Forefront Security for Exchange : release blocked emails

Forefont Security for Exchange (before v. 2010) may use a lot of CPU/RAM and almost hangs your transport server.

If you stop Forefront, some emails (*.eml) can remain blocked in the following folders (incoming and outgoing emails) :

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Forefront Security\Exchange Server\Data\Archive\in
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Forefront Security\Exchange Server\Data\Archive\out

In order to release them, just move them to the following folder and let Exchange process them :

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Forefront Security\Exchange Server\Pickup

Routing Sendmail SMTP messages to Exchange 2007 distribution lists

Relaying emails from an internal sendmail server to an Exchange 2007 transport server will work for AD users recipients, but not for AD distribution lists.
The error given by the Exchange server is :
550 5.7.1 RESOLVER.RST.AuthRequired; authentication required

In order to allow emails coming from an internal sendmail server, you can disable the authentication on this distribution list :

Edit the distribution list property in the Exchange Management Console, mail flow settings tab, Message Delivery restriction and then uncheck "Require that all senders are authenticated.

Send text messages (SMS) from Outlook/Exchange 2010

A cool new feature of Exchange 2010 allows you to send text messages from your OWA or Outlook 2010 client.

You will also need a Windows Mobile phone connected to your Exchange 2010 mailbox. WM 6.1 should download an update from the Exchange Server to enable this functionality (I haven’t tested this) whereas WM 6.5 can do this out of the box.

It basically works by syncing the SMS to your phone and your phone then sends it out.

When setting up the partnership between your Windows Mobile phone and Exchange you should see the option to also sync your text messages. Once you select this you will need to restart Outlook 2010 after which it will show you an additional item under “New Items” called “Test Message (SMS)”.

Incoming texts will also land in your Exchange mailbox.

It is worth noting that I wasn’t able to add the SMS syncing after I had created the partnership with Exchange – I had to remove the partnership and recreate it.

Add Traffic Light indicators to a Yes/No column in a custom SharePoint list

I needed to create a list which would show a Yes/No column as traffic lights. Since SharePoint already has the necessary images from KPI lists I decided to use them.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an option OOTB so I decided to generate the URL to the KPI gifs using a calculated column. The name of the Yes/No column was “Approved” so I created the following calculated column:

="<div><img src='/_layouts/images/KPIDefault-"&IF([Approved]=TRUE,0,2)&".gif'/></div>"

For those of you using various regional versions of SharePoint, be careful with the commas after “TRUE”. You might need to change them to semi-colons.

 

The problem with the result from the above calculated column is that it is simply displayed as text. While trying to get it to display as an image, I stumbled across this site, and in particular a script which does exactly that. The script can be downloaded from here. I have added it below for the sake of simplicity.

This script needs to be added to the bottom of the page using the Content Editor WebPart (add it by using the source editor not the Rich Text editor).

 

<script type="text/javascript">
/*
Text to HTML Lite - version 2.1.1
Questions and comments: Christophe@PathToSharePoint.com
*/

function TextToHTML(NodeSet, HTMLregexp) {
var CellContent = "";
var i=0;
while (i < NodeSet.length){
try {
CellContent = NodeSet[i].innerText || NodeSet[i].textContent;
if (HTMLregexp.test(CellContent)) {NodeSet[i].innerHTML = CellContent;}
}
catch(err){}
i=i+1;
}
}

// Calendar views
var regexpA = new RegExp("\\s*<([a-zA-Z]*)(.|\\s)*/\\1?>\\s*");
TextToHTML(document.getElementsByTagName("a"),regexpA);

// List views
var regexpTD = new RegExp("^\\s*<([a-zA-Z]*)(.|\\s)*/\\1?>\\s*$");
TextToHTML(document.getElementsByTagName("TD"),regexpTD);

</script>

Map a drive letter to SkyDrive

Office 2010 has a very cool option to save files to the Windows Live SkyDrive. By choosing “Save and Send” from the File menu you can connect to your Windows Live SkyDrive as shown in the screenshot below.

 

 

After you click “Save As” you will get a normal Windows Explorer Save As dialog with the address in the address bar such as this one:

 

Copy this address, open the Windows Explorer, click on Computer and choose “Map network drive”

 

Now paste in the address you copied from above and choose the drive you would like to map it to

 

Done! ;)

Very Useful Tool: ADRecycleBin

The new Active Directory recycle bin feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 can be extremely useful. The problem, however, is that you need all your domain controllers to be running R2. The lack of a GUI can also make a restore a little hairy at best.

I recently came across a handy little (FREEWARE) tool from Overall Solutions called ADRecycleBin. The tool can work with the new recycle bin feature in Windows 2008 R2 but if you are running earlier versions of AD the tool will also work.

For some screenshots and to download the tool go here.

Showing active SharePoint connections

It can be very useful to see how many active connections you have on your SharePoint server. This can be easily done using PowerShell to look at the IIS performance counters.

As is mostly the case with scripting, somebody has already done a much better job than I ever could. Here is a script which creates a PowerShell function Get-WebServiceConnections.

I created a PowerShell script called CurrentConnections.ps1 with the following content and can now run it whenever needed:

function Get-WebServiceConnections()
{
  $results = @{}
  $perfmon = new-object System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounter
  $perfmon.CategoryName = "Web Service"
  $perfmon.CounterName = "Current Connections"

  $cat = new-object System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterCategory("Web Service")
  $instances = $cat.GetInstanceNames()

  foreach ($instance in $instances)
  {
    $perfmon.InstanceName = $instance
    $results.Add($instance, $perfmon.NextValue())
  }
  write-output $results
}

Get-WebServiceConnections

Customizing Forefront Server Security Notification messages

As an administrator, you would like to know more information when a virus is detected on your Exchange organization than the default message.



Here you will find the list of keywords that can be added to your message template.
In my case, I wanted to add the recipient details, and sender address :

Sender: "%ISName%%ESName%%ESAddress%"
Recipient: "%IRName%%ERNames%"

Large XML file editor useful for displaying BackupExec logs

When using BackupExec to save all your data, the xml logfile can be huge, hundreds of MB or more.
Then BackupExec cannot display the result and it is really hard to find the reason of any issue encountered.
I found this freeware : XML Marker which works pretty good with a 700MB file (you can start searching the file even if not finished loading).

Exchange 2010 Public Folder Replication

After installing the first Exchange 2010 Server in an Exchange 2007 environment, I noticed the public folders weren’t replicating. Even after adding a number of replicas the hierarchy wasn’t even showing up.

After much searching I found this comment in a blog entry with the solution. Basically, it was due to an object still remaining in Active Directory from Exchange 2003 days.

Using ADSIEdit open “Configuration-Services-Microsoft Exchange-<Organization Name>-Administrative Groups-<Name of your Admin Group>”

In this container delete the object “Servers”.

(Before doing this you should probably back up your AD ;) )

 

After a little waiting, all was back to normal.