Modify the Calendar Printing Assistant Templates

We're often asked how to create or modify templates for the calendar printing assistant. While there isn't a whole lot you can do to change the templates, you can tweak the fonts.

The calendar printing assistant uses a template with the extension *.catx. It's stored in the Office template folder, typically located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates. Locate the template you want to edit and change the .catx extension to .zip. Unzip the contents into a new folder. Within the new folder, locate the CAL folder and open the content.xml file with Notepad. (You could use an XML editor, but its not necessary.)

To change the date formatting, look for the DAYFORMAT tag (near the end of the file) and find the CalendarText tag under DAYFORMAT. Make the desired changes and save the content.xml file. ZIP all of the files from your new folder and change the zip extension to catx. The template will be named "folder_name.catx".

Copy the modified file to your Template folder, open Calendar Printing Assistant and your new template to review the changes.

Moving an IMAP PST

An Outlook user asks: "Without starting Outlook 2007, I moved the IMAP pst from C to D. I hoped Outlook would ask me where the file is. However it creates a new one in the same location. How do I make Outlook use the new location?"

That method is used to move regular *.PST, it won't work with the IMAP protocol. It's actually not recommended that you use that method for any PST - you should move the PST then point the profile to the new location before opening Outlook.

Back to the IMAP PST move. You can move it using the following steps, in either Outlook 2003 or 2007.

First, close Outlook then make sure Outlook is not listed in Task Manager, Processes tab a few minutes after you close it.

1. Open the profile (Control panel, Mail) and click on Data files.
2. Select the IMAP acct and click Open Folder to open the folder containing the PST.
3. Move the PST to the desired location.
   *Do not rename the file* Outlook creates a new file in the default location if you try to rename it - you can only move it.
4. Switch to the Data Files window and double click on the account's data file.
5. Now you'll get the 'can't find' error and can tell outlook where to find it.

Close the dialogs and you are ready to restart outlook.

This will work with SharePoint and Internet Calendars, as well as HTTP accounts. You can’t move Outlook Connector message stores for Hotmail/MSN/Live accounts. In my experience, its mostly reliable but does occasionally get 'lost' and a new pst is made in the default location.

DEFANGHTML

I love questions that ask "How do I make Outlook stop doing this?" when the problem isn't with Outlook. This is one such question: "Outlook sometimes alters HTML by changing the references from "href=" to "defanghtml_href=". Why does Outlook do this? "

It's not Outlook. It's your antispam scanner. It adds 'defang' to the references it deems potentially dangerous so to create an invalid HTML tag which won’t be rendered as HTML. If your client side scanner is adding it, you may be able to disable the URL rewrite feature. If its added server side you'll need to speak with your email administrator.

If the URL's begin with "BLOCKED:", it is Outlook's doing. Copying URLs from Internet Explorer's address bar, rather from other documents or email messages seems to take care of it.

Mail Flow in Exchange Server 2007

by Michael B. Smith, MCSE/Exchange MVP

Actual mail transport, that is moving email from one server to another, only touches three of the five server roles in an Exchange server 2007 infrastructure. Those servers are the Hub Transport role, the Mailbox role, and the Edge Transport role.

People are often surprised that both the CAS and the Unified Message roles are not on that list. However, while a CAS can create a message in any number of formats (email, contacts, calendars, etc. via Outlook Web Access or Exchange Web Services) and a Unified Messaging server can create a voice mail message - that’s all they do. They submit a message to be handled; and in both those cases, they do so to the Mailbox role.

When a message is submitted, via any of Outlook, OWA, EWS, etc. then goes into a temporary “holding tank” item on the mailbox server of the user that submitted the message. The Mailbox server notifies the Hub Transport that a message is waiting; the Hub Transport picks up the message and places it into the Submission mail queue. From this mail queue, the various transport agents will operate on the message. This may include anti-spam agents, journaling agents, transport rules, etc. It is possible that a transport agent may decide that a message should have a Non-Delivery Report (NDR) generated and the original message will be returned to the sender without any further processing. A transport agent may decide that a message should be “dropped on the floor” with nothing else done to the message. A transport agent may decide that a message should be forwarded to a moderating party - either because the message appears to violate a corporate guideline or because the message is sent to a moderated public folder.

However, if all of the transport agents “pass” the message for further processing, then the transport engine will select a destination queue for the message. This queue may be local delivery - and if so, the message is delivered to the local recipient and the evaluation process tops. This queue may be based on DNS resolution and destined for a particular extern destination SMTP server. This queue may also be an interoperational routing group connector, if your organization is operating with legacy (Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2000) servers in your environment. This queue also may be for a Hub Transport server in another Active Directory site (if you have multiple Exchange servers in multiple AD sites). Finally, this queue may be for your outgoing gateway server (which is often an Edge Transport server and often a third party forwarder such as Postini).

So, we have this view: email is created on either a CAS or a Mailbox server by a user. Alternately, it can be created by the transport engine itself on a Hub Transport server. In all of those cases, the message is transferred to the Submission queue on a Hub Transport server. The Hub Transport applies transport rules. If a message still exists after that processing, the Hub Transport queues the message for delivery to the “next hop” destination, which may be the final destination.

So far, we have not covered either bifurcation (which may happen when a message has multiple recipients) or fan-out (which happens when a message has multiple recipients in multiple Active Directory sites). Those are subjects for future articles.