Hi, so I had an implementation for Lync 2013, consist of an FE and Edge server, of course the front-end went smooth and was ready in no time, but I had an annoying problem on the Edge after I installed it, that kept me busy for 2 days, until I found out what was going on, on it…

The replication was not working between my FE and the Edge server, and when I type:

Get-CsManagementStoreReplicationStatus

I see false on the Edge server, even if I run Invoke-CsManagementStoreReplication many times, I still don’t get anything on the Edge…

Because internal certificates are internal only, I used a local CA to issue the certificates on FE, and on the private side of the Edge as well, my CA was an intermediate one for a root CA on the same domain, so the certificate chain had 2 certificates in it, (one for intermediate, … Read the rest “CMS replication issues between Lync 2013 FE and Edge when using internal CA for Edge”

Due to some real life pressure (some are related to my current work) I was driven away from the blog… until the hosting has expired and I lost everything was on it…

Now I’m trying to recover the first blog contents depending on old archives from it on the web, such as (http://web.archive.org/)… thanks to God that there are some archived snaps of the blog and my other blogs so I can take the texts out of them and put them here again…

This second blog should be in much better state and under better care, I have changed the address and title as well to be something better than the old one, but still typing the address of the old blog will redirect to here.

Also I will try my best to republish old posts with their same date to keep the URL structure in case someone came here … Read the rest “First blog got deleted and everything was lost…”

One migration I did, the customer was using ISA server 2006, the customer did not like ISA and wanted to get rid of it, despite my opposite opinion of ISA as a good and perfect firewall/proxy solution, I helped the customer or at least tried to move him into a MikroTik router that was installed in his site… the amount of rules and configurations done on ISA made that quick transition so slow and time consuming…

So to save both our migration and time, I decided to keep ISA for him now and just allow access to all Google domains for now so the migration can go well…

All I had to do was creating a domain set and add in it:

  • *.google.com
  • *.gmail.com
  • *.gstatic.com
  • *.googleusercontent.com
  • *.googleapis.com

I allowed HTTP, HTTPS traffic coming from internal network to these domains, and every user even the users who did not have internet … Read the rest “Allowing access to Google Apps through ISA/TMG”

Sometimes you get a sudden need to forward bulk users’ mail to external destination… in normal days, you would create a mail contact, then forward the selected user’s mail to the new external contact.

Now what if you got a large number of contacts to forward? well, you can either:

  1. Manually create all the required mail contacts, then assign each user to each contact.
  2. OR THE BETTER WAY: Use the magic of PowerShell!

This is a very simple and quick procedure…

First, you will need to create the contacts, which you can find how in the following post: PS: Creating bulk mail contacts

Then with another script, you will forward each user to his corresponding mail contact item:

Import-CSV "C:\ContactForward.csv" | Foreach{Set-Mailbox -Identity $_.LocalUser -ForwardingAddress $_.ForwardAddress -DeliverToMailboxAndForward $true}

You can either keep the attribute “-DeliverToMailboxAndForward $true” to keep a copy of the message in the original mailbox or remove it.Read the rest “PS: Bulk forwarding mailboxes to external addresses”

Below is a useful script to create bulk contacts in Exchange Management Shell:

Import-CSV "C:\NameList.csv" | Foreach{New-MailContact -Name $_.Name -ExternalEmailAddress $_.ExternalAddress}

You need to have the following prepared before you use the script:

  1. A CSV file contains 2 headers: Name, ExternalAddress, with all the contacts list that you want to create.
  2. Save the CSV file in C:\ (to be completely complied with the script above, otherwise save it where you want, but make sure you specify it’s full path in the script above instead of “C:\NameList.csv”.

To make it a bit easier, here is the script ready, just open EMS and run it from there after you make sure the file is ready…

Bulk-MailContact

I’ve done some migrations recently from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps… While the migration itself went successful, I came across many serious issues that affected the overall satisfaction of the customer…

I tried my best to solve and workaround those issues during the migration process, and it seems everything went well after what I did…

One of the major problems was, the local users were unable to send to the users who got migrated to Google already!, this problem was because of simply because they are still on Exchange server, and the emails they are sending to their colleagues basically never leave Exchange to be routed outside to Google.

One workaround I managed to use was to put the testing domain that Google gives to the Google Apps users to a good use (MAIN_DOMAIN.test-google-a.com)

I have created mail contact item for every user on the Exchange points to … Read the rest “Some points to remember while migrating from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps”