Exchange 2003

The Microsoft Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer is perhaps the best tool I’ve used in a long time for troubleshooting Exchange external access – it just works! On the forums and websites I read, it doesn’t seem to get the coverage that I’d expect, so I thought I’d give it a mention.

I’ve just fixed an issue with Routing for my mixed Exchange 2003/2007/2010 environment. The environment is a single AD domain with 4 sites, Site1, Site2, Site3 and Site4. In Site1, Site2 and Site3 there are 3 Exchange 2003 servers, one per site. In Site4 there is an Exchange 2007 SP2 server (CAS, Mailbox, HT). All the connectors required worked as expected, and inter-site routing works as expected. I introduced into the mix a 2010 Enterprise server (CAS, Mailbox, HT) to Site1 as a prelude to a full upgrade of the site to Exchange 2010.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time today trying to sort out my iPhone sync to my Exchange Server, failing miserably. It used to work, pre-upgrade to iOS4, but for some reason fails to sync. Symptoms were: iPhone fails to sync, generic timeout error (or is very slow) https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/ successfully tests the mailbox access The server was configured as per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817379/en-us to allow OWA/ActiveSync with SSL on OWA. The iPhone was configured to accept the SSL certificate on the Exchange Server.

In the past, I would often say to my wife, “if it’s not in Outlook, it isn’t going to happen”. Increasingly it’s “if it’s not on my iPhone, it’s not going to happen”. The fact is that I can’t actually remember all the things that I need to do each day, I need reminding! I spend perhaps 8 hours a day at my work PC, maybe 2 hours a day on my home laptop and my iPhone is with me pretty much 24/7 – all of which are both data sources, and data endpoints.