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?
Category Archives: Musings
New white paper: MSIT experience with Exchange 2003 mobile messaging
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Spamusement
Spamusement: poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines. Some of these are pretty hysterical.
Update: they also have an RSS feed. (Here’s one just for Julie).
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Total lunar eclipse tomorrow night
Good news: it’s time for a rare astronomical event! Tomorrow night (27 October 2004), a total lunar eclipse will be visible across most of North America. Sky and Telescope calls this the “ideal lunar eclipse” because the eclipse will reach totality “after dark but while most people are still awake and about”. It just happens to fall during Game 4 of the World Series, too. Check this handy table for times in your area.
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It’s all about Tim
You’ve got to love Google’s sponsored ad links. If you query for “Robichaux Outfitters”, look what you get as a sponsored ad. I didn’t check to see if it points to Tim’s blog, but if it doesn’t, it should.
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Spamusement
Spamusement: poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines. Some of these are pretty hysterical.
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The doctor’s office
So, I’m going to be turning 36 soon. I decided to get a comprehensive physical, since I haven’t had one since I left the Marine Corps. At the same time, I figured I’d switch doctors to the practice that my dad and wife both use. My existing doc is a good guy, but I’m all about service consolidation. So, I called the doctor’s office to schedule a physical.
Me: I’d like to schedule a physical.
Them: We can schedule you for sometime in May.
Me: OK, let’s do that.
Them: Are you a new patient?
Me: Yes, I am.
Them: You’ll have to see the doctor first, and he’ll decide if you need a physical.
That means that my visit today is sort of a gatekeeper visit, if you will. If I’m healthy enough, I don’t get a physical (or maybe I do; who knows). The one thing I’m sure of is that I won’t get a flu shot, because (unlike members of Congress) there’s not enough vaccine here to go around.
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Cool command-line mailbox manipulation tool
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).
Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Microsoft and Cisco hook up NAC and NAP
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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Best practices: we’re not kidding
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BugTraq RSS feed
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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MS releases SP1 for Mac Office 2004
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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More on the Treo and Exchange ActiveSync
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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Microsoft, PalmOne announce Exchange ActiveSync for Treo
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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Death knell for Sender ID?
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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MS announces Data Protection Server
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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