TIPS & TRICKS: Make Sure 'Display Name' Is Populated

Learned something new today about Exchange. Apparently, the Display Name field holds much more significance than I originally thought. When searching for users to create a new profile (i.e. hitting Check Name) in Outlook setup, it actually relies on the Display Name field to find the appropriate user in the Global Address List. I used to think that giving it the correct username was enough.

In the future, I will make sure to have Display Name filled out appropriately and not leave it blank.

TIPS & TRICKS: Transferring Outlook 2007 AutoComplete Email Addresses to Outlook 2010

Most people probably don't know that Outlook saves frequently used email addresses, which is completely separate from Outlook Contacts. Those addresses are very useful to migrate along with your other Outlook files over to Outlook 2010.

There are 3rd party tools out there that help to do the migration. But, I'm always one to try to use native tools first, as long as they work well. I found this tool from Microsoft that seems to work well:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/980542#ImportNK2Files_Outlook

In addition, to this being a useful tool, the article also points out that Outlook 2010 no longer uses a .NK2 file to store these frequently used addresses. I didn't figure out where Outlook 2010 now stores these addresses. Perhaps there's some tie-in in the future to Microsoft's Live Services, in which case I would expect it to be in some sort of web-enabled file (i.e. XML or similar).

One thing I haven't figure out is if the machine is in a domain/Exchange, then what happens to those names that are not complete email addresses because of Exchange resolution in Outlook 2007. Do those names (i.e. usernames) get imported and become duplicates? I just did this for someone. We'll find out soon enough.

TIPS & TRICKS: Save As Popup for Outlook 2010

User got a new MacBook Pro on which I installed Bootcamp and Parallels. User boots into OS X, uses Parallels to start the Bootcamp partition of Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit. On that Windows 7 installation is Office 2010. In migrating over the user's almost 10GB worth of email data, I suggested we dump all of that archived email into Exchange. That's a lot of email data, I know. But, we had the space and figured we'd give it a go.

User opens up his PST files in Outlook 2010 and starts to move things into the Exchange area. After the first 1+ GB of data, he starts to get this window:



This annoying popup that came up every few minutes or so. Here are the things I tried:

- I checked to see if this would happen in another user's account on the same machine. It did not.

- I had him login to another machine to see if the problem would occur. It did not.

- I had him try just accepting the download for awhile. It did not stop.

- I created another Outlook profile to see if would continue. It did not.

- I tried to reinstall Outlook to see if it would stop the problem. It did not.

- I deleted his entire Windows user profile and created a new profile to see if it would stop the popups. It did not.

- Finally, I found this thread online: http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/outlooksend/thread/5bf5f5a4-e36b-48f0-a28c-eaa94518bbf2

Basically, the problem is probably a combination of one or more email messages in his account that is trying to interact with Microsoft's new Social Connector called People Pane. Since he didn't need this feature, I disabled it in Outlook > View > People Pane > Off. The popups all went away.

I guess it's one of those things where old data meets new software.

TIPS & TRICKS: Blackberry Enterprise Activation Duplicates

A user with a Blackberry connecting up to our Blackberry Enterprise Server was having trouble with syncing between Exchange and her mobile device. The device was originally configured over the wireless without ever plugging in to a machine and/or any desktop software. Everything had been functioning normally until recently. The Blackberry was not syncing over new appointments or contacts, though email was flowing normally. One other aspect was that there was an assistant to the user who also helped enter in contacts and appointments to the user's Exchange account. The appointments and contacts entered by the assistant were also not syncing onto the Blackberry. However, the information was showing up fine in the Exchange account through both Outlook Web Access and Outlook on a Windows machine.

One possible reason was that Exchange accounts were recently migrated from one store to another. A possible fix for this problem was to rerun an Blackberry Enterprise Activation to see if the Blackberry would reestablish the sync for contacts and calendar items. This did not work. The problem persisted.

The most drastic solution would be to wipe the Blackberry and rerun the Blackberry Enterprise Activation as if the Blackberry just came from the factory. However, I wanted to avoid this as the user had data residing on the Blackberry that was not backed up, especially since we did not create a connection between the Blackberry and any desktop software.

I finally figured out that there were duplicate contact lists and calendar lists. Somehow the Blackberry lost connection to the BES and when it did reestablish itself, it did not recognize that there was an existing list of contact items and calendar items. This is why there were only duplicates on the Blackberry, but not inside of Exchange. After some testing, I figured out which one of the calendar and contact lists were the actively synced lists and which were the ones with the lost connection. I configured the contact and calendar lists that lost the sync connection to no longer display (I may have even found a way to delete those lists after further investigation). This removed the duplicates. it's likely that a wipe and running of Enterprise Activation would have solved this problem. But, since we needed to find a more manual method, configuring the broken lists of contacts and calendars did the trick this time around.

Here's where I got my inspiration this time around:

http://www.blackberryforums.com/bes-admin-corner/122095-duplicate-contacts-after-new-enterprise-activation.html

Hope this helps you. Happy Computing.