Exchange Server 2013 High Availability Book

After a lot of work, I have finally released my first book: Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 High Availability!    :)

I now fully appreciate the work involved in the process of writing/releasing a book!

 

 

“This practical hands-on guide will provide you with a number of clear scenarios and examples that will explain the mechanics behind the working of Exchange 2013 High Availability and how maximum availability and resilience can be achieved through it.

 

Throughout this book, you will go through all the roles, components, and features that should be considered when addressing high availability. You will go through how to achieve high availability for the Client Access and Mailbox server roles, what’s new in load balancing, site resilience, the new public folders, and much more.

 

You will learn to successfully design, configure, and maintain a highly available Exchange 2013 environment by going through different examples and real-world scenarios, saving you and your company time and money, and eliminating errors.”

 

 

The book is available on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Packt Publishing, and soon in Google Play store, Apple books, Safari books online, Bookshout!, Kobo books, EBL, Vital Source and O'Reilly.

Any feedback appreciated! :)

Exchange 2013 SP1 Feature list

Now that we are getting closer and closer to the release of Exchange 2013 Service Pack 1, here is a list of its main features:

·        Exchange 2013 SP1 will add Windows Server 2012 R2 as a supported operating system for Exchange Server 2013 with SP1;

·        Support for S/MIME in OWA will be brought back in SP1. With SP1 customers will have S/MIME support across Outlook, Exchange ActiveSync clients, and OWA;

·        The Edge Transport server role for Exchange Server 2013 will be available with SP1.

·        Fixes and Improvements. SP1 will include fixes and improvements in several areas. SP1 is the first service pack issued in the new Exchange Server cumulative update release model - thus SP1 is essentially CU4. The installation of SP1 will follow the same process as the prior Exchange 2013 CU releases. SP1 will include all fixes included in previously released cumulative updates for Exchange 2013.

·        MapiHttp is the new communication mechanism added to later builds of Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 and Microsoft Outlook 2013. The plan is to add the functionality to Microsoft Outlook 2010 in a future build. You may also see the new MapiHttp feature referred to internally as the Exchange HTTP Transport or by the internal code name Alchemy. The new MapiHttp transport protocol replaces the older RPC/HTTP (RPC over HTTPS) protocol. This is in an effort to improve the reliability and stability of the Outlook/Exchange connection by removing the dependency on the Microsoft Remote Procedure Call (RPC) communication mechanism;

·         DLP Policy Tip support in OWA.

Free/Busy Information Period (Exchange 2013-2007 Error)

Free/busy information requests to an Exchange 2007 organization from an Exchange 2013 organization may fail due to a mismatch in the requested free/busy information period. By default, Exchange 2007 accepts availability requests for 42 days of free/busy information and Exchange 2013 may request 62 days of free/busy information. If the request exceeds the default 42 limit imposed by Exchange 2007, the request will fail.

 

In order to prevent this failure, follow the steps below to configure your Exchange 2007 CAS servers to accept longer period free/busy information requests:

1. On all your Exchange 2007 CAS servers, open the following file with a text editor such as Notepad (remember to create a backup copy first!):
<Exchange Installation Path>\V14\ClientAccess\ExchWeb\EWS\web.config

2. Locate the appSettings section;

3. Add a new key “<add key="maximumQueryIntervalDays" value="62" />” and save the web.config file. The maximumQueryIntervalDays value is not present by default. When this value is not present, Exchange 2007 uses the default interval of 42 days.

4. Restart IIS on all the Exchange 2007 CAS servers.

DLP Policy Tips in OWA

DLP Policy Tips are informative notices that are displayed to senders in Outlook when they try sending sensitive information. In Exchange 2013 SP1, this functionality has been extended to both the desktop version of Outlook Web App and the mobile version (named OWA for Devices), and you will see it in action if you have an existing DLP policy with Policy Tips turned on for Outlook.

 

The experience and functionality are similar to Policy Tips in Outlook, you do not need to set up anything else.

 

Check Status of Federation Certificates

The certificate used to establish a federation trust is automatically propagated to all Mailbox and Client Access servers in the Exchange organization. If you need to report on its status, use the following cmdlet:

Test-FederationTrustCertificate

This cmdlet, which does not require any parameters, will check the status of certificates used for federation on all Mailbox and Client Access servers.