS, followed by the SP1 and the premium CD, then the Todo list, Trend Micro AV.

Last but not least, we had the Exchange Fork-Lift and data migration. In order to leave the previous SBS server exactly intact, we decided to move the data through other means than the network, that being a USB disk. We copied the MDBDATA folder from the old server to the USB disk in 10 minutes, then there must have been only USB 1.0 on the new server (odd yes) but it took upwards of an hour!!! Once that was done, we copied the files over and the mount failed!!!.

Luckily, reading Jeff's documentation we realized that we needed to have the databases and log files in exactly the same position as they were on the old production server. Fixing this the store mounted immediately.

Finally (and still currently pending) is the restore of the use data to the new server from the same USB disk. Of course we have to do this around the Seattle SeaHawks in the SUPERBOWL!!!!, but that's ok, the restore will probably take 9 hours!

Let me tell you what I find most impressive about this process.

  • On the first reboot of the new production SBS server, we checked out the eventlogs, only to see a failure of the Folder Redirection. After the installation of all the SBS 2003 parts, this error went away, and the folder of the server was actually already redirected, exactly as it was in the old domain!

  • After we finished the ForkLift of Exchange, we quickly browsed to https://localhost/exchange and logged in as a user of the system, the mailbox already contained over 6000 email messages! How is that for cool!

So there you have it. If you've got the extra hardware for a Swing Migration, you should definately give it a shot, if you're having trouble, just check out the You Can Swing That - SBS Migration website for updated documentation.

Using your Smartphone/PPC as a gateway to the Internet over Blue Tooth

Posted on 2/04/2006 06:12:00 PM by with No comments

You give a Dev a laptop and a smartphone, and you end up with really cool links in your inbox. This particular one I want to share.

Last week I was asking myself how much I actually spent on my Internet access. It came out to a pretty heafty sum because of the amount of money I pay for my SmartPhone to get access. I was wondering how I could use that same internet access on my cellphone for more and more uses. Then my trusty dev Leszek, pointed me to a site on how to connect your bluetooth SmartPhone or PPC to your Laptop wirelessly to create a gateway to the Internet for use on your laptop! Especially handy when you don't want to pay for internet access at your local Starbucks.

If you're interested, check out the instructions over at SmartPhoneThoughts.com

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

ISA SP2 is released!

Posted on 2/01/2006 11:10:00 PM by with No comments
Well, The ISA Service Pack 2 is available for you few, but passionate folks who are running SBS Premium with ISA 2004 installed.

The service pack comes with a roll-up of all the hotfixes currently released, and a few new features. Don't get all excited just yet. The features are primarily focused at Enterprise solutions including BITS Caching, HTTP Compression and Traffic prioritization.

As The SBS Diva mentions, make sure you install this from in front of the physical box. During the install, the box enters lock-down mode in which case you won't have any traffic flowing inside and outside of the network. Oh yes, and another thing, this means that your folks won't be browsing the Internet during the upgrade also.

So choose your Install time wisely ....
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