Exchange Messaging Outlook Volume 10, Number 18

Exchange sever 12 beta was released to a small, select group of organizations this week. It's a closed beta, available only to a core group of organizations considered "technology early adopters". If your company isn't in the TAP program, you'll have to wait until it's released in a community preview, probably about six months from now.

What do we know about Exchange 12 at this point? To improve reliability, Exchange 12 will only run on 64 bit servers. Setup and deployment should be easier for many administrators because it will be based on server roles and only the components of Exchange 12 that they need will be installed. Exchange System Manager offers simplified navigation through a new graphical management console, which should help many administrators (and annoy long time Exchange administrators who know where everything is). Administrators can use the scriptable, command line shell based on the Monad scripting engine to automate routine and repetitive tasks.

Exchange 12 takes advantage of Outlook 12's new client detection and configuration feature which simplifies Outlook's account setup. While this is an Outlook 12 feature which Exchange 12 leverages, it is a welcome feature for any help desk and should reduce or eliminate end-user confusion when setting up accounts in Outlook. Because this is an Outlook feature, auto-configuration of accounts will work with any mail server. Prior to the release of Office 12, Microsoft will make available the information mail administrators need to configure their servers for automatic configuration.

For the end-users, Exchange 12 will offer speech enabled unified messaging, integrating voice, fax, and email in the user's Inbox. This means if you don't have an Internet connection and can't VPN into the server using a computer, you can call the server from any telephone and listen to your messages. As in previous versions, we can expect improvements to Outlook Web Access (OWA), including an Outlook 12-like interface.

It can't be a new version without security improvements and enhancements, and Exchange 12 has that covered with built-in anti-spam and phishing protection and automatic updates for anti-spam filters, block lists and reputation services. One of the first lines of defense against mail-born viruses is attachment filtering and Exchange 12 will allow administrators to block inbound or outbound attachments based on the extension, file name or content type.

Exchange 12 Homepage
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/preview/default.mspx

Exchange Team Blog
http://blogs.technet.com/exchange/archive/category/10058.aspx

The Commonwealth Games are scheduled to be held during March 2006 in Melbourne Australia and several Australian states including New South Wales, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory, South Australia and Tasmania, have changed the Daylight Savings transition end dates to the first Sunday of April 2006. To assist, Microsoft provided a patch so users can add these temporary Australian Daylight savings time zones to Windows.

When the Australian Parliament House tested the patch they found a "bug" that affects members who use the dual time zones feature in Outlook. The additional time zone reference within Outlook is not updated after the Microsoft Commonwealth Games patch is applied.

Because the time zone fix adds new keys to the Windows time zone settings, and doesn't touch Outlook's key for the second time zone, it's technically not a bug, although it will bug anyone who uses one of the affected Australian time zones as the second Outlook time zone.

The patch adds the following keys to the Time Zone options:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones\AUS Eastern Standard Time (Commonwealth Games 2006)]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones\Tasmania Standard Time (Commonwealth Games 2006)]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones\Cen. Australia Standard Time (CommonwealthGames 2006)]

Outlook's second time zone reads the TZ2 value found at this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\xx.0\Outlook\Options\TimeZone

(where xx = your version of Outlook)

Even though Microsoft doesn't plan to release a patch to update Outlook's secondary time zone setting, parliament members can run a registry file to insure they have the correct time zone set, instead of going to Tools, Options, Calendar, Time Zones to verify. When the time zone changes end, they can revert back to the correct setting using another registry key file.

Australian Daylight Savings Changes for Microsoft Products for the Year 2006 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DDA845DE-9D70-487C-8F7C-093D4DFD1899&displaylang=en

A reader asks "When I send email from my Outlook 2003 account, there is a question mark "?" added to the body of my email. Any ideas of what is causing this problem?"

This is a fairly common problem and there several solutions. The first one you should try is to install S/MIME from OWA's Options. Make sure that the client has all of the latest IE updates, then use OWA to download the latest version of the S/MIME control. This will fix it in most cases.

If installing the S/MIME control doesn't fix it, it's possible that another application installed a downreved dhtmled.ocx and triedit.dll. The install program probably just looked in the Windows\System32 directory, did not see the files, so it installed them and registered them. The ones you need to use are located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Triedit. Open a command prompt, change directory to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Triedit and then use regsvr32 to re-register the correct versions of dhtmled.ocx and triedit.dll. You can then go delete the older versions that are probably located in your windows\system32.

If neither of these solutions corrects the problem, does the client have a product called SolarWinds Professional edition installed on their desktop? This is a known cause and it's possible there are other programs that may also cause it. If other computers can send using OWA and not add question marks to the message body, compare the applications installed on each in an attempt to identify the cause.

If your organization is still using Exchange Server 5.5 and you want or need support from Microsoft Product Support Services, you'll need to upgrade to Exchange 2003, as all forms of support for Exchange 5.5 are ending.

However, if your organization is a member of either Premier Essential support plan or Premier Support plan and have an AD migration plan approved by Microsoft, your company can pay an additional fee ($200,000 or more per year) plus a hefty fee per each hotfix you need, for Exchange 5.5 support. (Yes, several companies have signed on for this program.)

New security updates and hotfixes will not be released for Exchange 5.5 after December 31. Existing publically available updates will continue to be available, although you should have all of them installed on your Exchange 5.5 servers already.

For more information, see
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/support/lifecycle/changes.mspx

There are numerous reports that users are unable to create new Calendar items after installing Outlook 2003's SP2. While we have no idea what is causing it and it doesn't appear to be very widespread, the solution is to restart Outlook. If Outlook doesn't close completely (look in Task Manager) you'll need to force it closed (select Outlook.exe and click End Process), otherwise you'll need to reboot. So far, everyone affected by the problem reports this fixes the problem.