Dougs Blog... (rarely) daily

Microsoft UK Consultancy Services

Windows 7

Recently installed Windows 7 and really liking it so far…  Not a single issue with it over the...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/29/2009

Getting your Exchange 2007 project approved – Part 4 (Big Mailboxes)

OK so the idea of big mailboxes has become a viable option for a lot of organisations since Exchange...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/26/2009

Couple of nice blogs on removing internal SMTP headers

Not that I believe you should be, but if you are concerned about the server names and ip addresses...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/25/2009

February 2009 MM&M UG UK

..announcing the next meeting of the Microsoft Messaging and Mobility User Group in the UK… This...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/23/2009

£££ Time to have a word with the boss… again £££

Tech Workers Get a Raise “The average information-technology pro made $78,035 last year, a 4.6%...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/22/2009

Strategic alliance announced in the NY Times

“Iron Mountain Digital and Microsoft Work Together to Deliver Cloud-based Backup and Recovery...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/22/2009

Make sure your virtualisation platform is supported to run Windows..

Just a quick one – if you want to make sure that your hardware virtualisation platform is supported...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/21/2009

Getting your Exchange 2007 project approved – Part 3 (Storage)

Ah yes that old chestnut…  SAN versus DAS – switch to DAS and save a load of money.  It’s...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/20/2009

Is my blog in the wrong place…?

When I started this blog at the end of 2006 I chose to stick it on MSDN mainly because the set of...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/19/2009

Getting your Exchange 2007 project approved – Part 2 (Make your backups more cost effective…)

The boss is tightening the purse strings and you're having trouble justifying an Exchange 2007...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/16/2009

Backup your DPM data into the cloud…?

This is a smart idea…  The DPM UI can be used in conjunction with Iron Mountain CloudRecovery...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/14/2009

Getting your Exchange 2007 project approved– Part 1 (Fewer Servers supporting More Mailboxes)

Let’s start with one of the obvious ones - Fewer Servers supporting More Mailboxes…  OK so it’s...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/14/2009

Is your E2K7 project in danger of being scrapped?

I’m guessing that over the next few months IT managers are going to be pushing their IT staff really...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/09/2009

Getting the registry through Powershell..

Just one more quick line to plug into DCM..  (plus a few powershell links which might be...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/09/2009

Couple of DPM Podcasts on edge.technet.com…

DPM 2007 SP1 -- how to do individual item restore for Exchange “This video continues the series of...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/08/2009

Twittering…

Joined Twitter a long time ago but finally going to try and actually use it.  Follow me here…

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/08/2009

LiveMesh

Have been using Live Mesh for about 6 months now and would definitely recommend having a look at...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/07/2009

Windows 2008 Read Only Domain Controllers and Exchange 2007…

Alright so there is quite a lot of information out there now about Read Only Domain Controllers...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/06/2009

Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides

To quote Technet: “The Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guides are the next version of...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 01/05/2009

Right – that’s enough of that..

I’m won’t be blogging for a couple of weeks over Christmas and the new year.. Happy Christmas and...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/19/2008

Recovery Scenarios for E2K7…..III

This is the last of a few blogs about designing for availability and resilience… The first two are...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/19/2008

Stress testing Exchange in a virtual environment..

I've been asked a couple of times about stress testing an Exchange server sitting on a hardware...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/17/2008

Technet Events for 2009… {Powershell v2 and OCS etc..}

TechNet Events Live: TechNet Event : Managing Windows Servers with PowerShell V2 Location: London...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/16/2008

Powershell, DPM and Virtualisation – some great blogs…

Powershell Explore Your [Environment] on the Windows Powershell blog, written by Jeff Snover. ...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/15/2008

Asynchronous or Synchronous Replication..?

One of the fundamental decisions that you might make in the early stages of an Exchange Server 2007...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/12/2008

..a few more bits of Powershell to feed into DCM

Following on from my DCM blog last month here are a few more bits of Powershell that can be fed into...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/11/2008

Recovery Scenarios for E2K7…..II

This is the second of a few blogs about designing for availability and resilience… The first one is...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/10/2008

MCS Talks – No. 10

Registration is now available for Session Number 10 of the MCS Talks Series – application...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/09/2008

Why not stretch CCR nodes across 2 Data Centres..?

Have had a number of conversations with customers concerning the merits of achieving both data...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/09/2008

Good Powershell book…

Just received a copy of a good Exchange 2007 and Powershell book: ‘Professional Windows PowerShell...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/08/2008

Exchange ActiveSync Errors and Solutions

Just seen this on Jason Langridge’s blog (which if you haven’t seen it already is the place to go...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/08/2008

NLB and the CASHUB role

I’ve heard a couple of queries recently concerning Windows NLB and the CAS\HUB combined role. ...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/08/2008

Need to clarify something about log roll and continuous replication

I blogged recently about log roll and CCR – ‘New log created every 90 seconds...’ and I need to...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/05/2008

“Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back Into Startup Mode”

Nice article on Wired… ‘Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back Into Startup Mode’ “I love software,...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/05/2008

Top 10 Exchange Server Blogs…

OK here are my top 10 Exchange Server blogs\feeds. 1. You Had Me At EHLO… Everyone has seen this one...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/04/2008

Want to check if your Exchange servers are configured how you designed them to be configured?

Then DCM, or Configuration Manager 2007 Desired Configuration Management to give it it’s full title,...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/03/2008

Recovery Scenarios for E2K7…..I

This is the first of a few blogs about designing for availability and resilience…  WHAT...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/03/2008

IPv6 and Exchange 2007

I know this has been blogged about on a number of occasions so apologies to those for which this is...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/02/2008

New log created every 90 seconds…

Let's say that over a period of an hour only a very small number of transactions are generated for a...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 12/01/2008

Dynamic Disk Provisioning…

Have been tracking a few internal discussions concerning dynamic disk provisioning – the idea of...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 11/28/2008

DPM SP1

Earlier this month Microsoft announced DPM Service Pack 1.  Some pretty significant updates...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 11/27/2008

Exchange Online

Microsoft Online Services was officially released this week and so we move a step closer to a world...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 11/26/2008

E2K7 on NAS storage..?

The support policy for Exchange 2003 running on a NAS (Network-Attached Storage) device is pretty...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 11/25/2008

BIG online mailboxes…

I recently made the assumption (not very accurately as it turns out) that deploying large mailboxes...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 11/24/2008

MCS Talks – No. 9

Registration is now available for Session Number 9 of the MCS Talks Series – Sharepoint this...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 11/21/2008

How quick's it going to take to backup and restore Exchange data with DPM?

One of the most often asked, and most difficult to answer, questions concerning Microsoft System...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 11/19/2008

Indexing is now less taxing...

Concerned about search in Vista and its impact on your Exchange Server? Windows Search 4.0 released...

Author: Doug Gowans MSFT Date: 06/09/2008

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