• Active Directory,  Articles and Books,  iPhone,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Microsoft Exchange Server

    Holy White Papers, Apple?!?!?

    May 21, 2012

    For those of you who say Apple doesn’t care about the enterprise, Apple has released a number of assets (technical white papers) on integrating Macs (Lion) into enterprise environments at http://training.apple.com/lion. This is also the page that you’ll find links to all of the official training and certification courses for Lion. The assets up on this page are about as close to a publicly accessible book on integrating OS X into the enterprise as you’ll to see for Lion… The first covers the basics of integrating Macs into enterprise environments: The second covers self support: The third is on evaluating Macs in Enterprise environments: The fourth is on deployment: The…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment,  Microsoft Exchange Server,  Windows Server

    How Exchange's Autodiscover Works With Mail.app

    January 6, 2012

    Autodiscover automatically configures profile settings for Exchange clients. These clients include Microsoft Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010, Outlook for Mac, Mail.app in Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad and ActiveSync enabled phones. Autodiscover is often made out to be complicated. There’s an Autodiscover service that gets installed when a Client Access Server (CAS) role is setup for Exchange 2010 in the form of a default virtual directory named Autodiscover for the default Web site in Internet Information Services (IIS). You then forward an autodiscover service locater record in DNS in the form of _autodiscover._tcp. The virtual directory handles Autodiscover requests. But what about other vendors, and even for Exchange, how do…

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  • Kerio,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Microsoft Exchange Server,  MobileMe,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Converting pst Files to mbox

    April 27, 2011

    Large scale mail migrations can be tricky. There is a shareware app that can be used to migrate pst files from the pst format into mbox, which can then be used with Mac OS X http://www.littlemachines.com. If the migration process needs to be automated (they all seem to at scale) then a script could be written to crawl users, finds the pst files and then convert them. Or it could be done on the client side using a self-destructing launchd item. Conversion syntax for libpst would be something like the following: readpst -o /output/folder /server/path/user.pst Before you can use readpst, it needs to be built via libpst on the system that…

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  • Microsoft Exchange Server,  Windows Server

    Building Exchange 2010 Signatures En Masse

    April 23, 2011

    There are a lot of environments that standardize mail signatures. In Exchange 2010 you can now automatically assign users a signature based on a user’s Active Directory information, thus allowing en masse standardization of signatures. To do so is pretty straight forward, first open the Exchange Management Console and browse to the Organization Configuration. Then click on Hub Transport and then on Transport Rules. Next, click New to create a new transport rule. Here you can build an organizational signature based on user’s Active Directory attributes. You can provide some text and then any of the attributes that you see fit by wrapping them in the standard double percentage signs…

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  • Microsoft Exchange Server

    Exchange 2010 and Archive-Only Mailboxes

    April 22, 2011

    Once upon a time, in a dark and dreary place, Exchange administrators (an already downtrodden lot mind you) had to let users archive their mail to pst files. These files, open while Outlook was open and distributed across the enterprise file servers, caused the poor Exchange administrators great pain and suffering as they were uncontrollable. The pst files roamed, causing great pains to SMB/CIFS, switching and other admins and these pst files worse of all had no policies applied to them. Then came a bright knight in shining armor. He brought with him Exchange 2010 and stories of mailboxes that could be used for archival to replace the monstrosity pst…

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  • Microsoft Exchange Server,  Windows Server

    Mail Tips, For Loops and Powershell

    April 15, 2011

    Powershell gives Exchange admins a lot of nice little tricks to use. Exchange 2010 has a new feature in tool tips. You can use Powershell, to run a basic for loop, looping through a quick Get-Mailbox. Based on the output of the Get-Mailbox, you can get a list of all valid mailboxes for an organization. You can then execute a command, allowing you to run any mailbox command against every mailbox of an organization. In the following example, we’ll use the Set-MailBox to make a basic mail tip for all users: foreach ($mailbox in (Get-Mailbox)) { Set-MailBox -Identity $mailbox -MailTip “Please send only legitimate emails” }

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  • iPhone,  Mac OS X,  Microsoft Exchange Server,  MobileMe

    Missing Sync for Android, iPhone, Pre Mobile Phones

    December 4, 2009

    “Trumpy, you can do stupid things!” So an Android, an iPhone, a Blackberry and a Palm Pre walk into a bar in sync. Get it?!?! Not gonna’ happen. Or is it? If you’re a Mac or a Windows user and you don’t mind the ole’ cradled sync, and you’re an absolute gadget-head, then the Missing Sync is for you. We’ve used it for years with Blackberry and back in the days before Microsoft purchased and summarily hastened the already upcoming doom of the Sidekick platform. But now, it supports Android! So if you’re like some of us and you need to always be accessible and therefore travel with 2 mobiles,…

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  • iPhone,  Microsoft Exchange Server

    iPhone + Locked Down Exchange

    November 27, 2009

    Some iPhones can have a problem with some Exchange servers due to the fact that they are not fully manageable using ActiveSync Policies. The New-ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy commandlet is can be used with the -Name parameter to assign a name to the new ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy, which we’ll call iPhone. To allow devices that are not fully manageable to use ActiveSync, an ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy needs to be created where  -AllowNonProvisionableDevices is set it to $true. For example, if we were to create such a policy and call it iPhone we would use the following command: New-ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy -Name iPhone -AllowNonProvisionableDevices $true

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  • Microsoft Exchange Server

    Bypassing Exchange 2007's Content Filter

    November 27, 2009

    Exchange 2007 is often set to filter all spam and reject mail that is classified as spam. If you configure Exchange 2007 to do so then you still need an email address that does not get filtered. The reason is that in the body of your rejection emails, you need to provide a valid user with a means to contact you in order to get their mail through. To bypass the content filter for an email address can be done using a commandlet, Set-ContentFilterConfig. When using the Set-ContentFilterConfig you can use the -BypassedRecipients option to specify email addresses that the filter will not be applied to, which would then be…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment,  Microsoft Exchange Server

    Snow Leopard & Managed Client Preferences

    September 2, 2009

    In Mac OS X 10.6’s Open Directory, when you add ManagedClient to managed preferences you end up with two com.apple.mail entries (one suffixed with .managed). One is called com.apple.mail.managed, which is used for Mail for 10.5 and below and frankly doesn’t seem to be complete, so I’ve manually populated my environment with keys from 10.5 Server. The other is com.apple.mail, which now supports SSL, but only gives the drop-downl list for Always, showing no options in Once/Often. One thing that was a bit confusing to me is what Beau and I discovered to be a GUI bug, where when you click on a manifest and then click on Once, Often…

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