Exchange Transaction logs - capacity planning

Sumatra's enterprise customers ask me how much space they should allocate for transaction logs.  I came across Ross Smith's Technet post.  Ross suggests a formula to compute the transaction logfile growth:

For ever 100 messages, Exchange generates 20 transation logs.
According to another Technet article, "Understanding Mailbox Database and Log Capacity,"  each transaction log is 2MB.

All calendaring transactions are messages.  Thus, to estimate the logfile size (in MB), sum the total number of transactions (generated through a macro in the Sumatra DB, M_ShowCounts) and multiply by (2/100).

Changing Google Calendar Notifications

The New York Times has a good post today about changing your Google Calendar Notifications.

Migrating Group Calendar from Oracle Calendar to Exchange

An interesting case came up the past few days as a site was migrating from Oracle Calendar Server to Live@ Edu. 

They maintained a calendar in Oracle for users to post when they were In or Out and wanted to take this to hosted Exchange as a Shared Calendar.

Since the Designate model in OCS is very different from the Delegate model in Exchange, when you're converting the OCS export files, choose this option for the raw data from those calendars and then run an insertion.  You'll get the results you desire.

Why this option? When events were added to the calendar by Designates in OCS they were OWNED by the Designates, and not the actual calendar.  The above option normalizes that for an Exchange environment by making the events owned by the shared calendar.