If you check the Eventlog, do you find these events?

The MAPI call ‘OpenMsgStore’ failed with the following error:
The information store could not be opened.
The MAPI provider failed.
MAPI 1.0
ID no: 8004011d-0289-00000000

For more information, click http://www.microsoft.com/contentredirect.asp.

Failed to open mailbox ‘/o=CONTOSO/ou=First Administrative Group/cn=Recipients/cn=JohnDoe’ in mailbox store ‘/o=CONTOSO/ou=First Administrative Group/cn=Configuration/cn=Servers/cn=ContosoMailServer/cn=Microsoft Private MDB81234567′ on server ‘ContosoMailServer’.
Error: The information store could not be opened.
The MAPI provider failed.
MAPI 1.0
ID no: 8004011d-0289-00000000

For more information, click http://www.microsoft.com/contentredirect.asp.

Quickly check if these users are not disabled.  Mailboxes with disabled users as associated account cannot be moved.  The workarounds are to enable the user accounts – which is not that desireable for your company’s Security staff – or assign SELF as the associated account.

More info at Microsoft.

• Go into the Exchange 2007 Management Console (or Shell)
• Find the mailbox in the Recipient Configuration
• Write down the server the mailbox is stored
• Disconnect the mailbox from the original AD user
• Get a list of disconnected mailboxes on the server you wrote down

Only to find that the mailbox is not listed. Panic!

Did you forget to check the Deletion Settings on the mailbox store? No, on second glance they are the default 30 days, so the disconnected mailbox should still be available.

But, wait… On Exchange 2003, didn’t you run the Cleanup Agent to find disconnected mailboxes?

No such a thing in Exchange 2007, or is there?

Yes there is.  Clean-Mailboxdatabase is your cmdlet and friend.  Run Clean-Mailboxdatabase <databasename> in an Exchange Management Shell and reload your list of disconnected mailboxes.

You saved the day!  Or at least Exchange saved your job ;).

So next time:

1. Get-Mailbox john@contoso.com | Format-Table Name, Database
2. Disable-Mailbox john@contoso.com
3. Clean-MailboxDatabase “Mailbox Server\Mailbox Database Storagegroup Name”
4. Connect-Mailbox -Database “Mailbox Database” -Identity “John Peoples”   -User john@fabrikam.com

Microsoft held their Unified Communications launch event on Thursday in Louvain-La-Neuve, and I attended to see what all the fuzz is about.

Microsoft renamed it’s Live Communications Server to Office Communications Server with the 2007 release, and features new and improved features.

Communications Server is Microsoft’s answer to the possible information overload you could get when using e-mail, instant messaging, one or more cellphones and your desk phone, and the integration of all the personal internet experiences into an business environment.

The information worker of 5 years ago could live without IM, possibly even without his cellphone and was happy to communicate face to face, by his desk phone or by email.  The information worker has evolved, however, and is now using Instant Messaging at home to keep in touch with colleagues and friends, his cellphone has grown into a personal notepad and he keeps a blog, while at work he still communicates with his old one-trick deskphone and archaic e-mail.

The information worker of the future is the teenager of today: work is done in a team effort through IM, webcam conferencing, sharing desktops and being digitally omnipresent while physical presence loses importance.  These people will not fit in a business environment where the main communications platform are e-mail and a deskphone, and where physical presence is required to manage these communication methods.

The business that will succeed in offering a digital presence, will attract the information worker.  The business that will only offer physical presence, will appall these talented workers.

The issue with all these information streams is that currently, these are separate information streams: you need to ask your colleage something, so you look up his number to call him.  You dial the number into your deskphone, but he’s not available and you leave a message in his voicemail.  Following that, you send him an email to be sure he reacts.  The more urgent your question is, the more quickly you are going to repeat the above procedure until he reacts.  This all while in the mean time people are trying to reach you, and you are trying to do your work.

OK, so how does Office Communications Server fit in this vision of the future?  Communications Server delivers a central platform to interconnect your Exchange Server, Instant Messaging, mobile access and telephony.  All communications are connected, so before you call, you can see if someone’s available on IM or in any Office application (and application which uses the Communicator API).  If your contact does not respond to your IM message, he’ll get it when he is ready.  If you call your colleague and he does not pick up, your voicemail message generates an item in your colleague’s inbox.  And if you need to have a meeting but your colleague is not around, you can easily drop him into a conference call or conference webcam.

I’ll be testing this in the near future, to work together with Exchange Server (and it’s newly released Service Pack!).  In the mean time, be sure to check the I Know UC website.  So you’ll know… :)

edit: The speaker presentations are up on Everybody.knowsuc.be.

The Update.exe Package Installer relies on Update.inf to check wheither the update, patch or hotfix is suited for the operating system and patch levels of your application.  Normally, this poses no problem, but at times you might have something running which was supported, and then not.

So tonight seemed to be the case.  For various reasons, I had an Exchange 2000 Server running on a Windows Server 2003.  On paper incompatible, but with Service Pack 3 of Exchange, it works fine.  Up until you want to run the August 2004 Exchange 2000 Server Post-Service Pack 3 Update Rollup from KB870540 and are greeted with a screen which tells you:

Now, offcourse, you go check the registry settings for your Exchange Server, and notice the actual “NewestBuild” DWORD value in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\Setup clearly states 4417 (or 0×00001141 in hex).  So the installer must be clearly mistaken.

Halfway, tho.  After extracting the Package Installer with the -x argument on the command line, I am greeted with the standard Package Installer layout: a directory with all the package files, and a subdirectory \Update which hosts the infamous update.exe and it’s friend update.inf.  On closer examination of Update.inf, I notice that the first segment of the file, the [version] segment, has multiple settings for minimum and maximum version requirements for the OS and – in this case – Exchange.

I did the normal fiddling: changed the Exchange build values in the .inf file, changed them in the registry, …  All but to no avail.  There was light in the darkness when I tried to modify the NT version builds, up until the point where lowering the Windows build versions in regedit did not give any effect, and modifying them in update.inf giving the following message:

The Cryptographic Service provides three management services: Catalog Database Service, which confirms the signatures of Windows files; Protected Root Service, which adds and removes Trusted Root Certification Authority certificates from this computer; and Key Service, which helps enroll this computer for certificates. If this service is stopped, these management services will not function properly. If this service is disabled, any services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start.

That is the official version.  The reality is that, once you stop this service and run Update.exe, this service is started again.  Even if you disable the service, the service pops up again and welcomes you with the nasty error message, blocking installation of the patch.

I started fiddling some more.  I wrote a quick batch script that would continously stop the Cryptographic Service.  When it ran, Update.exe would not continue: it needed confirmation from this service that the added update.inf was genuine! And offcourse, an update.inf with changed build numbers for my OS failed the test.  So I needed a solution where my update.inf would ánd pass the test, ánd have a different setting than the original. 

I wrote one last final hack as a batch file:

net stop "Cryptographic Services"
copy update.good.inf update.inf
start update.exe
ping localhost
copy update.orig.inf update.inf

It stops the nasty service, gives time to copy a “faulty” update.inf with a higher build number to accomodate for Windows 2003′s 3700′s build number, start Update.exe, wait a few seconds for Update.exe to read in the “faulty” file (sleep.exe is not default installed on Windows 2003) and copy the “correct” file before Update.exe launches up the Cryptographic Services again to check on Update.inf’s genuinity.