Month: July 2010

Cost for bulk uploading to Microsoft’s Exchange Hosted Archive

As part of our investigations into hosting mail online using Microsoft Exchange Hosted services I have spent several hours on the phone with several companies to obtain prices and quotes. A couple of companies are out of the running as they didn’t bother to return my calls and although Microsoft were helpful, they just did not get it.
One of their offerings is email archiving. Every email sent and received, both internally and internally is copied to the archive service which is then searchable for ediscovery or just in case you can’t find that one email you know you received way back when. The only downside with this is the old email currently sitting on the exchange server that would not be searchable. However according to the Buy Microsoft Exchange hosted Services, “”You may bring historical data into the archive for a one-time charge, which is priced per GB”
As you can purchase the standard archive service from Microsoft and the same page contains prices for this service, it makes sense that Microsoft would be able to provide costs for this data import. About 2 hours on the phone later I realised that Microsoft unfortunately do not have a clue and nobody was able to give me a straight answer or even a ballpark figure. I was bounced around to several departments until eventually someone said that this service is purchased through the reseller channel. This doesn’t really make sense as the BPOS service itself can basically be purchased direct so why not the data import?
Our reseller is Ingram Micro, but their price list is only available to people with an account – useless for a tech like me who is trying to get some data together. However, CDW came to the rescue and this service is available by purchasing the “Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive Historical Data Load at a cost of $60 per user (not per GB as in the original Microsoft documentation). The part number is 74P-00053. If you have an Enterprise Select agreement the part number is 74P-0059 but the price is still the same.

I’m not sure why Microsoft can’t give this price in the original web page and say to contact your normal reseller for more information.
Once the order has been placed there are more hoops to go through to get the data sent to Microsoft. The data can apparently be ftp’d to Microsoft – I’m hoping this is actually secure ftp – but as most users are going to have many Mb’s or Gb’s of data the normal scenario is to put the data onto a USB drive. I was pleased and also surprised to see they support Truecrypt. For more details of the process, continue to read the rest of the entry.

Fixed – “Manage Network Connections” is missing in network section of control panel of Windows 2008 R2

Occasionally you may see references to Manage Network Connections in the Microsoft Documentation. I came across this item when following a link in the Best Practise Analyzer for the dhcp server that complained that the binding order was incorrect on the server. Step 1 of the solution reads

Click Start, click Network, click Network and Sharing Center, and then click Manage Network Connections.

Unfortunately Manage Network Connections is actually called Change Adapter Settings. If you click this, the rest of the instructions make sense.

I’ve added a comment to the Technet article – hopefully it will get changed. The documentation is also incorrect in the BPA itself.  If anyone knows how to log a service request with microsoft to get the documentation changed then please let me know.

Page Not Found when publishing a WordPress post

Since updating to WordPress 3.0, every time I create a new post, I get an error messaging saying Page Not Found but the post is created successfully and appears in the right hand side of the screen under the recent posts. From what I can see in the forums, most people who get this message don’t get the post generated either. For me the error message shows up but the page has been created successfully.

This post will be updated as I work through the solutions – Troubleshooting consists of disabling plugins and then re-enabling them one at a time  – a very  time consuming process.

Typical – now I can’t reproduce the error! Seeing as though the page does actually exist I think I’m just going to not worry about it 😉

BPOS active Directory Synchronization does not work on 64bit or domain controllers.

Thinking about BPOS to host the exchange mail for your small office? – I discovered a small gotcha this afternoon but first a couple of thoughts in our recent experiences between Google Apps and Microsoft BPOS.

We’ve had several requests from clients to host their email in the cloud using services like google apps or Microsoft Hosted Exchange. Our first deployments were with google apps due to the lower cost per year, but as we’ve found out the support from Google is severely lacking.  We had a peculiar issue where one users email sent through outlook would get marked as spam all the time, yet if they used the gmail web interface and sent exactly the same content the mail would get sent with no problems.  The service that marks the destination mail as spam is postini – now owned by Google so it should really be a simple matter of turning over the problem to Google to investigate. Unfortunately Google’s response so our request was basically “thanks – if we feel like getting back to you, we might do – in a couple of days”.   As it turned out, the issue was resolved by deleting the google sync profile and recreating it again.

Contrast this to a Microsoft issue which started off as a pre-sales technical call to get a user id setup and ended up with the gtlv owa issue I blogged about earlier. I had several calls from Microsoft within an hour to work on the issue. They worked really hard to ensure my problems were solved and it almost felt like they were harassing me as they kept following up for a status even though I’d told them a couple of times that I was happy for the case to be closed – I even got a call at 5pm on Saturday afternoon from support – something I’ve not experienced (at least from a end user experience!)

So, after singing Microsoft’s praises – the gotcha.  Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange service has a directory sync service that synchronises AD information to the cloud ready for newly created users and distribution lists to appear in the hosted exchange environment. Unfortunately, according to the Directory Synchronization prerequisites the server needs to be running 32bit AND not be a domain controller.   Unfortunately for small companies just starting out from a peer to peer network and getting their first server (but don’t want SBS2008 for some reason), this first server is very likely to be 64bit (crazy not to nowadays) and also a domain controller – possibly/probably even THE domain controller. Installing a 32bit member server is totally out of the question.   It’s not *that* big a deal as all the information can be created online, but it’s twice the amount of data entry along with the possibility of typos but also every AD change of membership and user creation/deletion now needs to be duplicated online.  For large organizations this is not going to be a problem as they’ll likely have extra servers lying around, but for small businesses this is very unlikely. For very large organizations (ie Universities hosting mail through live.edu) it seems that the AD sync program actually requires extra software functionality with the Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) package (however I’m not too familiar with these details just yet)

This is the second flaw in Microsoft’s online feature list that extols the virtues of Microsoft vs Google that I’ve found – Active Directory synchronization is not always possible and the other is the benefit of not having to download an application to synchronize data from outlook to the cloud/google – fair enough a client doesn’t have to be downloaded for that application but instead a single signon client needs to be downloaded to prevent the various Microsoft apps asking for the password multiple times. I did think that was the whole point of the “save password” option is for in the outlook and browser applications!

I was also really surprised that the Exchange online is not running Exchange2010 – the Outlook Web App is so much nicer in 2010 compared to 2007 – as I run Outlook 2010 at home and Exchange2010 in the office I’m spoilt (but I still need Office 2010 on the work laptop – thats hopefully coming real soon)

Fixed – ‘gtLV’ is null or not an object when replying to an email from OWA

I was getting the “‘gtLV’ is null or not an object” message when I replied to an email using our Microsoft Online Hosted Exchange email account. Ironically enough, the problem would always occur when I replied to a new email from a Microsoft support engineer. The email would go through but I would get the ” ‘gtLV’ is null or not an object” error message popup on the screen. If I replied to the email again the problem would not occur. A very similar message can be seen in the Microsoft Exchange Server forums where I also posted the provided solution.

After many emails to the very patient support tech at Microsoft (as I would reply and then send an email to let him know if the reply worked or not) we escalated the ticket and I got back the following resolution.

1. type regedit on command prompt or run
2. go to: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
3. create TabProcGrowth (string or dword) and set the value to 0

This solution worked for me.  From what I can see at the ie8blog this has the side effect of reducing the protectedmode protection and I think the browser tabs use the same process rather than running in seperate processes.  This is a slight downside, but I doubt many users will care – they’re more than happy to have OWA working.

Gmail unavailable for a Blackberry 8830 – fixed

A couple of weeks ago I decided to do a wireless upgrade of my Blackberry. It warns you that it will take a couple of hours to do – and also stated that I need to remove some applications as I was running out of memory. This seems to be a common theme with the Blackberry – I don’t know what is so hard about getting Blackberry to store data on SD cards but instead they insist on storing everything on the devices memory – and Windows SmartPhones and Treo’s were no better from my past experience. Anyway – after the upgrade I went to access gmail and initially gmail would just lock up after loading. Thinking a deletion and redownload would fix it, I went ahead and deleted the application. When I went to download it again, the gmail website stated that gmail was not available for the 8830. I knew it was as I’d been using it about 4 hours earlier!  I tried several methods of installing and nothing worked. The Sprint website gave me the ability to download my gmail into the main blackberry email application which then meant I had a mixture of gmail and work mail in one inbox. It was also only downloading some of the emails  – not what I wanted.  I tried searching online and couldn’t find much information and no solutions on this problem.

For some reason I then decided to do another check for wireless update and sure enough, there was another wireless update. Considering the blackberry state couldn’t get much worse I downloaded the new update and voila – gmail was available again. If this happens again, go to Options, Advanced Options, Wireless Update, Check for Updates. I’m now running v4.5.0.186

So far I’ve not seen much difference but yesterday I did see the option to enhance the call quality whilst on a call (but seeing as though I saw this when trying to work out why neither of us on a call could hear each other I don’t think the button really helped!)

The other difference I’ve noticed is that pushing 1 for Voicemail no longer worked and instead the phone asks me to assign a shortcut for the w key. The solution for this is to delete the empty speed dial entry for w and then reboot by pulling the battery out.