Insert Holidays Server-Side into Exchange 2007

Done.

Ship it.

The Sumatra Utilities for Exchange 2007 are now available for download.

Keep in mind, they won't just insert holidays for the 2010 calendar year, they'll also let you:

• Check for broken meetings in your conference rooms
• Gracefully remove terminated user meetings
• Extract resource use data you can then analyze in a spreadsheet (not full ResourceWatch but it gives you easy access to data that was hard to get before)
• And if you want to start using them to develop your own applications (we've got one business school that's done that and another evaluating), we can do that as well.

Sumatra Utilities documentation is out

A quick update on the Sumatra Utilities for Exchange 2007: we've field proven them in an East Coast medical school with over 8000 users.

Insertion of 10 holidays for these users took about three hours.

We consider that a success.

We're running our final regression testing on them now but we can give you the link to the documentation (Word format).

http://www.sumatra.com/Sumatra%20Utilities%20Manual.doc

Stay tuned.

Impersonation in Exchange 2010

Quick tip: Impersonation in Exchange 2010 has morphed from setting ACLs to Role Based Access Control (RBAC). It could not be easier to impersonate users in the entire domain:

new-ManagementRoleAssignment -Name:_suImpersonateRole
-Role:ApplicationImpersonation -User:'xxx@xxx.xxx'

Here is a link to a Microsoft TechNet article: Understanding Role Based Access Control

Sumatra Utilities for E2K7 available next week

We're not trying to drive you crazy -- just trying to make sure everything works and getting our legalese squared away.

The Sumatra Utilities for Exchange 2007 (including holiday server-side insertion capability) will be available next week.

Keep checking here for updates.

FullAccess fails with the error: The specified folder could not be found in the store.

I have been banging my head against the Exchange 2007 brick wall for the last month over the error: "The specified folder could not be found in the store."

Sumatra's conference room analysis tool's Exchange Web Service calendar folder "FindItem" request failed for about 5% of the rooms at one client. Other clients do not have this problem! The service account had FullAccess to all rooms. All conference rooms were on the same Exchange mailbox server, in the same OU, configured to autoaccept. Some had delegates, some did not.

The client could use the service account credentials to access the calendars via OWA. Was it a corrupted meeting? We changed FindItem's interval. No luck. Was EWS timing out over a large mailbox? Increased the HTTP timeout. No luck. Our FindItem requet uses the DistinguishedFolderID. We called GetFolder to find the FolderID. It failed on the inbox with the message "The specified object was not found in the store", and for the calendar folder with the message "The specified folder could not be found in the store".

Ahha! The permissions were not inherited. We added "InheritanceType: All" and it worked. Here is the syntax:

Get-Mailbox -filter {isResource -eq $True} -Resultsize unlimited
Add-MailboxPermission -User: xxxx -AccessRights: FullAccess
-InheritanceType: All

Holiday insertion server-side in Exchange 2007

Remember the Sumatra Utilities for Exchange 2003 and their beloved server-side holiday insertion capability?

And you remember how every year you ask us if we've done it for Exchange 2007?

Well, we (finally) rebuilt it for Exchange Web Services. Check out this example.

Friends of Sumatra can use this at no charge (you all know who you are) so just ask us and we'll send it out.

For everyone else we're actually going to charge for the capability this time.

Which brings me to the purpose of this posting: If you have any preferences on how we should do this -- drop us a line. If you do not know our emails you can use our contact form.

Oh yeah -- this is also going to include the broken meeting check, the terminated user utility, and the interface for managing conference room statistics (the full application for the last one will be a separate follow-on offering).

500 errors on test insertion into Exchange 2007?

When you get a "500" error on validation or a test insertion, please verify your:

1. CAS/MBX boxes are members of Windows Authorization Access Group
2. Impersonation permissions stuck (and are not denied) through Active Directory Sites & Services
3. Service Account is NOT a member of any Exchange Admin Group/Domain Admin group