Category Archives: General Stuff

Entourage 2004 has been released to manufacturing, so I can now talk about it. I’ve been working with it for the last several months, and it’s a great piece of work. I’m working on a long article on it for Exchange & Outlook Administrator, but in the meantime, you might be able to try it for free. What? It’s true. If you have valid Exchange CALs for your users, you’re able to use Entourage as a client. See this “how to buy” page for more details (but don’t ask me where you’re supposed to get the bits, because I don’t know!)

I needed to look up a piece of trivia on the Exchange routing engine for the cookbook, and after a little Googling I found this gem: the Exchange Server 2003 Transport and Routing Guide. I’m not sure how I missed it before, but it’s quite comprehensive. Recommended reading if you want a better understanding of how the transport core works. In particular, its description of how the various connection filtering pieces work together is almost as good as what I wrote in Chapter 8 🙂

Microsoft’s finally taken the lid off a very, very cool addition to their product line: the Feature Pack for Windows Storage Server allows you to put your Exchange 2003 databases on a Windows Storage Server NAS box. There are some limitations: this approach is designed to handle up to 1500 concurrent users, and it requires good network connectivity between the Exchange server and the Windows Storage Server. However, it’s a real, live, supported-by-PSS solution that can potentially deliver SAN-scale performance to organizations that can’t afford Fibre Channel SANs. Check it out.

If you’ve been around the Internet for a while, you’ve probably heard of BOF, or “birds of a feather” sessions. BOFs are informal meetings held in parallel with conferences like LISA and regularly scheduled meetings like the IETF conferences. The International .NET Association is coordinating the process of setting up a series of BOFs for TechEd 2004. The cool thing about these sessions is that the BOF topics are proposed by TechEd attendees. Their content isn’t driven by MS, or anyone else besides the people in the room. They’re not presentations– they’re an opportunity for people with related interests, whatever they are, to get together and hang out for an hour. The MS TechEd staff is encouraging speakers to encourage “their” communities to propose BOFs here. There are tons of potential topics for Exchange, including security, anti-spam, job hunting, mobility, Notes migration, Exchange 2003 SP1… the list goes on. Let the INETA folks know what you’d like to see.

TechEdBloggers.net is back again this year. I enjoyed last year’s edition; it was cool to see TechEd through the perspective of other speakers and attendees, especially folks who got to go to some of the many sessions I missed out on. To keep things simple, I’m going to post all of my TechEd-related stuff here, not on my personal blog.
I’m currently scheduled for two sessions: a troubleshooting panel discussion and a session on building high-availability Exchange 2003 deployments. Should be fun!

In 2000, I built a site of Exchange FAQs, driven by a (primitive) set of PHP scripts and a MySQL database. It mostly languished, because I didn’t take on the extra effort of keeping it up to date. Meanwhile, Andy Webb and a crew of Exchange MVPs had created a good set of Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 FAQs. So, I gave andy the ExchangeFAQ.org domain name, and his new rendition of the site is now live. It looks great.

I just can’t help myself sometimes: I am a serial columnist. (Groan. Hey, at least I didn’t make a pun on serial-ATA…)
Last week’s Exchange UPDATE column was an update to my previous column on iSCSI and Exchange; I’d already blogged about the change, but the column has some additional material, including a discussion of MS’ KB article describing support boundaries for NAS/SAN devices with Exchange 2003.

This is really cool: Windows &.NET Magazine now has a page of RSS feeds. The Exchange feed is my favorite.
Update: the feeds occasionally time out, and they seem to only have five items in each category. They also don’t include the Exchange UPDATE newsletter. Dang.
Update again: the Exchange feed hasn’t been updated since my original post, which I take as a bad sign. I’ve emailed my editors to see what’s up.

My column this week (which I can’t link to right now, thanks to a bug at the Windows &.NET web site) was on iSCSI and Exchange. A helpful MS PR person wrote to point out an error: there’s not actually a separate “certified for Exchange logo”. If an iSCSI device has the “Designed for Windows” logo, it’s supported for use with Exchange.
Update: it turns out that the Windows Catalog uses the “Designed for Windows XP” logo for iSCSI devices. Even though the column, and the press release which inspired it, talk about the “Designed for Windows” logo, those products listed in the catalog are certified for use with Exchange 2003.

Scott Oseychik, formerly of Microsoft’s customer problem response team, has moved on to new things: he’s now a stand-up comedian. No, really. I have no idea if he’s funny or not, but he was very helpful in explaining the intricacies of the Exchange 2000 and 2003 transport engines when I was writing about them. I wish him luck (and I’ll go see him if he’s in Detroit, Toledo, or the surrounding area!)

Want a job working for the Exchange team in Redmond? They’re having a hiring spree fair in late April in Seattle. See the jobsblog or send your resume here.

I wrote about a security problem with Plaxo a couple of weeks ago. It’s since been fixed, but now I’m starting to hear that companies are barring their employees from using Plaxo, LinkedIn, and other social software. Why? Several reasons. The biggest seems to be that these services enable wholesale exporting of your contact database, which makes it easy for you to find out which of your existing contacts already use the service. This has two problems, though. First, it runs afoul of European Union data privacy laws; many multinational companies in the US have already been working hard to make their internal operations conform to EU regulations because they have EU operations and employees who live and work in the EU. Microsoft, AT&T, General Motors, and American Express come to mind. The other reason, of course, is that companies don’t like the idea of a third party getting unrestricted access to a significant portion of their internal contact data. Imagine the bonanza for a clever Sun salesman who managed to steal all of the contact data for an IBM sales rep, for example. This is precisely why very few companies expose even shadow copies of their master directories to the outside world: there’s too much risk in doing so, and the reward is fairly limited.
Will these bans work? Beats me. Services like LinkedIn and Plaxo have to reach a certain degree of critical mass before they become useful, but it’s difficult to see how such bans can be efficiently enforced. Interestingly, the one ban I’ve actually seen in written form doesn’t say anything about “personal” social software like Orkut and Friendster.

Secure Messaging with Exchange Server 2003 is now in stock at Amazon. It doesn’t look like anyone’s actually bought it yet, but hey, you can’t have everything. Update: the book has now attained the stratospheric Amazon sales rank of 92,218, despite its being paired as a bundle with Jerry Cochran’s excellent Mission-Critical Microsoft Exchange 2003 for only $70. Sigh.

In a press release today, Microsoft announced that they’ll be supporting iSCSI and NAS devices for Exchange. The PR doesn’t mention any specific devices or vendors, merely that devices that are logo-qualified for the Designed for Windows logo will be supported. We’ll have to wait and see what “supported” means in this context.