What do you think is the hardest thing about Exchange Server
Filed in Uncategorized on Jan.21, 2010
I wanted to leave this post open and make is more of a user poll.
Please leave a post about an item or configuration you think is difficult to manage with Exchange server or if you had one wish what would you add to the product?
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January 21st, 2010 at 11:56 pm
Exchange has gotten increasingly more complex, less admin friendly, less featured, harder to support, focused on command line, and no one at Microsoft seems to be listening to 80% of us who don’t need the top 5% feature.
We need to return to simplicity, get back to basics, and provide both a superior GUI process methodology for us hardcore Windows people and command line for those… people.
My 2 cents.
JMM
January 22nd, 2010 at 1:27 pm
Thanks for the feedback, can you proivde me an specific areas you think the gui is short and what version of Exchange are you current referring too.
February 1st, 2010 at 12:04 pm
Exchange 2007 is very good mail server so far but it becomes very hard to manage or replicate database if the database grow big.
I was doing SCR last month but because my database was 75GB the SCR fails. It work after creating a new storage Group and moved users one by one.
February 1st, 2010 at 3:05 pm
What issue did you hit, as the limit for a db is 16TB (not that you would want that) Many of my dbs today are 80 -150GB (ex 2010) and growing since we give large mailboxes to users.
February 6th, 2010 at 7:44 pm
I have performed two Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 migrations. The absolutely, most positively hardest part of the setup was Outlook Anywhere. When it came to performing the migration and getting Exchange 2007 to a 100% functional state, I used a non-Microsoft website. I couldn’t find any step-by-step guide from Microsoft…it was very frustrating. The second item wasn’t hard, but annoying. Exchange 2007 has 3-4 different places to manage things. For instance, to limit the size of incoming email, you can change settings in several places. It took several tries before I finally found that setting that was affecting my users. Until then, they had to use a personal email account.
Complex? You bet and uneccessarily so. I hear, though, that Exchange 2010 remedies that. Exchange 2010 is to Exchange 2007 what Windows 7 was/is to Windows Vista.
February 8th, 2010 at 9:31 am
thanks for the feedback, I pass on all this information to the Exchange product team
February 24th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
The only part that I ever stumble on are IIS virtual directories, their authentication settings, and publishing them with ISA/TMG/UAG. If it is all HTTPS and basic auth, well that is easy. But any time there are changes it can be fun. It would be nice to have a configuration tool for these settings.
And if you make that, can you add in some guidance for redirecting users to the /owa directory too?
I have seen the TechNet articles and have successfully done redirection, but depending on OS and if you are using ISA/TMG/UAG the guidance is different.
February 25th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
Just found your site and thanks for doing it. I have just implemented Exhange 2007 SP 1 and I really appreciate your overview on the spam filtering. I have cut down the amount dramatically. However, I am pulling out what is left of my hair over the remote Outlook clients. I have them all on Office 2007 but when they try to connect to the server with the “ANYWHERE” they keep getting prompted over and over again for their login credentials and it never connects. I really wish that there was a step by step explanation that was not in MS “clear-as-mud-speak”.
February 26th, 2010 at 2:28 pm
What is you setup like, there was an old bug related to continous prompting. Are you using a private cert or purchased from a provider like verisign?
February 26th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
I purchased a UCC from godaddy. My setup is a single forest domain, with Exch 2007 on one box. My internal domain is companynamekc.net and ext is companyname.us, I was not sure of the multiple domains to use so the best I could determine was to do the cert as follows:
common name: mail.companyname.us
and the alternative names:
autodiscover.companynamekc.net
mail.companynamekc.net
owa.companynamekc.net
ziggy.companynamekc.net
I registered the cert into Exchange through the EMS and Anywhere is enabled. OWA works great for everyone but the Outlook clients are getting the repeated login prompt!
February 26th, 2010 at 4:08 pm
what OS are you running Windows 2008?
Have you looked at this http://www.exchange-genie.com/2009/02/continous-prompting-in-outlook-anywhere/
February 26th, 2010 at 7:05 pm
Yes I am running 2008 server. I read that article but I came away with the impression it applied only to terminal server. I will give it a second read. One related question. In my hunt to resolve this problem I tried the Anywhere activation through my EMS again and it would not run the command because the RPC site was all ready there and assigned. I removed the RPC virtual app thinking the application would recreate it. Now I don’t have it. Can I just add it back as a Virtual App and point it to the correct directory or do I need to do an uninstall?
March 8th, 2010 at 11:53 am
I re-read your 2008 article thanks for that information. It didn’t fix this problem in my situation. I do have it working now but I am wondering why I had to do it this way? I hope you don’t mind but I’m going to step through it as I figured it out so other nuebes like me can fix this.
First I needed to undo the changes I had attempted with IIS security on the RPC directories:
I turned off the Outlook Anywhere through the EMC and then uninstalled the RPC/HTTP in through the control panel on the server. I restarted IIS and the virtual app directories RPC and RPCProxy were gone. I then re-installed RPC/HTTP and re-enabled Outlook Anywere in the EMC. That got me back to basics.
I found the https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/Default.aspx Romote Connectivity Analyzer and used it to resolve my required DNS entries and finally it got down to this error, “RPC Server Unavailable Error was Thrown by the RPC Runtime”. The resolution offered was to install SP2 for Exchange 2007 so I did that and installed the rollup ver 2. Still the same result. Then I noticed a guy had made a comment on Microsoft technet saying he had made a simple entry in the hosts file on the server and it began working. I made the same entry on mine and now all it good. Here is his link: http://www.gurkubondi.net/blog/2009/06/outlook-anywhere-rpc_s_server_unavailable-error-0x6ba-was-thrown-by-the-rpc-runtime/ Apparently, this is a problem only when you have all the Exchange roles running on one server, which is my config.
March 8th, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Let me see what I can find out about that issue, thanks for passing the information on. Its interesting that you had to rem out the loop back address and add entries for the server.
March 10th, 2010 at 6:29 pm
That was the recommendation on his site but I actually did not rem the loopback, all I did was add the server ip and the netbios and fqdn on one line and it was fine with it.
192.168.xx.xx ziggy ziggy.brunXXXkc.net
Thanks again for your site!
March 17th, 2010 at 11:39 pm
E2k7. I personally think it is hardware hog. Exhange was initially design for pure email/calendar app etc and now it has UM, outlook anywhere. Personally, working with Exchange since 5.5 and that is what Exchange should be like. Basic enough and allow admins to easily manage the servers.
The positive side of E2k7 and 10 is DR better than previous version of Exhange.
March 18th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
This sounds like you are attempting to connect from home… one potential issue is related to the certificate on the site if you are doing rcp.https. How are you attempting to connect via mapi through the vpn or ?