Exchange 2013 migration options are opening soon and ORF 5.1 with support for the next-generation Exchange platform will arrive just in time to fill in your need for spam protection.

In our three-part series, we talk about the changes the new Exchange version brings to ORF.

This finishing article of the series describes how ORF has changed to meet the challenges of Exchange 2013.

ORF changes that may directly affect you

• The Replay Directory of Exchange is not available under standalone Exchange 2013 Client Access Server (CAS) installations. In a CAS-only setup, ORF will use SMTP as fallback option for sending emails. By default, emails will be sent to 127.0.0.1:25. If you have no receive connector listening at that address and port, make sure to point ORF toward a working SMTP server on the System / Microsoft Exchange page of the Administration Tool.
• To prevent the new Exchange Health Monitoring email probes from clogging up the ORF logs, the ORF Transport Agents skip reporting emails sent to the system Health Monitoring mailboxes. The email addresses for these mailboxes are retrieved during ORF installation and upgrades. The addresses might change over time — introducing new mailbox databases and similar changes may require updating this address list. If it comes to that, just run “orfmexhelper” (see next bullet point) with the “-updatehealtmonitoring” switch.
• The ORF Transport Agent Installer (orfainst.exe) has been renamed to “ORF Exchange Helper” (orfmexhelper.exe) and requires two further binaries to work (orfmexhelper2.exe and orfmexhelper4.exe), depending on the Exchange platform.

Changes under the hood

• ORF Transport Agents now adapt to the locally available Exchange roles and hook the appropriate events only. This means you will receive only Before Arrival events in the log under Exchange 2013 CAS and only On Arrival ones under Exchange 2013 Mailbox Server.
• The Administration Tool will show “N/A” for the status of the ORF Routing Agent under Exchange 2013 CAS, because routing agents cannot be installed under CAS.
• The Transport Agent health status shown under a single-server (mixed) CAS and Mailbox Server installation by the Administration Tool is now a compound one, because you actually have two SMTP Receive Agents, one under CAS and one under Mailbox Server. The status will be “healthy” only if both SMTP Receive Agents are in healthy status. The same compund status is returned by the “-status” switch of the Exchange Helper.
• The ORF Exchange Helper now detects the local Exchange platform and performs agent installation, uninstallation and status query according to the available roles and Exchange version installed.
• The list of Exchange services to be restarted upon Transport Agent operations now depend on the Exchange 2013 roles you have installed locally. All components in ORF have been updated to deal with this change. The ORF Exchange Helper will specifically tell you what services to restart e.g. on reinstalling agents.
• We have extended the ORF Setup, the Administration Tool and the ORF logs with notices to be displayed if the available Exchange roles limit ORF’s functionality in any way. You may receive such notification under standalone Exchange 2013 CAS and Mailbox Server installations.
• Different Transport Agent binaries are used under Exchange 2013 (orftagent15.dll) and previous Exchange versions (orftagent.dll).

The first beta release of ORF 5.1 is just around the corner: stay tuned for more ORF 5.1 goodies!