Brien Posey

In the first part of this article series, I talked about a few of the things that you should do to begin planning for an eventual migration to Exchange Server 2007. In this article I want to conclude the series by discussing some other aspects to the planning process. Prepare the Active Directory Exchange Server…

We’ve all heard that the difference between a successful Exchange 2007 migration and a disaster is planning. That being the case, I wanted to take the opportunity to write about the types of issues that you need to think about planning for prior to a migration. Assessing the Exchange Features that Your Organization Needs Generally…

According to all of Microsoft‘s marketing hype, one of the goals of the secure computing initiative is to make server secure by default. I would have to agree that the newer Microsoft products tend to be more secure while running a default set up than the product from even a few years ago were. Even…

In the first article in this series, I talked about the edge transport server’s role within an Exchange server organization, and I talked about the firewall port requirements associated with an edge transport server. In this article, I want to conclude the discussion by talking about some more techniques that you can use to ensure…

Although the thought of saving money on Exchange 2007 deployment costs is tantalizing, the money that you save may not be such a bargain if the Exchange organization’s performance suffers as a result of the shortcuts that you have taken. In this article, Brien Posey shows you how to estimate the impact of consolidating your Exchange servers.

Disk quotas were originally introduced in Windows 2000, but have improved in each subsequent version of Windows. Of course these constant improvements mean that the way that this quotas are implemented have changed from one version of Windows to the next. In this article, I will show you how disk quota management works in Windows…

So far in this article series I’ve shown you how to create a dedicated postmaster mailbox that can be used to intercept responses to non-delivery reports, and I wrote another article that discusses the meaning of various types of non-delivery reports.  If you read that article, you know that some types of nondelivery reports can…

Of all the features included in Microsoft Outlook, my favorite has to be cached mode.  In case you’re not familiar with cached mode, it is a mechanism that copies the contents of a user’s mailbox, calendar, etc. into an offline file called an “OST” file.  This allows the user to have full access to anything…

The Windows Performance Monitor has been around in one form or another since the days of Windows NT.  Even so, this is one tool that I rarely see anyone use in the real world.  I suspect that the reason for this is probably that the Performance Monitor tends to be both tedious and difficult to…

In the second article in this series, I mentioned that one of the biggest improvements in performance monitoring was the addition of Data Collector Sets. Data Collector Sets are collections of performance monitor counters and system traces, that are all related to a specific purpose. In this article, I will show you how they work….

When it comes to configuring file servers, many administrators choose to use a distributed file system  (DFS) rather than a traditional standalone share point, because of the redundancy that DFS provides. Although DFS can greatly improve the performance and availability of the data stored on your network, these benefits come at a price. There are…

Note:This article is a follow up to Planning a DFS Architecture Part One and Part Two. Although Windows Server 2008 improves upon DFS technology, DFS has been around for quite a while, and I have learned quite a bit over the years about planning for DFS replication.  I’m not talking about the replication topology itself,…