Exchange Server Deployment Assistant–Now with Clouds & Cross-Premise

The Microsoft Exchange Server Deployment Assistant now support Cloud and On-premise + Cloud deployments in addition to On-premise only. This is pretty exciting and will be a great boost to help those looking to upgrade to cloud or hybrid Exchange solutions.

You will need to have Exchange 2010 CAS role on-premise to migrate or to setup a cross-premise deployment. For now only Exchange 2003 is live, with 2007 and 2010 to come soon.

Exchange Server Deployment Assistant: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exdeploy2010/default.aspx#Index

The tool walks through setting up DirSync and ADFS 2.0 to support identity federation. So if you are considering Office 365, another hosted solution or just a plain old on-premise upgrade head over to the tool.

On a related note, I am pleasantly surprised by the number of organisation I come across now using Microsoft Online Services ranging from small to very large.

Daniel Noakes
http://twitter.com/dannoakes

Windows Media Format SDK for BES on Server 2008 without Desktop Experience

If you have installed BES on Windows Server 2008 you should have installed the Desktop Experience feature to install Windows Media Player and the Windows Media Format SDK 11 (WMFSDK11) runtime to support audio attachments.

If you have a requirement preventing the Desktop Experience feature being installed you can run the following from an elevated command prompt.

Windows Server 2008 x64
pkgmgr.exe /ip /m:"%windir%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-Media-Format-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.0.6001.18000.mum"

Windows Server 2008 x86
pkgmgr.exe /ip /m:"%windir%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-Media-Format-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.0.6001.18000.mum"

Windows Server 2008 R2 x64

pkgmgr.exe /ip /m:"%windir%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-Media-Format-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.1.7600.16385.mum"

I suggest always installing the Desktop Experience feature. This should be run with elevated privileges from Windows PowerShell.

Windows Server 2008 (command prompt)
ServerManagerCmd –i Desktop-Experience

Windows Server 2008 R2 (Windows PowerShell)
Import-Module ServerManager
Add-WindowsFeature Desktop-Experience

Daniel Noakes
http://twitter.com/dannoakes

System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 QFE Rollup [KB 2250444]

 

A new hotfix roll up is available for DPM 2010 and has been published here, http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=f399fbfa-5c8b-4eb6-bda2-ea997745919a. The support KB2250444 is here, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2250444.

This hotfix rollup resolves the following issues:

• You cannot protect the Microsoft Exchange Database Availability Group (DAG) on a secondary DPM 2010 server.
• You are prompted to restart a client computer after you install an agent on the client.
• DPM services crash, and you receive the error, "Unable to connect to the database because of a fatal database error."
• MSDPM crashes, and event ID 945 is logged in the event log.
• When you change a Protection Group, add a very large database, change the disk allocation, and then commit the Protection Group, DPM 2010 does not honor the user intent, and instead, DPM 2010 sets the sizes of replica and shadow copy volumes to the default sizes.
• The Management tab does not link to information about the latest Microsoft Knowledge Base article for DPM 2010.
• You receive the message, "Computers not synchronized," when you try to replicate DPM 2010 databases to a System Center Operations Manager.

I have encountered a few of these.

Daniel Noakes
http://twitter.com/dannoakes