Auto Accept Agent

Now that the majority (almost 700) of our users are off groupWise and on Exchange 2003, manually handling calendars for Resources such as conference rooms is becoming a pain.

First, I looked at setting this in Outlook 2003, but found it too intensive based on the requirement to set permissions for each user that is going to send appointments to the resource and the Outlook client must be running (so one might have a dedicated desktop running Outlook with all resources).

Next, I looked at Exchange server auto accept agent . It's a COM application that runs on your Exchange server and handles the auto accept on it's own. Plus side is that it doesn't use Free/Busy generation to search scheduling, so it's faster, and also the resource doesn't have to be added to the meeting as a resource (. i.e. it still works if a users adds the recourse in the TO: field). Negatives are that you have a single XML configuration file that will apply to all Exchange accounts you configure to auto accept, so no configuration options down to the mailbox level and you must also set some AD values and permissions for it to work. (Although they supply a cscript to make this a little easier).

Check out the documentation here .

Disabled accounts and Exchange

Well, being relatively new to the world of Exchange, I was surprised to find it took more than a single click to resolve situations where with a disabled mailbox enabled account being re-enabled. I was expecting that once re-enabled, the mailbox would also be set to work, but it turns out there is a little more legwork needed.

Here is the Microsoft KB article on it, which is a bit windy. However, I found the comments at amset.info a little easier to digest.

This is probably not a big deal for most organizations, but since we are also using DirXML and GroupWise doesn't behave this way, I can see some headaches when NDS/eDir accounts are disabled previous to Exchange account access being transferred if needed.

DirXML populating

Now that the Novell DirXML Starter Pack is up and running, synching NDS/eDirectory accounts and Active Directory accounts, I needed a way to gradually add existing users to the sync as the desktop group migrated the client from GroupWise to Outlook 2003. Since this would be happening almost everyday for over a month, I didn't want to burn too much time in the iManager interface.

My solution was to first export the entire Active Directory forest as a comma delimited file using the Microsoft CSVDE tool. (Here's an overview from Guy Thomas.) I had previously populated the accounts with DirXML, but had removed the driver for a reconfiguring at one point. Desktop wanted the sync to be enabled as close as possible to the migration day anyway, so it actually helped that the accounts weren't entirely linked. I took the CSVDE export and narrowed it down to just the DN, the GUID and the SAMaccount name.

Next step was an import into UltraEdit (kedit is another good editor) and a save. This broke the DN down into fields for each aspect of the context, and allowed me to perform a search and replace on the first part of the DN with the SAMaccount name inside of Microsoft Excel. (This was necessary as the DirXML starter pack uses the Full Name attribute out of NDS/eDirectory for the Common Name in AD, and I was trying to populate the DirXML attribute on NDS/eDirectory).

This left me in the dilemma of how to get a comma delimited file into NDS/eDirectory, and although the developer version of the ICE command line is supposed to support imports from delimited files, I was never able to figure out the right combination of switches. Instead I found a Novell Consulting tool that takes a CSV and generates and LDIF file.

After a little more search and replace to correct syntax and issues such as an Organization unit (O) being and Organizational Unit (OU) in AD, I had a flat LDIF file of all my user accounts.

As the desktop support team serves up a list of user daily, I perform a find on my master list and stage an import LDIF file for ConsoleOne.