Category Archives: Musings

Need a good laugh? Go to this article and check out the targeted ads. Obviously Google is channeling the feelings of people who’ve worked with OCS.

The folks at SearchExchange have been kind enough to turn chapter 2 of my current ebook, The Definitive Guide to Exchange Disaster Recovery and Availability, into a short “10 tips in 10 minutes” article. Check it out here, or get the entire book (well, the first 6 chapters; I just turned in the final chapter yesterday) here.

My Jasjar wasn’t really dead, it was just playing dead. I let the battery run down completely, then plugged it in to my Thinkpad and tried the firmware update again. This time, it worked like it’s supposed to. John and I had fun playing around with it at the office; it flawlessly plays video that was encoded for his iPaq hw6315. I have several TiVo-to-Go shows on my laptop that I want to transcode to watch on the device, but WMP10 obstinately refuses to recognize the Jasjar, and since I’m on an airplane I can’t check the Internets to see what the likely problem is.

I’m also having problems with ActiveSync 4.0, but that’s nothing new. Every version of ActiveSync I’ve ever used has been troublesome. Come to think of it, so has every version of the Palm OS sync software (man, the stories I could tell about their Mac products…) Maybe that helps explain why Nokia just dropped US$430 million on IntelliSync.

Breaking news: Exchange 12 will be 64-bit only. I have a lot more detail to post on this, but they’re about to close the forward boarding door– more when I land in Cincinnati in an hour or so. Here’s a link to the umbrella press release from IT Forum.
Why the change? x64 technology is already widely deployed, and using it with Exchange reduces the I/O count dramatically– by up to a factor of 4. This is huge, since IOPS are much more expensive than RAM or CPU. (If you don’t believe me, try pricing 16GB of DRAM and a dual Opteron server compared to an EMC SAN and get back to me).
One objection I anticipate hearing is that this will strand customers who aren’t on x64 hardware. I’m resistant to this argument, though, because even low-end servers now often include x64-capable CPUs, and this trend is only going to accelerate between now and the time Exchange 12 ships next year. Organizations that are planning to move to Exchange 12 after it ships can easily buy x64 hardware any time between now and the time they upgrade, usually without any increase in cost. Of course, I expect to hear criticism of this move because some customers won’t be prepared to move to x64, but the fact is that there will always be customers– for any product– who don’t want to, or cannot, upgrade when the manufacturer wants them to. Sure, there will be Exchange customers who will cling to their existing versions, but that has always been (and will always be) true for Exchange, Notes, Workplace, OCS, SAP, and any other software in this class.
The big news here, to me, is that Exchange is once again breaking ground in delivering a new technology– and in this case, it’s one that has the potential to radically alter the scalability and cost factors we’re used to working with. I can’t wait to get my hands on some E12 bits and start testing!

This week’s UPDATE column, posted here because I don’t have time to write a separate entry on this right now

One of my favorite things about IT conferences like Exchange Connections is going to the exhibit floor to talk to vendors and see their products. Sometimes large vendors like HP and Symantec have interesting things to say (like Symantec’s announcement of a new version and pricing strategy of their Exchange security products), but for my money the real goodies are usually found in the booths of smaller vendors. They tend to be more enthusiastic about their products, and more engaging when discussing them. I’ll do a broader review of some of the cool things I saw here next week, but with my deadline looming I had to pick one thing to write about, and it’s… RSS.

Now, you may wonder what RSS has to do with Exchange. Over the last year I’ve mentioned RSS a few times, but it’s always been as a client-side technology that enables individual users to find the information sources they want and display them in a web browser or a rich client like Outlook. However, there are some problems with client-side RSS use:

• you have to install an RSS client on each desktop; this is a non-starter for organizations that are trying to reduce the number of desktop touches. It also encourages end users to install and manage their own software, another hot-button issue that many firms are trying to clamp down on.
• users make duplicate requests; if you have 500 users, and 200 of them are making hourly requests for the latest content for a particular RSS feed, you’re using excess bandwidth to pull the same data over and over. (Of course, the owners of the servers providing the RSS feed might take issue with getting a large number of requests from your organization, which is why heavily-trafficed sites often include a throttling feature that will block requests from IP addresses that are making requests too often.)
• users are left on their own to find the information sources they need. This is an advantage insofar as it allows users to make their own choices, but it makes it difficult to effectively share and consolidate useful information.

NewsGator Technologies has been making client-side aggregators for several years; their NewsGator for Outlook plug-in is my primary aggregator. I run it in a VM to let it collect RSS data that is then published to a tree of folders in my Exchange mailbox; that way, I can access it through OWA, Outlook, Entourage, or even an IMAP client. This addresses the first two of the problems I mention above, but it doesn’t do anything about the third, and it doesn’t scale well.

Enter a new product that NewsGator is showing on the expo floor: NewsGator Enterprise Server. It’s a slick piece of work that effectively addresses all three of these problems by collecting and consolidating feed data in a centralized SQL Server database, then publishing it to users’ mailboxes via WebDAV. This eliminates the need to license or install individual client plugins, and it makes the collected RSS data available to any client that can access an Exchange mailbox through IMAP, WebDAV, or MAPI.

This functionality in itself is very useful, but NewsGator architect Lane Mohler surprised me by showing me two other features. First, NewsGator Enterprise Server lets you specify default feed sets for individual mailboxes, or for sets of mailboxes as defined by Active Directory groups or OUs. For example, you can define a default set of feeds for users in your sales organization, and those feeds automatically appear in those users’ mailboxes. Add a new employee, and she automatically gets access to whatever content you’ve identified as most valuable for people in that position. This neatly eliminates the problem of helping new users find the right set of resources when starting a new task or position.

The other cool new feature is called clippings. It addresses the problem of sharing relevant information by allowing any user to select an individual article and add it to their clipping set—to which other users can subscribe. I think of this like a librarian-in-a-box. Say you have someone in your company whose job it is to find articles about the company or its competitors and share them with appropriate groups. They probably do this by mailing URLs or articles to people, but the same task is more easily accomplished by using clippings; as the librarian finds relevant articles, he can add them as a clippings that are then automatically published to the appropriate users and groups.

What really gets me excited about the potential of NewsGator Enterprise Server is that it works with any kind of RSS feed, not just blogs. You can produce RSS feeds from SharePoint data or other back-end systems, making it easy to slip notification or status data automatically into users’ mailboxes—a very cool potential that I expect other vendors to exploit.

I got a reader question asking whether you can install Exchange 2003 SP2 on Small Business Server 2003. On first reflection, I couldn’t see why not; a quick query to Susan Bradley (SBS MVP and mistress of all SBS knowledge) netted a link to this article by Vlad Mazek, which explains the installation procedure in great detail.

It’s live! Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 is now available for download. This is great news, because SP2 adds some very welcome message hygiene, mobility, and management features. I’m working on an article on the mobility features now, and as soon as that’s done I’ve got plans for a lengthy post exploring Sender ID support.

Update: here’s a list of the bugs that are fixed.

It’s live! Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 is now available for download. This is great news, because SP2 adds some very welcome message hygiene, mobility, and management features. I’m working on an article on the mobility features now, and as soon as that’s done I’ve got plans for a lengthy post exploring Sender ID support.