Thursday, October 31, 2013

Convert user mailbox to resource when using Exchange Online

I am in the middle of a cutover migration from an Exchange 2003 environment to Exchange Online. One issue with the cutover is that all our resource mailboxes were imported as user mailboxes, rather than resources. Luckily, using PowerShell, it is easy to convert these and I only had ~10 so it was easy enough to do. If you have a lot of resource mailboxes to convert you may want to script it instead. Anyway, here are the instructions which I originally found from here:

1. Connect Windows PowerShell to the Service. Refer to the article below.
http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/cc546278.aspx

2. Run set-mailbox mailboxName -type room, substituting your specific mailbox name in for mailboxName, and also specifying either room OR equipment. The example is to convert to a room resource

Friday, October 25, 2013

Cannot get mail connection to server is unavailable error on iOS device

The typical answers to this would be verify your username/password/server address, and make sure you have an active data connection and can access the server. However, I'm posting this because I ran across a very odd solution to this error message when those first two failed.

I had a user who could not receive any new emails on her iPhone 5 through an Exchange ActiveSync connection, yet she could send and also had the contacts and calendar working fine. It happened out of nowhere and I was able to replicate the issue on a 2nd iPhone. No other users were reporting issues, and the user's email was working fine in Outlook and OWA. It was very odd.

After doing some extensive troubleshooting I finally tracked down the issue and decided to post it in case anyone else runs across the same problem and is scratching their head. The user had used an emoticon when sending an email, and had two replies to that message in her Inbox. However, that emoticon had gotten corrupted on the receiving end, so when sent back to her in the reply it actually made the messages unreadable on the iPhone and prevented any newer emails from being downloaded as well. As soon as I removed those 2 emails from the Inbox, the iPhone began working correctly again.

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Error while trying to export to PST using Export-Mailbox on Exchange 2007

This is probably valid for more than just Exchange 2007, but that's the version I was working on where I ran into the problem. After finally getting myself setup with a machine running a 32-bit Windows OS, and with both Exchange Management Tools and Outlook 2007 installed, I tried running my Export-Mailbox command. No go, and in checking the migration log file the error looked something like:

Error was found for user1 (user1@email.com) because: Error occurred in the step: Moving messages. Failed to copy messages to the destination mailbox store with error: 
MAPI or an unspecified service provider.
ID no: 00000000-0000-00000000, error code: -1056749164

I scratched my head on this one for a while after the Google results for the error code didn't show any results. Luckily my brain still works without Google (kind of...) and I had to smack myself a little for how simple the fix was. I didn't have full access to the mailboxes I was trying to export with the account I was logged in with! Once I realized that I simply ran

Add-MailboxPermission -Identity user1 -User myaccount -AccessRights FullAccess

Once that was done I tried my Export-Mailbox command again and viola! Exporting to PST files from the Exchange 2007 information store worked as expected.