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SBS 2011 Standard Additional Accepted Email Domains (Multiple Accepted Domains)

http://titlerequired.com/2011/07/14/sbs-2011-standard-additional-accepted-email-domains/

 

My customer is expanding his business, and is going to add a specialist arm of his company in a particular field.

As such he has setup a new website for that particular department and wants some of his staff to have a new email address based on whether they work for that part of the company.

This is really very easy to setup using Email Address Policies, and i will show you how to do that in this blog post.

I did try to get the process a little more automated, and integration into the add user wizard would have been great, but so far i haven’t got that working, but i am hoping with a little prodding of the SBS Dev team, we may be able to find a way.

To follow me through this process, you will need:

A Server running SBS 2011 Standard.

Two domains configured to send email to the SBS Server.

Some user accounts to test with..

First of all what we will do is add our new domain name as an accepted domain in Exchange.

The process for this is very similar, if not identical to that of Exchange 2007.

From Start, go to All Programs, Expand Microsoft Exchange server 2010 and open up the Exchange Management Console (EMC).

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When the exchange console opens, expand Microsoft Exchange On-Premises, expand Organization Configuration and select Hub Transport.

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Switch to the ‘Accepted Domains’ tab.

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This shows you the current accepted domains.

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On the right hand side, select ‘New Accepted Domains’

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Enter a name for your new domain, and enter the domain name itself. We will leave the server as the authoratative server for this domain, click New,

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After a few seconds, the action will complete, and you will be shown the PowerShell command that would have performed this action from the exchange shell. Click Finish.

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You can now see your additional domain added as an accepted domain.

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If we now switch to recipient configuration, and the mailbox section, we can see our current mailbox users.

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If we go to the properties of one of these accounts, we can see the current email addresses associated with that account.

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We can see that no changes have been made to this account so far.

That’s good because it means existing users are not affected by what we have done.

We will have a look at existing users in a moment, but first let’s add a new user to the system.

Since i am listening to The Beatles at the moment, i am going to call this guy John Lennon. My Favourite Beatle happens to be George, but that isn’t relevant. Why then am i not calling him George Harrison, well i don’t know.

I am not covering the add user wizard here as other posts exist out there on how to do this. Plus it is in the books relating to SBS 2011.

So John, is a good guy and he’s working for my company’s new department.

But wait, as we can see here, he still has an SBSTIPS.co.uk address, not TITLEREQUIRED.com – that is good, that is what is expected.

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Now, we need to edit his account.

Let’s open up ADUC (Active Directory Users & Computers) From Start, go to Administrative Tools, and you will see ADUC at the top.

Expand Yourdomain.local and keep expanding down until you find MyBusiness\Users\SBSUsers

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Find John’s account, and go to the properties.

Switch to the ‘Organization’ tab, and enter ‘Titlerequired’ into the department field.

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Click OK to save this change, and close ADUC.

Switch back to the EMC

Go back to the Organization Configuration, Hub Transport area, and go to the ‘Email Address Policies’ tab.

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You can see we have 2 current policies. The Windows SBS Email Address Policy is set to make whatever domain name you entered in the Internet Address wizard the default for all users.

So we want to add a new Email Address Policy. On the right click, New Email Address Policy.

We need to enter a name, and also select the container where this policy should be applied, and also the type.

You can leave these as default values, but please do enter a name. Click Next.

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Put a check in the box for ‘Recipient is in a Department’ under Step 1.

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Under Step 2, select the hyperlinked word ‘specified’ and enter our department name value of Titlerequired.

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You can then click Preview, and the policy will show you which users or recipient types it will affect. Hopefully we will only see Mr. Lennon’s name.

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We do! That is great because it means whatever we are doing here will only affect that one account.

When you are happy click next.

On the email addresses page, click Add.

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Here we choose how the new email address should look, i like to use first initial and surname, so i will select that.

The default is to add a new email address to the ‘default’ domain, since this is yourdomain.local the new address for John would be jlennon@sbs.local – we want to add this to our new accepted domain, so we must choose to specify the accepted domain.

Click the radio button for that option, and click Browse.

You will then see all the domains we have setup on our system.

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Double Click the domain you want to use, and it will be added to your policy.

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Click Ok.

You will now see your email address shown, using the variables that are used for whatever name format of address you chose. More on that here.

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The table below is taken from the TechNet website and shows variables you can use.

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Click Next.

You have the option to apply the new policy immediately, or at a scheduled time, or not to apply it all. We want to do it immediately, so click next.

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You will see a summary page with some PowerShell commands listed. Click New to build and apply the policy.

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The policy is built and applied successfully.

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Lets switch back to our Recipient area, and check the email addresses our users now have.

We can see that our user still has his old address.

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Switching back to the Policies area, we can see our new policy has a priority of 2, and the Windows SBS policy is set at 1.

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We need to change it to priority 1. Select your new policy and on the right hand side, click Change Priority, and enter the number 1, Click OK to save.

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It now jumps to the top of the list.

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Now we need to reapply the policy. Right click the policy and click Apply. We get those same options as before, click on Next, and Apply.

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Again you are shown some PowerShell, and you can click Finish to close the Apple Policy page.

Switching back to Recipient Configuration, you can now see that John has a new email address. (you may need to refresh the view)

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IF we go into his account properties you can see he now has an email address for both SBSTIPS.co.uk and TITLEREQUIRED.com but that TITLEREQUIRED.com is his default address.

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If we want to move an existing user to a new department, just edit their AD account to change their Department, and then reapply the policy.

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You can see that the email address is added as an additional address.

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And that is how to add an additional domain name and have it apply to only certain users.

If you want to have an additional domain apply to all users, but not as the default, then simply don’t narrow your Email Address Policy by using a department as in Step 1 and 2 above, and leave the policy at priority 2.

You can always use the Preview button to help confirm who will be affected by such a change.

If you want to change the default domain for all users, you should run the Internet Address Wizard and add your new domain here, then add your old domain as an accepted domain, and build a policy as described here to add that old domain as an additional address.

Potential issues after installing SharePoint Foundation 2010 SP1 SBS2011

http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2011/07/06/potential-issues-after-installing-sharepoint-foundation-2010-sp1.aspx

Potential issues after installing SharePoint Foundation 2010 SP1

to us courtesy of Fang Xie, Guang Hu and Ning Kuang from Sustained Engineering and Christopher Puckett, John Bay and Damian Leibaschoff from Commercial Technical Support]

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) was recently released through Microsoft Update. On a default installation, Windows SBS 2011 Standard administrators should be able to see it in the SBS Console and would need to approve it for installation before it is offered for installation on the server.
Since SharePoint Foundation 2010, patching SharePoint is a two-step process. The updated binaries are first installed and then PSCONFIG must be completed to update the SharePoint databases.
Without completing PSCONFIG, you might experience unexpected SharePoint search failures and all backups may stop working on the affected server.

The Following errors may be found in the server application log:

Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft-SharePoint Products-SharePoint Foundation Search
Event ID: 70
Task Category: Gatherer
Level: Error
User: CONTOSO\spsearch
Computer: CONTOSO-SERVER.contoso.local
Description:
The mount operation for the gatherer application 37ad8233-57f1-47b1-873e-6a91d0f1bc36 has failed because the schema version of the search administration database is less than the minimum backwards compatibility schema version supported for this gatherer application. The database might not have been upgraded.

Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft-Windows-Backup
Event ID: 521
Level: Error
User: SYSTEM
Description:
The backup operation that started at ‘?2011?-?07?-?06T02:12:07.198000000Z’ has failed because the Volume Shadow Copy Service operation to create a shadow copy of the volumes being backed up failed with following error code ‘2155348129’. Please review the event details for a solution, and then rerun the backup operation once the issue is resolved.

You can also run the following commands to determine if you need to complete the update process with PSCONFIG:

  • Launch an elevated (Run as Administrator) SharePoint 2010 Management shell from start, All Programs, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products, SharePoint 2010 Management Shell.
  • Once the shell opens, type the following command followed by enter:
    (get-spserver $env:computername).NeedsUpgrade

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If the result of this command is True, then you need to complete the steps below. If the result is False then no further action is needed, if you are encountering similar events the cause will most likely not be resolved by the following steps.

To complete the SharePoint service pack process you need to follow the same steps that were previously posted on the Official SBS Blog regarding the necessity to complete PSCONFIG after a SharePoint update. Here are the steps from the article:

In order to update the SharePoint databases, you must manually run the PSconfig utility. To run the utility:

1. Open an Administrative command prompt.
2. Change directory to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN
3. Run PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures

Note: The Companyweb site will be inaccessible while the command is running. It is best to run the command after business hours. The amount of time the command takes to run will vary on the size of the database and the speed of the machine. On a reference machine with 8 logical processors, 32GB of RAM and a 2GB content database, the command took approximately 5 minutes to execute.

SBS 2011 – WSUS SQL Memory Usage Is Very High – How To Reduce It from MPECS Inc. Blog

http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2011/07/sbs-2011-wsus-sql-memory-usage-is-very.html

Our destination SBS 2011 has an SQL (S-Q-L) process that was taking up a whopping 5GB of RAM:

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Since this was a relatively fresh install of SBS 2011 we needed to find out what SQL setup was using so much memory.

  1. Open Task Manager –> Processes tab.
  2. View –> Choose Columns –> PID, Memory, etc. (Our SBS 2011 Setup Guide has the customizations)
  3. Start –> CMD –> Right click and Run As Admin.
  4. tasklist /svc [Enter]
  5. Scroll through the resulting list looking for the PID.
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  6. Start –> All Programs –> Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 –> Right click and Run as Admin on SQL Server Management Studio.
    • Server type: Database Engine.
    • Server name: \\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query
      • Copy and paste the above.
    • Authentication: Windows Authentication.
  7. Click Connect.
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  8. Right click the root node (\\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query) and left click on Properties.
  9. Click Memory.
  10. Change the amount of memory that WSUS can use. On this particular SBS 2011 VM we have 16GB of RAM allocated. So, we will set the amount of RAM to 1GB.
    1. Before:
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    2. After:
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Our WSUS SQL memory usage was now a lot more reasonable:

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UPDATE 2011-07-16: Tweaked the steps for a typo as per Arcon’s comment.

How do I avoid needing to activate Windows when I move a VM? [Hyper-V]

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2011/09/12/how-do-i-avoid-needing-to-activate-windows-when-i-move-a-vm-hyper-v.aspx

How do I avoid needing to activate Windows when I move a VM? [Hyper-V]

Ben Armstrong [MSFT]

It is possible to move virtual machines around between different physical computers running Hyper-V without needing to run activation inside Windows. The trick is that you need to make sure that the virtual hardware does not change when you move the virtual machine.

The most common mistake that people make when moving a virtual machine by hand (e.g. not using SCVMM or Hyper-V Clustering) is that they just copy the virtual hard disks (.VHD files) and create a new virtual machine that uses these virtual hard disks.

This new virtual machine will have new hardware identifiers for all the virtual hardware it contains – so even if you setup the virtual machine with the same settings, Windows will ask to be reactivated.

The best way to avoid this is to export the virtual machine on the source Hyper-V server, and then import it on the target server. This will ensure that all the virtual hardware has the same identifying information, and you will not need to reactivate Windows after moving the virtual machine.

Using “built in” applications with Windows XP mode

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2011/12/22/using-built-in-applications-with-windows-xp-mode.aspx

Using “built in” applications with Windows XP mode

Ben Armstrong [MSFT]

Last week I was asked, on Twitter, if it was possible to publish a built in application (like Internet Backgammon) from Windows XP mode. The answer is: Yes, but it is a little tricky.

Most people use Windows XP mode to run specific applications that they have that will not run under Windows 7. These people do not want to have their start menus cluttered with all the applications that populate the Windows XP menu – they just want to access their applications. For this reason, we block publishing of all of the built in applications in Windows XP – but you can unblock them.

To test this out – I published Internet Backgammon on one of my systems. The process that you need to follow is this:

  1. Figure out the path and name of the executable that you want to publish. In my case this was “bckgzm.exe” in “C:\Program Files\MSN Gaming Zone\Windows”:
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  2. Then you need to open RegEdit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Virtual Machine\VPCVAppExcludeList
  3. Search the entries here and you should find a string value with a name of the executable (“bckgzm.exe” in my case) and a data value of the path. Delete this key.
  4. Reboot the virtual machine.

After doing this – the application will appear in the Windows 7 start menu:

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And you can run it as an integrated application:

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Cheers,
Ben