Rich Dodson

Most of my September was spent concentrating on replacing Vanderbilt’s current email archiving product with a new email archiving solution.
During one week of the month, I worked with a contractor who assisted with the implementation of the new archiving solution. Our plan was to set up the new application within an active/passive clustered windows server 2008 environment.
We were able to implement the new solution but were unable to take advantage of the clustered environment due to some unforeseen OS problems. We decided to carry on with a single server and were able to create a pilot group which included me, two other co-workers and two test user accounts.
There were some pitfalls along the way, but we were able to successfully provision and archive user’s email and retrieve the emails via OWA and the Outlook client add-in.
The last week of September was spent attending on-site training sessions that were geared towards installing, administrating and troubleshooting the new archive solution.
All in all I feel that Vanderbilt is headed in the right direction by replacing our legacy archiving system with the new archiving solution and I look forward to continuing this project and actually migrating users from our legacy system to the new.

July has been a very busy month for the Exchange Team here at Vanderbilt. One of the largest aspects of moving forward with Exchange 2007 is migrating people from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. After saying that, I have had the honor of migrating over 1300 people (with the help of powershell of course) this month alone. The aforementioned number not only included E2K3 users but also IMAP users.
I was also able to help introduce and implement the introduction of SMTP authentication services within the E2K7 environment, which by the way uses TLS port 587.
My next task for the month of July was to introduce E2K7 allowed relay services. This task was accommodated by introducing two network load balanced E2K7 Edge servers (behind an F5), but not Edge servers in the traditional sense. These Edge servers are being used strictly as relay services with the Edge’s having no knowledge of AD or the HUBs. To put it simply, the role was introduced, the receive connectors were set to allow anonymous users and were restricted based on IP. I then configured a send connector that smart hosts to a Proof Point appliance.
I was also involved with two companies that recently became part of the Vanderbilt Medical Group and whose email needed to be forwarded from their old email domain to the Vanderbilt.edu email domain. Not only that, but close to 150 email accounts had to be created in the E2K7 environment in order to accommodate all of their new email.
Finally, the archive project is finally coming into full swing. We are currently planning on migrating from a legacy email archive product to a new email archive product. This in its self will probably take up most of my time in the Month of August.

Well my first official week with App Hosting started on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009. I finally have everything moved over from my ole’ home at NCS, and into my new abode here at the University. With regards to Acorns, so far so good. 

There is plenty to do with regards to Exchange 2007/2003, OCS, Unified Communications and the prospect of a new email archiving application. Here’s to the future.

‘Nuff said.