Brien Posey

Any time that I think about server migrations, I always have to cringe a little bit. I’m not anti-progress or anything, it’s just that my memory always reflects the way that we used to do migration at a company that I worked at in the early 1990s. Although it was a large, enterprise environment there…

In the first article in this series, I outlined three steps that I think are essential to the Exchange 2007 migration process. In this article, I want to continue the discussion by providing you with some more steps in my migration best practices. Step 4: Focus on the Clients Your users aren’t going to get…

Up until about a year or two ago, Exchange Server routinely enjoyed a reputation as being the most complicated product that Microsoft makes. In recent years, Exchange Server hasn’t gotten any easier, it’s just that Microsoft has created other products such as Office Communications Server that are more complicated than Exchange. Given the complexity of…

By now you’re probably familiar with the idea that Exchange Server 2007 is designed in such a way that every message flows through a central pipeline.  Microsoft designed Exchange Server in this way so that there would be a central portal through which all messages flow, and therefore messages could be analyzed in certain types…

When a company with an existing Exchange Server organization begins adding Exchange 2007 servers to the mix, it is tempting to remove the old Exchange 2003 servers immediately upon completion of the migration process. However, it has been my experience that immediately decommissioning legacy servers is a big mistake. In this article, I will explain…

A lot of Exchange administrators are surprised to learn that in most cases a new Exchange Server 2007 deployment is not able to send mail to the outside world until the administrator does some additional configuration.  The reason for this is that unless you have installed an Edge transport server, and created an Edge subscription,…

If you have been using Exchange Server for a while, then you probably remember when Microsoft introduced ActiveSync policies in Exchange Server 2003 SP2.  The policies that were available in that version of Exchange Server were a good start, but there were a bit lacking.  For starters, you only have the option of creating a…

The Light Weight Directory Services, or AD LDS, has been around in one form or another for quite a few years now. In Windows Server 2003, this service was called the Active Directory Application partition, or ADAM. Being that the service’s new name is the Lightweight Directory Service, I hate to describe the service as…

In my first article in this series on creating lightweight directory services, I explained that the Lightweight Directory Service (AD LDS) had replaced Active Directory Application Mode in Windows Server 2008. I talk about some real world examples of how AD LDS is used. In this article, I want to finish off the series by…

If you’ve ever worked with Microsoft’s Virtual PC or Virtual Server, then you know that those products work in the same way as any other Windows application. They sit on top of the host operating system, and all of the virtual machine’s hardware calls are passed through the host operating system, which manages the server’s…

If you’re considering bringing Windows Server 2008 onto your network, then one of the decisions that you will eventually have to make is how you plan to integrate this new operating system into your network.  In the vast majority of cases, Windows Server 2008 domain controllers are simply added to existing domains, or some of…

As someone who spends a lot of time traveling, I have always thought that OWA was pretty much the greatest thing since sliced bread. In the hands of a user though, OWA can present a serious security risk. You just never know when a user could potentially disclose sensitive information by opening a file attachment…