LDAP Filters - Mail Enabled Objects

Recently I had to come up with an LDAP filter to grab all mail enabled objects for a customer preparing to utilize the Schemus tool provided by our partner Messagelabs (Azaleos's ProtectXchange offering).

A lot of people, even sharp technicians, I've noticed tend to avoid LDAP queries like the plague.  I think the reason is the lack of basic understanding.

Simple things like understanding the operators (such as & being AND, | being OR, ! being NOT, etc) can help immensely.  

My final product for the filter is:

(|(&(mailnickname=*)(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user))(&(mailni ckname=*)(objectCategory=group)))

A great quick site to glance at for a general overview is here.

Google Chrome

For those of you who haven't seen this, a colleague of mine pointed out that Google's Chrome web browser is now available for download. You can grab it here.

Very cool idea of running tabs in different processes. Seems as though they really want to position themselves for running apps (Gmail, Calendar, etc..). I noticed that it seems require half the memory that firefox does, and the visual design is very appealing. One cool thing is Chrome's taskbar. It shows strain on the system broken out by tab, but it also shows which ones are actively hitting the network. This is useful to find out if your tab is autorefreshing (whether that be a good or bad thing!).

Another thing that was pointed out was the discrepancy between what Chrome thinks its using for resources, and what Window's task manager thinks its using. Small difference, but interesting none-the-less.













Now if we can just get some better skins for it... (or at least allow it to use the OS's theme).

Archiving Policies - Hard limit, or Quotas?

I run into this constantly on the job. Many people like the simplicity of a hard set policy; IE archive everything 30 days old or older. My argument to this is that quotas, while requiring a bit more planning and foresight, are eventually much more dynamic and easily managed in the long run.


My personal preference is to set the archive quota to use the warning limit. This way, it is seamless to the user as it prevents the notifications, and doesn't hit the send/receive limit either. Another pro to using the warning quota in Exchange is that because they don't see a warning, they don't misinterpret what is going on and try to archive it themselves. This is compounded if the ability to use PSTs has not been disabled via group policy. Hard set limits such as nothing in the last 7 days will help with potential user grief (especially if the slider on the quota limit tab is set toward size rather than date). Also setting the "Do not archive messages smaller than" setting is good to set so that it mitigates the frustration of having to pull down an archive that didn't really get any size savings anyways. Stubs tend to be around 2-3kb, so that part is a no brainer. I like setting it a bit higher due to the balance of overall size savings versus user acceptance. Again this is a culture based decision.


The quota limit tab is another place decisions come in to play. You'll want to set the percentage of the quota to begin archiving from to at least be less than what the person could receive in a day. That number also affects how far down to archive. The size versus message age debate is one of, surprise, culture. If your company receives a barrage of large images for viewing/editing, you'll obviously take different steps than if your business relies on email primarily as a quick messaging service.




Now to the dynamic part. The best part about this system is that you only need one policy. This means no messing with automation policies down the road, no messy clean ups, etc. Merely change the quota limit in Exchange for the mailstore or individual and viola. Powershell scripts in Exchange 2007 make this a very powerful solution!