First Exchange 2010 Deployment

I deployed my First Production Exchange 2010 server farm today. It was an upgrade from Exchange 2003. The upgrade went very well. I had one issue. If you uncheck IPV6 in the network stack, the Exchange Active Directory discovery service fails. After I checked it, everything worked ok. After some research, discovered that you need to change a registry key to disable IPV6.

The first server I installed was the Client Access or CAS. After the CAS, I installed the Hub Transport and Mailbox roles. I then moved a mailbox and tested. I discovered that mail routing between from Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2003 was not working. After some troubleshooting, it was an Exchange 2003 permissions issue. After that, it went well. Microsoft has some nice tools to verify the install.

I am impressed with 2010. It is a complete product. I was not impressed with Exchange 2007.

Exchange 2010 Power Breakfast

As I have discussed before, we held an Exchange 2010 Power Breakfast a few weeks ago. We caputured video of the event. This is the link to the Video http://vimeo.com/8245250

Exchange 2010 TechTip-Conversation View

With the upgrade to Exchange 2010, you have the ability to view emails by conversation. This is handy as you can follow an email thread much easier than you could before. This view works with Outlook Web Access and also Outlook 2010.


Microsoft has designed Outlook Web Access to make you more productive. Below is what it looks like with Exchange 2010

Exchange 2010

I held an Exchange 2010 event last Tuesday at our office despite the weather, the event was a successful. I am going to keep this blog post short, but I did a very good presentation and the link to that presentation is here. http://www.jsotechnology.com/_presentations/Microsoft%20PowerPoint%20-%20Exchange%202010%20Power%20Breakfast%20Presentation%20three%20up%20handouts.pdf

Security Highlight-Palo Alto Networks

As I have mentioned before, back in September we held our Annual Security and disaster recovery event at Miller Park. Today I would like to highlight security solutions from Palo Alto networks.

Palo Alto makes a next generation firewall. Most traditional firewalls block based on a port basis. This worked will back in the 90's, but not so well in today's environment. Applications have evolved with numerous client server applications running over port 80. With those applications come threats. Let's take facebook as an example. Not only can you post messages, you can also chat. A traditional firewall would be unable to find the chat application.

Another issue with traditional firewalls is preventing Instant Messenger. Instant Messenger programs are setup to port crawl (search for an open port). Even if you block the standard port, it could still find a way out.

Palo Alto identifies the application without the need to worry about the port. Palo Alto can identify the application by an ID. They have well over 500 applications identified, from Microsoft Updates, World of War craft and various others. You can simply stop the application.

Virus scanning is another feature missing is most traditional firewalls. Some of them are solving it by plugging in a third party solution. Palo Alto can scan incoming traffic for viruses, ensuring all traffic is clean.

User Authentication and Identification is another important function. With User Authentication you can assign a user to a URL filtering and a single rule in a firewall rulebase. If the user moves to a different workstation, the firewall rule set follows them. This is good for logging and also gives you some great flexibility in creating a rule set.

To check our presentation on To Palo Alto next generation firewall'sat. http://www.jsotechnology.com/_presentations/Miller%20Park/Microsoft%20PowerPoint%20-%20PALO%20ALTO%20JSO_day.pdf