No properties available on the Exchange Org container in AD Sites and Services

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Scenario:

So I ran into an odd case this week where the customer could not see the properties of their Exchange Org container in AD Sites and Services. Not only could they not see it, it's icon, which should have been a folder icon, was actually the notorious Unknown icon. It looked as such:

ADS&S-IncorrectView2

When they right-clicked on the org container, they were able to click on properties, but it returned a blank window, similar to the following:

AS&S-BrokenProperties or ADS&S-DisplaySpecifierIssue2 (redacted customer's org name)

As I am not an AD engineer, I reached out to our Directory Services team and worked with an Engineer named Gary. After some research, he said he felt like the issue was with the Display Specifiers in AD. With that in mind, he had the customer take a look at the Display Specifiers in ADSI Edit. Sure enough, under CN=409, which is the Display Specifier for the English language, there was an exchange object called msExchOrganizationContainer-Display.

ADS&S-ADSIEditDisplaySpecifiers

Exchange objects in the Display Specifier are from legacy versions of exchange and are not supported. By the object existing, it was breaking the view of the org container in AD Sites and Services.

So what do we do about it?

Simply put, you delete the object in ADSI Edit. Once we deleted the object, and AD replicated, we closed and re-opened AD Sites and Services and the Exchange Org container then appeared with the proper folder icon.

ADS&S-CorrectView

The properties were then showing properly as well.

AS&S-FixedProperties

NOTES:

As always use extreme caution when deleting anything from ADSI Edit. One wrong move could render your entire AD and exchange environment useless.

Information on Display Specifiers can be found in MSDN at the following URL: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms675905(v=vs.85).aspx

Acknowledgements:

Special thanks to Gary Mudgett (garymu) on his help with this case. I had never heard of Display Specifiers prior to this and would likely have taken a really long time to figure this out. One Microsoft FTW.