Enabling / Disabling Conversation View

With the roll out of Microsoft Exchange 2010 Web Access, Outlook 2010 and Office Mobile 2010 now allows for conversations as a new group by. I have been using this feature for a few months and have grown to like it. But the question has been asked how to disable this view. Below I have posted how to toggle this view on and off for each product. Just a heads up this can be turned on or off in any view.

 

Outlook 2010

Click the View tab on the top then if date is selected the conversations button will be enabled. Click the Conversations button and uncheck the Show Messages in Conversations.

Outlook Web App (Webmail/Web Access)

You can find this option by the Arrange by and click the arrow and uncheck the Conversation option.

 

Outlook 2010 Mobile

This one is almost the same as webmail but you can only change the sort by template. This will not let you select your sort by column and then enable conversations view. Click the arrow next to your sorted column and change your sort by template.

SharePoint – In place domain Migration for all users

Switching domains for sharepoint doesn’t seem to have a SID or account migrate for all users. The stsadm tool does support migrating one user for all sites which is really quite nice. To finish the task of getting all the users from the old domain to the new domain logins I started with exporting the user list. Under Active Directory find your users OU. Click View and add remove columns. Add the column Pre-Windows 2000 Logon Name. Right click on the users OU and export list to CSV. After opening this in Excel you should have 3 columns from the export by default. The script below can be paste into D2. This uses the column C to get their usernames. Click and drag fill down square to the bottom of your user list. The path to run this command from might differ depends on install, open command line and change directory to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN. Then you can paste all of column D into command line window.

=CONCATENATE("stsadm -o migrateuser -oldlogin olddomain\",C2," -newlogin newdomain\",C2)

DiskPart - Removing ReadOnly Flag from Volume

This is the process I use to add Replay/Clone of SAN disk for recovery. This is only works if the SAN allows writing to your Replay/Clone.

1. Right click on computer and goto Disk Management
2. Right Click on Disk Management and Rescan Disks
3. Right click on the Disk and goto properties
4. Find Disk by LUN and Target ID
5. Right Click on the volume and Change Drive Letter and Paths
6. Click and assign drive letter
7. Open Command line (CMD)
8. type 'diskpart'
9. type 'list vol'
10. find your volume by drive letter
11. 
12. type 'select vol #' (replace # with Volume number)
13. type 'attrib vol clear readonly' (Allows disk to)
14. 
15. Go back to disk management and right click on the volume and Change Drive Letter and Paths
16. Click Remove on the drive letter and Click OK
17. right click on the volume and Change Drive Letter and Paths
18. Click Add and add your drive letter again
19. Disk should be have write access

 

Error: The operation did not complete

Answer: Most likely ISCSI mappings or Disk must be removed and added again.

Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging - Enable All Users

I didn’t find a easy way to enable all users with Unified Messaging. So I exported a list of users from AD with the extra column that contains the business phone. (View –> Add/Remove Columns )

After adding the column, right click on the OU and export list to CSV. Open the export file in Excel and that should display four columns A through D in column E2 (row 1 is header) paste powershell script from below. Replacing Domain, Policy Name and OU (add more to the path if users are deeper then one OU)

=CONCATENATE("DOMAIN/OU/",A2,"' | Enable-UMMailbox -PinExpired $false -UMMailboxPolicy 'Policy NAME' -Extensions '",D2,"'")

Now drag using the copy square to the bottom. Now that column E has all of your scripts to enable all those users you can copy and paste them into your Exchange enabled powershell window. The safer method could be paste into a powershell script. Pretty simple little method to get all your users up with Voicemail. By the way this does send out emails with their new Voicemail PIN.

Help File Error - Navigation to the webpage was canceled

Just thought I would share a random tip if your opening a Help file (.chm file) and get this error:

	Navigation to the webpage was canceled What you can try: Retype the address

The help file can't access that location because a security setting is blocking it. Goto properties of the help file and click the unblock button.

Disk ID issues with disk cloning on Windows Clustering

In windows clustering Disk ID is used to determine disk uniqueness. If you are using a SAN or other utilities that clone a disk and try to add another disk that is already clustered storage your disk will come online as reserved. Cluster storage takes control of this disk assuming that its meant to be the same disk. This would and can be great if you need to restore a cluster disk that failed and have a disk clone of that disk. When it would get restored the cluster would match on the disk id which would allow the clustered application or other clustered services to work without reconfiguration. Where this can effect you if for example you have a SAN that supports disk cloning which would indeed copy the disk id. That disk was a sysprep based windows LUN and when attached to a cluster node will become reserved. To prevent this from happening you can change the disk id from within diskpart. Best way I found is attach your LUN to a non cluster member that way it won’t become reserved. To run the commands below you will need to have the disk in the online state. (replacing the disk number with yours).

 

DISKPART> rescan

Please wait while DiskPart scans your configuration...

DiskPart has finished scanning your configuration.

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online          139 GB      0 B
  Disk 2    Online          105 GB  1024 KB

DISKPART> select disk 2

Disk 2 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> uniqueid disk id=11170901

 

You can come up with your own disk id numbering method. Date based methods work pretty well for smaller environments. I have not yet automated this but plan to do so to make this more scalable. Once your disk ID is changed you can attach this disk and attach this to all your nodes in your cluster and when you run add clustered storage the disk rescan will find this to be a new disk now that the disk id is different then all of the other clustered storage.

Laptop uses WLAN before LAN

This comes up when I use my laptop on a dock where I have wireless enabled and Ethernet plugged into the dock. Its common for laptop users to want their wireless enabled while roaming. To fix this issue you can change which connection is used first.

Windows 2003/XP

1. Start Button
2. Control Panel
3. Network Connections

Windows 2008/7/Vista

1. Start Button
2. Control Panel
3. View Network Status and Tasks
4. Change adapter settings (Vista is Manage Network Connections)
5. To get the Advanced menu up press the ALT key

Once you are able to get to the advanced menu click on advanced settings.

In the upper section you can move a network connection up or down. That connection on the top will be tried first. In the case of the WLAN always online and plugging into dock once the LAN connection comes online WLAN will not be used until LAN connection is unplugged. This can be issues on servers or other computers with more then one network connections but more commonly laptops use two different network connections for the same network purpose.