Category Archives: Musings

Over at the real Exchange blog, Neil posted a note about a cool web-based tool for reviewing messages archived by the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter. Written by Daryl Maunder, the tool is simple to install (create a new IIS virtual directory on your Exchange server, copy the tool files to it, and voila!) and works well. In the comments to that post, the tireless KC Lemson noted another filter, this one a C# tool written by James Webster of the Exchange team. Both work well; I currently prefer Webster’s tool because it shows both the message and the contents of the P2 recipient data, using a sort of preview pane arrangement; I also like the fact that it’s open-source. Maunder’s web-based tool is cool too because you can access it from other machines on your LAN (or via VPN). Either tool is an improvement over the minimal functionality the IMF itself provides for reviewing archived messages– try them both and see which you prefer. (Note to both authors: please, please implement a way to select multiple messages for action– that would be a big help.)

This week’s column was on the very cool OWAAdmin tool. I neglected to mention that Tosh Meston, one of the developers on the OWA team, mentioned it in his blog– sorry, Tosh.

This tool, which you can install on any Microsoft IIS server that runs version 1.1 of the Microsoft .NET Framework and ASP.NET, lets you remotely administer your OWA servers from anywhere in the organization. Although OWA offers quite a few features, the process of controlling OWA servers has always been a hassle because it depends on the creation of registry keys or values. Every Windows administrator knows how to do that, I know; the problem arises when you want to make configuration changes to multiple machines. Doing so manually is a bother and is even harder when you factor in common security settings that restrict or prevent remote registry access. You can always create your own Administrative Template file and attach it to a Group Policy Object (GPO), but only if you have the proper permissions in Active Directory (AD). Exchange administrators are often dependent on some other person or group to make directory changes.

You might consider this an error from the book, but it’s really more of an omission: I never mentioned that you can use PFDAVAdmin to view, modify, and set public folder permissions, including fixing the “invalid windows handle ID” error that we all know and love. The MS Exchange Blog has a good overview piece, and I made PFDAVAdmin the topic of this week’s UPDATE column,

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.