Category Archives: General Stuff

The US Senate committe on homeland security and governmental affairs released its report on its investigation of the US government response to Hurricane Katrina. This should be required reading for anyone involved in messaging or collaboration systems planning. It’s not very pleasant, but it does set out, quite clearly, where they think the problems lay.

Called out for special positive mention: the US Coast Guard. As a Marine, I am honor bound to make fun of the other armed services whenever possible. However, I’ll suspend that rule in the case of the Coast Guard.

What a great show! The sessions went well, the attendees enjoyed the sessions, and Nice is a fantastic place to visit. The big news was that PowerShell is now upon us, and that Exchange 12 is now officially named “Exchange Server 2007” (big surprise there; can’t believe that was actually under NDA).

There don’t seem to be any general repositories of Monad scripts for Exchange yet, so I’ve added a new “Monad” category to the Exchange Cookbook web site and will be posting Exchange-ish Monad stuff there. If you’re interested in Monad, you might want to grab the Cookbook RSS feed.

Educause and the National Cyber Security Alliance just posted the winning videos in its Computer Security Awareness Video Contest. Some of them are pretty funny (here’s my current favorite), and all of them are generally appropriate for most non-technical audiences.

Conventional presence (is Paul online? is Missy on the phone?) is useful. Extended presence (when is Peter free to talk? what does Devin’s OOF message say?) is even better. Microsoft has done a great job of delivering both of these capabilities in Outlook, Communicator, and the SharePoint twins. However, I want to kick it up a notch: I want to see Plazes-like

geo-presence information. Imagine being able to see a web part in your SharePoint team site that shows the (self-reported, opt-out) location of each of your team members. For my team, it’s small enough so that this would be more a curiosity than anything else, but for larger teams it would be terrific.

I already do something like this, updating my IM status message to say things like “DTW enroute SEA” or “Exch Conn – Orlando” so that people will know not only what I’m doing but where I am. It would be great to make this more automatic, though. You could probably do this easily enough by making Plazes queries for your team then plotting them on Virtual Earth or Google Maps.

Some differences I’ve noticed in my first day of toting the MDA. I’ll update this as I get more time under my belt with it.

• With SnapperMail on the Treo, I can hit the “mail” button twice and get mail– once to turn on the device if it’s off, and once more to tell SnapperMail to pick up the mail. There’s no equivalent on the MDA.
• Speaking of mail: why, oh why, does Pocket Outlook not allow you to easily navigate from a message you’re reading to the next or previous message in the message list? This drives me crazy. It’s a simple feature that every other mobile mail client I’ve ever used has.
• It drives me crazy that most apps don’t recognize the center button in the 5-way nav pad as “OK”. This makes one-handed navigation about 100x harder than it needs to be.
• DirectPush is awesome. 5 minutes of setup and I was wirelessly getting my mail– first via 802.11g here at the house, then via GPRS at the library. I called the chiropractor, made an appointment, put it into my calendar, and was delighted to see it in Outlook when I got home.
• I created some test IMAP accounts and needed to get rid of them, then I couldn’t figure out how to delete an email account. I found the answer, but it wasn’t intuitive– guess I’d better get used to tap-holding things to see what actions are available.
• The built-in apps have some limitations, e.g. not being able to create a task from the Calendar app, that bug me after my long years with DateBk+ on the Palm.It looks like PocketInformant might be worth a try (as will FlexMail, the same company’s Pocket Outlook replacement).
• Microsoft Voice Command is super cool. I love being able to have it read me my calendar. I don’t quite have it working with my Bluetooth headset yet, though.

What a cool idea! This guy wrote an Exchange event sink to take incoming attachments from Vonage’s voice mail service and transcode them using a codec natively supported by Windows Media Player on both the desktop and on mobile devices. I wish I’d thought of that.

I’m waiting for my new T-Mobile MDA to get here. In the meantime, I’ve gathered a few useful links:

• How to back up and restore ROM images on the Wizard (and still more on the same topic)
• The Wizard tweaks wiki
• This thread on essential free downloads for the Wizard
• A great review of the Cingular 8125 (same device, different carrier), with details on customization and tweaks
• A comprehensive set of notes from a guy who switched to the MDA from a Treo and wanted to customize the MDA for as much one-handed operation as possible

Before the device gets here, I need a new cert for my Exchange FE (some WM5 devices don’t like self-signed certs), and I have a few dozen things to download to prep the install 🙂 In particular, my first step will probably be to put an MSFP ROM on the device so I can use DirectPush. That will be invaluable when I travel.

Update: just ordered a 2GB miniSD card for the MDA, which got here about 30 minutes ago. I’m backing up the ROMs right now preparatory to installing the MSFP AKU2 image.

Well, mine are, anyway. (For once, I got this done before Jim McBee… yay me!) The sessions:

• EXC04, Cookbook Reloaded: Cool Exchange Scripting with Monad: a 200-level introduction to the new Monad shell and how you can use it with both Exchange 2003 and Exchange 12.
• EXC10, Improving Your Message Security: an overview of what CIA really means and how to get better confidentiality and integrity for your Exchange environment. One slide on E12 security features.
• EXC17, Using Continuous Backup: coverage of storage- and host-based continuous backup solutions for Exchange, including a discussion of local continuous replication (LCR) and clustered continuous replication (CCR) in Exchange 12.

Wow, busy day yesterday! I got up early, hit the hotel gym (man, I love those elliptical machines!), had a huge breakfast with Devin and Missy, and hit my room. I say “my room” because I was in it for three sessions back-to-back: one on continuous backup, one on Exchange security, and one on scripting with Monad. All three were well attended, and I got a ton of questions in each session. Some of the questions were pretty thought-provoking, too, which is always fun.
Atypically, I didn’t spend much time on the exhibit floor; I went to Devin’s Sender ID session (which I’ll be delivering in Nice), and we had a short book signing at the show bookstore. (Thanks to those of you who came by!) I missed the MVP get-together because I had planned what I thought would be a short trip via water taxi to Epcot for a souvenir run. Turns out that the water taxi takes you to the Epcot entrance on the opposite side of the lagoon from the front gate, and there’s no gift shop there. By the time I made it back from the hotel, I was too tired to do anything but order room service (which was excellent) and start working on the list of session submissions for the fall Exchange Connections show. If you’ve submitted proposals, I hope to let you hear something back by week’s end.
A couple of observations: first, I was surprised that no one in any of my 3 sessions (close to 400 people in total) was running 5.5. That’s a very good sign. There was a lot of interest in Monad, with tons of questions about what specific tools the Exchange team would be shipping in beta 2. Cemaphore and Mimosa have gained a lot of name recognition since the fall San Diego show. Finally, I didn’t win the Harley Sportster that the show organizers gave away. Maybe next time…

Here’s an interesting idea: a small, silent spam-filtering appliance for the home. The folks at SpamCube may be on to something here– if, that is, their filtering works well. For $150 MSRP, it’s probably worth a good look, especially if their filtering works. (Their site does some unfortunate handwaving about “AI“, which always makes me suspicious!)

Morgan Stanley is in the news again because one of its former employees (who coincidentally was central in the Perelman affair) is suing for wrongful termination. Messaging Pipeline says it best:

A saga of inappropriate, incompetent, and potentially illegal conduct continues to unfold at Morgan Stanley, with the company’s own E-mail trail at the center of it all.

Man, I hate it when that happens. The plaintiff, Arthur Riel, claims that he was terminated after pointing out inappropriate emails, including requests by the CTO to fix things so no one except the CEO’s direct reports could email him. The company claims that Riel misused his access as head of the company’s archiving project to spy on others. I don’t know who’s right, but it’s clear that a) this case will get uglier before it’s resolved; b) there are probably other similar Lurking Horrors waiting in other companies’ archiving and retention efforts; and c) if I were a corporate counsel I’d be boning up on messaging case law.