Category Archives: General Tech Stuff

So, I wrote an UPDATE column (URL forthcoming) on the good and bad of using an iPhone with an Exchange server. I was limited by space there, so consider this article a sidebar that goes in to more detail on specific things i liked, and disliked, about the iPhone+Exchange mail experience compared to the iPhone+IMAP one.

• The iPhone doesn’t expunge deleted messages properly. This is so 1985. There’s absolutely no excuse for Apple to have bobbled this, and I certainly hope they fix it soon (although there are workarounds).
• It’s wonderful to not have to worry about how much storage space to allocate to mail. With 8GB of space on the phone, I can easily have the full contents of my primary accounts, with subfolders. On the other hand, there’s no way to specify which folders you want to sync. I’ll call this one a tie.
• There’s no search tool on the iPhone– at all! If you don’t know exactly which message you want, too bad. You also can’t search across applications, something I miss in both WM and the iPhone after using it on Palm OS. By contrast, WM6 has the ability to use the server-side search catalog that Exchange maintains, and you can easily pull messages with search hits down to your device. Advantage: WM6.
• It’s much easier to navigate between folders and accounts on WM6. The iPhone requires multiple screen taps, and there’s no way to collapse folders. Advantage: WM6.
• The iPhone doesn’t do multiple selection, so you can’t delete or move messages en masse.
• no flagging on the iPhone. In fact, almost none of the message metadata you’d expect to be preserved (like forwarded/replied-to) is preserved. Only read/unread status is kept.
• The iPhone screen makes reading most HTML mail a pleasure. The rendering is quite good overall. Viagra spam has never looked so crisp or appealing.
• You can choose to check your accounts manually, or at intervals of 15, 30, or 60 minutes. That’s it. No separate schedules for separate accounts, and no other intervals. Big advantage WM6.
• The iPhone has limited support for reading Word and PDF attachments, but you can’t edit or create them. Big advantage: WM6.

Technorati Tags: iPhone

My iPhone still won’t reliably delete IMAP messages. There’s no way to tell the phone to empty its deleted items cache, and because I’m not using IMAP with either of my Exchange accounts on other machines, there’s no way to do it from there either. However, the folks at Fresh Logic have written a tool called expunge that looks like it might work. I’m going to give it a try.

Technorati Tags: iPhone

Dave Winer has a nifty idea: turn a news feed with RSS into a river of news. Think of an essentially endless web page, where the newest news articles are always on top. This is a perfect format for mobile devices, and in fact the iPhone provides a terrific browsing experience for Winer’s two river-oriented sites: the NY Times river and the BBC river. If you have an iPhone (or, what the heck; even if you don’t), give them a try. I think you’ll like what Dave’s done.

Technorati Tags: puppy

According to iTunes, I have 2879 items taking up 14.21GB in my iTunes library. Sadly, this is about five times as much free space as I have on my iPhone, which spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E for my plan to ditch my existing iPod. However, I hit on a useful strategy. I already have a playlist called “Never Played”, currently at about 2056 items. This is a little misleading, since I’ve actually played many of those songs between flattening my iPod, moving my music library, and so on. However, I now have a new rule. I have to listen only to that playlist. Any time I get the urge to skip a song, or find a song that I haven’t heard and don’t like, IT MUST GO. We’ll see how well this works to weed out stuff I wouldn’t listen to anyway.

Well, this is a pain in the butt: by default, when you create an IMAP or Exchange account on the iPhone, messages you delete aren’t ever actually purged from the server. The effect of this is that messages you delete on the iPhone don’t disappear from your Outlook/Entourage/Exchange ActiveSync/whatever mailbox, leading to angst if you’re trying to keep a tidy inbox.

The fix is simple, once you know it exists: Tap Settings > Mail, select the IMAP account, tap Advanced, then select the purge interval from the “Deleted Messages” group. (Apple has a cursory document on it here). The problem is that the shortest interval is 1 day– so when you remove a message on the iPhone, it will take 24hr to disappear from your other clients. This is a pretty poor “feature” and I’m disappointed that Apple didn’t take the time to implement proper deleted item purging as they do in Mail.app. Boo hiss.

Update: another annoyance is that the iPhone insists on creating its own Deleted Items folder in the Inbox. That’s just wrong. I suspect this can be fixed by modifying the server path prefix, but that shouldn’t be necessary. The whole point of having a defined account type for Exchange is to avoid this kind of problem (that’s why the iPhone correctly hides other folders, like Calendar and Contacts).

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Mac

You’re probably familiar with the idea that, for most companies, a relatively small percentage of customers generates a large percentage of revenue. This is particularly true for industries, like airlines, where pricing is highly variable. Looks like the same thing is true for mobile operators. Sprint Nextel has an innovative solution: find the customers who are costing you the most in support, then fire them. I wonder if this model will ever catch on in the software industry?

So last week I went to TechEd 2007, primarily to present a session on how Forefront Security for Exchange Server (FFSE) works. I arrived Monday night after an uneventful flight (the kind I prefer), got to the hotel, and went to bed. The next morning, I had breakfast with Anne Grubb and Amy Eisenberg of Windows IT Pro. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been writing for them for nearly ten years! I spent the rest of the day on Tuesday attending a series of MVP deep-dive technical briefings put on by the Exchange and OCS development teams. There’s some really exciting stuff happening with both of those products; you’ll be seeing the fruits sooner than you expect.

Wednesday I had breakfast with an old friend, Ed Woodrick of Dell, then I went to prep for my session. As usual, the room I was in was waaaay too big; it probably seated close to 1200 people, and I had 252 in attendance. No, I didn’t count them; Microsoft uses an RFID-based system to track session attendance. This year John wasn’t presenting so I didn’t have a chance to beat him; that’s too bad, because my session scored 7.81, a personal best.

The bad news is that I was in the security track, which ended up taking the top overall score. Of the 10 sessions rated most highly by attendees, security sessions took 5 of the top 6, so clearly I’ve got some room to improve (although let’s get real; I have no realistic hope of outscoring someone like Steve Riley or Mark Russinovich unless I start passing out $20 bills during my sessions!)

From my friend and fellow Exchange MVP Andy David, a handy field guide to spotting attendees at TechEd (and Exchange Connections), plus a few additions from Andy Webb, Tony Murray, and Melissa Travers:

1. The Clothes Horse: Puts on the official Teched T-Shirt as soon as he registers. Wears a different vendor shirt every day, even at the attendee party.
2. The Vendor Whore: Visits every booth and allows his badge to be swiped. Flashes and glows all week. Thinks the booth babes like him.
3. The Wanderer: Moves from session to session., never staying for more than 20 minutes. Rates each presenter poorly.
4. The Yes Man: Concurs with everything the presenter says, nodding his head in agreement, shaking his head “No” when told that is something you shouldn’t do. Raises his hand whenever asked.
5. The Continental: Wears male Capri pants every day.
6. The Nodder: Dozes through each session.
7. The Tapper: Breaks out his laptop at the beginning of each session and reads email, IMs and browses the web. Never looks up and leaves 5 minutes before the session ends.
8. The Carpet Hugger. Similar behavior to The Tapper, except this species heads directly for the floor against the wall and the nearest power outlet to power up his laptop to do his work.
9. The Shutter Bug: Takes pictures of every session, every vendor, every booth babe and then posts to a blog that no one ever visits.
10. The IT Guy: Wears vendor shirts from previous Techeds to every session and events, including the elusive “IT Hero” Hawaiian shirt. Takes the first bus back to his hotel once the free beer runs out.
11. The Inquisitor: Makes his move to the microphone half-way through a session. Looks annoyed when asked to wait till the end. Asks a question without an answer.
12. The Attendee: Usually only seen at the attendee party. Typically female, they look like they would rather be anywhere else but there.
13. The Tropical Breeze – The Hawaiian shirt wearing, flip flop sporting retrosexual male who makes the rounds to every party (invited or not) until the free beer and the free food run out. And occasionally attends a late afternoon session.
14. The Gadget Kid. More holsters than Dirty Harry. No visible social skills and hasn’t actually spoken since the age of 12, but has well developed thumbs.
15. The Assassin hunts daily for that one choice piece of product information, contact, meetup, product team intro that couldn’t be found any other place or time. Is satisfied if the week produces at least 4 hits.
16. The Sycophant won’t ask a question at the microphone, but will badger a speaker for 20min after a session and follow them down the hall until stopped by security at the speaker lounge.

Technorati Tags: ExchConn

A great tip from my friend Liam Colvin:

I don’t know if you’re like me but I was experiencing slowness (like a 20-30 second delay) when opening an Explorer window to view files. You might have found this before me, but it took me some time fiddling with settings to figure it out.
I was trying all the usual ways to determine what was causing the delay in opening the explorer window: anti-virus, explorer extensions, etc – and nothing worked, very frustrating.
I looked extensively internally and searched the Internet, and the best I could find were issues with copying files down from servers causing delays due to SMB issues (there is a hotfix out there for that, by the way – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931770/en-us).
I finally found it after carefully reviewing the behavior of Explorer when it opened by monitoring the Explorer process with Filemon. I noticed that when Explorer went to open a folder (from a shortcut, for example), it parsed all the files in the root of the directory. Urk! This clearly took a long time.
I looked at the Folder Options under Control Panel and noticed the very first setting under the View tab: Always show Icons, never Thumbnails. It was not checked. I realized that Vista must read each file when opening the folder for a thumbnail and/or creates one. When I checked the Always show Icons, never Thumbnails, it reduced the time required to open each folder to 3 or 4 seconds.

So Jim McBee and I are together again, this time in the Big Apple, for the upcoming Exchange 2007 roadshow. I just got some mail from one of the roadshow managers at Windows IT Pro:

I am looking forward to meeting/seeing you both in New York for the Exchange event next Tuesday! I have been asked to tell you that while we are doing all we can to make sure you have all you need for your presentations, please make a backup plan in case something goes wrong with the phone line or Internet connection during your presentations. If you have a canned demo that would be great, but if you don’t, please consider a backup plan, preferably one that does not involve strings of four-letter words

My backup plan is that we all go out and take in a Broadway show. Jim said his backup plan involves a puppet show. I guess that means we’re all covered.