Exchange performance:HP NUMA BIOS settings

I was just made aware of a HP specific setting which has a huge impact on performance. But before you start panic, have a look at the conditions:

• you’re running Proliant Gen9 Servers
• these servers are equipped with Intel Xeon E5 2600v3 and higher processors
• you have the default setting for NUMA Group Size Optimization

If you’re not matching these conditions, you can stop reading and relax. If not….you might want to continue reading.

Update 01.08.2017

Another PFE made me aware that the script HealthChecker.ps1 is checking the setting by comparing the values EnvProcessorCount and NumberOfLogicalProcessors

Good example

Bad example

Outlook: Issue with modified occurrences in a series

Currently I see an increasing number of reports about missing body of meeting series. As most of the series are Skype for Business and contain the dial-in information, this is really a bad end-user experience. Imagine you want to join the meeting and have no dial-in information or the attachments are gone.

My first thoughts were that this is a Skype for Business only issue or related to Exchange ActiveSync. But this time it turned out it’s not. After analyzing of several cases, it came down to an Outlook for Windows only issue in a delegate scenario.

Office 365 retrospection

Last week I attended Office 365 Engage conference in Haarlem. This event took place in the Philharmonie, which is really a breathtaking location.

Anyhow the location was well-selected. I arrived by plane on Tuesday morning and for 5€ I got a relaxing ride with the public transportation almost directly to the event.

The event itself contained a lot of tracks to satisfy all kind of attendee’s interests:

• Azure Infrastructure
• Exchange Online
• Office 365 Administration
• Office 365 Development
• Sharepoint Online

Modern Attachments behind a web proxy

With Exchange 2016 a huge improvement in regards of document collaboration with OneDrive for Business was introduced when you have a Hybrid configured.

You can read more about it here:

• Configure document collaboration with OneDrive for Business and Exchange 2016 on-premises
• Modern Attachments for Exchange 2016 Hybrid Customers

When I introduced Exchange 2016, I was more than happy to configure and make this feature available to my end-users. But after I run through the prerequisites and steps, I wasn’t able to get the option in OWA and with Outlook I received the following error:

The same happened when I was using Outlook for Mac. As different clients, protocols and servers where affected, I assumed a general issue and started troubleshooting.

Get-IISStats: Updated version available

Over the last months a lot of changes needed to be addressed. The script was intended to extract data from the IIS logs. With PowerShell in combination with LogParser it did a great job. But different versions of Exchange, changed infrastructure and multiple versions of Exchange ActiveSync protocol demanded an update to fulfill these needs.

The latest version focused on code improvement and added support for the new version of Exchange ActiveSync protocol v16.1 .

Speaking at Office 365 Engage

I am happy being part of  the new Office 365 Engage conference in Haarlem from 19-22 June.

The number of European conference is increasing as the demand is there. Tony Redmond is taking care of the impressive collection of sessions, delivered by Microsoft MVPs like Michel de Rooij, Jaap Wesselius, Siegfried Jagott, Brian Reid, Paul Robichaux, Brian Desmond, Chris Goosen, Vasil Michev, Steve Goodman, Andrew Price and many more.

Don’t forget the pre-day workshops, which are really hands-on ones and close to daily business.

Update 05.05.2017:

When you register, don’t forget the code SPRIG387 to get 10% 20% off.

I hope to see you there!

Outlook for Mac in Coexistence Environment

Currently I’m upgrading an Exchange 2013 environment to Exchange 2016. In general this upgrade runs very smoothly and is almost seemless for user. It’s a complete different story when you’re coming from Exchange 2010.

So far I got only positive feedback and no issue were reported. Until a bunch of shared mailbox have been migrated.

Users complained they cannot access these mailbox anymore. First I couldn’t reproduce the issue, until I got another important detail:

All these user are using Outlook for Mac and indeed I could reproduce the behavior.