Yes! It’s here! The long awaited and formerly know as Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator has been renamed and released! So meet the brand new Exchange 2013 Server Role Requirements Calculator.

As the new name hints this version of the calculator gives you recommendations not only for the mailbox role but both Exchange 2013 roles, Client Access and Mailbox. And even if we no longer have a specific role for transport the calculator factors in that as well since it’s a part of the mailbox role.

I have to admit that I have not yet had time to fully test the function yet but the look it’s the same and I bet Ross and David has done a great job and I will get down to business with the calculator very very soon!

For more information read Released: Exchange 2013 Server Role Requirements Calculator over at The Exchange Team Blog and download the calculator here.

For as long as I can remember I have been going to TechEd every year, some years to both Tech US and TechEd Europe. The sad par of all these visits have been a trend where the sessions about Exchange has decreased by the years. To my great joy I see that this trend has been broken! A look at TechEd Europe Content Catalog reveals not fewer than seventeen session about Exchange! Okay some of them may be more focused on Office 365 that my primary interest Exchange 2013 on premises but still a great lineup!

Among the speakers we find really great Exchange presenters like Scott Schnoll, Nathan Winters, Jeff Mealiffe, Ben Appleby and my fellow MVP’s Paul Robichaux ,Jaap Wesselius and Sigi Jagott.

I’m “super exited” about many of the sessions but the one I wouldn’t miss for the world is of course Jeff’s session about Exchange 2013 Sizing.

Below is a list of all the breakout sessions I found doing a simple search for Exchange.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Managed Availability

Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Client Access Server Role

Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 High Availability and Site Resilience

Developing Mobile Apps with Microsoft Exchange Web Services

Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Sizing

Microsoft Exchange Archiving Policy: Move, Delete, or Hold

Virtualization in Microsoft Exchange Server 2013

Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 On-Premises Upgrade and Coexistence

Team Collaboration with Site Mailboxes

Microsoft Exchange Hybrid Deployment and Migration On Your Terms

Get Moving with Your Mailbox!

Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Tips & Tricks

Data Loss Prevention in Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook 2013

Modern Public Folders Overview, Migration and Office 365

Internals of Deploying the In-Place Archive: Online, On-Premises, or a Hybrid

Microsoft Exchange in the Cloud: Scared of Losing Your Job?

Exchange Online Protection

I hope I see you in Madrid!

On site with a customer today I was asked to provide all bookings of room mailboxes with a note about who was the organizer. No big deal, there’s a feature for that called “Add the organizer’s name to subject” on room mailboxes, se below.

Said and done it was set on all room mailboxes and I tested to book a meeting. To my surprise the subject was not changed and no organizer was added as seen below.

After a session with Bing I found a note about this on Technet Forum and tested to add a distribution group to who was allowed to book the room. In my case I ran:

Get-Mailbox –Recipienttypedetails roommailbox | Set-CalanderProcessing –AllBookInPolicy $false –BookInPolicy mailmasterlab_all

And as soon as the command was finished I ran:

Get-Mailbox –Recipienttypedetails roommailbox | Set-CalanderProcessing –AllBookInPolicy $true

After this the organizers name is added to the subject.

My Exchange 2010 Server was a fresh install of Exchange 2010 Service Pack 3.

Inspired by a disk failure in my current lab server and my fellow MVP Jeff I decided to put together a new lab server.

My current server is a i7, 24 GB RAM machine with one WD VELOCIRAPTOR as OS disk and 4 * 1 TB WD (I don’t remember the model) in RAID 10. It has served me well for a couple of years but as one of the disks failed I realized that more will fail soon and I want more RAM for my VMs so I went shopping!

The parts I decided on are shown below, I won’t shop from Amazon but rather a local Swedish dealer but for you, non Swedish readers, I thought you might have a hard time translating so the links are all to Amazon.

Parts used:

In my office I have a modular Cooler Master 500 W power supply that has been around as a spare and I will try to use that for power, not sure it will be enough but I think it will.

I hope for great speed when all parts arrive and I will make sure I get back with result and maybe some pictures as well.

Please feel free to comment on what mistakes I did in this setup or what you would have gone for!

(In Swedish)

Exchange 2013 har i och med att Microsoft släppt CU1 blivit en komplett plattform och det självklara valet när tidigare versioner av Exchange skall uppgraderas. Skillnaderna ser möjligen inte revolutionerande ut men ”under huven” finns massor av nyheter. Dessa och mycket mer vill man självklart veta och bästa sättet att på kort tid sätta sig in i produkten är att gå en kurs.

Tillsammans med Expero erbjuder mailmaster samtliga kurser från Microsoft samt några egenutvecklade utbildningar som erbjuder dig som redan är specialist att bli ännu bättre.

Vårt koncept kring utbildningar är enkelt, vi har tagit det bästa från de utbildningar vi själv gått och paketerat detta! Det betyder att vi alltid kör kurserna i centralt belägna, nya fräscha lokaler, med de bästa instruktörerna och på nya snabba datorer. Precis som vi själv vill ha det när vi går kurs…

Så ska du gå utbildningar på Exchange, kolla med Expero först!

Exchange Server 2013 RTM Cumulative Update 1 is now released! I have scanned the web for useful resources and this is my list:

Microsoft:

Download

Release notes

Upgrade Exchange 2013 to the Latest Cumulative Update (will be available soon)

High Availability Changes in Exchange Server 2013 Cumulative Update 1

Blogs:

The Last Missing Piece – Exchange 2013 RTM CU1 Released!

Exchange 2013 RTM CU1 Stops Transport During Prerequisite Check

New Features in OWA 2013 RTM CU1

Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 1

Exchange 2013 CU1 – the software that RTM could have been

Exchange Server 2013 RTM Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) Released

Installing Exchange 2013 CU1 on DAG member servers – some care and maintenance mode required

You are more than welcome to suggest more links as comments!

With Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 1 coexistence between Exchange 2010 (Service Pack 3) and Exchange 2013is finally supported. It’s been a long journey but let’s now focus on how to install Exchange 2013 and coexist with the latest and greatest Exchange version, 2013.

In this part I will cover how to install Exchange 2013 CU1.

In my lab I set up the following:

I use split DNS so the domain is called mailmasterlab.se both internal and external. Since it’s been common to have a TMG in front of Exchange I have included one and we will go through what configuration we will have to do there as well. See table below for all fact of the servers.

Of course there is no good reason for using a load balancer for only one server but in this blog series we will also build a DAG later on so I added a KEMP for that purpose and we will also look at how to configure it.

And the next server we will set up will be the Exchange 2013 server, note that to be able to install Exchange 2013 all Exchange 2010 servers in the organization will need Exchange 2010 Service Pack 3 before we can install. If any Exchange 2010 servers in your organization (including Edge servers) does not yet have SP3, start by upgrading them or the Exchange 2013 setup will fail because of a “hard block”.

Our Exchange 2013 server will have the following characteristics:

The next thing to do is to install an Windows 2012 server. Even though I won’t set up a DAG in this blog I recommend you who will to base your Exchange 2013 server on Windows Server 2012 Standard as Failover Cluster is included. in standard and much more affordable.

I won’t cover the Windows setup in details but when you have Windows 2012 in place follow the steps below.

Download and install Unified Communications Managed API 4.0 Runtime

Download Exchange Server 2013 RTM Cumulative Update 1 (CU1). Note that you can install from CU1 and don’t have to upgrade from RTM.

Extract the the content to a directory of you choice, in my case C:\Ex1013

Start an elevated cmd and run setup if you like to run the GUI based setup or run the command you prefer to do a unattended setup. In this blog I will do it through the GUI.

You will be asked to check for updates, it’s unlikely that any updates will be found.

After you click next files will be copied and setup will initialize.

A few next and a accepted license agreement later you will be asked to install with recommended or custom settings, I go for custom in this case.

As I will install one Exchange 2013 server I go for both Client Access role and Mailbox role. Since I didn’t do anything specific to Windows roles and features I check “Automatically install Windows Server roles and features that are required to install Exchange Server”.

Pick your destination where you want Exchange to be installed. I go for default .

Next I select to keep Malware Protection enabled.

Setup will check that all components are in place and that the server is ready to be installed. A restart will probably be needed after all Windows components are installed. so lets restart and try again.

After rerunning setup you will see something like above, don’t worry about the warnings about Filter Pack.

Hit install and beside getting Exchange 2013 installed on the server your organization will now get some new stuff in AD,  yes as usual there are schema updates so be prepared that this might take a while (and require permissions).

Some 35 minutes later you have a brand new Exchange 2013 CU1 server! Congrats!

In part 2 of this blog series we will take a look at what we should configure on this brand new server, stay tuned!