Saturday, November 22, 2008

iPhone setup for Exchange Activesync

As long as your phone has 2.0 firmware or better, the iPhone supports Exchange Activesync. Here is how to set it up:

Click Settings
Click Mail, Contats Calendars
Click Add Account
Click Microsoft Exchange

As requested:
Enter your full email address
Enter your username (usually the part before the @ sign in your email address)
Enter your email password

Hit Next

A box should pop up asking you for your server. Enter your server name (usually your webmail URL).

Hit Next.

If all goes well, it will say that your account is verified. Tell it to sync your mail and/or contacts and/or calendar.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Free Antivirus options

Of the dozens of antivirus software products on the market, there are a few open to residential users for free (there's no product I know of that a commercial entity can use without violating the end user license agreement).

Options:

1) Avast Antivirus Home Edition
2) AVG
3) Avira Antivir Personal

Sunday, November 16, 2008

setting up BackupExec to notify on backup failure

Here are the steps to making BackupExec send email notifications of failure (instructions for BackupExec 11)

Tools -> Email and Pager notification
Setup the SMTP Configuration tab as needed

Tools -> Recipients
New -> Person
Set the email up as needed

Open the job in "job setup"
Click on notification and set up the user you created to receive notifications

Adjusting memory threshold to get rid of allocated memory alerts

I get allocated memory errors on all my SBS boxes from time to time. There can be reasons that is happening, but on most of my boxes, that is not the case. You can adjust the alert thresholds by using the helath monitor in the MMC:

http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/archive/2006/06/07/433707.aspx

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

how to handle email after an employee's departure

When an employee chooses to leave or is asked to depart an organization, there are five main options that most organizations choose from:

1) the email address is directly forwarded to another staff member who will sort through it and forward personal emails to the departed employee

2) We put up an autoreply that says “for company related items, email 'this staff member' at this address, for personal related items, email the former employee at this address”

3) A combination of 1 and 2 where we forward all emails to another staff member and we put up an autoreply that essentially says "this employee has left the organization, but your email has been forwarded to [name], who will handle your email appropriately"

4) We allow a non-departing staff member to open the departed employee's mailbox as an extra mailbox where the non-departing staff member can view the departed employee's emails in an inbox separate from his/her own.  This can be used with or without an autoreply on the departed employee's mailbox.

5) We delete the former employee’s address so people get a bounceback when they email that address

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Dealing with corrupt Exchange information stores

Here is Microsoft’s official process of dealing with corrupt information stores:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996027.aspx

Often, you can just run an eseutil a couple times on the private information store (but you must make sure that there is at least 20 GB free on the partition you’re running the eseutil on). Here is what you normally run in what order:

Eseutil /r e00 /i

Eseutil /p “d:\exchsrvr\mdbdata\priv1.edb”

Eseutil /d “d:\exchsrvr\mdbdata\priv1.edb”

isinteg –fix