Alexander’s Blog

Have you noticed that when you use System Manager in Exchange Server 2003 to browse Mailboxes that the “Last logged on by” column frequently displays incorrect account information? For example, you may have noticed that your mailbox account shows other people listed in the “Last logged on by” column. This is often very confusing for the administrators. They are concerned about the security and finding several people being logged in to other people’s mailboxes is not very comforting. Rebooting the server won’t make a difference and even if your server is up to date with all the patches and hotfixes, the behavior still remains the same.

The reason for this “feature” displaying other users as “Last logged on by” in Exchange is that the other users are querying free/busy time. You can test this easily with a meeting entry and query someone else’s mailbox for free/busy time. You will notice that your name will show up in the “Last logged on by” column.

I had a client who asked me the other day if it is possbile to prevent out-of-office messages in Exchange 2007 from being sent to anyone not on the users’ contacts list. Luckily, in Outlook 2007 Microsoft allows us to set two different out-of-office messages.

Sending out-of-office messages to anyone could be a security risk and can also help spammers who are ableto verify your e-mail address. Bad guys can benefit from information about you that they shouldn’t have. For example, there are known cases of people getting robbed when out-of-office message informed the would-be robbers that people will be out of town on certain dates. Out-of-office messages also pose additional social engineering threats.

In Outlook 2007, you have much better control over out-of-office replies. Not only can you send out-of-office replies during specific dates, which is very helpful, you can configure one auto-reply for people that are inside your organization and another for people who are outside your organization. For example, you can configure the dates for when you are out-of-office ahead of time and Outlook 2007 will automatically turn on the feature during the dates that you are out of office. To configure out-of-office auto replies in Outlook 2007 you go to Tools, Out of Office Assistant. Notice that when you enable the feature by clicking “Send Out of Office auto-replies” you have two tabs: one for “Inside My Organization” and another for “Outside My Organization: When you type a message for users “Outside My Organization”, you can choose to either select “My contacts only” or “Anyone outside my organization” (which is the default setting).

The ability to limit out-of-office replies only to users that are on your contacts list is a major improvement in Outlook 2007.

Have you run into a situation where your users are getting an unexpected login prompt? If your Outlook 2007 users are configured to use NTLM authentication yet they are receiving a login prompt, which they shouldn’t, you need to modify Outlook Anywhere settings for the Autodiscover service. More specifically, you need to use the Exchange Management Shell and modify a server-side setting for Outlook Anywhere. This should be done on the server that is running the Client Access server role. For the Autodiscover service, you should set the value for the Server attribute for the EXPR OutlookProvider object to $null for the Outlook Anywhere configuration settings. Here’s how.

Make sure you have the proper permissions to modify the settings on the Exchange 2007 Server. For example logon as an account that has the Exchange Organization Administrator role. Start the Exchange Management Shell and run the following command:

Set-OutlookProvider EXPR -Server $null

In order for the changes to take effect, you should either restart Internet Information Services (IIS) or recycle MSExchangeAutodiscoverAppPool on the Exchange server that’s running the Client Access server role.

Restarting IIS is simple but if you decide to recycle MSExchangeAutodiscoverAppPool, you need to go to Application Pools container in the IIS console. Right-click MSExchangeAutodiscoverAppPool and select Recycle. You will not expect any messages confirming your action but the application pool will get recycled. If you have any doubts whether the recycling of the application pool took place then you can restart IIS instead, which will also accomplish the same thing.

TechRepublic’s blog has a nice posting by author Rick Vanover called 10 cool things you can do with Windows PowerShell. The article lists the following cool things to do with Windows PowerShell.

#1: Report all of the USB devices installed
#2: Perform your favorite CMD tasks in PowerShell
#3: Kill a process in PowerShell instead of Task Manager
#4: Use PSDrive to view more than just drives
#5: Export NTFS folder permissions — recursive or not
#6: Play with PowerShell 2.0
#7: Work from the keyboard in Graphical PowerShell
#8: Background a time-consuming task
#9: Insert timestamps into PowerShell outputs
#10: Stop and smell the roses

Check out this link for more details on how you can benefit from these cool tips. Considering the fact that Windows PowerShell is now a core part of Exchange 2007, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008, you will find these tips handy while you work with Windows PowerShell.

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 supports both American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and UNICODE personal folders (.pst) and offline folder (.ost) files. You can use the following four registry entries to limit the size of both the .pst and the .ost files:

• The MaxFileSize registry entry
• The WarnFileSize registry entry
• The MaxLargeFileSize registry entry
• The WarnLargeFileSize registry entry

Note The WarnLargeFileSize and WarnFileSize registry entries do not enable Outlook to warn you before the file size limit is reached.

Thew default values for these entires are:

MaxLargeFileSize = 20 GB

WarnLargeFileSize = 19 GB

MaxFileSize = 1.933 GB

WarnFileSize = 1.816 GB

The policy location for the registry entries is located in the following path in Registry Editor.

Outlook 2007

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\PST

The user preference location for the registry entries is located in the following path in Registry Editor:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\PST

Outlook 2003

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\PST

The user preference location for the registry entries is located in the following path in Registry Editor:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\PST

Check out Microsoft’s KB article 832925 for more details on this topic.