A review of the Unified Communications Day conference

Yesterday I attended the first Unified Communications Day at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham, and I must say it was a very worthwhile event to attend.

The event was the brain child of Andrew Price and several of colleagues and it's goal was to bring together like minded people in the hope of networking and sharing knowledge on Unified Communications (Exchange/Office 365/Skype for Business) systems.

The UC Day team had managed to gather some very recognisable and well known names to attend and speak at the event as well as attracting the support of many big name companies to sponsor the event.

Attended the event for me meant a trip down south to Birmingham, but as the event venue (the National Motorcycle Museum) was only a 10 minutes taxi ride from the airport it was very accessible.

On arrival we collected our lanyards and badges and gathered for some pastries and coffee to start the day off, it was a nice way to ease into the day by catching up with old colleagues and friends also attending the event. The keynote speech by Andrew Price and Ian Woolner from the Microsoft Skype team. There was a nice buzz to the opening session of the day, you could tell that everyone was excited about what lay ahead.

Once the keynote was finished we all broke away to our sessions. There were three conference rooms dedicated to sessions throughout the day, one for Skype for Business, one of Office 365 and lastly one for Exchange. I chose to head to Steve Goodman's "Exchange 2016 Hybrid – Getting it right first time" session. Having followed Steve on Twitter and read many of his blog/tutorial posts over the years it was a nice chance to get to meet the man in the flesh and hear what he had to say. His session was very informative and gave a very good overview of what to do and what not to do in regards to a hybrid setup.

My second session of the day was Gary Steere's "Troubleshooting AutoDiscover and Availability in Exchange and Office 365" session. One of the best sessions of the day for me, Gary took the Autodiscover right back the basics and gave us some useful insights and tips on how to troubleshoot and set up Autodiscover within Exchange.

After a well deserved lunch break I chose to attend Justin Harris's "So You Think Your Directory is Ready for Office 365?" session. I came out of the session a little disappointed as I don't think the session went deep enough into the topic for the audience that attended. It was billed as an Intermediate session but I was still left a little wanting from it.

My next session was with Dave Stork on "Tooling Your Exchange", unfortunately the Demo Gods were against Dave during his session but none the less he pointed out some really good tips on troubleshooting Exchange and listed some great resources to use.

The penultimate session of the day for me was Michael Van Horenbeeck's "Exchange Hybrid Inside and Out" session. Michael is an energetic speaker and had the audience really engaged. He was struggling to cram all his content into the 45 minutes he had but he crammed alot into that session. Definately another session for me that was worth travelling for.

Nick Parlow's "Be Smart, Play Dumb; Exchange Design and Operations for Shared Services" session was the last of the day. Again Nick is an engaging speaker and had the audience intrigued with his knowledge and witty banter.

Overall, I feel the event was very worthwhile. I thoroughly enjoyed being able to learn from people who I regularly follow and use as mentors via Twitter and blog posts. It was also nice to get a chance to meet up with old colleagues and discuss issues and woes we have with clients, technology and life itself. The event was extremely well organised and laid out by Andrew and his team, here's hoping they will be able to organise the event again for next year and even more people make take the time to support it. We definitely need more events like this in the UK, there is an active and dedicated community willing to get involved and support events like this without a doubt. It's just a shame that there is a lack of woman within the IT community, would love to see some more females rolling up their sleeves and getting involved in the technical aspect of IT.

My Top Three Sessions

1. Michael Van Horenbeeck's "Exchange Hybrid Inside and Out" session
2. Gary Steere's "Troubleshooting AutoDiscover and Availability in Exchange and Office 365" session
3. Nick Parlow's "Be Smart, Play Dumb; Exchange Design and Operations for Shared Services" session

Unified Communications Day website - http://www.ucday.co.uk/

All ready for the event in my Windows 10 #UpgradeYourWorld t shirt

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Setup cannot continue with the upgrade because the “beremote()” process has open files.

I was applying a Service Pack to an Exchange server last week and came across this error message when running the setup wizard:

Setup cannot continue with the upgrade because the “beremote()” process has open files:

The server was being backed up with Symantec Backup Exec, this was causing an issue. I stopped the Backup Exec services and was able to continue with the service pack installation.

HP ILO 2 old firmware versions

I came across an old server that had a very out of date iLO version installed on it. Thankfully I had old copies of the firmware stored on my OneDrive I could use.

I thought it might be helpful to share the firmware files for others.


iLO2 version 2.07

iLO2 version 2.13

iLO2 version 2.23

iLO2 version 2.25

iLO2 version 2.27


I've found with the older versions you need to do small upgrades at a time for them to apply correctly. Jumping from a really out of date version to the latest version doesn't always work.

Firefox works best with iLO2 as well.

How to resolve the error ‘550 5.7.1 Unable to Relay’?

I recently came across an issue at work where one of our servers wasn't able to send any email alerts out. On troubleshooting the issue we were receiving a '550 5.7.1 Unable to relay' error message.

Duly checked the receive connectors within the Exchange Management GUI and everything looked okay but still the server wasn't able to relay. On launching the Exchange Management Powershell console we ran the command:

Get-ReceiveConnector "Receive Connector" | Get-ADPermission -User "NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON"

And noticed that instead of there being rights for "ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Recipient", there were rights for "ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Sender"

We issued the command:

Get-ReceiveConnector "Receive Connector" | Add-ADPermission -User "NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON" -ExtendedRights "ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Recipient"

And the server was able to relay messages once again. We haven't been able to determine, who or what changed the permissions on the connector but they'd been modified and the above command resolved our issue.

If you are trying to send notifications via your Exchange with an Anonymous connector ensure the following has extended rights:

NT AUTHORITY\Anonymous Logon {ms-Exch-SMTP-Submit}
NT AUTHORITY\Anonymous Logon {ms-Exch-Accept-Headers-Routing}
NT AUTHORITY\Anonymous Logon {ms-Exch-Bypass-Anti-Spam}
NT AUTHORITY\Anonymous Logon {ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Recipient}

Find the Collection Membership of a Specific Machine

There many times during the course of troubleshooting issues within SCCM where you will need to find out what Collections a specific client machine is a member of. Unfortunately there is no native way of finding that out, but you can use SQL and reports to help you find this information.

You can run the following SQL query against your SMS database within SQL Management Studio

select v_FullCollectionMembership.CollectionID As 'Collection ID', v_Collection.Name As 'Collection Name', v_R_System.Name0 As 'Machine Name' from v_FullCollectionMembership
JOIN v_R_System on v_FullCollectionMembership.ResourceID = v_R_System.ResourceID
JOIN v_Collection on v_FullCollectionMembership.CollectionID = v_Collection.CollectionID
Where v_R_System.Name0='ClientMachineName'

Replace ClientMachineName with the device name

You can create a custom report within SCCM. You would need to modify the query slightly, you would replace the ClientMachineName section with a parameter, like so:

select v_FullCollectionMembership.CollectionID As 'Collection ID', v_Collection.Name As 'Collection Name', v_R_System.Name0 As 'Machine Name' from v_FullCollectionMembership
JOIN v_R_System on v_FullCollectionMembership.ResourceID = v_R_System.ResourceID
JOIN v_Collection on v_FullCollectionMembership.CollectionID = v_Collection.CollectionID
Where v_R_System.Name0=@Comp

I would encapsulate the above query into one dataset and use that to populate the table results within the report. Then create a second dataset holding the SQL query:

select Name0 from v_R_System

That can be used to populate the options within your @Comp parameter. Your SQL report builder will look something like this:

The above SQL should work both on Configuration Manager 2007 and Configuration Manager 2012.

Uninstall Project 2013 with Configuration Manager

As I'm sure all of you have found there are lots of helpful articles out there about how to do a silent install of Microsoft Office/Project/Visio/etc through SCCM, but there is very little information out there on how to do an un-install silently. After much head scratching I finally found the method of doing so...

1. Navigate to the directory where your install files are located
2. Edit the config.xml file located within prjstd.ww (note this changes depending on the version of Project)
3. Remove the values from the Display level line and change it to look like below

4. Within your SCCM deployment modify the Uninstall file to read:
setup.exe /uninstall prjstd /config prjstd.ww/config.xml (again note the visio version name will differ depending on the edition)

5. Click OK and test the uninstallation via SCCM software centre