First, DPM server must be a standalone server, it cannot be installed on an Exchange server or a domain controller.  In addition, you should install the AD management tools on the server as without them you will get a cryptic error message telling you that the server cannot communicate with AD and thinks you are in a workgroup or have a mis-configured DNS client. 

Now that you have the DPM Server installed, its time to deploy the agent.  You can deploy the agent to remove computers from a wizard driven interface, however I found that this did NOT work for me at all.  I had to manually install the agent by running the agent installer directly from the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\ProtectionAgents.  Think you are done…not quite!  Now open a command prompt and navigate to the DPM\bin directory.  Execute this command “setdpmserver -dpmservername nameofyourserverhere” and press enter.  for the servername, use the FQDN (i.e. servername.domain.local).  The documentation says to use domain\servername, but this DOES NOT WORK. 

One you do the above, you can go into the services control panel and set the DPM server service to automatic and start it.  Now you can go to your DPM server and configure protection groups and add member servers.  Enjoy!

This project was accelerated to the top of my todo list after taking a week long training course at Tech Sherpas on Exchange 2010.  The new high availability features and the added resiliancy of Exchange 2010 sold me on the new flavor of Exchange very early on.  I’m going to go through some of the things I experienced and learned during my migration.  I’ll be going through another migration soon and will append this post with any added information I disciver during a second g0-round. 

It all starts with Active Directory and DNS.  Planning your Active Directory and DNS namespace is critical to having a healthy and resiliant Exchange mail system.  I made a critical error a few years ago when setting up Active Directory in my home office.  I had chosen the AD domain name “home.us” to use internally, since I was not anticipating using any products that would create a conflict when using a public domain name internally.  The problem I had was with SSL certificates.  I wanted to get an SSL certificate that used SANs so that I could access OWA and ActiveSync internally and externally without getting a certificate prompt.  The issues started when I tried to generate a certificate using the home.us domain name, since its a public domain, anytime I tried to add a SAN using that domain, the request would fail.  Since home.us is a public domain, whowever owns it would have received the requests to create a certificate on that domain.  I called the SSL certificate provider I was using and confirmed with them that there is no way around this, I would have to change my internal domain name or not use it at all in my certificate.  So that is where my post about renaming an AD domain comes in.   Once I renamed my AD domain to something clearly internal only, I was able to generate my SSL certificate with all the SANs that I needed. 

Now regarding the actual migration of Exchange 2010, it was a bit tricky.  I ran into problems exporting my mailboxes from Exchange 2007.  I had to install the Exchange management tools on another server and install Outlook and all the prerequisites required to make the export work, which was a huge pain.  I’m seriously hoping that Microsoft one day makes mailbox exports a little easier and require less legwork to make it happen.  I finally got my mailboxes exported and jotted down most of my critical Exchange settings. 

Normally you would just install Exchange 2010 on a new server and migrate your mailboxes and other content over to the new server.  You can then shutdown the old server and you are done.  However, I had the domain rename issue to worry about which cannot be done if Exchange exists in your AD domain.  By removing Exchange completely, I was not doing a migration in a strict sense of the word, but instead a new installation and ended up importing mailboxes and manually restoring settings. 

I installed Exchange 2010 with no problems on my first server.  I then tried to import my mailboxes and ran into problems.  Turns out there is a known issue with Exchange 2010 and importing mailboxes on a single server.  So I setup a second Exchange 2010 temporarily and was then able to try again, this time I found that I could not export the mailboxes because the mailbox server absolutely has to have Outlook 2010 installed on it.  This is completely different from previous versions of Exchange where we are warned not to install Outlook on the Exchange server.  I finally got all the requirements in place and was able to import my mailboxes.  So far so good. 

I had some difficulty getting my Outbound SMTP connector re-configured, but I think that issue was only due to me fat fingering the password or authentication methods.  The next step was to try to take advantage of Enterprise features like DAGs for high availability.  The first issue I ran into here was that Exchange 2010 requires a host operating system of Server 2008 Enterprise edition in order for this to work (since clustering is used in the background).  My second server was only Server 2008 Standard edition, so I had to reload the server using Enterprise edition in order to proceed with my setup.  I finally had both server running the right operating system, same version of Exchange 2010 and ready to go.  Oh, one little caviat is that if you install any of the update rollups for Exchange 2010, you will run into issues when trying to uninstall Exchange 2010.  You get an error saying that a previous version of the product is already installed and it recommends removing the previous version before installing this one.  To get around this, just remove the update rollup and reboot.  Then re-appy the update rollup and then try the uninstall again.  That worekd for me and I was able to do my uninstalls with no further problems, although this took me a few hours to figure out. 

End result of hours of work for most of the day on Saturday was two fully functional Exchange 2010 servers with working mailboxes, incoming and outgoing mail and partially functional SSL certificate.  The Certificate issues were resolved a day or two later once I finally got my certificate straightened out with the provider, I had to re-key it a few times and wait for the e-mail confirmation. 

Now to work on high availability.  I created a Database Availability Group (DAG for short) and ran into some small issues with permissions.  I wanted to use my AD domain controller as my “witness” for the DAG, but I would get errors when trying to create the DAG which I discovered were actually permission errors.  If your witness server is not another Exchange server, you must add the “Exchange Trusted Subsystem” Security group to the local Administrators group of the server you are going to use.  Since in my case this is a domain controller on a private home office system, I just added the group to the Administrators group in AD, which accomplished what I needed to get this to work.  Once that was taken care of, I was able to create a DAG successfully.

Once the DAG is created, I then proceeded to add server members to the DAG, which took longer than I expected, but worked absolutely perfectly.  Once that step is done, you can proceed to add copies of mailbox databases to the DAG.  I added copies of my two databases to the DAG and made one server the first preferred server and made the second server the failover by assigning a preference value of “2″. 

I did some basic tests of the DAG failover and found that it worked perfectly.  I could switch back and forth between servers and it only took a few seconds at most.  During my testing, OWA clients would momentarily get a message saying an item was unavailable if they just happen to be opening a message during the first few seconds after switching servers.  Outlook clients would also only have a momentary issue if a user happened to be opening a message in online mode when the transition of servers is taking place.  For all intents and purposes the switchover of mailbox servers is transparent to the users, which is awesome! 

Another great feature of Exchange 2010 is that you can now move mailboxes between mailbox servers while the users are connected to their mailboxes.  The new “move request” feature allows the move to take place with the mailbox in use and any changes to the mailbox after the move is complete are written to the database to bring it current on the new mailbox server.  Users that are connected via Outlook will get a message saying that changes have been made that require Outlook to be restarted.  Once you restart Outlook, you are connected to your new mailbox server automatically (assuming the old server is still online to allow redirection to occur). 

How about backups?  This is one of my favorite things about the new Exchange 2010 DAGs.  Because you can now have super easy high availability in Exchange 2010, you get the added perk of making backups more efficient.  How?  Simple, backup your secondary DAG member databases.  Assuming you have at least one server in the DAG with a real time copy of the database in question.  By backing up the secondary copy, you reduce mailbox server load, by not running backups on a server users are connecting to.  Because its a real copy of the database, you can do brick level restores and anything else you would normally do in your backup strategy. 

To restore content in Exchange 2010, rely on your deleted items retention period for most of the common short range restore requests.  For anthing greater than that, you can restore a backup of a mailbox or an entire database to an Exchange recovery database.  Then use Exchange management shell cmdlets to recover specific information or the entire mailbox to the production database or mailbox. 

A few other perks that aren’t so loudly advertised about Exchange 2010:}
   1. OWA is now supported fully in other browsers, yes it works in firefox without having major rendering issues or having a requirement to use the “light” version.
   2 OWA now supports conversation views of message threads
   3. Exchange control panel lets administrators and regular users manage many aspects of their DL membership and account info right from their web brwoser.  This includes their mobile device management, contact info, ability to create new DLs, etc.
   4. There is better role based management of feature/security access in Exchange 2010.  You can define custom roles or use the default roles provided by Microsoft.  This is good for large companies who want to separate roles between admins. 
   5. Mailtips are cool!  You can create custom mailtips to be displayed at all times, in addition to the intelligent mailtips displayed by the OOO or calendar conflicts.  Mail Tips are informational messages displayed to the sender of new messages or calendar requests when using Outlook 2010 or OWA.  For example, if you send a user a meeting request, if the user isn’t available due to a calendar conflict, Mail Tips will let you know before you ever send your message and will suggest alternate dates for your meeting based on the user’s availability.  In addition, if a user has the OOO turned on, if you try to send a message to that user, you will get a Mail Tip telling you the user is out of the office and you will get a preview of the first fiew lines of the OOO message the user customized in his auto-reply. 
   6. If you will be using Exchange 2010 high availibility to handle your backups using DAGs and multiple database copies setup for a log reply lag, you can go ahead and set your loging to “circular”.  However, if you will be using another product to backup Exchange, such as Data Protection Manager or Backup Exec, then you will want to keep your logging setup as normal, so that your backups will clear committed logs.  Otherwise you will get warnings in Data Protection Manager specifically, that a synchronization isn’t possible because you are using circular logging and only full copies of the database can be used. 

There is so much more I could mention, but those are probably some of the best parts of Exchange 2010.  For more information I recommend giving the tiral version a try, or download a virtual Hard Drive and see for yourself all of the major improvements in Exchange 2010.  Some of the documentation isn’t very detailed yet, I had a hard time finding step by step instructions, so it seems this is one of those times when a good lab setup for testing is a great idea to get familiar with the caviats of how things work and what is required to get them configured.

To do the rename, I was expecting to see the “Rename domain” option in ADUC, but as it turns out its all command line.  So after a few commands of the rendom tool, I was able to rename my AD domain.  I first had to remove Exchange completely, then I was able to perform the rename.   It wasn’t that bad and went rather well.  I did run into a few bumps, such as my DNS server needing a manual re-config, and the connected client machines (desktop and laptop) did not automatically update their DNS suffix.

I wouldn’t recommend doing this unless absolutely necessary, and I very nearly did just start over from scratch, but I wanted to press on and see if I could get everything to work on a renamed domain.  To my delight, it worked and I’ve even got Exchange 2010 running now.  The only thing I would recommend is to re-install Exchange on a server with a different node name than what it had previously.  This caused me all sorts of little issues that I’ll deal with later in a separate post.

I had the 3G icon in the top left corner of the screen but I could not check mail or browse the web in Sarari.  I tried rebooting, disabling and re-enabling the data connection, even tried resetting the network settings but none of that fixed the issue.  Wifi would work without a problem, but if not on wifi, none of the above would work.

I connected my phone to my computer and used the iPhone configuration tool from Apple to open the device console log.  From there I found errors and warnings related to the network config.  A few Google searches later I found some threads on the apple support forums with users complaining of the same issues I was having.  Someone in one of the forums suggested the issue could be caused by a glitch in the APN settings.

I then used the iPhone configuration tool from Apple to create a custom configuration profile where I manually input the correct AT&T APN settings.  After applying this profile to my iPhone, I am now able to check mail, browse the web, etc.  According to the support forums, this issue does not always occur, but there are a significant number of devices where this does occur.  Apple and AT&T were reported to be at a loss relating to these issues when users would call for support.

At this point, the only other option for correcting this issue is to do a restore in iTunes and setup the phone as a new device, rather than restoring from backup.  The downside here is the loss of SMS/MMS, call history, app data, etc.

The iPhone configuration tool is available from apple here: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL926

The correct APN settings for AT&T:

apn: wap.cingular
user: wap@cingulargprs.com
pass: CINGULAR1

(All other settings under APN must remain blank)

I hope this information will be helpful to someone.

In the future if I need to change alias (due to name change) or if there are problems resulting in a need to re-create the mailbox, the steps in the article can be used to avoid having mail delivery problems for the affected user.

• The listed steps will allow the cached Outlook entries to properly resolve the user mailbox. No user action is required to make this work.
• You can find the proper alias for the user in an NDR message or by going to the cached entry in outlook and viewing its properties. It will be a string in one of the values displayed on the properties. (Note, this only works before you make the changes above).
• The updated string for the Exchange 2007 environment is automatically added to re-created mailboxes in X400 form. The old pointers can be added using X500.
• This issue only affects mail sent from internal clients using the cached entry in Outlook, all SMTP mail flow and external mail will continue to flow to the user uninterrupted regardless of this issue.

In anticipation of obtaining my Windows 7 Pro upgrades (which I ordered in July on the pre-order 50% off sale) I installed Windows 7 Pro using a clean install without entering a product key for activation on two of my computers.  My laptop and my main home computer.  Both computers were clean installs on either a new hard drive or a new partition.  On my laptop I resized my partitions and installed Windows 7 on a new partition separate from Windows Vista.  So now its in a dual boot configuration with Windows Vista and Windows 7. 

On Thursday, I got my upgrade product keys from the Microsoft store and went to activate my computers.  On my laptop the activation was successful wtihout a problem.  Then I went to activate my home computer and got the error telling me that I can’t use an upgrade product key to activate a clean install of Windows 7.  So now I am left with a fully loaded PC running Windows 7 with only 10 days left to activate before I either have to re-arm or enter a new product key.  It takes hours to backup and restore the data on this PC, its my wife’s main computer and we have tons of stuff to backup and move around.  I’d pay a fee to avoid having to do this! 

The home computer was running Widnows Vista 32-bit Home premium edition.  It got upgraded to Windows 7 Pro 64-bit using a clean install method.  A while after I had installed Windows 7, I decided to cleanup the old hard drive that had the Windows Vista install on it because I wouldn’t need it anymore.  So I can’t even go back to Vista without having to do a clean install of Vista first which is something I want to avoid.  But from my understanding you can’t upgrade a 32-bit OS to the 64-bit version, so I have to do a clean install anyway.  But now that I’ve wiped out the hard drive that had Vista on it, so the activation wizard can’t see the old OS and won’t let me use my upgrade key.  I heard hints in various forums that the activation wizard looks for partitions with an upgradable OS on it. 

On my laptop, I still have the partition with Activated Windows Vista home premium 64-bit because of the dual boot setup, so I think thats why the activation wizard let me activate my laptop without a problem.  So what can we do in a situation like this?  Call Microsoft, take a huge risk and investigate non legit options?  

I had thought about trying to run the Retail upgrade install of Windows 7 on my home PC and use my upgrade key for activation.  The reason I had hope that this might work is because my home PC was loaded using the RTM Windows 7, and the download I got from Microsoft was the official retail media, so there is a very small chance it may have let me do another upgrade using my upgrade key and then possibly activate successfully.  My other thought was to install windows Vista on a spare hard drive and just leave it in my PC when booted up to Windows 7 and see if the Windows 7 Activation wizard will recognize a valid copy of Windows Vista and let me activate using my upgrade key. 

I was getting desperate since it could easily take two days to reload my home computer and go through all the trouble to get Windows 7 running again!  This is such a pain!  It shouldn’t be this hard for legit customers to use Microsoft software!!!

Ok, now that the rant is over, let me tell you how to get around this problem and get your Windows 7 systems activated.  This is actually very easy and only took a few minutes.  To my knowledge there is nothing underhanded or risky about this procedure.  Its also not well documented, it took me two days of google research and massive searches to find the information that helped me. 

Thanks to Winsupersite.com community for this information!

After performing the clean install, ensure that there are no Windows Updates pending that would require a system reboot. (You’ll see an orange shield icon next to Shutdown in the Start Menu if this is the case).  Install the updates and reboot if necessary before proceeding.

Then, open regedit.exe with Start Menu Search and navigate to:

HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/

Change MediaBootInstall from “1″ to “0″.

Open the Start Menu again and type cmd to display a shortcut to the Command Line utility. Right-click this shortcut and choose “Run as administrator.” Handle the UAC prompt.

In the command line window, type: slmgr /rearm

Then click OK, close the command line window and reboot. When Windows 7 reboots, run the Activate Windows wizard (go to system properties and click the activate windows link at the bottom of the window), type in your upgrade product key and activate windows.  It should activate successfully and you are now finished!  Congratulations on saving yourself hours (or days in my case) of wasted time jumping through hoops trying to get your genuine Windows 7 installation activated!

   After some research and manual testing to try to identify what was causing the problem, I found a strange thing.  In the IIS 6 metabase on one of the Exchange 2003 servers, the public SMTP domains were missing from the “domains” key under LM\SMTPSVC\1\DOMAIN.  Two of our domains were listed but all the rest were missing.  If the domains are not listed in the IIS metabase for SMTP, the server will reject mail sent to those domains because it doesn’t realize that its responsible for receiving mail for them.  So I decided to do a test, I opened up the recipient policy and put a check next to all public SMTP domains and waited a minute before refreshing the IIS metabase information.  When I checked again, I found all the public SMTP domains were correctly listed in the IIS metabase now. 

   Earlier in the day I was trying to send test messages via telnet through SMTP.  When I would try to send a test message to a user on one of the affected domains I would get the error “unable to relay for user@domain.com”.  After refreshing the IIS 6 metabase, my telnet test messages were being accepted successfully and I confirmed that the user was receiving them.  Again, the recipient policies have been the same since the beginning of the AD in this site.  I have no idea why all of a sudden we would see incoming mail problems.  I can only speculate what might have happened, perhaps a quirk due to an unexpected DC shutdown, or maybe its some weird fluke with IIS 6 and some other third party apps that have SMTP event hooks that caused it.  I really have no idea and I don’t have a screenshot of the IIS 6 metabase config from before the time when we started to have problems. 

   What fixed the problem was to make sure all the public SMTP domains appeared in the IIS 6 metabase.  After that was taken care of, mail delivery issues were fixed and I was able to verify this using manual telnet test messages.  So I know what the problem was and I know what fixed it, I just don’t know what actually caused the problem in the first place. 

   If you don’t have a metabase explorer, you can use the one included in the IIS 6 resource kit, which is available as a download from Microsoft.

1. The taskbar is taller and takes up more screen real estate.  This isn’t necessarily bad, but takes some getting used to.  It makes the icons look smaller. 
2.  The quick launch bar has been transformed into something different, mabye better, not sure yet.  I was dismayed to find out that the upgrade had wiped out my quick launch folder completely, all my pre-arranged shortcuts were just gone!  I found a way to work around this by creating a new quick launch folder manually and moving shortcuts that I wanted in the list.  I wish I had backed up my quick launch folder before the upgrade! 
3. The transparency is nice, but at times a little weird.  Since the top inch or so of many apps is now transparent, it seems like your apps are not maximized or as if there is a big gap at the top of the screen. 
4.  I think its cute how the new network connection icon in the task bar looks like it has a pitch fork in it. 
5.  I like the new start menu, specifically the ability to expand options for programs such as RDP.  Now when you go to RDP in the start menu, it gives you an expandable list of recent connections, which I think is nice, even though I use mRemote to organize my RDP connections.  
6. Performance seems good, the PC boots up pretty fast especially considering it was an upgrade install. 

The official upgrades for my home computers will be available in a few weeks, so I’ll post back later on with more observations.

So now that I’ve had my new iPhone for  a week now, here are some thoughts and notes about my switch…

Things I miss from Windows Mobile:
   1. The ability to control the volume for PDA sounds and the ringer separately.  At night I used to mute the PDA sounds and leave the phone ringer on maybe 2 bars.  This worked out great for me as I’m on call 24/7, so witching my phone to silent or even putting it on vibrate is not a great option for me.  Maybe one day this will be available as a feature on the iPhone.

   2. Easier file management.  I miss being able to just connect my phone to my PC and copy files back and forth via windows explorer.  Having to use iTunes to simply put files on my phone is a bit of a pain, epsecially when I’m not around my home computer and want to copy something to my iPhone.  I know there are 3rd party apps out there to help with this, but the lack of built in file management is a bit of a pain.  Not to mention that much more limited range of file types you can actually use on the iPhone.

What I love about the iPhone:
   1. The interface!  Its easy to use, visually appealing, clean and responsive.  Windows Mobile can be a bit slow at times and more complicated to navigate through screens and various settings. 
   2. It just works, right out of the box I was able to connect it to my bluetooth radio in my car for hands free calling.  I didn’t have to run through any setup wizard to align my screen or anything like that.  It just worked. 
   3. Easier to get apps!  There are many apps for windows mobile, but you have to go hunting for them, and most of the good ones cost money!  The iTunes app store has many apps available and a good number of them are free, some good ones too!  I love being able to tap “install” and it just goes to work and then you can open the app and begin using it.  

Some problems with the iPhone:
   1. The mail client lacks the enterprise grade functionality and reliability that I’ve come to get used to with Windows Mobile.  I’ve tried different types of mail accounts (activesync and MAPI, etc), and I’ve seen inconsistent behavior with the push functionality.  For example, I have an Exchange account setup and sometimes I’ll notice an hour delay in getting notified of new mail.  I can be on either 3G or wifi and it still happens.  Its just not as reliable for instant e-mail notifications. 

   2. I really really wish I could control PDA sound volume (email alerts, notifications, etc) separately from the phone ringer.  This is huge for me! 

Overall, I love my new iPhone.  Its awesome to have my mobile phone and my iPod all in one device.  It works great with other technologies I employ in my daily life.  Some people get a little uptight about losing some enterprise business features or reliability on the iPhone, but thats not really the target audience anyway.  And really, most post people are not going to care if they can’t edit Microsoft Office documents on their iPhone, they just want to be able to read and reply to e-mails on the go and are completely happy to do the PC work on the PC and just enjoy the iPhone for what it is.