Support policies for Exchange Servers in a virtualized environment
It has been a while ago so it’s time for a new tutorial.</p>
This tutorial will be about dynamic distribution groups, a new feature in Exchange 2007. With a dynamic distribution group you can create a group which members will be selected according to a filter you specify. Each time a mail is send to this group a query will be done to select the users who are a member of the group.
There are two methods to create a dynamic distribution group:
Dynamic Distribution Group via the Exchange Management Console
We start with the first method, for this you will need to startup the Exchange Management Console and go to groups via recipient configuration .
When you have selected the groups icon you can select the option new dynamic distribution group in the right menu to start the wizard.
You will be presented the screen above, here we can define a name for the new dynamic distribution group. When the name has been defined you can click on next
The next step is to define the filter, here we need to define from which OU the members will be selected. The other thing we can define here is which objects will be selected from the OU. Standard all objects will be selected but if you have an OU which different types of objects you can specify for example only Exchange Mailbox users.
When your statisfied with the filter click on next
The next step is to define the conditions which a user must met to be a member of the group. As you can see in the screenshot there are a few fields displayed at step 1. When you wish to use another field will need to create the group via the Exchange Management Shell. This is described later in this tutorial.
In this case we would like to select all people who work in the IT department, therefor we select the option Recipient is in a Department, in the lower part of the screen we must define the condition. By clicking on specified we can specify a value. When clicking on it you will see the following screenshot.
Here we specify the value which we want to use in our filter, in this case IT. When you have specified all values you can click on OK.
Now we have provided all necessary values we will get a short overview of what we are going to configure.
When we are satisfied with this we click on new, after this the new dynamic distribution group will be created.
Now we created the new group we would like to know which users are a member of it. To find this out we need to get the properties of the group.
Next thing is to select the tab conditions and push the button preview
An overview of the users who are a member of the group will be displayed.
Standard only mail from authenticated users will be accepted. This is to prevend people from the internet sending mail to this group. When you would like to enable this group for receiving mail from the internet we need to configure this. This can be done on the tab Mail Flow Settings
When you opened the tab select the item Message Delivery Restrictions and click the button properties.
In the upper part of the screen you will see accept messages from below that title you will find the option require that all senders are authenticated, remove the checkmark before the option to accept mail from the internet.
Dynamic Distribution Group via the Exchange Management Shell
As mentioned earlier we can create a dynamic distribution group via two methods. The second method is via Powershell. You can do this by using the command new-DynamicDistributionGroup. It can be done via an easy or by are more complex way. Can we specify only a few fields in the EMC, in Powershell we can filter on much more fields.
But that's for later, let's start with the easy version:
Event id 12014 is caused by a problem with loading the certificate when setting up a SMTP connection which uses TLS for authentication.
In Exchange 2007 you can create a custom GAL. Creating the custom GAL can be done via the EMC of Powershell.
Today rollup 5 for Exchange 2007 is released. This update contains fixes for:
On the site of the Microsoft Exchange Team an article is published about rollup 5 which will be available within a few days. One of the fixes in the rollup will ensure that all services will start after the installation of a patch. There are some known cases that this will not happen after the installation of a rollup. The problem is caused by a check of a certificate which is used to sign the binaries. This check wil try to contact crl.microsoft.com but when the environment has limited or no internet access this can cause this issue.
It’s now a few weeks after TechEd, some sessions of TechEd are published on a special TechEd site. One of this sessions are ESE internals presented by Ross Smith IV, Senior Technology Architect from Microsoft. Ross goes in to the depth of ESE the database type used by Exchange.
As each version of a software package each package will need some tricks to solve issues. With Exchange 2007 this is also the case. It can happen that the Microsoft Exchange Transport service won’t start. When you have this issue you may see several events with the ID 5023. This was the case which I found on a forum. The cause of this issue appears to be an empty MsExchHomeRoutinggroup attribute.
