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.

Get-ExchangeDiagnosticInfo: Deep dive

In a previous post here, I wrote about a few basic commands, which are useful to quickly gather information about transport component of an Exchange server.

In this post I want to give you a deep dive about it and how you can explore what the CmdLet can do for you as it evolves in each Exchange version and can be very useful.

How to hunt down an EAS bug

In the past month I had to troubleshoot a lot of EAS related issues. This is always a complex process and you as an administrator have to collect a lot of data and provide them to your vendors. After providing these, you often feels like a ping-pong ball. Especially when multiple vendors are involved.

Based on two examples I want to explain, how I was able to proof some misbehaviour of EAS clients. Meanwhile both have been acknowledged by the vendor as a bug:

• Time to Leave:

With iOS 10 this feature can trigger a meeting forward to multiple recipients using SmartForward command.

• Read/Unread flag:

When a user marks an item read or unread, the flag does not get synced to the mailbox.

Update 27.06.2017: There is also a fix in KB4012108 related to this issue. It’s not exactly the issue I’ve found, but a similar one. The details can be found in KB4024649.

For troubleshooting I used the following tools:

• Get-CalendarItems.ps1
• Get-DatabaseEvent
• Get-IISStats.ps1

Outlook:No free/busy in scheduling assistant

Every now and then I hear complaints about Free/Busy information retrieval issues. There are a lot of reasons for such issues, but the interesting part by these issues is that accessing the shared Calendar is not a problem. Only when users set up a meeting and using the Scheduling Assistant, they suddenly see only the beloved hash marks:

Using OWA the user was able to retrieve Free/Busy information using Scheduling Assistant.

And this happens usual to VIPs like the CEO or CIO. So I started troubleshooting with highest priority and found an easy fix.