Test Layout

I'm doing some experimentation with Windows 10 deployment and attempted to run Sysprep. When I ran it, I got the following error: Sysprep was not able to validate your Windows installation. Review the log file at %WINDIR%\System32\Sysprep\Panther\setupact.log for details. After resolving the issue, use Sysprep to validate your installation again. When I read the log file, I found this: Package 9E2F88E3.Twitter_4.3.3.0_x86__wgeqdkkx372wm was installed for a user, but not provisioned for all users. This package will not function properly in the sysprep image. So, apparently the Twitter app that is included by default is causing my issue. I did some research and found references to other packages causing the same issue if Windows 10 communicates with the Internet. The VM I'm using does have Internet connectivity. To remove the app, I ran the following command. Note that you can use wildcards in PackageName for Get-AppxPackage, such as *twitter*. Get-AppxPackage PackageName | Rem...

This is a unique scenario, because it applies primarily to testing environments. I have a lab setup with Exchange Server 2016 and Outlook 2016. I was going a bit nuts because each time Outlook 2016 tried to configure the profile I got the following error message: The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action. This error can occur when you get names wrong in your internal or external URLs. So, I verified the names in all of my internal and external URLs. I also tested connectivity in Outlook and the URLs from Autodiscover were correct. Also verified the names in the certificate. It turned out to be an issue with the default gateway. As part the connection process, Outlook 2016 was attempting to connect with the default gateway (which didn't exist on my test network). When connectivity to the default gateway failed, Outlook provided that error. To fix this, I pointed the client running Outlook 2016 at a valid IP for t...

As part of developing the new Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 course, I needed to get Office Online Server Preview (formerly Office Web Apps Server) working with Exchange Server 2016. If you read the instructions it's pretty straight forward. There isn't much to do other than run setup and run a single command to create a farm. Instructions are here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219455%28v=office.16%29.aspx The command to create the farm for Office Online Server is: New-OfficeWebAppsFarm -InternalURL https://office.adatum.com -ExternalURL https://office.adatum.com -Certificate OOSCertificate -EditingEnabled After creating the farm, you need to set Exchange 2016 to use it with the following command: Set-OrganizationConfig -WacDiscoveryEndPoint https://office.adatum.com/hosting/discovery After running the command in Exchange 2016, you need to restart the MSExchangeOwaAppPool. Or If you're lazy, just do an IISreset. After this, I was able to send a Word documen...

A while back we had an interesting issue where a non-organizer cancelled a recurring meeting for an entire group of people. And, life being what it is, it was of course for a group of executives in a large organization. The message text was something like this: From: Microsoft Outlook On Behalf Of Susan Smith Sent: Monday, November 30, 2015 7:00 PM To: John Roberts Subject: Canceled: Management Meeting When: Occurs every 1week(s) on Tuesday effective 1/1/2015 from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM (UTC-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada). Where: Boardroom *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* This meeting has been canceled by the organizer. This meeting has been canceled by the organizer. To see the original contents of the meeting, view the item in your calendar.   _____   Sent by Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 This type of message was send to all meeting participants, not just John Roberts. The meeting organizer was not Susan Smith. And the meeting organizer indicated that she didn't cancel the m...

I have one customer that uses Netvanta UC for their voicemail system. It runs on a virtual machine hosted on a Hyper-V cluster. That's a bit of an issue in itself because the software fails if the VM is migrated between hosts. To migrate it between hosts you need to reactivate it. Not cool. For the past while, they've been having audio quality issues with this system and have investigated all points in the system, but none seemed to show any signs of an issue. I'll let the customer describe it for you: We have been plagued with garbled voicemail for a while now. Finally, we found some Adtran techs who took a hard look and found that when voicemail was hitting our NetvantaUC server sometimes (fairly often actually) up to 35% of the packets were out of order, causing a robotic and sometime impossible to understand recording. They also checked our PRI gateway and noted that there were no issues from the PRI (MTS) or leaving the gateway. Of course this left one switch in quest...

Working with a large number of mailboxes is usually about the same a working with a small number of mailboxes, except that you need to include -ResultSize Unlimited in your Get-* cmdlets. However, I recently ran into the following error when getting a large list of mailboxes (approx 38K) with Get-Mailbox and piping them to Set-Mailbox: Sending data to a remote command failed with the following error message: The total data received from the remote client exceeded allowed maximum. Allowed maximum is 524288000. In the end this seemed to be a limitation of piping from Get-Mailbox to Set-Mailbox. For example, this would generate the error: Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Set-Mailbox -SingleItemRecoveryEnabled $true One option to work around this is to chunk up the work and do it by database instead: Get-Mailbox -Database XXX -ResultSize Unlimited | Set-Mailbox -SingleItemRecoveryEnabled $true However, my preferred workaround was this: $mbx=Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited foreach($m ...

I'm currently working with a large organization where they've lost track of mailbox removals when accounts are disabled. They keep disabled accounts for an extended period of time after users leave. So, some disabled accounts are years old and still have a mailbox. We're going through and cleaning up right now. So, we wanted a list of disabled user accounts with an Exchange Mailbox. However, since resource mailboxes have a disabled user account, we need to exclude those. It's a nice easy one line of PowerShell: Get-Mailbox -Filter {ExchangeUserAccountControl -eq "AccountDisabled" -and IsResource -eq $false} -ResultSize unlimited | export-csv C:\temp\DisabledWMailbox.csv