2012: looking back

Reading Time: 3 minutes Now that 2012 is in it's final hours, I wanted to look back professionally but also personally. It's the human thing to do [:)] (Fellow UC Architects Michel de Rooij and Micheal van Hoorenbeeck also made a retrospective) What were the interesting technical events that happened in 2012?

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The UC Architects episode 14 is now available!

Reading Time: < 1 minute Episode 14 is now available for download! It is hosted by Steve Goodman and co-hosts were John Cook, Serkan Varoglu, Johan Veldhuis and Stale Hansen. Christmas Exchange 2010 SP2 RU5 Version 2 Issues with the Windows Management Framework on Exchange 2010 and 2007 Lync Pilot Kit Lync Conference 2013 Tips for early adaptors on Lync 2013 Issues with Live.edu to Office 365 migrations What will be hot in 2013? The newest UC Architects episode is now available from iTunes and

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Simplifying the OWA URL with Citrix Netscaler

Reading Time: 3 minutes Next to Content Switching (which I recently wrote a post about), Citrix Netscalers can also do URL Rewrites. This enables us to simplify the OWA URL. First, be sure the Rewriting option is enabled by going into System, then Settings and choose Configure Basic Settings. Check the tick box for Rewrite After this, first make an Rewrite Action by going to Rewrite>Actions and add an Action. Give it a comprehensive name and set the type to REPLACE. In the Expression

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Load balancing Exchange 2010 with Citrix Netscaler using Content Switching

Reading Time: 4 minutes Next to F5, KEMP technologies and a lot of other network load balancing vendors there’s also Citrix with it’s Netscaler brand. Especially when an environment also has Citrix servers, it could mean that well scaled Netscaler devices are present and can also be used for other purposes next to Citrix Secure Gateway access. Obviously Exchange 2010 comes to mind. Citrix already has a very helpful Netscaler Exchange 2010 deployment guide (PDF warning). But unfortunately that guide is not always something

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Managing mailbox storage with Exchange 2010, Part 3

Reading Time: 6 minutes In the previous part one and two of this series, I’ve discussed using PSTs, Exchange Personal (on-premises) and On-line Archiving as well as third party solutions. In this last post I will discuss the use of Retention Policies and Mailbox quota’s in order to manage storage usage. As a bonus I will shortly discuss improvements in Exchange/Outlook 2013. Retention Policies The basic Messaging Records Management functionality behind Retention Policies isn’t actually that new. In Exchange 2000 and 2003 you could

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The UC Architects podcast episode 13 is up! With special guest Rick Kingslan (Lync Sr. Technical Writer)

Reading Time: < 1 minute Episode 13 is available for download for a while now! It is hosted by Pat Richard and co-hosts were John Cook, Tom Arbuthnot, Justin Morris and I rambled some lines in there myself . Topics include news stories about the Surface Pro, the new improved Exchange/Lync Connectivity Analyzer website, the revoked Exchange 2010SP2 RU5 update and a lot more. As a special guest we had Rick Kingslan, Microsoft Senior Technical Writer for Lync. We asked him some questions like: How

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Exchange and malware protection

Reading Time: 4 minutes This blog post is something I intended to write for a while now, because it is a question that i get asked a lot. On which Exchange server roles do you need to install the Exchange malware protection software, be it the now no longer for sale Forefront Protection for Exchange or similar products from McAfee, Symantec or GFI and the like. Why is this IMHO a valid question? Well, if we ignore the Microsoft recommendation to install multi-role servers

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My company is migrating to Microsoft Exchange 2013!

Reading Time: 3 minutes I already knew this for several weeks, but wasn’t allowed to discuss this publicly yet. But as some know the company I work for, OGD ict-diensten, is using Zarafa as its groupware solution and recently decided to migrate to Microsoft Exchange 2013! Why Zarafa? A lot of the Exchange experts I met during the Microsoft Exchange Conference and some outside that event asked my why we were using Zarafa and how that works. Especially when they hear we also deployed Lync

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Using the Microsoft Connectivity Analyzer Tool

Reading Time: 4 minutes Recently Microsoft released an updated version of the Microsoft Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer rebranding it as the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer as it now also can test Lync connections, next to Exchange and Office365. Another addition is the Microsoft Connectivity Analyzer Tool, a local variant of the online tool for Exchange connections. This is a very helpful tool for internal testing and despite being in beta, it already successfully helped me correctly identifying a certificate issue before I used it

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