OWA
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Outlook Web Access stops working after renewing 3rd party Certificate
We had an interesting issue this week. We renewed our Exchange certificate with a 3rd party vendor. Installed the certificate on Exchange and ISA Server. OWA access from the internet stopped working after we installed the certificates. We tested OWA internally and it worked which pointed to something on the ISA server. After a long investigation we found the issue to be ISA running on Windows 2003 which is not compatible with the Secure Hash Algorithm 2 (SHA2) family of hashing algorithms that the certificates from our 3rd party cert provider issues. Microsoft has a hotfix available to get around this. We were able to access OWA from the internet…
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Outlook Web Access not displaying correctly when using IE 10 and Exchange 2003
Tonight I was busy patching my servers for the monthly scheduled patch cycle and tested Outlook Web Access from my home PC. I received the results below. After almost having a miniature heart attack, I tested Outlook Web Access from my work laptop (IE 8) and home PC using Chrome. OWA displayed and functioned correctly as expected. I then checked the IE versions. Home PC = IE 10 (Recently upgraded) Work Laptop = IE 8 After a quick search on the internet I found an article by Pete Long who posted a work around on his blog. It seems like IE 10 is…
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How to reset IIS folders on an Exchange 2003 server
Sometimes IIS or IIS permissions go corrupt or just leave the planet for different reasons. When you need to delete and recreate these folders do the following… Back up the IIS Metabase on your Exchange Server: Start IIS Manager. Right click the Default Website, choose All Tasks, and click Save Configuration to a File. Now delete the OWA virtual directories: Right click Exadmin and click Delete. When prompted if you are sure click Yes. Now delete the below listed virtual directories: Exchange ExchWeb Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync OMA Public Close the IIS Manager. Open the command prompt. Change to (driveletter:)inetpubadminscripts Type adsutil, and hit Enter. Click Yes when prompted to register CScript as your default host for VBscript and then click…
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Reporting on OWA for Exchange 2003
I recently received a request to report on OWA for a 2003 Exchange environment. Needless to say without any 3rd party tools you are kind of left in the dark. However, I found the below website that assisted me with pulling some stats from the IIS logs using Log Parser 2.2 and 2 SQL scripts. First browse to this website and follow the instructions. The site will give you 99% of the information you need to pull the reports. There was one issue that they failed to mention though. How do I export the data to CSV??? Here is a screenshot of how the command looks like: (you need to add -o:CSV…
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Outlook Web Access is not showing the same content as in Outlook
I had a very interesting problem today that I’ve never experienced before with Exchange 2003 and OWA. Some users advised that when in OWA the mail shown is a month old and no new mail is shown in OWA newer than the previous month. All e-mail is visible and accessible in Outlook though. I logged onto OWA using the user’s credentials and noted the same. I then saw that the view in OWA is set to messages (which should show all messages) as per below: I then chose unread messages (which shows unread mail but not necessarily all or recent mail) as per below: This showed all unread mail but not the results we…