Exchange Server 2010 to Exchange Online Message Tracking Does Not Work

My organization is currently working on moving from on premise Exchange to hosted Exchange from Microsoft via Office 365 and Exchange Online.

Prior to moving any mailboxes to our tenant, we have been testing from on premise mailboxes to test cloud mailboxes.  

We were tracking messages from Outlook Web Access.  Under Manage My Organization, Mail Control, we'd run Delivery Reports.

I would search from an on premise mailbox to a cloud mailbox for messages I had sent.  The search would work well and return results.






 













Once I double clicked one of the results to see detail, however, that wasn't successful.  It would not be successful and would fail after a timeout.

 








I opened a ticket with Microsoft Support.

It wound up being fairly involved and we did quite a bit for troubleshooting.  But the ultimate solution was to close the ticket as a known bug.

I consulted about the results of our last troubleshooting to get Message tracking report using EMS and we got the error related to “WARNING: The log search service was unavailable on server 'mwhpr09mb2047.namprd09.prod.outlook.com'.”

It’s a known issue on O365 which possibly might not be addressed any time soon, the alternate option would is to use the Messaging Tracing if they can in our  scenario. Message Tracing is available to admins only, can't directly search on Subject (but can search on recipient, sender, date/time then sort to locate specific subject).

As an administrator, you can find out what happened to an email message by running a message trace in the Exchange admin center (EAC). After running the message trace, you can view the results in a list, and then view the details about a specific message. Message trace data is available for the past 90 days. If a message is more than 7 days old, the results can only be viewed in a downloadable .CSV file.

Reference:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj200712(v=exchg.150).aspx

Since this a known issue in product, you will not be charged for the incident. 

So, I can track messages from the Office 365 administrator center, and can do nothing to correct the issue impacting my on premise message tracking

How To Map A Network Drive to OneDrive for Business (or What To Do If You Don't Have Enough Free Space to Sync Your OneDrive for Business Data)

My organization is currently in the early stages of looking a migration to Office 365.  I welcome the possibility of getting out of the business of managing users' home folders by giving them 1TB of cloud space on OneDrive for Business and letting them use it as they see fit.

We are currently in the process of deploying SSD drives to some of our computers to help with performance issues.  As a cost savings measure, I know we are often deploying 120GB drives.  As we test and evaluate, several colleagues asked me what would happen if we had more data than we had hard drive space.  I would assume that a 120GB drive might have 80GB free after the installation of operating system and software. It's very possible that some of my users have more data than that.

I opened a support ticket with Microsoft and got a great option.  They confirmed that the OneDrive sync client might crash or slow the system down if it was trying to sync more data than space allowed.  There are options to not sync down the entire OneDrive contents, but I worried that might be cumbersome for users.  

The alternative is to skip the OneDrive sync client and map a network drive to the OneDrive for Business space.  This means you need Internet access to access your data, and there could be bandwith implications, but this sounds like a great option.

The steps to do this are as follows (as demonstrated on Windows 10):

• Open Internet Explorer
• Go to https://portal.microsoft.com. Keep me Signed In option box checked and Sign In 
• Depending on your version of Internet Explorer, take one of the following actions: 
• Click the Tools menu, and then click Internet options. 
• Click the gear icon, and then click Internet options.
• Click the Security tab, click Trusted sites, and then click Sites
• In the Add this website to the zone box https://*.sharepoint.com >add> ok 
• Click on Custom level> Scroll all the way down to select Automatic logon with Current username and Password.
• Browsed to   gear icon on IE >compatibility view settings > sharepoint.com> ok
• Start > Run > type Services.msc > Search Web Client >Change Startup to Automatic > Ok
• Browsed to the OneDrive Location which you want to map  > Click on return to Classic OneDrive >click on Gear icon >Ribbon On >click on Library >Open with Explorer>>and copy the  path 
• Open File Explorer>right click on This PC or My Computer> Map Network Drive> Select the drive and paste the URL> ok 

Temporary Profile Problems with Active Directory to Blame

I recently received a ticket from my helpdesk escalating to my team.  It reported that two relatively new users were unable to get local user profiles on two computers.  They were receiving errors that a profile could not be created and a temporary profile was used.  

The full language of the error is: "You have been logged on with a temporary profile. You cannot access your files and files created in this profile will be deleted when you log off. To fix this, log off and try logging on later. Please see the event log for details or contact your system administrator."

The helpdesk staffer asked me to "delete or correct their AD profiles."  What?  I am certainly not deleting a user's Active Directory account.  I took the ticket, determined to demonstrate to the helpdesk that the problem was with these two computers and had nothing to do with Active Directory.

Sadly, that was not the case, oops!

My expectation was that the Default User profile on these computers was damaged, so new profiles were not being generated successfully.  I disproved that theory when I logged onto the system for the first time.  It generated a local profile for me without error or issue.  Hmmm.

At this point, I indeed had to go into Active Directory Users and Computers and I examined the two user accounts in question.  A little review, and the problem quickly came to light.  

Somehow, some info had been typed into the "Profile path" field.  We don't use roaming profiles, so this field should be left empty/default.  I typically copy user accounts (to preserve a number of account settings like group memberships for a similar job title), so I had copied this problem around to these two new users.  I also found this problem on the source user account.

By deleting the text from the Profile path field, the users confirmed their next logons were without issue.  They managed to create local profiles without error.

A simple problem, but it stumped me for a few moments, so it seemed worth sharing.

Customization Wizard Not Yet Supported from VMware for Windows Server 2016

Windows Server 2016 released a few weeks ago.  I was interested in whether or not I was ready to run it.  

I'm unfortunately not in a great position to move to the latest version of VMware vSphere.  I'm on 5.5 Update 3.  6.5 has just been announced this week at VMworld Europe (though I didn't see it available for download yesterday).  I look forward to upgrading to the latest version shortly.

In the meantime, can I run Windows Server 2016 in my VMware environment?

The good news: yes.  Checking the VMware Compatability guide https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software&testConfig=16) demonstrates that Windows Server 2016 is supported for vSphere 5.5 Update 3.  I'm on track.

(Note: When building virtual machines, Windows Server 2016 isn't an option.  But, that's OK, just pick Windows Server 2012.  https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2132789)

OK, I typically deploy servers from template.  I build my first VM, and performed my standard steps to prep it for templating.  Now, what about that Customization Wizard?  I ran through it, and it seemed to work.  But....

I couldn't find the answer on this one on my own.  I reached out to support.  I got my answer quickly enough: "As of now, the guest customization wizard for Windows Server 2016 is not supported."  And then, the matrix I hadn't managed to find to document the answer:http://partnerweb.vmware.com/programs/guestOS/guest-os-customization-matrix.pdf

I need to do some additional research.  Did the Customization Wizard actually properly SysPrep the server and it is safe to use?  Or, should I learn how to do the Microsoft method to clone the server?

Until I figure those answers out, I'll stick to manually building my Windows Server 2016 systems to avoid issues down the road.