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Here are some field notes from a recent message tracking case.

If you have to find all messages from one certain domain, that have entered your Exchange environment, this is possible using Exchange Management Shell and the Get-MessageTrackingLog cmdlet.

Run the following:

Get-MessageTrackingLog -Server "ExchangeServerName" -Start "8/1/2011" -End "9/1/2011" -resultsize unlimited | where {$_.Sender -like *@domain.com}

This works on Exchange 2007 and 2010.

Here is some notes from a recent issue error that I encountered at a client.

This error may be seen on Exchange Server 2010 SP1, when removing or adding a Database Copy to the Database Availability Group (DAG).

This error will look like this:

Summary: 1 item(s). 0 succeeded, 1 failed.
Elapsed time: 00:00:00

EXDB02
Failed

Error:
Registry key has subkeys and recursive removes are not supported by this method.

Warning:
An unexpected error has occurred and a Watson dump is being generated: Registry key has subkeys and recursive removes are not supported by this method.

Exchange Management Shell command attempted:
Add-MailboxDatabaseCopy –Identity ‘EXDB02’ –MailboxServer ‘EXCH-MBX-01’ -ActivationPreference ’1′

Elapsed Time: 00:00:00

This error may occur for both adding and removing database copies. When removing a database copy from a DAG member the action is shown as successful despite the error, but when adding a database copy to a DAG member the action is not successful.

This is a known issue with Exchange 2010 SP1, previously reported by the Microsoft Exchange Team. 

The work around is to locate the Registry key and delete it.

To locate the Registry key, you will need the GUID of the database. The GUID can be retrieve using this command:

Get-MailboxDatabase “EXDB02” | fl name,guid

It will list the name and the GUID of the database.

Once the GUID is found, you can delete it using the GUI (Regedit):

Locate DumpsterInfo in the registry and delete it, it is found under:

HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v14\Replay\State\ddec1f7e-7834-3628-ee21-99a25c22773c

or you can delete it using this Powershell command:

Remove-Item HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v14\Replay\State\ddec1f7e-7834-3628-ee21-99a25c22773c\DumpsterInfo

After you have removed the registry key, you should be able to add the database copy to the Exchange server.

Other resources: Tim McMichael has also written about this issue:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/timmcmic/archive/2010/08/29/exchange-2010-sp1-error-when-adding-or-removing-a-mailbox-database-copy.aspx

Here is some notes from a recent issue error that I encountered at a client with SSL certificates for an Exchange 2010 server.

This error may be seen on Exchange Server 2010. It may occur even though the certificate is a public certificate, from a trusted provider e.g. GlobalSign, Verisign or anyone else. Although it is most often seen when using certificates from a private PKI infrastructure. This blog post will focus on the usage of a public certificate, in this case from GlobalSign.

The error: The certificate is invalid for exchange server usage

It is shown in the Exchange Management Console (EMC) as:

The reason for the error is because the certificate cannot be verified to a trusted Certificate Authority.

The certificate chain is broken, because of a missing or wrong Intermediate or Root CA in the Certificate store of the Exchange 2010 server.

Make sure you have the correct Intermediate and Root CA from the provider (validate with your provider, that you have the correct ones) and make sure they are imported into the Certificate store. They should be imported into the correct destination of the Certificate Store of the Computer (Exchange Server), such as Trusted Root Certification Authorities (holds the Root CA) and Intermediate Certification Authorities (holds the Intermediate CA), as shown below:

When you have imported or validated the correct versions, the next time you start the Exchange Management Console, the certificate will now be listed as valid, as shown below:

As usual Microsoft has put all the sessions from this years TechEd online at www.msteched.com.

I have compiled a list of interesting UC sessions within:

• Exchange 2010
• Lync 2010
• Office 365

All session links include a webcast of the session along with the powerpoint.

Read more…

The Exchange Team has announced SP2 for Exchange 2010, it is scheduled for release in the second half of 2011.

The SP2 includes the following major new features:

• Outlook Web App (OWA) Mini: A browse-only version of OWA designed for low bandwidth and resolution devices. Based on the existing Exchange 2010 SP1 OWA infrastructure, this feature provides a simple text based interface to navigate the user’s mailbox and access to the global address list from a plurality of mobile devices.
• Cross-Site Silent Redirection for Outlook Web App: With Service Pack 2, you will have the ability to enable silent redirection when CAS must redirect an OWA request to CAS infrastructure located in another Active Directory site. 
• Hybrid Configuration Wizard: Organizations can choose to deploy a hybrid scenario where some mailboxes are on-premises and some are in Exchange Online with Microsoft Office 365.
• Address Book Policies: Allows organizations to segment their address books into smaller scoped subsets of users providing a more refined user experience than the previous manual configuration approach. They blogged about this feature earlier: GAL Segmentation, Exchange Server 2010 and Address Book Policies.
• Customer Requested Fixes: All fixes contained within update rollups released prior to Service Pack 2 will also be contained within SP2.

Read more at the Exchange Team blog.

Great news from the Exchange team today. They have announced enhancements to the virtualization support of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 running with SP1.

With Exchange SP1 the following scenarios are now supported running under hardware virtualization:

A new Best Practices for Virtualizing Exchange Server 2010 with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V whitepaper has also been released.

Read more about these enhancements on the Exchange Team blog.

The Office team has posted a nice overview of the needed licenses for using Exchange 2010 Personal Archive and Retention Policies.

To use Personal Archive or retention policies requires a Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 account with Microsoft Exchange Server Enterprise Client Access License (CAL) and one of the following Microsoft Outlook licenses.

Read their post here.

I recently installed the Exchange 2010 SP1 Unified Messaging (UM) role at a client and in that process I was installing the pre-requirements:

• Unified Communications Managed API 2.0, Core Runtime
• Microsoft Speech Platform – Server Runtime

I found that there are multiple versions of the Speech Platform Runtime, available as download:

• Microsoft Speech Platform – Server Runtime (Version 10.2)
• Microsoft Speech Platform – Server Runtime (Version 10.1)

Since this was a new installation, I was about to download and install version 10.2. Be aware that this version is not supported with Exchange 2010 SP1 and you might experience that the Exchange 2010 SP1 Readiness Check will not recognize the Speech Platform Runtime installed as a pre-requirement.

The solution is to install version 10.1 of the Speech Platform Runtime.

Why it does not recognize the version 10.2 I do not know, maybe it is a version mismatch in Exchange 2010 SP1.