11th MVP Award Rewarded

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I am actually on vacation, but as I sit here under the summer sun, toes in the pool and a cold drink within reach, I have been waiting for that email confirming that I’ve been awarded my 11th Microsoft MVP Award! As last year, I am being awarded in both the Teams and Copilot category. To say I’m humbled would be an understatement. Being part of the global Microsoft MVP community for over a decade now has been an incredible journey, filled with learning, sharing, speaking, and connecting with passionate technologists from every corner of the world. What is the Microsoft MVP Award? The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award is given to technology experts who share their knowledge and real-world expertise with communities. With fewer than 4,000 MVPs worldwide, it’s an honor to be part of such a vibrant and dedicated group. MVPs contribute through speaking engagements, writing, open-source contributions, and helping others online and offline. You can learn more about the progra...

Installing Exchange 2007 SP (And the continuing story of my Unified Messaging installation)

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I have now completed the OCS R2 Core installation. Voice, video, chat and document sharing (live meeting) now work like a charm. I had some initial problems with the old offline address book (I am replacing OCS 2007 with OCS R2 by removing the old installation and installing a new server) on the clients. But after 24 hours, all clients were synchronized and running properly.

Now I have moved on to installing a new Exchange 2007 SP1 server with the unified messaging role. This server will be added to an already existing Exchange Organization, and I thought it would be an easy task. Not so.....

The installation is pretty easy, and very few things can go wrong. But one of the things that can go wrong was stopping me from installing Exchange onto the server. The only problem was that the error message said: File not found ??? "An error occurred. The error code was 3221684226. The message was The system cannot find the file specified.".

Once again; The problem was a missing prerequisite on the server, but the prerequisite wizard did not catch the missing object. I believe it is because the Windows 2003 and 2008 servers are very different in what features and roles you deploy in a "basic" setup. And the Exchange 2007 wizard was really created for the 2003 server.

In the case of installing Exchange 2007 onto a Windows 2008 server, you also need to install the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) and Active Directory Domain Services Tools (run ServerManagerCmd -i RSAT-ADDS in command prompt). After adding these tools, I had no more problems during the installation of the UM role.