Early Certification

Check Nicholas King blog at http://blogs.technet.com/nking/archive/2008/07/27/early-certification-sbs-ebs.aspx

EBS Jumpstart site is live

A site not to be missed for partners thinking about EBS, check the jumpstart online kit at http://www.ebsjumpstartkit.com/index.aspx

EBS Demo by N. King

Nicholas King has a cool demo of ebs on his blog; check it out.

adding a new distribution group can take 4 hours to propagate

If you create a new distribution group, and need this to go live instantly, you should run the following command: Start-EdgeSynchronization

User and group data is synchronized between the Messaging and edge servers every 4 hours by default.

Vista blue screened on a system restore “Event viewer service” error 4201

We found that after doing a system restore on a Vista x64 sp1, it blue screened on startup, however a safe mode boot worked; after enabling msconfig, and disabling all the Symantec modules, the system booted;

Next step was uninstalling Endpoint which failed on the services screen, on further investigation we found that the “event viewer service” was not starting, and was generating a “Error_WMI_Instance_Not_Found 4201 The instance passed was not recognized as valid by WMI data provider”

We found the quickest fix was to boot into repair mode, and rename Repository locate in C:\windows\systems32\wbem\

If this does not work, then

net stop winmgmt

winmgmt /resetrepository

restart computer, event viewer should now be working, Endpoint did not not to be uninstalled.

 

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/110886-event-viewer-error-4201-a.html

Outlook 2003 outbound mail delayed for 60 seconds

Thanks to Mark S. for this fix;

We found that after migrating mailboxes to Exchange 2007, Outlook 2003 clients that were not in cache mode, had all outbound emails waiting for 60 seconds before leaving the clients outbox, however if you clicked on any folder it immediately left.

here is the solution:

Outlook 2003 against previous versions of Exchange Server registers a random UDP port with the Exchange for update notifications.  This means that the client UI is refreshed every time an event fires.  This port no longer registers against an Exchange 2007 server;  instead, Outlook relies on the server’s maximum polling interval setting.  This is set to one minute by default.  The vast majority of installations use cached mode, so they would not normally notice this behavior.  To clarify, the mail in the outbox has been sent and delivered, it is only the client that has not refreshed.

Polling frequency can be increased by modifying the value of

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\

MsExchangeIS\ParametersSystem\Maximum Polling Frequency on the Messaging Server. 

This key has a value of 60000 milliseconds (1 minute) by default.  Changing it to 15000 or even 10000 will gives a faster client refresh time.  The trade-off, of course, will be slightly higher load on the server, but it would be hard to impact performance with <250 users.

 A few notes: 

• After setting the value (make sure to specify decimal )
• MSExchangeIS needs to be restarted for the setting to take effect
• Setting this key is probably an acceptable workaround for a deployment up to 250 users.  Monitor CPU, memory and disk queue length to make sure that they are still at acceptable levels after lowering the threshold
• would not recommend setting the frequency much lower than 10 seconds. This will result in more traffic to the server, but probably not to an appreciable amount on a gigabit network
• Real time for the refresh is an additional 2-3 seconds over the polling time because of latency, disk writes, etc
• Cached mode clients will see that the mail leaves immediately, but there will be a corresponding delay for delivery until the polling frequency is hit
• This behavior is not present in Outlook 2007 because of its different polling architecture

Mobile 6.1 release for I760

Samsung released today the long awaited 6.1 upgrade the files can be located here

Pushing out SCE agent fails and the Fix.

We had a new Windows 2008 x64 joined to the domain acting as a Terminal Server. we could not push the SCE agent out, and kept on getting this error error is 800706BA The RPC server is unavailable

We investigated and found no DNS entry for this newly added server.

As soon as we added  the A record, we could successfully push the agent.

EBS official release date has been announced.

Steven VanRoekel, senior director, Windows Server Solutions Group at Microsoft announced that the release date will be on November 12th 2008.

Excel 2007 on Vista slow to save

We ran into a situation where Vista clients with Excel 2007 were slow in open and saving of files.

We came across the following which has helped the situation

We checked the “Lookup wizard” Add-Ins in Excel Options Add-Ins this made excel faster in most areas.