Category Archives: General Stuff

This week I’m on the road in Boston and New York City, presenting the second and third iterations of the Microsoft “Optimizing Collaborations and Communications” roadshow that I wrote about last week. Yesterday’s event was well attended, and the attendees asked some tough questions about Microsoft’s C&C strategy. However, the session evaluation results indicate that they liked the answers they were hearing. MS’ message– that you can augment Notes/Domino installations by adding technologies that drive better business value– seems to be resonating with these folks. Today, I go to Manhattan via the Acela (which I’ll blog about later, or maybe during), then tomorrow it’s St Paddy’s Day in the Big Apple. I didn’t bring anything green, so I need to do some shopping lest I face the wrath of the Irish.

The AP is reporting that Microsoft is buying Groove, which I think is great news. Groove adds some critical capacity to Office System and SharePoint. Lots of other folks will be analyzing this in more detail. The most interesting detail to me is that the AP’s report says that Ray Ozzie is going to be the new Microsoft chief technology officer. That certainly raises some very interesting possibilities.

I’m supposed to be working on something else, but I couldn’t resist the urge to answer Ed’s post on the Microsoft Office Communicator launch, which in turn is in response to this Microsoft Monitor piece (which, by the way, contains a couple of errors).

First, let’s consider public IM connectivity. Right now, if you want to interoperate with (say) AOL, you have to install AIM or an AIM-compatible client on your desktops… at which point you lose the security and compliance capabilities that Live Communications Server and Sametime/Workplace both offer. On the other hand, if you have a genuine business need for public IM connectivity, you can use the PIC feature of Live Communications Server to interoperate (selectively) with MSN Messenger, AIM, and Yahoo! Messenger users and still maintain both security and compliance. It’s true that PIC is currently priced as a subscription. Ask yourself this: why did AOL suddenly decide to allow a competitor to interoperate? Normally their MO is to break interoperating clients as soon as they can get away with it. Are they getting a cut of the revenue? I don’t know, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

Next, let’s take Ed’s point that the Microsoft collaboration platform has more than one piece (he actually uses the phrase “jigsaw puzzle”). Back in the day, Microsoft’s claim was simple: Exchange does it all. They have since repented of that, instead delivering a broad suite of collaboration and communication tools that you can mix and match. You can deploy them together or separately. If you don’t need, e.g., SharePoint Portal Server, fine– don’t buy it. There’s significant stand-alone value in each of the components. In fact, I’m seeing a groundswell of interest in Live Meeting and Live Communication Server deployment among customers that aren’t currently using Exchange. Why? Neither of those products require Exchange, and both add measurable business value.

Now, it’s also true that the more pieces of the MS platform you deploy, the more capability you get. This is no different from Workplace, except that many of Microsoft’s platform components are more mature than their Workplace equivalents. It’s a little disingenuous of Microsoft Monitor to claim that you have to buy all of the features; that’s like saying that I have to buy the Hemi when I buy a Dodge Magnum (well, OK, I would have to buy the Hemi, but that’s another blog post).

About those Microsoft Monitor article mistakes: I count two simple typos (“Instanbul” and the confusion between SharePoint Portal and Windows SharePoint Services) and a misunderstanding of the Outlook/LCS connection. You can deploy Outlook 2003 without Exchange 2003 (in fact, you can even use Outlook 2003 against Notes/Domino servers, using either MS’ or IBM’s connectors). Every Exchange 2003 CAL includes an Outlook license, but Outlook is also licensable separately.

So, you might have seen Gary or Ed mention this, but now that it’s underway I have time to talk about it too. 3sharp is presenting a 10-city roadshow called “Optimizing Communication and Collaboration with Microsoft Technologies“. The thrust behind the roadshow is simple: you can get a lot of mileage from Microsoft’s investment in communications and collaboration technologies by deploying them in parallel with– not necessarily as a replacement for– whatever you’re currently using. The structure of the events is simple: if you’re a developer, you go to John’s excellent class on how to extend Notes apps by having them produce, or consume, data from .NET web services; if you’re a technical decision maker, you come hear the Burton Group’s forecast on market dynamics in the C&C space, then I get to explain the pieces of MS’ collaboration strategy, with copious use of demos.

Our first event in Dallas this week went really well. My content was well-received; it was obvious to the attendees that we’re not suggesting they rip-and-replace their existing infrastructures (well, maybe if you’re using OCS). Instead, we’re making a solid case for extending their business systems with Microsoft’s collaboration and communications platform. Next stop: Waltham! (Personal to Ed Brill: the Chicago show got moved to 4/21, so please adjust your calendar!)

Lots of discussion about Autolink, which is good. So far, though, I haven’t seen very much discussion around Adzilla. Their white paper for service providers describes their services for stripping banner ads (and other ad-related content) and letting the ISP insert its own ads. Yikes. I can’t imagine that content providers are going to be too happy about that. Imagine going to CNN.com and seeing locally-inserted ads from your cable modem provider.

Back in November, I wrote about a problem with Entourage and Exchange transaction logs— sending a message that was larger than the Exchange global message size limit would cause Entourage to resubmit the message each time it tried to send mail, and this would lead to a flood of transaction log files. There’s now a server-side hotfix for this problem: MS KB 889525 (An e-mail message stays in the Outbox and the Exchange Server 2003 transaction log files grow when an Entourage user tries to send a message that exceeds the size limit in Global Settings).

Dang, I never thought I’d see this happen: the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) has a blog. Pretty cool, and definitely good news for MS’ ongoing attempts to broaden the degree of security communications.

The Weblogs Inc folks covered Adomo’s unveiling here (including a picture that’s just begging for a caption). I suggested that the Adomo folks contact Robert Scoble before the show; their product is a natural for discussion on his blog, since it’s a) MS-centric b) built with .NET and c) very, very cool. I don’t know if they did, and now he’s offline. However, he gave them (and everyone else) the same advice.

Now this is a surprise, and a pleasant one. Nokia announced that they’re licensing Exchange ActiveSync for their Series 60 and Series 80-based phones. This is excellent news for the Exchange team; clearly their effort to get EAS more widely deployed is bearing fruit. (Nokia also licensed Flash.. just what I want on my phone, not.) Interestingly, the WIndows Mobile team has been busy at 3GSM World too; they announced that Flextronics, a large original device manufacturer (ODM), will be building “Peabody”, a new, lower-cost, reference platform for Windows Mobile devices. It should be interesting to see how this plays out.

Update: it turns out that Nokia is also licensing a bunch of Windows Media technologies, including Windows Media DRM and the Media Transfer Protocol. Take that, Apple and your not-yet-shipping Motorola iTunes phone!

Today a startup named Adomo is launching their new product, Adomo Voice Messaging. They briefed me on it a month or so ago, and I’ve been eagerly waiting for today (the start of the DEMO 2005 conference) for the embargo to lift so I could talk about it. What they’re essentially trying to do is build a comprehensive unified messaging (UM) solution that uses Exchange not just as a message store (like Cisco’s Unity) but as the communications backbone. I think they’re on the right track, taking what I privately label the CommVault approach: they’re leveraging Exchange as much as possible, instead of building a product and trying to make it work, not very well, with multiple back ends.

The Adomo system has three parts: an appliance (running their own *NIX variant, I forget which– maybe FreeBSD?) that handles up to 36 ports from the PBX, a connector that ties the appliance to the Exchange message store, and a really slick speech-based auto-attendant. You can chain appliances to use more than 36 ports, and Adomo’s literature shows smaller 12- and 24-port appliances being used in remote offices. Adomo claims that a single 36-port appliance is enough to serve between 1800 and 3600 users, depending on usage; they’re purposefully targeting organizations with more than 500 users. The appliance compresses incoming messages using the GSM codec (which means that you can listen to messages on pretty much any Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux machine– the codec is ubiquitous, unlike Cisco’s ACELP implementation) and sends them to the Exchange connector.

The Exchange connector is where the action happens: incoming messages are directed to the user’s mailbox, where they appear as regular email messages. This is particularly important because it allows you to deploy their solution without any desktop changes: there are no required plugins or Outlook bits to add, and VM attachments are available on any device that can handle email attachments (including handhelds, OWA, and so on). Messages are delivered using an Exchange form that includes buttons that let you play your VM on your phone, call the sender, and take other appropriate actions; Adomo has promised tighter integration with Outlook for future versions, but the existing integration is pretty darn good.

One of Adomo’s big selling points is that you don’t have to touch the Exchange server or Active Directory to implement their product. You only need one connector per Exchange organization. The connector doesn’t have to be on an Exchange server, and there are no AD schema changes required. You provision user accounts for voicemail by specifying the associated phone numbers, so there’s no need for a separate user management tool. Adomo hasn’t said which AD attributes they use, but their literature does claim that you can do all the provisioning through AD Users and Computers or through scripts.

Messages appear with Caller ID data, and the connector is smart enough to match that data against the user’s Contacts folder so that messages appear with the correct sender information. That makes it easy to prioritize and handle VMs (either manually or with rules) in the same way you would any other email. In addition to the ubiquitous “message waiting” light, the connector can send SMS messages to a mobile phone or alerts (including the Caller ID number in the subject line) to BlackBerry or other non-audio-capable devices.

It’s hard to do the auto-attendant justice in this form, but I’ll try. When you call in, the attendant answers and plays its recorded greeting. You can speak a name at any time, and their speech recognizer will attempt to find the name in the GAL (with conflict resolution, so it can ask the user which John Smith (“John Smith in Sales, or John Smith in Engineering?”) to connect to based on OU, domain, or group membership. This in itself is very cool; the cooler part is that the attendant has access to a wealth of user-specific data, including your schedule and presence data from LCS. Imagine being able to set a rule that says “if my wife calls on her cell phone, IM me to tell me; otherwise, dump all incoming calls to voicemail”. From a user perspective, imagine calling a contact and having the attendant tell you “Jane’s in a meeting until 3pm Central; do you want me to notify her that you’re calling?” (based, of course, on Jane’s decision to trust you with that information as a contact in her Contacts folder). There are almost limitless possibilities for future expansion here, particularly given that the Adomo solution can be used with SIP products (conveniently including LCS 2005).

Of course, given Adomo’s target market focus, their solution won’t work for everyone. First, it requires Exchange 2003. Second, they haven’t released pricing data (at least to me) but since their focus is on 500-plus seat organizations, it likely won’t be cheap. (One interesting note: Adomo’s pitch talks about the benefits of their product for organizations that sell hosted Exchange services– this could potentially be a nice revenue sweetener for hosting companies). However, in terms of functionality, their nearest competitor is the Wildfire service, which (last I checked) was $70-150/month/user– so they’ve definitely got some pricing maneuvering room. I think their product will be successful, but I’m sure it will be interesting to see how Microsoft’s announced UM support in Exchange 12 plays against Adomo’s solution, which now has a year or two to get traction before E12 ships.

Interesting news: Microsoft is buying Sybari, makers of the outstanding Antigen line of anti-virus products (and some pretty good anti-spam tools, too). Interestingly, there are Antigen versions for Exchange, Live Communications Server, SharePoint, and even Domino; I expect that the breadth of their product line made them a more appealing target than some of their peers. It’ll be interesting to see how this acquisition works in conjunction with MS’ buy of GeCAD’s RAV technology. However, it will be even more interesting to see what effect this announcement has on the second-tier AV vendors– companies like Command and Panda have got to be sweating now. (Not to mention that many organizations who have stuck with products they don’t really like will now use this as an excuse to move!)

I could snark about this filter update taking so long, but at least Microsoft’s making the IMF freely available– some messaging systems have no integrated spam filtering. Anyway, there’s now a filter update for the IMF available here.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t post this announcement here, but I’m going to break tradition and do so because I’m one of the conference co-chairs. As such, I have to help find speakers, so I want this call for papers to go out far and wide.

Windows IT Pro is now accepting session proposals for the Oct-Nov. 2005 Windows Connections conference. We’re heading to San Diego October 30 to November 2, 2005, for the premier Windows technical conference, and we’d like to hear from you!

If you’re interested in speaking on Exchange-related topics at the show, send your abstracts to paul@robichaux.net by February 18. 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. There are three basic requirements:

• Send a minimum of 3 session proposals (4 or 5 is ideal for discussion purposes)
• Include a biographical statement with your session proposals
• Include any additional pre- or post-con session proposals, if applicable

Please adhere to the February 18 deadline as we need to make speaker and session selections right away. (We plan to have a conference brochure ready to distribute at TechEd in June.)

Here’s a very cool trick: Glen Scales wrote a script that finds all of your mailbox and public folder stores, then queries their servers’ event logs to find event ID 1221s indicating how much white space is available. This is a slick solution to the vexing problem of monitoring how much white space is lurking in your databases.