PowerShell cmdlet for Determining Double Booked Meetings

As we've said before, we've seen a lot of interest in this.

Here's a preview of the syntax we're using:

If you want to get in on testing this in your environment, drop us a line.

No guarantees on any of this yet, but we're so far into it we're definitely going to finish it.

Russ is spending his time with it in on-premises Exchange 2016 and Zyg is using it in our Office 365 test bed.

Detecting Resource Double Bookings in Office 365

So if you have Microsoft Exchange / Office 365 settings for resources which ALLOW for double bookings, sometimes you need to FIND where these double booking are.

Take this screen shot of the calendar for Conference Room 222

We aren't showing you the email notifications yet (because it's not done) but it's easy to find and generate the list of conflicts (notice we also have some in the next week).

New York Times: Four Ways to Be More Effective in Meetings

From The New York Times a good, succinct article: Four Ways to Be More Effective in Meetings.

Often you'll see people try to institute applications in schedulers for some of these points.

Usually it doesn't work.  

The best scheduler applications are the ones that handle timing selection, communication, and resource booking and leave the social interaction to the human social environment.  Don't over-complicate these things.  Down that path lies much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The best advice we ever see is: don't propose a meeting without an agenda. 

'Nuff said.

Sumatra DBA: Double Booking Alert for Resources in Microsoft Exchange and Office 365

We started to get curious when what we thought was a dry, technical issue of double booked conference rooms became one of the most-read posts on our blog.  We DO pay attention to this stuff.

I refer of course to Double-Booked Meeting Rooms in Office 365 (and how to avoid them).

In the space-time-convenience continuum which is always a struggle with different views of how to optimize your Microsoft Exchange calendaring experience, Outlook and Exchange 2016 do a good job of warning you at booking time of future conflicts with resources and recurring meetings.

But 1.) time management is a very dynamic entity so conflicts creep in at awkward times and 2.) it's easy to procrastinate and then lose track of future conflicts.

The best summary of the problem was here:

We are not happy; our users are not happy.

This brought us down a path of looking at simple means to accomplish checking for double bookings and (more importantly!) to make fixing double bookings actionable on the part of end users! 

We found a serviceable script (from the author of the above quote) at Auditing Exchange Rooms for Double Bookings.

This has a few problems: it's very good at saying "yes there are double bookings in your resources, Mr. Administrator."   And then what the heck is supposed to happen?

We thought it best to let the Exchange Administrator do what they're good at (managing Exchange, installing and maintaining software, handling permissions) and to create a mechanism to get the information where it is most needed -- into the hands of he affected meeting organizers.

To this end we've created Sumatra DBA: Double Booking Alert.

Sumatra DBA: Double Booking Alert

We see the following advantages of our approach:

• Installs and runs Server-side (no Outlook add-ins to distribute / manage)
• Pro-active instead of reactive
• No user training involved (notices come to the inbox of meeting organizers)
• Admin configurable
• Notifications configurable by site

Stay tuned for screenshots and examples.

Want in on early testing?  Contact us.

Installing Exchange 2016 CU4: Service 'WMSVC' Failed to Reach Status 'Running' On This Server

Upgrading our Microsoft Exchange 2016 servers to CU4 failed with this error:

"Microsoft.Exchange.Configuration.Tasks.ServiceDidNotReachStatusException: 

Service 'WMSVC' failed to reach status 'Running' on this Server"

The solution hint came from Paul Cunningham's Practical 365 Blog post: Service 'WMSVC' Failed to Reach Status 'Running' On This Server.

In our case, we had a valid SSL certificate.  Why did it mysteriously disappear from IIS' Management Service??? I reapplied the certificate, restarted IIS, and resumed the Exchange CU4 in-place upgrade.

Here is the error screen, btw:

Russ

Outlook won't remove Exchange Mailboxes: "This group of folders is associated with an email account. To remove the account...."

What a way to start the morning: Outlook added 25 account folders to my list of folders. (perhaps that's why it took four minutes to open.) Selecting a folder, then Right-click to close "Ted Kelly" brought up a message: "This group of folders is associated with an email account. To remove the account, click the File Tab, and on the Info tab click Account settings. Select the email account, and then click remove." (See image, below)  Problem solved!?!

It does not work -- there are no accounts with that name to remove.  A Microsoft Answer was not helpful.  What changed?

Well, this weekend we tested the latest build of our Exchange-to-Exchange migration tool.  I granted "Full Access" to several accounts to see how they migrated.  Hmmmmm.  I wonder if it's a feature from Exchange 2010 SP1:.... auto mapping of shared mailboxes to user’s Outlook 2010 profiles will remove a support headache.  Ok.  They swapped one headache and replaced with a migraine.

How do you un-automap the mailboxes?

Two ways:  

1. Use Exchange Management Shell Powershell to turn automapping false:

Add-MailboxPermission -Identity  -User  -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All -Automapping $false

2. Use ADSIedit to edit the MsExchDelegateListLinked attribute for that User Object, and remove .

Failed to remove additional account folders

To our domestic and international readers

We're NOT with this guy.

We just live in the same place he's trying to control.

If you've been following current events you get the impression that the political system in the US is really fucked up right now.

That is a correct assessment.

Please know that NONE of us in Sumatra Development are supporting Trump or his racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sexist agenda (how many prejudices does this guy and his deplorable supporters HAVE? Short answer: all of them).

And we're giving time off for anyone with no active projects to protest or take action as they see fit.

American liberty is too precious to lose now.

Zimbra Calendar to Office 365 Full-State Migration Video

As we promised, here's a video demonstrating our (pre-release) full-state calendar migration from a live Zimbra server (on Ubuntu in our lab) to Microsoft Office 365 (in the cloud).

Meetings come over as real meeting with guests and their responses, including exceptions.

Resource bookings are re-created and in the guest list.

The result is a migration that is as though users had been on Exchange all along.

We also migrate Contacts and Tasks.

Finally we have an UNDO capability to remove only the data we inserted in our process.  This is really useful for testing and disaster recovery.

If you want to try it out contact us here.

Zimbra migrations using PSTs

PSTs?  Seriously?

Even Microsoft is walking away from and disavowing PSTs.

We found migrating into Exchange using PSTs is really slow and inefficient.

But Zimbra wants to perpetuate this.  See:  How to use the new Zimbra Migration Tool: pst file to Zimbra Desktop.

Ok -- if you have a handful of users -- fine.  If you have a hundred or so and are motivation-challenged or not very good at systems administration -- sure.

If you're an enterprise of any size use real tools.  Pick imapsync for your email migration (follow our guide in reverse) and drop everything else if you have to.

New Zimbra to Office 365 Calendar Migration Version

We've been doing Zimbra to Microsoft Exchange calendar migrations for a while now.

As always -- we mean full-state migrations where meetings come over as real, update-able meetings with all attendees and resources, not just appointment slots in your calendar.

But our previous methods grew out of our first-generation technology using an external database (a legacy of our genesis migrating Meeting Maker).

Our new version reads Zimbra data directly without any intermediate steps or need for tunneling your MySQL ports.  It has the advantages of being simpler and faster but still delivering full calendar migrations.

We'll have more to say about this in January but we've got it going reliably enough for us to tell you about it.

BEFORE:

AFTER

Sumatra in CIOReview

Sumatra made it into CIOReview!

Check us out in their Microsoft Special Edition.

Microsoft Exchange Free/Busy

Good read:  The Hybrid Mesh: why free/busy is broken and what you can do about it.

If you have any external free/busy relationships configured things can get complicated in Exchange.  In truth outside of Exchange they can get almost impossible (props to Zimbra for its efforts on Exchange free/busy integration).

The short answer is that it gets really complicated (basic reason: in email systems where calendaring is an after-thought, free/busy is an after thought to the after thought).

Follow the instructions therein to have any hope of making it work,

Using iTunes to sync contacts on your legacy system and your migration to Exchange

oooohhhh boy.

You think using Apple iTunes on your legacy system (in this case Oracle Beehive) to sync contacts will result in no problems (because Apple has such high quality (yes, this is sarcasm) software in the Windows world.....).  But when you migrate into Exchange some contacts are duplicated.

But you migrate and you get some duplicate contacts.  Not from ALL users, just the ones using iTunes.

Yep.  That happened in a real world site this past weekend.

Use this procdure post-migration to de-dupe:

Delete duplicate contacts

If you imported contacts into Outlook by using the same names or e-mail addresses that already exist in your Contacts folder, and you selected the Allow duplicates to be created option in the Import and Export Wizard, you might have unwanted duplicates of several or all of the contacts that you imported.

Removing the unwanted duplicate contacts is a manual process, but the following is the easiest way to do it.

NOTE:  These instructions are for Outlook 2007. Instructions are also available forOutlook 2013 or Outlook 2010.

In Contacts, select the contacts folder that has duplicate contacts.

In the Navigation Pane, under Current View, click Phone List. This is the best view to scan your contacts list and see the duplicate contacts. Now you can sort the list by modified date and group the duplicates together.

On the View menu, point to Current View, and then click Customize Current View.

Click Fields, select Modified in the Available fields list, and then click Add.

Click Move Up until Modified is at the top of the Show these fields in this order list.

Click OK twice.

In the list of contacts, hold down CTRL while you select each duplicate contact.

When you have selected all the duplicate contacts, press DELETE.

This is from:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Resolve-or-delete-duplicate-contacts-0fa9c0a0-499a-48ab-b818-4e6463ccb9fa

Tips and tricks for optimizing IMAP migrations from Microsoft

Good to see this:

Tips and tricks for optimizing IMAP migrations: https://t.co/UH5MCjrVVR pic.twitter.com/MEPMya69rh

— Microsoft Exchange (@MSFTExchange) August 24, 2016

 But they left out the most important suggestion:  evaluate imapsync instead of Microsoft's black box.

How to Create Shared Calendars in Office 365 Part 2, Server-Side

Gentle Reader of Scheduling Intent,

When last we spoke it was of shared calendars / group calendars client-side in Office 365,

Today we will look at the same capability server-side.

In what a psychoanalyst would call a "breakthrough" Microsoft has established a user-interface for an Office 365 Admin to create a Group.  Log in as your Administrator and it is easy to navigate to:

from which

You will need to hit REFRESH (under "More") to see it but you can then add users / owners.

Not bad.

Can you still do this with PowerShell as in the olden days of Exchange 2007?  Sure.  Leave a comment if you'd like to see that.

Oracle calendar to Zimbra via ICS does NOT solve all your problems....

In response to our post: Oracle + Zimbra?  we got at least one person writing in saying "But we can just import the ICS files."

Yes, you can use ICS export/import and it SORT OF works.

You will not have your recurrence patterns and every recurring meeting and appointment will come in as a series of single, disconnected instances.

That is for starters.

Then there are the issues of mapping users throughout the OCS namespace so they map to the new IDs in your Zimbra namespace.

Then there's the issues of conference room / resource behavior that OCS allows but Zimbra does not and how you should deal with that.

How to Create Shared Calendars in Office 365 Part 1, Client-Side

Gentle Calendar-Using Reader,

The team at Sumatra feels it is time to update one of our most popular posts ever, Shared Calendars in Exchange 2007 sp1, for the Cloud Era of Office 365.

There are two methods for doing this:  Client-side and Server-Side.  We're going to deal with each in separate blog posts.

You might think that since we did this for Exchange 2007 in the year 2008 of the Common Era that this should be a simple matter of a few well-pointed clicks in a graphical user interface.  It HAS become easier.

Let's look at Client-Side (i.e., End User-Side) first from the perspective of a user in OWA (the process from Outlook is not exactly the same, but you'll get the idea)

First create a secondary calendar:

Now you need to name it something (In this case: "Zyg's Shared Calendar" it could just as easily be "QA schedule" or "group vacations and travel"):

Now let's Right click on the secondary calendar and select Share Calendar to pick who we want to see it and how much power we want to give them to post or edit things:

Note that we can give Russ the ability to Edit or add things and Jimi only the ability to read what's there.  This is darned useful.

From the Microsoft-generated text in Jimi's invitation it is pretty clear that Redmond expects users to have trouble with this process.

Notice that accepting the invitation automatically lists the shared calendar in Jimi's calendar list AND that Jimi can now see the events the owner has posted:

and while Jimi cannot edit or add to the events, Russ can edit any events (and note that in good social practice he is annotating that it's him doing and mods -- Exchange/Outlook/OWA do not do this for you

Note -- you need to be careful what you put into these calendars because events do NOT show up as BUSY in a free/busy check.  So it is very easy for Zyg to book a meeting at the same time.  Note that below you do NOT see a conflict in the Scheduling Assistant.

Another way of doing this is via Groups (I think of this as "SharePoint Lite"):

You get similar options:

Because of  the license requirements of nickel-and-diming Office 365, you will need both a OneDrive for Business license and an Exchange Online license:

Oracle + Zimbra?

My latest newsletter from Zimbra had the following:

As the referenced Press Release Oracle Gives Partners a Fast Path to Cloud explains: "Zimbra plus the Oracle Cloud means users can start small and grow, or start big and get bigger"

Forget the fact that Zimbra's had its own cloud that's been promising the same thing.

The Zimbra back-end of mySQL (now owned by Oracle) makes this start to look more interesting than it might otherwise seem.

Consider this:  Microsoft has the very successful Exchange and Google has its office suite.

What Oracle has is the obsolete Oracle Calendar and the moribund Oracle Beehive.  

Given that Oracle traditionally cannot stand not having anything in the enterprise that Microsoft and Google already have. are we looking at the first tentative steps towards an acquisition?

OCS / Beehive into Zimbra is doable on your own if you want, but you'll need to be really careful of resources.  If you want to do it the right way and you've at least a few thousand users drop us a line.  We've got a long history taking both Oracle and Zimbra into Exchange (I mean, check out the rest of this blog).

After 20 Years Sega Saturn DRM Cracked.... and what it has to do with calendaring.....

Bravo to Dr Abrasive for cracking the Sega Saturn DRM method.

What on earth does this have to do with calendaring?

Well, since we broke Meeting Maker, Oracle Calendar Server, Zimbra, Oracle Beehive, and a few other encoding schemes, we're not allowed to talk about, we're sort of connoisseurs of reverse engineering and call out kudos where they are warranted.

What's kind of amazing is that none of the engineers came forward in the last 20 freaking years with anything that would help this.  Of course, for Meeting Maker the group of hacks finally working on it only started to contact us after we'd done everything significant to read their data and insert it into Exchange.

And don't even get us started about the Oracle people!!!!

Troubleshoot Outlook Connectivity in Exchange 2016 on-premises

We hit connectivity issues running Outlook 2016 on Exchange 2016 at least once a week.  Troubleshooting is difficult because of many platforms and technologies in play. 


A recent blog post from the Microsoft Exchange Team titled "Checklist for troubleshooting Outlook connectivity in Exchange 2013 and 2016 (on-premises)" promises to help us figure it out.  There wasn't a check list, per se.  Rather it was an organized collection of troubleshooting tips and techniques. We hope it helps us and helps you.  (Note: this is NOT intended for Office 365 connectivity issues!)




First, here are examples of the connectivity problems they cite, and we've hit:

Clients prompting for credentials (intermittently or continuously)

Clients getting disconnected

Clients are unable to establish a connection

Clients freezing or going unresponsive

Here is a summary of their tips and recommendations:


* Ensure that everything is fully patched.  We find Office Configuration Analyzer Tool (OffCAT) quite helpful.  In fact, Microsoft Office released OffCat Version 2.2 June 2016.  Download v2.2 here.


* They recommend cached mode vs. online mode to smooth out the user experience.  We agree it helps, although it masks connectivity problems.


* Ensure CAS servers are not turning off NIC cards, use outdated drivers, or are not configured for power saving mode.  The same holds true for the load balancer -- make sure keep-alive and idle timeouts are set above the 15 minute threshold.


* Too many cores:  it's hard to believe that you can have too many cores, but you can.  Don't have any more than 24 cores per server


* Configure Exchange performance monitoring ("perfwiz").  MS points you to two articles:  Troubleshoot High CPU Utilization in Exchange 2013, and Exchange Monitoring tool, "Exmon"


* Logs: The article recommends Outlook logging, HTTP logging, IIS logging, Exchange Logging, and RPC logs.  They recommend a tool, Log Parser Studio, to help parse the logs.




Writing this blog was the easy part.  Now we'll have to try each suggestion until we discover what's causing the client connectivity problems.