Shared Mailboxes -- Warning Will Robinson!

One of the new features in Exchange 2010 Sp1 contained a client side feature that enabled auto mapping of shared mailboxes to user’s Outlook 2010 profiles.)  This should be a major win for the shared mailboxes (e.g, IT Vacation Calendar, Helpdesk Coverage, etc.....)  AutoMapping allows the "delegate" to simply open Outlook and *poof*  there is the shared calendar.  No more navigating the GAL!  No more support headaches (at least in this area.) 

In fact, Steve Goodman has written a step-by-step approach in his blog post Auto-Mapping shared mailboxes in Exchange 2010 Sp1 with Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007. 

There is a caveat, though.  What happens if you have users who do not want the mailboxes they "share"  to show up in their Outlook? I hit this issue, and have blogged about how to remove automapping.

If you automatically populating shared mailboxes in end user's calendrs is something you want, consider the implications from of a shared calendar showing up in an end user's calendar -- and leaving the end user no facility to remove those mailboxes. 

Remove an "AutoMapped" Mailbox from Outlook 2010

My Outlook takes forever to open.  I've finally figured out why:  I have added too many shared mailboxes that Outlook has to open.  Only I don't remember adding them.  Time to to remove them.  I right-hand click on the shared calendar and "remove calendar."  Outlook throws this error message: ("The group of folders is associated with an e-mail account.  To remove the account, click the File Tab, and then the Info tab, click Account Settings.  Select the e-mail account and then click Remove.)

If the solution were only that easy.  This is a shared mailbox that I have FULLACCESS to;  there is NO EMAIL account in my profile. 

The contributor: (or "feature") is "automapping!! (Here is how to set automapping.)  The solution, for EXCHANGE 2010 Sp2, is to DISABLE AUTOMAPPING!  Here are the powershell commands taken from a Micosoft Technet forum:

Disable automapping between "shared mailbox" and "delegate":
Add-MailboxPermission "Shared Mailbox" -User -AccessRights FullAccess -AutoMapping:$false
  
If you want to set it on all the mailboxes:
$mailbox = Get-Mailbox
$test = $mailbox |
     Foreach {Add-mailboxPermission $_.Name –User ‘administrator’ –AccessRight FullAccess –Automapping $false}

That's it!
Russ

When your ICS export has TWO SMTP addresses for the same user

So from the annals of "what we see in the real world is always more interesting than what we make up ourselves...."


We migrated a client from Zimbra to Exchange and found a user with TWO separate SMTP email addresses.  Call them Krueger@company.com and Freddy.Krueger@company.com.  How did this happen?  The company changed their email address policy six months ago; the new policy makes all primary SMTP addresses to be first.last.

The Sumatra tool uses ICS export file name to identify the user who owns this calendar information.  Thus, the user Kruger (KRUEGER.CALENDAR.ICS) would miss all meetings or appointments he owns under FREDDY.KRUEGER@company.com."

You with me so far?

The solution IS fairly simple; Customers in field report it works beautifully.

1. Insert KRUEGER.CALENDAR.ICS 
2. Rename the primary SMTP on Exchange to FREDDY.KRUEGER@company.com
3. Copy KRUEGER.CALENDAR.ICS to FREDDY.KRUEGER.CALENDAR.ICS
4. Insert FREDDY.KRUEGER.CALENDAR.ICS
5. Rename his primary SMTP if you wish.

The other approach, for the brave, is to replace all of the mailto:krueger@company.com with  mailto:freddy.krueger@company.com.  Be mindful you don't find and replace the wrong SMTP address.

Is there still enough GroupWise out there to make a calendar migration tool worthwhile?

We've been having such success with how easily the "faster, simpler" method works with Zimbra and Oracle that we're wondering if there's any demand for any other calendar migrations that have been under-served.  The one that comes to our minds is GroupWise.

Anybody want an easy way to migrate their GroupWise calendars to Exchange server-side?

Let us know.

Zimbra to Exchange New Functionality

Pretty soon we're going to have migrated more people from Exchange to Zimbra (in a few months) than we migrated from Meeting Maker to Zimbra (in a few years).  Cool!!!!


We just added some functionality at the request of a site.


The subject is reading the contacts in the "Suggested Contacts" folder in Zimbra and migrating those to Exchange.


Now it's possible.


The newest zCalReader looks for files named:

USER.contacts.vcf 

and 
USER.econtacts.vcf 


and loads them both into “Contacts” in Exchange.

Why cannot we load econtacts.vcf into the Outlook/Exchange "Suggested Contacts" folder? Because Exchange Web Services does not currently give us access to that folder. 


We actually found in a migration this weekend a 24 Mb exported Suggested Contacts list containing over three hundred thousand contacts.  That caused zCalReader to bomb (we just weren't scoped for that many contacts).

Symantec Endpoint Protection running on Exchange Servers: Fool me twice....shame on me

Note to self:  Disable all instances of Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) on ALL Exchange servers before and during a calendar migration.

Why?

* Insertion throughput dropped 99%: from 750 transactions/minute to four (4) transactions/minute.
* SEP stripped all of the Sumatra strings we associate with calendar items to process messages.

This product bit us two years ago.  It just bit us again.

It's your choice to deploy SEP in your Exchange environment (or not.)   But do not deploy SEP during a Sumatra calendar migration.

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.

Add Holidays to Resources in Exchange 2010

Okay, okay.  I know we wrote that the SuHoliday cmdlet would not add holidays to resources.

BUT -- if you use FULL ACCESS instead of Impersonate, the current download-able version works like a champ for this.

To try this out:

·        Provision a service account (say, "exsu") that is NOT an Enterprise Admin

o   Set impersonate RBAC for that account

§  new-ManagementRoleAssignment -Name:_suImp8Exsu -Role:ApplicationImpersonation -User:'exsu@cod.sumatra.local'

o   Try to do an insert for a user AND

o  For resources "cr101b" or "room 222"

Results should not be good, but NOW....

·         Add fullaccess to that service account

o   Get-Mailbox -filter {isResource -eq $true}  -resultsize unlimited | add-mailboxpermission -user exsu -accessrights fullaccess   -InheritanceType: All

o   Add holidays for that room

Holiday Insertions in Live @ Edu

Kudos to Rachel in Georgia for her holiday insertion into Live @ Edu.

She's used SuHoliday on over 8000 users.  Thus far we think this is a record but we usually only hear from people when there are problems.

Also based on her experience and feedback we've added capabilities to our most recent version of the cmdlet, including:

• Not setting reminders for holidays
• Better logging
• Default time zone handling
• Memory handling improvements
• Improved resilience when Exchange throttles your insertion

We're discussing when and how to roll this out to the main cmdlet download.

Zimbra to Exchange Migrations Field-Proven

Just got the word from Portland, Oregon that our faster, simpler method for Zimbra to Exchange calendar migrations successfully migrated 800 Zimbra users' calendar, tasks, and contacts into Office 365 this past weekend.
We're considering this a success.
Yippee!

Sumatra Undo in Action

Ever since high school film strips we've been convinced that visual aids are the most effective.

And ever since college we've been convinced that designing a software system without a back out strategy is just darned irresponsible.

So we combined both of these lessons in our video of Sumatra's UNDO capability in action.

Zimbra to Exchange Calendar Migration - The Video

We've had a good response from one of our test sites on the faster, simpler Zimbra to Exchange calendar migration method so we did a video of the process to show you in real time how it all works.

Enjoy.

And if you want to see the full screen version, you can watch that off our website.

Faster, easier Zimbra ICS to Exchange migration

UPDATE: June 2015.  We've modified the faster-simpler ICS method so that it's faster-simpler AND full state (works like aces for Oracle Calendar Server! and in this case Zimbra gives us the recurrences already so we're one step ahead.)  We can do it for Zimbra if there is sufficient enterprise-level interest.

One of the developing trends we've seen is sites moving out of Zimbra and into Exchange.

Imapsync is excellent for moving the email, but the calendars, tasks, and contacts are another issue.

While we've have a full-state migration solution for over a year, a lot of the folks who want to move want something simple, but still server-side, and oh, could we PLEASE keep meetings live?

It's a tall order, but as usual we deliver.

This is the basic screen:

In short what you do is export your Zimbra calendars, tasks, and contacts server-side (using either zmmailbox, cURL, or whatever you're comfortable with) in ICS and VCF format, then run this application against the resulting files.

With the proper credentials on your Exchange server (and yes, we have tested it against Office 365 and Live @ Edu), these will upload.  Meetings will be re-proposed (so your users will see invitations in their inboxes come the Monday morning post-migration).  The alternative is the full-blown Sumatra process which is overkill for many of you moving out of Zimbra.

Rather than our three step process (export, map user IDs in a database, and insert into Exchange), this is a TWO step process (export, import) with no intermediate mapping.  So if you're changing a lot of user IDs going from Zimbra to Exchange, this is probably NOT the recommended process for you.

We're in test right now with this at a couple of sites and will let you know when it's ready for prime time.  We'll give you the full documentation set and a video then too.

Get Time Zones for your users via PowerShell

We recently released a cmdlet that bulk-inserts holidays in Exchange 2010 (see the Sumatra website or the Sumatra Blog).

A holiday is a simple all day calendaring event in Outlook. Yet simple calendaring events can be tricky! Consider: when your end users work in different time zones! If you force an all day event into one time zones, all users who are not in that time zone will see their holidays span multiple days. Not a happy scenario. What's the solution?

We wrote a script that uses Exchange 2010 "get-mailboxRegionalConfiguration" cmdlet to find the timezones. If used in conjunction with get-mailbox, you can output a file that has the user information plus the timezone. Problem solved!

This script produces a file that outputs PrimarySMTPAddress + TimeZone:

#Define your 'default' timezone (if none is set)
$myDefaultTimezone="Eastern Standard Time"

#Define the output file
$myOutputFile="userlist.txt"

#Define the list of User Accounts to process
$myMailboxList = get-mailbox -Filter {RecipientTypeDetails -eq "UserMailbox"}  select-object Identity,PrimarySMTPAddress

#If file exists, delete the file
$fileExists=test-Path $myOutputFile
if ($fileExists -eq "True"){del $myOutputFile}


#Loop through list and get
foreach ($t in $myMailboxList) {
    $priSMTP=$t.PrimarySMTPAddress
    $xi=get-mailboxRegionalConfiguration -Identity $t.Identity
    if ($xi.TimeZone -eq $Null) {$tt=$myDefaultTimezone} Else {$tt=$xi.TimeZone}
    write-output "$priSMTP $tt" >> $myOutputFile
}

write-output "Done!  see the file $myOutputFile"

You can also download getUserTimezones.zip

If you have another way, please share!

-Russ

Holiday cmdlet for Exchange 2010

We've been inserting holidays server-side on Exchange for a while and after some feedback last year we started re-thinking how to accomplish this.

These are the files in the downloadable ZIP

We've written a PowerShell cmdlet we call suHoliday that inserts holidays server-side.  We've run it through our internal testing against on-premises Exchange 2010, Live @ Edu, and Office 365, so now we think it's time to let it out into the wild and see what you folks can do with it.

The sample CSV file for US holidays

 Your inserted holidays will look like this in a user's calendar:

If you want to download it and run it through its paces in your test lab, you may do so here.  We just ask you to answer a few questions so we can keep track of where it's going.  If it works for you consider making a donation of US$20 per instance.  It'll make it easier for us to consider updates and new features for next year.

What's it do now?

Insert server-specific or user-specific holidays through 2012 with NO user intervention.

Customize for different state or national holidays.

Define Free/Busy status.

Script adding holidays at user provisioning time (e.g., by piping in from get-mailbox).

Support for multiple time zones.

Define All-Day Events or appointments at specific times.

Support international holidays / date formats. For example: 2012 UK Bank Holidays

Try it out and tell your friends.


Limitations (or, what do you want for free / ultra low cost?)

• This only inserts holidays for the year 2012 (well, we give you a few weeks into 2013).
• All inserted events have "Inserted courtesy of the Exchange Calendaring experts: Sumatra Development" in the agenda. (yep, even if you license it)
• We support via electronic means, so keep an eye on our blog.

Advance Notice: Sumatra in SF Sept 30, Oct 1

Sumatra (well, Zyg) is going to be in San Francisco on September 30 and October 1,  Mainly he's there to go to the Opera, but since that always happens at night and his engaging wife will be working at Wells-Fargo, if any of our calendar-oriented acquaintances in the Bay Area are looking for some guidance, drop a line.

Propagating Changed SIP URIs to Existing Meetings

One of our favorite sites contacted us about a problem they're anticipating. Knee-deep in solving said problem we at Sumatra wonder if anyone else has the same issue.

They're changing a number of SMTP addresses and want to change the associated Lync SIPs to match.  Here's Microsoft's guidance on how to do that for Office 365.  And a different take on scripting a solution.  See Impact of Changing a User's SIP Address for a full discussion.

Changing the SIPs is not the problem, but the number of existing meetings with the old SIPs that are then left in your users' calendars IS a problem that requires updating.

So in this example of an existing calendar item, let's say riuliano became russ_iuliano, to keep end users from going bug-house you'd want to modify all the LiveMeeting URLs in existing calendar objects server-side and update them.

And this is the cue for Sumatra's ability to manipulate Exchange calendar data.

Does anyone else out there have the same problem?

More Weirdness in an Over-Loaded Google Calendar

While experimenting to see if I could delete calendar items from a calendar and thereby finally clear an over-loaded test account I got this message:

 "Oops"?  Cute.  Too bad I do not know any serious corporations that ask for cute.

The goal was to see if deleting items would get me below a threshold, or if the threshold was irreversible.

The weird thing is that once I got that message, previously-deleted objects began re-populating the calendar.  Calendar zombies had risen from the grave!

Clearly there's a cache of the deleted items.  I have no information on when, how often, or if it gets cleared in a single session.

There is also some interesting behavior with old items.  To see this, load 10-15 years worth of calendar data and then travel back to some month in the year 2000.  The following unobtrusive message will display while the data renders (and it seems to take a while):

So there's either some background mechanism shunting historical data into slower, longer-term storage, or the system is not really optimized for rendering arbitrary stretches of time.

Added on September 6, 2011:
A variation of the above: cannot load your data -- come back when it's more convenient for Google....