Mailflow Cutover to Exchange 2010 SP1 (take 1)

Things were looking good. We started the change at 5pm. Out network guy modified the mail flow on the load balancers, then we tested OWA and ActiveSync pointing to both the 2007 and 2010 servers. Modified the external URLs on all the servers and CAS services, swapping the "owa" and "legacy" names as needed. Ran into a strange problem with proxying to our remote sites, but my consultant quickly located an article describing the fix, which worked like a charm. Everything seemed to be working as expected, so we called it a night.

Unrelated to the change, I was awakened at 4am because internet mail had stopped working. First thing I checked was the Forefront services, and found them stopped. Couldn't restart them because the WinHTTP Autodiscover service is disabled. On both servers. Set the startup to Manual, then restarted the Transport service, which brought up everything agin, restoring mail flow.


By the time I got into the office at 7am, reports had started trickling in, complaints that some phones weren't able to connect to Exchange. More investigation revealed a common thread - they were all Android phones. Still have to collect more data, because some Androids are working, while others are not. Shortly after, some Mac clients reported being unable to connect. Seems to be those with older Entourage clients. My own Outlook 2011 client works fine, and supposed the Entourage 2008 client with EWS support will also work. The desktop group is on the job, trying to identify which Macs are having issues, and getting them upgraded.


The phones will be a problem. How do you talk several hundred computer-illiterate people through upgrading their phones to a compatible OS version. And to make matters worse, one of our first upgraded phones still won't connect to 2010 and proxy to a 2007 mailbox. It will connect to either 2007 or 2010 directly, but attempting to proxy from a 2010 CAS to a 2007 mailbox won't work.


Tomorrow I'll pull a report of the ActiveSync client information, in order to identify potential upgrade candidates, so we can come up with a plan to move forward.

Powershell - Enable Domestic Mailboxes for Archiving in Exchange

Configuring mailboxes for archiving is a time-consuming task. Identity management was supposed to handle this automatically, but that does not yet seem to be reliable. After some time, you may discover that a large group of mailboxes are not yet enabled for archiving. The following steps will allow you to enable an entire group of mailboxes for archiving (on the Exchange side, anyway).

 

This particular example queries Exchange for all databases except those specifically excluded (see the WHERE clause), then retrieves all the remaining mailboxes which do not have a ManagedFolderMailboxPolicy configured (field is $null).

 

First, query Exchange for all domestic mailboxes which do not have a ManagedFolderMailboxPolicy set, and assign those objects to the variable $mbx. We do this so that we can use the variable (which contains objects) to pipe those objects to other Exchange commands.

 

$mbx = (Get-MailboxDatabase -Server EXCHANGESERVER | where {$_.Name -ne "Germany Users" -And $_.Name -ne "Italy Users" -And $_.Name -ne "Sweden Users" -And $_.Name -ne "Canada Users"} | Get-Mailbox | where {$_.ManagedFolderMailboxPolicy -eq $null})

 

Next, set the ManagedFolderMailboxPolicy on each of the mailbox objects.

 

$mbx | set-mailbox -ManagedFolderMailboxPolicy "Delete Anything Over One Year"

 

Next, add all the mailbox objects to the appropriate distribution group (used for provisioning by Enterprise Vault).

 

$mbx | Add-DistributionGroupMember -identity "Email Archiving Group"

 

Finally, pipe the mailbox objects to the Start-ManagedFolderAssistant command. This will force Exchange to create the Managed Folders in each user's mailbox, per the ManagedFolderMailboxPolicy.

$mbx | Start-ManagedFolderAssistant

 

That's it for the Exchange side. All that's left to do is to provision and enable the mailboxes for archiving in Enterprise Vault.

 

• Mike