Category Archives: General Stuff

On March 1, Microsoft announced that it was making Exchange 12 beta 1 available to TechNet and MSDN subscribers as a community technology preview (CTP). When beta 1 first began, late last year, it was a private beta restricted to about 1400 Microsoft customers, all of whom had to be nominated by Microsoft employees. MVPs and a few third-party developers were also nominated, but—even including participants in the Technology Adoption Program (TAP)—only a relative handful of the tens of thousands of Exchange-using sites were in on the beta. That’s about to change dramatically, since there are more than 200,000 TechNet and MSDN subscribers, all of whom will have access to beta 1.

This isn’t the first time Microsoft’s offered a CTP; you may remember that Exchange 2003 SP2 was released as a CTP in August 2005. As with the SP2 CTP, the Exchange 12 CTP is being released so customers can get familiar with it in their own environments. It’s not supported for production use (obviously), and Microsoft has already told beta 1 customers that they won’t be able to upgrade from beta 1 directly to the released version.

As part of the CTP announcement, the product team also announced that beta 2, coming later this year, will be a public beta, so we’ll all be able to discuss it to our hearts’ content. Until then, both reviewers (which technically means me) and CTP participants are bound by the relevant NDAs and EULAs.

One thing that’s no longer under NDA: Microsoft’s finally starting to talk publicly about the new continuous replication features in Exchange 12. There are two flavors of continuous replication: local continuous replication (LCR) copies transaction log data to a second local volume, essentially giving you a protected local copy of your data. Clustered continuous replication (CCR) is cooler; with CCR, cluster nodes don’t have to share disk resources, meaning that geographically dispersed clusters get much, much easier to design and deploy. Look for more on LCR and CCR in future columns.

Interestingly, the CTP builds will be made available in both 32- and 64-bit versions. This is a smart move on Microsoft’s part, because customers that haven’t decided on their forward path from Exchange 2000 (or even Exchange 5.5) will be able to evaluate Exchange 12 features (if only in an early state) on the hardware they already have. I don’t expect any changes in their previous commitment to release the production version of Exchange 12 as a 64-bit-only product, though.

MSDN subscribers can download the Exchange 12 CTP starting today, while TechNet subscribers will get the bits as part of their March delivery. If you’re not already a subscriber to one of these two programs, you can subscribe through Microsoft’s web site.

Microsoft today released the new version of their Application Analyzer tool for Lotus Domino applications. It features a new UI, better reporting, and a customizable XML-based system for customizing the analysis it does and the ensuing recommendations. This version of the tool uses the four-phase process that MS has defined and refined since the last App Analyzer release. There’s also an accompanying best practices guide. I’m looking forward to seeing customer feedback on these tools; the previous versions of the app analyzer had some shortcomings that I hope the new version fully addresses. In particular, I’m interested in seeing Paul Mooney‘s take on it.

Microsoft is making two pretty interesting announcements today. Stay tuned for more details.

Update: now you know what the first one is.

Windows IT Pro is now accepting session proposals for the Fall 2006 Exchange Connections conference. We’re heading to Las Vegas for the premier Exchange technical conference, and we’d like to hear from you! We expect the fall event to have a healthy dose of Exchange 12 content, plus our continued emphasis on real-world solutions for Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000/2003 administrators. This year, I’m co-chairing the show along with Kieran McCorry and Kevin Laahs, both of HP.

If you’re interested in speaking at the show, send your abstracts to me by March 21. We want proposals for regular 75-minute sessions as well as 1/2 day and full day pre-conference and post-conference sessions. Note that we have a limited number of speaking slots, and all participants must be able to present a minimum of three 75-minute sessions.

• Send a minimum of 3 session proposals (4 or 5 is ideal for discussion purposes)
• Include a short bio with your session proposals; if you have prior speaking experience, please include it
• Include any additional pre- or post-con session proposals, if applicable

Please adhere to the March 21 deadline as we need to make speaker and session selections right away.

The Lazy Admin has a great piece on the use of MSH profiles with Monad. If you’re exploring Monad, you should check it out, since profiles are the primary customization method for your interactive shell sessions.

Sweet! I just noticed this article on the Exchange team blog– RSA’s SecurID product can now be made to support Direct Push. This is a big win, because many organizations that want to deploy Direct Push also want strong 2-factor authentication.

Actually, I blogged about this on Monday morning, but my local copy of Ecto ate the post and just spit it back out this morning.

Terry Myerson drops science on public folders in Exchange 12 over at the Exchange team blog. High points: public folders will be supported until at least 2016, new apps should use the .NET framework and Windows SharePoint Services v3, and with Outlook 2007 + Exchange 12, you don’t need PFs for free/busy. (Interestingly, I don’t think that last tidbit has been publicly disclosed before Terry’s post).

Wow, I love Monad. That’s all I have to say about that.

Somehow I missed this, but MS last week announced the impending availability of a Windows Mobile version of Office Communicator. This may be the app that gets me to carry a Windows Mobile 5.0 device full-time, because having in-pocket access to presence, VoIP, and extended presence data for my contacts would be incredibly valuable. I’ll post more once I get the bits.

I’m working on my Exchange Connections presentation on Monad. There’s already a good bit of information out there (including the official Monad team blog), but I’m interested in knowing what you want to know about Monad and Exchange. Leave feedback in the comments, and whenever possible I’ll work the answers into my presentation.

I’ve been married for nearly 15 years. During that time, I have never taken a vacation wherein I didn’t do some kind of work. Sad but true! Actually, “sad” isn’t quite the right word; the freedom to work from the road has let me spend a lot more time traveling with my family than if I had a job that required physical presence in a defined location. However, I’m breaking the mold: for the next seven days, I’ll be cruising the Caribbean with no laptop, and thus no email. I will have my trusty Treo, but it only works in 3 of the places we’re going to, and I’m mostly taking it so we can call the kids to see how they’re doing. I’ve already turned in my columns for next week, along with some other stuff that needed doing, so I’m free as a bird until 2/13. See you then!

This is interesting: Computerworld’s running a story saying that IBM has promised to make good its years of benign neglect by shipping a Mac Notes client that has feature parity with Windows. As someone who had to suffer through writing applications for the Mac Notes clients back in the day, I say “it’s about time”. Now, Microsoft: how about improving SharePoint support for Mac OS X?

Forbes Magazine has an interesting, if short, interview with Exchange sensei Tony Redmond. For those of you just stepping out of the spaceship, Tony is an ex-DEC, ex-Compaq messaging specialist with an incredibly deep background on messaging in general and Exchange in particular; he’s also a VP and CTO of the services division at HP.

Ever want to know how to effectively use limited user accounts (LUA) to run on Windows XP? Me too. Fortunately, MS just released a white paper that details what LUA is (and isn’t) and how to implement it on XP desktops. This is very valuable guidance– try it yourself and you’ll see what I mean.

It’s not often that I can praise Toledo (which I live near) as a technology leader. However, in yesterday’s Blade, a story by Mark Reiter gives me something legit to praise: the local federal district court is using iPods to pass out evidence to defendants for review. I’ve got a call in to Jeff Helmick, who’s quoted in the story, to ask some follow-up questions; check back here for an update.