Where has the M: Drive gone in Exchange 2003

Thought this would be interesting to anyone who works with Exchange. Exchange 2000 had a nice feature where you could access a virtual M: on the Exchange Server and access individual emails using explorer or even triggering events based on the existence of an email or not.


This feature is turned off by default in Exchange 2003.

Link to Microsoft Exchange Technical Library
http://tinyurl.com/d5ue8 Take a look at the M: drive section of this linked document it's a Microsoft link shortened with http://www.tinyurl.com

In fairness there was good reason to turn this off, as using an anti-virus product to scan this directory or even restoring to this directory was likely to cause corruption

Even without enabling the M: drive you can still access the virtual file system by using the following syntax.

dir file://BackOfficeStorage/mail.swift.local/mbx assuming your mail server’s FQDN was mail.swift.local this would list all the mailboxes in the information store

Hope this helps

Regards Mark

Really appreciate you attending the Exchange Session

A big thanks to everyone who attended the Exchange Deep Dive session on Sunday in SMB Nation. I had wanted to cover a lot more but as someone described to me after the session I am a bit more of a marathon runner then a sprinter when it comes to presenting.


Anyway I promised I would provide links to more information particularly areas that I didn't get to during the presentation.

More information on Disaster recovery for Exchange written earlier this year if you scroll down the page there is an article on setting up MX records to allow you to get away from the pop connector , the blog isn't too big so if you check the archives you will see more exchange related articles.

http://sbslive.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_sbslive_archive.html

Please feel free to email me or comment here with your suggestions or questions or feedback

Mark

Blackberry Versus Windows Mobile

Came across Susan's post on her blog http://www.sbsdiva.com
http://msmvps.com/bradley/archive/2005/09/04/65168.aspx.

Have to say I agree, the Blackberry concept and the various handsets are attractive to the end user and to say the marketing is slick is an understatement.

However without the Blackberry Enterprise Software the functionality is very limited.
Basically without the BES installed on or near your internal Exchange Server you only have access to email not wireless synced calendaring and contacts you also do not have the famous push email instead you have a 15 minute pop3 polling action only.

Now I would be the first to agree that a full Installation of BES and a proper configuration is very appealing as we then get true push email, in the windows world we are almost there but not quite until Windows Mobile 2005 hits the shelves.

But as Susan makes the point the handset cost is not the problem as a blackberry device or a windows mobile Smartphone can be bought for roughly the same money.

The big cost at the moment is the BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) software which must communicate with your Exchange Server, in Europe this software up to recently has cost € 1500 to € 1700 Euros just for a five user licence.

Also remember with the Windows Mobile devices we get a much richer application set
MSN Messenger - Works great to keep in touch much cheaper to run then texting
Internet Explorer - Can browse actual websites unlike the cut down browser on Blackberries
Media Player - Business and easy listening
Built in Camera - On most Smartphones
Huge number of third party applications to expand what you can do on your Windows Smartphone or Pocket PC.

Just my two (euro) cent

Mark

Not really Techie feature in Word

Sorry about this everyone, but although it's about Word (2003) I thought it was useful enough to blog about this. I wouldn't usually include information on Word on my blog but when I came across this posting from Sean Daniels blog I had to try it.

Basically if you hit ALT and then Right Click (Mouse) on any word you then get the option to use the thesarus to find it's meanings or to translate it into one of a dozens languages.

If you highlight a whole page in a Word Document and then ALT Right Click it jumps online and it only takes seconds to translate it into French or German or one of a dozen different modern languages.

Try it, great for translating those postings in newsgroups in other languages.

Mark ..