Exchange – The State Of External Client Access

Introduction

Most within the messaging and collaboration industry are hyped up about the next wave of Microsoft collaboration and messaging products which are soon to be released. Among these products is Exchange 2013 RTM. This type of release typically precedes yet another wave of architecture upgrades across the corporate landscape. Some of these (beta testers) will be will undoubtedly upgrade to Exchange 2013.

Other corporations will start to feel the burn to upgrade as well. These will be organizations which realize that their Exchange 2003/2007 infrastructure is nearing a decade old existence and cannot meet the demands of their ever growing mobile workforce. Realizing they are behind the curve, they may feel hastened to upgrade as well, possibly just to Exchange 2010. Regardless the reason in choosing to upgrade their messaging infrastructure, there are critical design decisions which need to be made in how clients access this infrastructure both internally and externally. This article focuses solely on the external access aspect of the infrastructure.

Exchange: Automatically Generating Configuration Scripts

I’ve started a side project which is born from personally having to redo many aspects of an Exchange migration over and over again. Most of this, I believe, can be automated. Some aspects of this process include exchange server role prerequisite procedures, co-existence configuration, DAG/CAS configuration, and other general reminders and processes.

Exchange 2010: Poor Man’s Monitoring

I quietly released a new script into the wild the other day, Troubleshoot-MailboxServer.ps1. This script is meant for monitoring, fixing, and reporting on Exchange 2010 database servers. It pretty much just wraps around and reports on troubleshooting scripts found in %ExchangeInstallPath%Scripts. I also set it so you can have an email sent including warning/error color coded report upon completion.

Exchange 2010: Even More Migration Tips

It has been a while since I passed on some personal experiences when performing Exchange 2010 migrations. I thought it was about time to update my list to include some more of the lesser known aspects of an Exchange 2010 migration.

Active Directory: Best Practices Workbook

This is a checklist for technicians performing Active Directory assessments. It is broken down by category and best practice. Some items listed are not really a best practice, but rather something which you may find in an environment which should be rectified (as part of an audit perhaps).