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Don't adjust your mind - it's reality that is malfunctioning

ExOleDB problems on Exchange 2007

If you are using the ExOleDB provider on Exchange 2007 it might fail with this error message:

Error : Provider cannot be found. it may not be properly installed. / 800A0E7A / ADODB.Connection

I know of two errors which can cause this message:

  • Your are trying to access the ExOleDB provider from a 32bit process. Exchange 2007 is completely 64bit. This typically breaks old Visual Basic programs or scripts running under the 32bit version of the Windows Scripting Host. To check this, open the Task manager and search for the process name under the "Processes" tab. If the process name is appended with a *32, it runs as a 32bit process.
  • The COM registration of the ExOleDB provider is messed up. This can be fixed by calling Regsvr32 "C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\bin\exodbprx.dll".

Posted by Henning Krause on Monday, May 19, 2008 4:19 PM, last modified on Tuesday, July 26, 2011 9:56 PM
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A search on a calendar folder can not span more than 732 days

More Information

A SEARCH on an Exchange calendar folder with a constraint of a begin and an end date is called an expansion query. This means, that all recurring appointments are expanded, and each instance is returned in the query. (See Searching Calendar Folders with WebDAV on MSDN for more information. The article specifically targets the WebDAV  protocol, but the issue explained here applies to the ExOleDB provider as well).

An example of such a query is displayed below.

If you run this query and use values for the start and end properties where the difference between start and end is greater than 732 days, you get the following error:

Error while processing WHERE clause in the SQL statement.

Example

An example of such an expansion query might look like this:

    1 SEARCH /exchange/~username/calendar/ HTTP/1.1

    2 Host: www.example.com

    3 Content-Type: text/xml

    4 

    5 <?xmlversion="1.0"?>

    6 <g:searchrequestxmlns:g="DAV:">

    7   <g:sql>

    8     Select "urn:schemas:calendar:location", "urn:schemas:httpmail:subject",

    9     "urn:schemas:calendar:dtstart", "urn:schemas:calendar:dtend",

   10     "urn:schemas:calendar:busystatus", "urn:schemas:calendar:instancetype"

   11     FROM Scope('SHALLOW TRAVERSAL OF ""') WHERE

   12     "DAV:contentclass" = 'urn:content-classes:appointment'

   13     AND "urn:schemas:calendar:dtstart" &gt; CAST("2005-01-01T00:00:00Z" AS 'dateTime.tz')

   14     AND "urn:schemas:calendar:dtend" &lt; CAST("2006-01-01T00:00:00Z" AS 'dateTime.tz')

   15     ORDER BY "urn:schemas:calendar:dtstart" ASC

   16   </g:sql>

   17 </g:searchrequest>

Workaround

To work around this problem, do your search in multiple steps, with a time span of two years or less.

Status

This is a known limitation in the Exchange Server: Expansion queries are limited to a time span of two leap years.

Posted by Henning Krause on Thursday, April 13, 2006 12:00 AM, last modified on Thursday, April 13, 2006 12:00 PM
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Iterating through all mailboxes in an Exchange 2000/2003 organization

Description [Updated]

Updates

  • 2008-07-23: Corrected intra-site links.

One question that came up lately in the newsgroups is: How can I find messages containing certain keywords in the mailboxes of all users in my organization?

This scenario is not directly supported by Exchange. All one can do is to search each mailbox individually.

You must follow these steps to do the search over all mailboxes:

  1. Enumerate the users which have a mailbox. Essentially, these are the users appearing on the global address list. See How to get the Global Address List programatically for more information on how to do this.
  2. Build the mailbox url which can be used to access the mailbox via WebDAV or ExOleDB. See Get the WebDAV url for an Exchange 2000/2003 mailbox on how to do this. If you are using the ExOleDB provider or want to use the administrative virtual root instead, see the remarks section for more information.
  3. Once you have the url for the mailbox you can start accessing it. If you must support different languages, see Getting Well-Known Mailbox Folder URLs on MSDN to get the url of the default folders.
  4. If you are using WebDAV and have Form-based-authentication enabled on your server, you must do a manual logon to the mailbox. See Access the Exchange store via WebDAV with Form-Based-Authentication turned on.

Remarks

Permissions

Depending on how you want to access the mailboxes, you need different permissions:

  • If you are using the normal urls (e.g. http://myserver/exchange/username), you need access permissions to all mailboxes on the MAPI level. See HOWTO: Grant access to all mailboxes on a mailbox store to a special account on how to do this. If you have more than one mailbox store, you should grant the necessary permissions on each mailbox store. To simplify this process, you could also grant the "Send as" and "Receive as" permission on the Administrative Groups container via ADSIEdit.msc instead of each mailbox store.
  • You can also use the administrative virtual root. This method is used by the Exchange Systems manager, and it is available via WebDAV and ExOleDB. The normal MAPI permissions are completely ignored when using this method, but an administrative account is required to use this method (See Working with Store Permissions in Microsoft Exchange 2000 and 2003 on Technet for more information on this topic).

Mailbox urls

  • If you are using WebDAV to access the store, you can simply build the mailbox url based on the article Get the WebDAV url for an Exchange 2000/2003 mailbox. To use the administrative root instead, modify the url from http://myserver/exchange/mailboxname to http://myserver/exadmin/admin/<dsndomainname>/mbx/<mailboxname>. You must replace the <dnsdomainname> with the primary smtp domain name of your organization.
  • If you are using ExOleDB, you must modify the address from http://myserver/exchange/mailboxname to file://./backofficestorage/<dnsdomainname>/mbx/<mailboxname>. To use the administrative virtual root, change this url to file://./backofficestorage/admin/<dnsdomainname>/mbx/<mailboxname>.

Posted by Henning Krause on Thursday, April 13, 2006 12:00 AM, last modified on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 10:59 PM
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