Category Archives: General Stuff

Jeremy Kelly of Microsoft has a great post on online maintenance over at his blog. If you’ve ever wondered what happens during the online maintenance window, now you can find out.

Finally! You can sign up to get Microsoft security bulletins through RSS. Thanks, guys.

During TechEd last week, Microsoft sneaked out a new white paper on Exchange 2003 journaling. It covers the new SP1 “envelope journaling” feature, as well as finally explaining where Exchange journaling doesn’t work. It also, at long last, describes how to deploy journaling as part of an overall DCAR solution. Good stuff.

Check this out: for 15+ years, the permissive action link system that controlled US land-based nuclear missiles was set to (drum roll): all zeroes. Really. Yikes!

Jeremy Reichman of the Rochester Institute of Technology has kindly collected a page of useful hints and FAQs related to using Entourage with RIT’s Exchange environment. You should also definitely see the Entourage Help Page, which is chock full of useful info on Entourage 2004. If you don’t read anything else, see the FAQ.

Just landed in Cincinnati and checked my evals: 7.72. Comments were mostly favorable; a few “not technical enough” and one angry “Microsoft does too support our products” from a VERITAS product manager. However, that means that John humbled me decisively (his Word session racked up an 8.21!) In fact, I was just below the average score for messaging sessions this year. I’ve got to do better next time.
Update: with 108 evaluations out of a total of 522 attendees, my final score was 7.78. Since the overall for messaging sessions was 7.85, I’m still a little under the curve.

• This year, the speaker shirts were color-coded so that MS employees and speakers had different colors. This is great, since it makes it much easier for attendees to find FTEs to bother question.
• A request from all those born and raised in the Southern tradition of good manners: please do not use, talk on, or answer your cell phone while you are in the bathroom. Thank you.
• The service at Dick’s Last Resort is as bad as it’s claimed. Unfortunately, the food is worse than reported.
• The speaker shirt is the first shirt I’ve ever owned with Spandex in it. It will, God willing, be the only shirt I ever own with Spandex.
• The San Diego airport has free WiFi service. I can get a signal sitting in my seat (6C) with the boarding door open, but it’s intermittent and doesn’t allow me to actually log on.

First thing yesterday, John and I met for breakfast at Cafe 222, where I had some excellent pancakes. The food at the San Diego convention center is pretty good, but it’s always nice to take a break from the HUGE CROWDS of people for which TechEd is justly famous, so we did.
I did a session and a half in the “Meet the Technologist” area yesterday, where I continued to be impressed with the level of questions we got. Lots of high-end, thoughtful technical questions, with very few of the howlers or RTFMs common in years past. The cabana idea has worked well, except when Navy SH-60s fly past outside.
Yesterday was my first spin through the exhibit hall. I got to meet with some folks from Quest/Aelita; they have an impressive line of management products that oddly doesn’t seem to be well known. The Authentica folks have an interesting product that can do digital rights management protection at the email gateway and via a web service– very cool stuff. I’ll write more about that when I have time to dig into it more.
Interestingly, the two overwhelming giveaway items this year were Xboxes and iPods. Some group of companies was giving away a MINI Cooper, which is kind of neat (although not as cool as the Mercedes SLK that was given away at TechTarget’s Enterprise Messaging Decisions show 🙂
Also on the show floor, I finally met John Osborn, executive editor at O’Reilly. We had a great discussion about Offfice development and books (which we extended later at the O’Reilly author party once JohnP got there). I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to turn some of the cool content we did for the Fabrikam project into a book, or two, to help build up our Office dev branding.
In a few minutes, I’m heading back over to Cafe 222 for another stack of pancakes, then it’s time to present MSG381 and fly to Cincinnati to rendezvous with my family. In the meantime, let it be known that JohnP’s Word dev session yesterday is holding steady at an excellent 8.09/9.00 rating, which is going to be tough for me to beat. However, the folks I linked to last week are still ruling: Steve Riley’s sessions have three of the top 10 slots, including an incredible 8.81! Go Steve!

Microsoft has released a nifty automated tool for building threat modeling documents for applications you develop.

It organizes relevant data points, such as entry points, assets, trust levels, data flow diagrams, threats, threat trees, and vulnerabilities into an easy-to-use tree-based view. The tool saves the document as XML, and will export to HTML and MHT using the included XSLTs, or a custom transform supplied by the user.

This might seem to have low relevance for Exchange, but if you take a look at what’s in these documents, you’ll get a good jump start on understanding how to build a threat model for your network and deployed messaging applications (yes, even if you’re using something besides Exchange).

I flew out to San Diego yesterday and got to the convention center about 45 minutes before my first session, a troubleshooting panel with Chris Nelson (from Microsoft’s IT group), Karl Robinson of HP, and the legendary Paul Bowden. It was fun to share the stage with three knowledgeable people, and we got some good audience questions.
Next, I had a book signing, at which I sold three whole copies of my book. It was fun nonetheless; I got to spend some time chatting with the legendary Charlie Russel, with whom I’ve worked but who I’ve never met, Paul Cayley of the MS UNIX migration team, and Eldon Nelson from Microsoft Press. After that, it was off to the “Meet the Technologist” area (aka “Ask the Experts”). The place was mobbed! Erik Ashby was drawing a steady line of folks asking 5.5 migration questions, and there were lots of miscellaneous troubleshooting questions.
John and I got together for a short visit (wherein I learned that his first session outscored mine by about 0.5– significant on a 1.0-9.0 scale!) before I headed out to the MVP dinner organized by KC Lemson at the Zocalo Grill. I had the good fortune to sit with Andy and Kim Webb, Andy David, Scott Schnoll, David Sapery, and Sue Hill (all MVPs, save Sue, who works on the Exchange User Education team), and there were a ton of other MVPs (including Sue Mosher, Diane Poremsky [at least it looked like her from the back], Chris Scharff of MessageOne. The product team was well-represented: KC and David Lemson, Ed Wu, Nicole Bonilla, and a few others were there. As a bonus, I finally got to meet Brandon Hoff, the MVP lead for Exchange; he and I have missed each other several times in Redmond, so it was good to finally shake his hand. The food was quite good, and the company was great. (Thanks, KC, for setting it up!)
Today I’m back in the Ask the Experts area for a while, but I should be able to actually attend some sessions– more on that later.

Very cool news: the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter is out, and it’s available at no cost to all Exchange 2003 customers. Microsoft had previously said they would only offer it to SA customers, which generated a lot of discontent. I’m glad to see them reversing their stance. Get the IMF here, and be sure to read the deployment guide. (Oh yeah– Exchange 2003 SP1 is out, too).

Very cool: Evan Dodds of Microsoft has a blog about (drum roll) Exchange clustering. You should only go there if you want actual factual technical information, though; you’ll have to go somewhere else for $spin.
So, Evan, here’s a clustering question: can I force all outbound SMTP traffic on a cluster to originate from the IP address of the cluster instead of one of the physical nodes therein?

Happily, there’s finally a review of Secure Messaging online at the Windows IT Library. My thanks to David Sengupta. (Now, if only Amazon would start posting the reviews that I know are queued up there…)

John Welch is posting a long review of the entire Office 2004 suite. It’s not done yet, but the first part— which, conveniently, covers Entourage in depth– is ready now.