Exchange 2010 OWA Out of Office - "Sorry! We're having trouble processing your request at the moment. Please try again in a few minutes."

Had an issue where whenever a user attempted to access their Out of Office section in OWA 2010 they received an the following error when saving it:

"Sorry! We're having trouble processing your request at the moment. Please try again in a few minutes."

In this particular instance, Exchange 2010 is running on a 2012 server

Eventually tracked the issue down to certain applications pools in IIS being assigned to .net v4 instead of v2

To check this out yourself, open IIS and go to "application pools"

Look in the list to see what version .NET Framework is set to - in particular look at the highlighted ones below.

"DefaultAppPool", "MSExchangeECPAppPool" and "MSExchangeOWACalendarAppPool"

When I initially looked at IIS, these were set to v4.0. I double clicked on the them and changed them back to v2.0 as below

This instantly resolved my issue!

Windows 10 appearing to briefly lose connection when using a mapped drive

A clients office has recently started to upgrade to Windows 10 from Windows 7

They've been running a couple of machines with 10 to check all works OK with their software. The machines which were upgraded started to develop a strange fault; Windows would report that the connection to the mapped drives had dropped

At face value it looked like the problem was that the network had a fault, potentially a failing switch, NIC or cable but the problem persisted after changing ports and switches.

Fast forward through more investigation and the problem was eventually tracked down to how the mapped drive was being made using Group Policy

For some reason, if the drive is mapped using the CREATE option then Windows 10 appears to drop the mapped drive connection (for only a brief moment) to re-create it again. The Windows 7 PCs don't seem to mind this and it doesn't cause any problems

The resolution was simply to change the mapping from CREATE to UPDATE and the problem was solved

Installing Sage Accounts 2010 on Windows 10

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to install Sage Accounts 2010 then you'll probably see that installing it isn't as easy as you may think. When you run the installation, Windows 10 will stop it and not let you install.

Right click on the installer and select "Run as Administrator" I hear you cry! Alas, that won't work either.

Disable UAC? Nope

To get around it, run a command prompt as an administrator and then launch the installation from here - problem solved

You may also find that updates won't automatically download - in which case you'll need to log into the Sage website and download them manually. Use the above process again to run the updates

Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) The namespace \root\microsoft\bits doesn't exist on the server RTS.

Recently we've been converting a number of physical machines to virtual ones - and to help the process we've been using the MVMC wizard.

One of the error messages that we often see is:

The namespace \root\Microsoft\bits doesn't exist on the server RTS.

Why? Because I always forget to install the BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) feature before I start! 

So to fix this error, simply install this as a feature making sure to select the compact server as an option and it should resolve it for you