Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Update Rollup 5 for Exchange 2007 SP1

The Update Rollup 5 for Exchange 2007 SP1 has been released and is available at Microsoft Download Center.
So would recommend that you should plan for its install as this has fixed quite a lot of issues.
More details at MS Exchange Team Blog.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Information Store Crashing, Exchange 2007

The Microsoft Information Store Service (Store.exe) is repeatedly crashing an Exchange 2007 Mailbox Server.
In the application log, we get the following error message and store.exe is crashing due to EXCDO.DLL file:

Faulting application store.exe, version XXXX, time stamp XXXX, faulting module EXCDO.DLL, version XXXX, time stamp XXXX, exception code XXXX, fault offset 0x00000000001ed390, process id 0x1fc8, application start time XXXX.

Have opened up a case with MS PSS and had them analyze the crash dumps. They have identified it as a Bug. The issue is casued by Mac's, Entourage clients that does calendar bookings in the ICS format and the crash is occuring due to Entourage Client accessing a badly created ICS.
MS will provide a fix to this issue in Update Rollup 6.

If anyone is experiencing this issue, make sure you call MS PSS first thing and have them provide the temp bug fix to you.

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Web Services, Exchange 2007

Now that we have finished the final phase of our migration and we have fully migrated the Public Folders to the new Exchange 2007 environment, want to talk about this exciting new component of Exchange 2007, that is the Web Services. Well I think this is the most exciting and amazing new feature in Exchange 2007 that makes life very easy of an Exchange Admin.

The Web Services that are included in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 provide an XML messaging interface for managing Exchange store items and accessing functionality on a computer that is running Exchange 2007 from client applications.

Exchange 2007 includes the following Web services:

  1. Exchange Web Services
  2. Autodiscover Service
  3. Unified Messaging Web Service
1. Exchange Web Services

Exchange Web Services provides the functionality to enable client applications to communicate with the Exchange server. Exchange Web Services is deployed with the Client Access server (CAS) role. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 clients connect to the computer that is running Exchange 2007 that has the Client Access server role installed in an Active Directory directory service site by using an HTTPS connection.

Some of the main operations that Exchange Web Services provide are:

  • The Availability Service: Outlook 2007 clients can use HTTPS to connect and download free and busy data for other users through the Availability Service. Unlike previous versions of Exchange, free/busy data does not have to be stored in public folders, instead we access the target mailbox’s free/busy data directly from the calendar (via the Availability service).
  • OOF: The ability to set Out-Of-Office messages is controlled by a new web service.
  • OAB Distribution: Outlook can use HTTPS to locate and download the Offline Address Book (OAB) from a web distribution point.
  • The Exchange Data Service operations: The Exchange Data Service operations enable the handling and organizing of items, folders, and attachments, as well as ambiguous name resolution and distribution list expansion.
  • Notification and Synchronization Operations.

2. Autodiscover Service

The Autodiscover service provides a mechanism to automatically configure Exchange 2007 client applications to access the Client Access server.

It is used to set up client applications like Outlook to work with Exchange by returning configuration data that is necessary for applications to function properly without requiring users to know where to fetch the data, such as discovery of the server that hosts a user's mailbox.

3. Unified Messaging Web Service

The Unified Messaging Web Service provides an extensibility point for clients to read and change information about Unified Messaging properties. If your mailbox is enabled to use Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging, you can use Outlook 2007 to play a voice message back to a phone.


Will discuss about their configuration in detail in the coming posts :-)