Category Archives: General Stuff

What do you get when you combine Exchange Server 2003, KVS Enterprise Vault, KVS Discovey Accelerator, and SharePoint?

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Microsoft has what’s probably the largest deployment of OMA and Exchange ActiveSync. What have they learned about how to scale and provision these services?

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Joe has a number of really nifty free tools on his site, including the world-famous ADFind. However, I just stumbled across a new tool he wrote while working on the Exchange chapter of the Windows Server 2003 Cookbook (forthcoming from O’Reilly).

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Now <em>this</em> is interesting: Microsoft and Cisco are hooking up and exchanging some network-protection DNA. Microsoft mentioned their Network Access Protection (NAP, a somewhat unfortunate acronym) at their worldwide partner conference in July; now MS is pushing the release of NAP back to Longhorn Server in order to integrate support for Cisco’s Network Access Control (NAC). This interview with Windows GM Bob Kelly says that MS and Cisco will work to ensure that NAP and NAC are fully interoperable, which is great news; since NAC is already shipping, it would have been counterproductive for MS to complete their own, incompatible, solution and make customers choose between them.

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It’s hard to keep track of who’s blogging, particularly as automated tools that make RSS feeds for automated systems proliferate. Personally, I want to see as much data in RSS form as possible, especially for fast-changing or noisy systems like, oh, mailing lists.

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Excellent! Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Office 2004. I haven’t found a list of fixes yet, and I’m away from my Mac so I can’t download it to try it out. It’s supposed to be available via the Microsoft AutoUpdate tool or directly from the MS Mac page.

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This afternoon I had a call with the PR folks from PalmOne to get their take on the Exchange ActiveSync for Treo announcement. As is to be expected, they were mum on the details most people really want. The new devices, which they didn’t explicitly name, are being released “this fall– before the end of the year”. When I asked if they were prepared to say which carriers would offer them, all I got was a chuckle.

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This is big and rich: Microsoft announced today that they’ve licensed the Exchange ActiveSync protocol to palmOne for use in their new, officially-unannounced line of Treo smartphones (including the 650). I want one.

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Now, this is interesting: the IETF Sender ID working group is apparently defunct. This is more or less the equivalent of that milestone of farce comedies, the divorce due to irreconcilable differences.

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This Computerworld story (and the related MS press release) announce the arrival of a new Windows product: the Data Protection Server (DPS). DPS is basically a distributed tool that puts agents on the file servers you want to protect; the agents then run scheduled disk-to-disk backups. Depending on how this is implemented, this might be a significant improvement over the kind of ad-hoc disk-to-disk backup schemes most small and medium organizations use. DPS combines replication and point-in-time copies, which places it squarely into competition with products from Legato and Veritas (among others).

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This is very, very cool: the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer is a new tool from Microsoft that checks your Exchange infrastructure for good design practices. To be more specific, the tool investigates various parameters (including some from AD, a few perfmon counters, the IIS metabase, and your DNS) to see how well your operational configuration conforms to generally accepted best practices.

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