Thursday 5 December 2013

Exchange 2013 CU3 released 25.11.2013

Microsoft have released Exchange 2013 CU3. The list of bug fixes are included below.


Summary
This article describes Cumulative Update 3 for Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 that provides the latest fixes for Exchange Server 2013 and contains stability and performance improvements.

Notes

The Cumulative Update 3 package can be used to perform a new installation, or to upgrade an existing Exchange Server 2013 installation to Cumulative Update 3.
You do not need to install Cumulative Update 1 or Cumulative Update 2 for Exchange Server 2013 when you are installing Cumulative Update 3.
For more information before the deployment of Exchange 2013, go to the following Microsoft website:
Release Notes for Exchange 2013
For more information about coexistence of Exchange 2013 and earlier versions of Exchange Server, go to the following Microsoft website:
Exchange 2013 System Requirements


INTRODUCTION
Issues that the update rollup resolves
Cumulative Update 3 for Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 contains the fix for the security issue that is described in Security Bulletin MS13-061 and resolves the issues that are described in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) articles:
 
2865161 "Errors: Failed exporting item id: from source id" when you try to copy search results in an Exchange Server 2013 environment
2871980 Child domains are not displayed for selection when you create a mailbox by using EAC in an Exchange Server 2013 environment
2878160 "The Active Directory user wasn't found" error when you create or update an In-Place eDiscovery search in an Exchange Server 2013 environment
2874216 Security issue that is described in Security Bulletin MS13-061 is resolved by an Exchange Server update
2882608 Exchange Server 2013 does not share the inproxy.dll file
2886115 Retention policies are not applied to Exchange Server 2013 mailboxes when user accounts are on different domains
2888274 WebClientReadFormQueryString string and WebClientEditFormQueryString string return incorrect URLs in an Exchange Server 2013 environment
2888315 Event 2112 or 2180 is logged when you try to back up a database in an Exchange Server 2013 environment
2888612 Retention policy does not work after you run a cmdlet in an Exchange Server 2013 environment
2889786 Sign-in format for Outlook Web App on mobile devices is not adjusted according to the Set-OwaVirtualDerictory cmdlet in an Exchange Server 2013 environment
2890650 Items in the Drafts folder are not stamped with the retention policy tag in an Exchange Server 2010 or 2013 environment
2895487 "Copy Search Results" option does not work in an Exchange server 2013 environment
2895500 DBCS characters appear garbled when you run some PowerShell scripts in EMS in an Exchange Server 2013 environment
2895678 "Nombre de usuario\dominio" is displayed unexpectedly on the Spanish version of the OWA and EAC logon pages in an Exchange Server 2013 environment
2902929 You cannot forward an external meeting request in an Exchange Server 2013 environment
2902929 You cannot forward an external meeting request in an Exchange Server 2013 environment
2902933 Generate incident report does not display the Bcc field in an Exchange Server 2013 environment
2902934 Korean language localization issues in Exchange 2013 OWA user interface
2902936 You cannot change SMTP addresses for distribution groups by using EAC in an Exchange Server 2013 environment
2902938 You cannot preview Office documents in shared folders by using Outlook Web App in an Exchange Server 2013 environment
2902939 EMS connection error when you install Exchange Server 2013 Mailbox server and Client Access server separately
2883203 Exchange Server 2013 restarts frequently after Cumulative Update 2 is installed
2890814 No redirection to the Outlook Web App URL for Exchange Online users in an Exchange hybrid deployment


Resolution
Cumulative update package information
Download information
The following file is available for download from the Microsoft Download Center:
Download Cumulative Update 3 for Exchange Server 2013 package now.
Release Date: November 12, 2013


Prerequisites
Exchange 2013 setup will identify any missing prerequisites.

Restart requirement
You have to restart the computer after you apply this cumulative update package.


Registry information
You do not have to make any changes to the registry after you apply this cumulative update package.


Removal information
After you install this cumulative update package, you cannot uninstall the cumulative update package to revert to an earlier version of Exchange 2013. If you uninstall this cumulative update package, Exchange 2013 is removed from the server.
References
For more information about software update terminology, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
824684 Description of the standard terminology that is used to describe Microsoft software updates



The CU3 compatible UM language packs are here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=41176

Take care,


Oliver Moazzezi - MVP Exchange Server


 

Tuesday 5 November 2013

Calculating CAL requirements for Exchange Server 2013

Today I had a request from finance to calculate our Standard and Enterprise CALs for Exchange 2013. We have historically relied on exART data but as Exchange 2010 has this feature in the EMC and via Powershell, I knew Exchange 2013 likely would have also.


Things have changed since Exchange 2010 however. Two Powershell commands are available. Get-ExchangeServerAccessLicense reports on the licenses available to be reported on. Get-ExchangeServerAccessLicenseUser will total up the CALs required for different scenarios. I am specifically looking for Standard CAL and Enterprise CAL usage so these two Powershell commands should give me what I need.

Get-ExchangeServerAccessLicenseUser –LicenseName "Exchange Server 2013 Standard CAL"
Get-ExchangeServerAccessLicenseUser –LicenseName "Exchange Server 2013 Enterprise CAL"


They both work, but what I found was that ZERO Enterprise CALs came back continually. I knew this couldn't be the case as we have both Unified Messaging and in-place Archives enabled, and Microsoft licensing states these are Enterprise CAL features: http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/exchange/microsoft-exchange-server-licensing-licensing-overview-FX103746915.aspx

So what was up?

Digging into Powershell I confirmed the numbers for UM:



Just in case it was a UM specific issue, I tried it against in-place Archive, and again I got hits so it appears there's an apparent Enterprise CAL calculation issue in the code.



Back in Exchange 2010 there were two great TechNet scripts for Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2010 SP1+ You can see them here:


Unfortunately they don't work (I immediately tried the SP1 version):


The above was the first of many errors. So I have gone through the code and cleaned up what isn't supported anymore like you see above, Managed Folder Policies; and also changed all cmdlets that have changed since Exchange 2010 SP3 to Exchange 2013 as well as tidy up a few other bits and pieces and remove any old Enterprise CAL features that are now support via the Standard CAL.

Currently Data Loss Prevention is a manual check, as I wanted to get this out of the door today and we don't use that feature here, but by all means add it into the code and let me know!

This is how it looks, working, against Exchange 2013 today:


You can grab the updated ReportExchangeCALS.ps1 script now for Exchange 2013, here.

Enjoy.

Update: Jeff Guillet (follow him on Twitter @expta) has also pointed out that the Exchange 2013 Help File (chm) has incorrect information for these licensing Powershell commands, so don't reference them!

Take care,

Oliver Moazzezi - MVP Exchange Server



Friday 18 October 2013

People Picker bug for UM Call answering Rules in Exchange 2013 ECP

There currently appears to be a bug in the way Call Answering rules allow you to pick a user from your contacts or the GAL. This has been tested with two CU2 and CU2v2 Exchange 2013 Forests that have happen UM enabled, and I have had confirmation of it from another third party.

I haven't tested this on the RTM version of the product nor CU1 – but I am assuming the behaviour is the same.

This is present whether you use Address Book Policies or just have a single Global Address List, however read below on how to circumvent it and educate your users.


To reproduce:


Login to the ECP as a user and go to Call Answering Rules


Create a new call answering rule


Select options and use 'Transfer Call'



Then select contacts as my transfer target:



When it initially loads you will get a blank screen. This is the main issue that will confuse users.


However if you click on 'people' you can get it to show your contacts, and then if go back to 'all' it continues to work.

Note however that if you simply refresh the above page on your browser or by hitting F5, it will only ever show the empty page.



It also appears that 'Directory' does not work – it simply shows nothing and appears greyed out (after expanding the window by clicking "^^")

This again will confuse users who have made it this far. They will think they can only create rules for contacts and not their actual colleagues which they would pick from the GAL.


However if you search for someone in the GAL using the search people function under your Contacts, and click on the find magnifying glass, you will be able to search the GAL and find them.



The biggest issues I see are

1. When the People Picker initially loads it is a blank screen and is always a blank screen until you select 'People'. When you go back to 'All' it then works.
2. You do not appear  to initially at first be able to search the Directory, or GAL causing confusion
3. Having to select "^^" to expand the window to see "Directory" is not great and additionally - it doesn't work as it does not show you the Directory or GAL
4. Searching for GAL users via your contacts does work, and provides the workaround – but is sub optimal


Hopefully this less than ideal behaviour will be fixed in a future Cumulative Update (CU) or Service Pack (SP)

Take care,

Oliver Moazzezi - MVP Exchange Server


Friday 13 September 2013

Lync 2013 LHPv2 Dialin Simple Url rewrite issue

Greetings people

As per the documentation here we can provision tenant Simple Meet URLs by the addition of the tenants SIP domains appended on to the Hosters primary SIP one.


The LHP code supports the provisioning of Tenant meet simple urls by performing the following:


You can see this in the LHP deployment guide.

However it doesn't support the same method for the dialin simple url.

This appears to follow the previous guidance when performing multi-tenancy with Lync 2010 Enterprise.

However if you put in the dialin url as for example https://dialin.hostedprovidersSIPdomain.com and publish the topology (this is the default behaviour!), at no point is an IIS url rewrite rule created to forward the domain to

(Note that the code appears to still provide references to the BETA of Lync Online, this obviously wasn't cleared up for the RTM release)

LHP code doesn't add the rule in. Here's my screenshot from IIS, my Lab is under hslab2.net:


You can clear see the re-write rules for the Meet url. There's not one ever written for Dialin.

So how can we work around this issue?

What I have done to work around this is to publish the Dialin simple url in the topology builder as https://dialin.hostedprovidersSIPdomain.com/dialin

See here:


This then works around the problem, and all Lync tenants will have https://dialin.hostedprovidersSIPdomain.com/dialin as their phone access url when creating a Lync online meeting in Outlook.

Be sure once you make this change (or any other for a Simple URL) you run Enable-CsComputer on your Lync Front Ends and Directors if you are using them.

I have raised this to Microsoft and I am in the middle of pushing this as a bug, and I hope they will update their documentation in the mean time to be more specific around the Dialin simple URL.

 I will have more articles available on Microsoft Lync 2013 LHPv2 soon.

Take care people,

Oliver Moazzezi - MVP Exchange Server


Grab the Lync 2013 LHPv2 deployment documentation from Microsoft


Microsoft have release the Lync Hosting Pack version 2, based on Microsoft Lync 2013. It is formally known as Lync 2013 LHPv2.

Grab the deployment guide here

Oliver Moazzezi - MVP Exchange Server


Wednesday 28 August 2013

An error occured: "System.IO.InvalidDataException" "Multiple Active Directory entries were found for type "ms-RTC-SIP-TrustedService"

A strange issue happened recently with Lync 2013 LHPv2 (Lync Online – Lync Hosting Pack) – however it also appeared to affect Lync 2010 and Lync 2013 Standard and Enterprise editions also after going through all questions on the internet around it and no apparent resolution.

I was getting this error upon trying to publish the Topology as shown here:


If I tried to remove the Trusted Application from the Topology Builder and re-publish I still got:


And using Remove-CsTrustedApplication prior to removing the Trusted Service from the Topology gave me the same error too:



Browsing to a Domain Controller and going to Configuration Container | Services | RTC Service | Trusted Services, I could see multiple entries for the Trusted Application Server – backing up the error both from the shell and when trying to publish the Topology.




So to resolve the issue I needed to ensure just the one was present. This would allow me to fix the issue but alas doesn't tell me why the hell I had this issue in the first place – seemingly 2 weeks after the Trusted Application Server was published into the Topology - a Lync Watcher node in this case.


Being wary of removing the duplicate – and also worried the GUID may very well be linked back to the XDS database, I simply renamed one – allowing me to easily test, with a fail back by renaming it back to it's previous state.



So did this resolve the issue? I tried using Remove-CsTrustedApplication again:


And bingo it removed it.

Now I want to clean up the Topology Builder by removing the Trusted Application from the Topology and re-publishing. I simply don't trust what is there. So I want to get back to a verified Topology state and then I can add the Trusted Application back at a later date.

So I remove the Trusted application, publish the Topology and..

Bingo. It fixed the issue.



However we still have the issue of the renamed object in AD under Configuration Container | Services | RTC Service | Trusted Services

Lets get back there, confirm the remaining object that was not renamed is removed, and then let's remove the renamed duplicate.

I refreshed the view and confirmed the un-altered object was indeed deleted. I then simply deleted the renamed duplicate:



In all instances when dealing with this issue, make sure you have backups of your Lync Topology and back up Active Directory prior to making these kind of hard deletes.

I hope this helps all people with this issue and there's finally a how-to now on the Internet for it.

Take care people,

Oliver Moazzezi - MVP Exchange Server


Lync 2013 LHPv2 supported features

I thought this would be a useful comparison to compare Lync 2013 LHPv2 supported features compared to its predecessor Lync 2010 LHPv1.
The biggest win from a customer standpoint is Lync IP Phones and true VOIP mobility with the Lync 2013 Mobility Apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

 
Feature Lync Server 2013 Hosting Pack
Presence
1 to 1 and multi-party IM/Presence Yes
Contacts list Yes
Address Book Service Web Query service Yes
Distribution List Expansion protocol (DLX) Yes
Instant Messaging (IM)
Point-to-point IM Yes
Multiparty/Group IM Yes
Persistent Chat No
PC to PC audio/video dial out calling Yes
File transfer Yes
Mobile VoIP to PC audio Yes
Click to communicate from Office apps Yes
Interactive contact card in Office 2010 and Office 2013 Yes
Lync skill search in SharePoint Server (on-premises) Yes
Lync skill search in SharePoint Online No
Privacy mode No
Client Support
Lync Client 2010 and Lync Client 2013 Yes
Web app for joining scheduled meetings Yes
Rich attendee client (joining meetings) Yes
Mac attendee client Yes
CWA (2007 R2) No
OC 2007 R2 No
Lync phone edition (Lync-based IP phones) No
Support expected in a future release
Lync Attendant client (receptionist rich client) Yes
Lync Server 2010 version
Communicator Mobile (Windows Phone 6.x) No
Lync Mobile Yes
Lync desktop client Yes
Mac Messenger Yes
Attendee (meeting only) Yes
Lync Mobile clients Yes
(for Android, Windows Phone, iPhone) (If provisioned)
Conferencing and Online Meetings
Meeting attendee capacity 250
Point-to-point audio/video Yes
Video conferencing over IP Yes
Audio conferencing over IP only Yes
Meeting recording Yes
Registration No
Public Events page No
Customer branding No
Customer invitations No
Managed Q&A No
Virtual breakout rooms No
Easy Assist No
Desktop sharing Yes
Application sharing Yes
White boarding and annotation Yes
Office document upload No
PowerPoint upload Yes
Polling Yes
Unauthenticated in Web App (reach) Yes
Unauthenticated attendee (rich client) Yes
Scheduled conferences using Outlook plugin Yes
Round table support Yes
Lobby Yes
Integration with select partners for PSTN audio conferencing (ACP) Yes
Provisioning for approved ACP partners for Office 365 customers No
Scheduling an online meeting in OWA Yes
Client side recording and playback Yes
Cloud side recording and playback No
Authenticated experience in Web app (reach) No
Generate a link to a scheduled meeting via web page Yes
PSTN audio conferencing in MCUs Yes
via audio conferencing provider
1:1 Chat Yes
Backstage/Content Preview for Presenters Yes
Mute / Unmute all attendees Yes
Mute / Unmute individual attendees Yes
In-meeting Attendee Permission Controls Yes
Interoperability with on-premises video conferencing systems Yes
via 3rd party
Multimedia, JPEG, Text Page, Web Page, Yes
Screen snapshot (Desktop Annotation)
PSTN dial-out from scheduled meetings Yes
via audio conferencing provider
Ad-hoc audio dial-out conferencing Yes
VoIP via SIP Trunk
“Meet now” audio dial-out conferencing Yes
via audio conferencing provider
Scheduled audio dial-out conferencing Yes
via audio conferencing provider
Sharing
Point-to-point/multiparty data conference (white boarding) Yes
Point-to-point/multiparty file share Yes
Point-to-point/multiparty desktop and application sharing Yes
Point-to-point/multiparty Microsoft PowerPoint® slide sharing Yes
Polling Yes
Integration
Microsoft Outlook integration for IM, presence, calendar Yes
(with users on the same hosting partner)
Microsoft SharePoint® integration for IM, presence Yes
(with users on the same hosting partner)
Public IM Connectivity and Federation
Inter-tenant federation Yes
Federation with Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) No
IM/P/A/V Federation with Office Communications Server, Yes
Lync Server, Lync Online
IM/P/A/V with Windows Live Messenger / Skype Yes
IM/P and voice with Skype Yes
Public IM connectivity and presence No
AOL®, Yahoo!®, Windows Live
IBM Sametime federation No
Calling features
Public switched telephone network (PSTN) calling via Lync Yes
incoming and outgoing
Ad-hoc PSTN dial-out for meetings No
Call controls Yes
hold, transfer, forward, simultaneous ring
Voice policies Yes
Access to Exchange Online voice mail No
Team call Yes
Delegation (boss-admin) for Voice No
Call park No
Outgoing DID manipulation No
E-911 No
Dial plans & Policies No
IP desk phone support Yes
Resilient Branch Office Appliance No
Call Admissions Control (CAC) No
Support for Analog devices (e.g. FAX) No
Response groups Yes
via 3rd party
Private Line (secondary DID for execs) No
Direct connectivity with PBX via gateways Yes
Direct SIP for audio with on-premises IP-PBXs Yes
Direct SIP for signaling (presence updates) with on-premises IP-PBX Yes
RCC (click-to-call) with on-premises PBX No
Malicious call trace No
Unassigned Number No
Network QoS – DSCP No
Media path optimization No
Phone number management No
CDR & billing reporting Yes
Integration with call center solutions (Aspect) Yes
Team call YES
Delegation Yes
Private line (secondary Direct Inward Dialing (DID)) No
Call park No
Outgoing DID manipulation No
Voice features
Private dial plans No
Hosted Exchange Unified Messaging (UM) for voice mail Yes
ACP Integration with select carriers Yes
'Voice integration with select carriers Yes
Security and Archiving
IM & media encryption Yes
IM filtering Yes
Anti-malware scanning for meeting content and file transfers Yes
IM archiving (server side) Yes
SharePoint and Exchange Co-existence
Presence Integration with Exchange/SP on-premises Yes
Presence integration with Exchange/SP online Yes
On-premise UM integration with Exchange Online No
UM integration with Exchange on-premises Yes
Hybrid with Lync Online
Server/cloud co-existence (split domain) on user basis (some users on-premises, some users online) No
Splitting workloads (eg. Voice on-premises, IM&P in the cloud) No
Administration and Manageability
Windows PowerShell support Yes
Lync Server Control Panel UI No
Feature Configurability Per User Yes
Attendee/User Reporting No
Reporting (CDR, QoE) Yes
Support for 3rd party applications
Client automation APIs (client side) Yes
Server side APIs Yes
Support
Tenant User support No
IT Support Yes



 Take care,


Oliver Moazzezi - MVP Exchange Server