How many times did you bitch about Vista and Microsoft as a IT Administrator? Well I did few times. Because there was no Active Directory tools like "Active Directory Users and Computers" or "Sites and Services" in Vista. The Windows 2003 version of AD tools won't support on Vista. There was few workarounds, but you … Continue reading Finally! Active Directory Tools only for Vista SP1(They called “Remote Server Administration Tools” now) →

Did you ever disable a Active Directory Account which also disables the Exchange Mailbox on the older Exchange servers (Exchange 2000, Exchange 2003 with pre-SP2)? You want to just disable the account, but not the mailbox. right? There is simple solution, read more below. 1. Open the disabled (and enabled) Active Directory account properties. 2. … Continue reading Mailbox don’t receive emails after the associated AD account disabled (and enabled later) the Active Directory Account →

There are situations for IT administrator wants to reboot the server remotely. Fortunately there is Shutdown command from Microsoft. Shutdown command is in-built in XP, Windows 2003 and Vista machines (and Windows 2008 obviously). You can also write a simple batch file to reboot the server once a week or say shutdown your desktop every … Continue reading Reboot, Shutdown the Windows Servers remotely →

In a medium to large companies, there is lots of change continually happening in Exchange Servers and Active Directory, like new mailboxes, migrations, Name changes, deletions, etc., The reason I bring this up is the Outlook Address Book. Is your Outlook Address Book (Exchange GAL) is current? Is your auto completion cache valid anymore? In … Continue reading Outlook Address Cache aka Auto Completion Cache and Offline Address book →

I blogged about the Outlook RPC dialog box while ago. I found out more users seek out cure for the Outlook RPC pop-up cancer. Here are some step by step information you can check to resolve the issue. 1. Outlook Cached Mode. I repeat...Outlook Cached Mode. Most user's Outlook RPC issues end here. I know … Continue reading RPC Cancel Request dialog box or otherwise called “Outlook is trying to retrieve data from Microsoft Exchange….” →

Man, Oh Man!! I came across this dreading mail issue. Here is the problem description. Users complained that they were not receiving emails sent to a Distribution List.  Mails were sent from an external application to the Exchange DL. When I track the mails in Exchange, I see the mails came into Exchange and got … Continue reading Updated: “Message Submitted to Categorizer”, Then What? →

As a Exchange administrator, I get to dodge this particular Outlook RPC-dialog pop-up issues for users.  Sure enough, everyone must have seen the following dialog box at some point of time.     Let see the following excerpt from this MSKB 892764 You receive this message as part of the standard inter-operation of Outlook and … Continue reading “Outlook is trying to retrieve data from Microsoft Exchange….” →

Female employees get married and change their last name. DL might change their display name. I have been asked few questions about this change like "I still see the old name in Exchange System Manager", "Outlook doesn't reflect the name change". I would do the following things in order. a) Change the User's Name in … Continue reading Dealing with “Name Change” for a user or group in Active Directory →

I wrote a VBScript to deal with file and folders in a given path. I am going to explain the issue related to "Non-English" characters in file name and how I resolved. Filename or contents have NON-English (Unicode) characters. VBScript functions like "OpenTextFile", "WriteLn" and "ReadLn" are encountering below error. Microsoft VBScript runtime error: Invalid … Continue reading Dealing with Non-English characters in VBScript →

One of my friend called me and just to tell me how much he hate Vista. I asked him the 'hate' details. He wanted to install a home grown software and part of the setup process is to create "Environment Variable" manually. He couldn't find where to add the environment variable. His company developers gave … Continue reading How do I change the Environment Variable in Vista? →