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Many businesses incorporate a disclaimer or footer at the bottom of their outbound messages. These disclaimers often advise as to the limitation or ramifications of using information within the message for purposes other than they were intended, or to assert ownership of creative works contained in them. While there is always a debate as to…

What is the Security Configuration Wizard (SCW)? The Security Configuration Wizard is a security tool that reduces the attack surface of an Exchange server by disabling unnecessary services, ports, features, and programs. Additionally, the wizard configures auditing and the Windows Firewall, secures network interfaces, and more. In doing so, we further secure a server to…

Why monitor the network? One of the hardest tasks to handle in a medium to large network is tracking various assets. This includes computers and their installed hardware, and installed software and related licenses. Fortunately, Lansweeper from Hemoco Software comes to the rescue with a simple to install, simple to use application. Using a small…

Installing the Windows prerequisites on Windows Server 2008 is a bit more involved than on Windows 2003. On Windows 2003, we installed IIS, MMC 3.0, the .Net framework, and PowerShell. The list of prereqs for Windows 2008 is longer, and is complicated by different needs for different roles. The Exchange product group has posted a…

Learn how to get Microsoft Exchange mailbox sizes in PowerShell in this step-by-step tutorial by the Petri IT Knowledgebase.

In the previous article in this series (Using Exchange Management Shell to Configure Content Filtering, Part 1), I showed you how to use the Set-ContentFilterConfig command to specify bypassed sender domains in Exchange Server 2007. As you may recall though, the biggest problem was that whenever you enter this command, the existing list of bypassed…

One of the things that I’ve always found interesting about Exchange Server 2007 is that the Exchange Management Console was built on top of the Exchange Management Shell.  As such, anything that you can do through the console can also be done from a command line.  For the most part, I have always preferred to…

In the previous article in this series, I showed you how to create a postmaster address that could be used to intercept replies to non-delivery reports.  What you might not realize though, is that not all non-delivery reports are created equally.  In this article, I want to show you how to analyze the contents of…

In part one of this article series, I showed you how to create a recovery storage group, and how to restore data to it. In this article, I will continue the discussion by showing you how to use your recovery storage group to recover data. Mounting the Recovery Storage Group The first thing that you…

Recovery storage groups were first introduced in Exchange Server 2003.  At the time, the idea behind them was that you could restore Exchange database into the recovery storage group, and then use ExMerge to merge the data from the recovery storage group into the production database.  In Service Pack 1, Microsoft improve the process so…

In the first part of this article series, I talked about the differences between a stand-alone DFS namespace and a domain based DFS namespace.  The next thing I want to discuss is the replication topology that will be used by your DFS servers. Why Replicate? When I have introduced the concept of DFS to clients…

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,…