Exchange / Outlook

PocketPC Emulator

Microsoft have released a Windows Mobile 5 emulator that you can run on your pc, normally for developing software for the windows mobile. However, you can also use this to test and debug the setup of Direct Push with Microsoft Exchange 2003 service pack2. This is great to try before you blow up a users phone as you test stuff out. Seeing as though Direct Push has only just started being available on the phones, it is unrealistic to know how to get it working out of the box.

Microsoft Antigen for exchange

I downloaded Microsoft’s Antigen for Exchange last night and installed it on a server to remove some old virus’s that were stuck in the mail store (there is no scheduled scan of the mailstore as realtime desktop and smtp scanning is now used for virus protection). Although the product did the job of deleting the mail, the whole admin interface is awful to use and the support on the Microsoft website is non existant – there are NO documents in the technet database on Antigen version 9. With the various quirks in the admin interface and no support, this software really should be released as a beta. I’d only say beta due to the fact that it did remove the virus’s otherwise I’d recommend alpha status.
The extended entry contains my 22 points that I would provide as bug reports if it was in beta status.

Outlook Web Access problems

I was getting an error attempting to log into an exchange web mailbox with the message “The Local Security Authority can not be contacted”. As it turned out this was actually due to the fact that the previous administrators had set this user up so that they were only allowed to logon from one particular workstation. I (thought I) had already solved this problem by adding the exchange server to the list of computers that the user was allowed to log onto but that didn’t work – it was only after I removed the restrictions (which were not necessary now anyway) that they were able to get their mail via the web.

Deleting delegate access from outlook

Finally succeeded in deleting a delegate from outlook. As per this post where the delegate remained in the permission lists I had another user who had the same disabled person as a delegate and I was unable to remove the deleted person. Seeing as though the kind of people who have delegates are managers (in this case the head of the company) I really didn’t want to mess around with deleting the mailbox and recreating it.
However, it turns out that by re-enabling the disabled user, creating a mailbox for this user, logging into outlook as the person with the problem meant I could then delete the delegate for good. Then it was delete the mailbox and the user again.
Update See HelloMate for a script that will list who has delegate access in AD. By using this, I should be able to modify our disable user procedure.

mdbvu32

Information Store viewer can be downloaded from Microsoft’s website even though most documentation on the newsgroups states it is in the Support\Utils\I386 folder of the exchange server cd – well it isn’t in our volume licence cd – that folder doesn’t exist.
I’m trying to work out why outlook still tries to send information to a delegate who has been deleted in exchange and why the user can’t be deleted from within outlook (every time I delete them they appear on the delegate tab when I next open outlook). Apparently you follow the instructions at KB 253557, making sure you are NOT in cached mode, but I don’t see the Schedule+ EMS message that I need to delete. adding another user to a delegate creates the ems message that I need to delete. However, doing all of this doesn’t help as the delegates magically come back when I log into outlook. I am now exmerging the data out to a pst file, deleting the mailbox and recreating it again.

More event id searches and exchange fixes.

By adding the following to the registry

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\event]
@="http://eventid.net/display.asp?eventid=%s"

And then entering “event 1074” into my address bar it will take me straight to the eventid website with that event listed.
I’ve also had a couple of issues with exchange this week – MAPI client opens more than the default value of certain server objects occured for one user who has more that 500 folders in her inbox – I’ve increased the default value so that shouldn’t happen again.
Also the error Error: The Template Persistent Cache initialization failed for Application Pool” AppPoolName: because of the following error: Could not create a Disk Cache Sub-directory for the Application Pool. The data may have additional error codes: should be fixed by kb article 332097 – a problem that has been occuring for a while with no known fix working (so here’s hoping)