BlackBerry and Exchange Server

Most of our clients use BlackBerries with the BlackBerry Professional Server (BPS is baby BES)or Windows Mobiles to connect to their Exchange Server, today we had to connect a BlackBerry running the basic Internet Services (BIS) and it took far longer than it should have.

First of all, the setup wizard doesn't ask you for any OWA details to start out with. It will ask for the email address and password first, and when it fails to connect, you'll get the option to configure the account manually. At this point you'll see the OWA option, which is where you want to be entering all the user's details.

The next common problem is the Mailbox name. This is not always the same as the username or email address, and will be defined on your Exchange server. If you get the Mailbox name wrong, the connection doesn't work and the error wont't help much "bis cannot connect to email server or invalid server name"

The easiest way to check your Mailbox name is to log on to your OWA inbox, and mouse-over one of your emails. The URL will be displayed as your OWA address /Mailbox name. So for example an OWA account with Mailbox name Fred on server https://www.bizname.com/exchange/ will be displayed as https://www.bizname.com/exchange/Fred in the status bar of your browser when mouse-overing on your emails.

Once we'd sorted the mailbox name it went straight through, so one to remember for next time

Acer Apsire One fails to boot

Had a client bring in an Aspire Apsire One that wasn't booting, indeed it wasn't even giving us the BIOS screen when powered on. It turns out this is quite a common issue where the BIOS needs to be reflashed.

We followed the steps detailed in a blog posting here and had it up and running again in a few minutes.

MOSS 2007 - tied up in knots and no search

We had a server go bad following a hard powerdown and some Windows Updates that wiped out the MOSS 2007 search - well an intrant without a search function isn't much use.

We checked the search settings in the default SSP1 and all was well and it showed crawled results but we just couldn't get at them via the site search; after much time troublesehooting and reading we found an article that deasl with the Alternate Address Mappings and a broken search. Having reset the AAM bingo the search function now returns the results we need.

The article is here, see the entries by Chad Shultz: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepointsearch/thread/ba2cf811-75b1-49b6-9393-74869d6ac9a1

Internet Security 2010 - malware

If you protection lets you down or you get hit in a drive by infection you could well be seeing popup messages and lerts from Internet Security 2010 suggesting that you buy their full product to get clean - DON'T it's a con.

There's a great article on how to cleanup an Internet Security 2010 infected system here:
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/remove-internet-security-2010

SBS2008 and SharePoint 3.0 #2

Having got past earlier issues with SharePoint on a new SBS2008 installation we then found the logs contain loads of errors and we can't search for anything, this is known issue and using details in this post we have the full functionality we expected out of the box.

There is an option to install Windows Search Server Express 2008 - but there seem to be issues relating to the way the SBS team have deployed WSS that mean we'll wait for some braver souls to test the water.

Issues with Exchange 2007 and Outlook Web Access

We staged a new Windows Server 2008 with Exchange 2007 for a client recently, the plan being to deploy into the existing domain and migrate applications and data over to it. DFS, file & print went over weeks ago but we've been having issues with Exchange and OWA - it worked when first installed but broke after we applied SP2, giving OWA ERROR "Outlook Web Access did not initialize" and in the event log:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: MSExchange OWA
Event Category: ADNotifications
Event ID: 65

We've spent ages reviewing the configuration and found a great post here http://forums.msexchange.org/m_1800493181/tm.htm that having worked through has resolved our problem - on with test mailbox migrations now.

SBS2008 Migration from SBS2003

We've been practicisng in the lab with virtual machines but this week was the time to bit the bullet and complete the migration of our production network from SBS2003 to SBS2008.

We've opted to use the swing migration method from Jeff Middelton at www.sbsmigration.com and have been pleased with his approach which unlike the Microsoft migration method keeps the production system intact and provides scope for much work to be done offsite - thanks Jeff