Category Archives: Musings

Very cool news: the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter is out, and it’s available at no cost to all Exchange 2003 customers. Microsoft had previously said they would only offer it to SA customers, which generated a lot of discontent. I’m glad to see them reversing their stance. Get the IMF here, and be sure to read the deployment guide. (Oh yeah– Exchange 2003 SP1 is out, too).

Very cool: Evan Dodds of Microsoft has a blog about (drum roll) Exchange clustering. You should only go there if you want actual factual technical information, though; you’ll have to go somewhere else for $spin.
So, Evan, here’s a clustering question: can I force all outbound SMTP traffic on a cluster to originate from the IP address of the cluster instead of one of the physical nodes therein?

Happily, there’s finally a review of Secure Messaging online at the Windows IT Library. My thanks to David Sengupta. (Now, if only Amazon would start posting the reviews that I know are queued up there…)

John Welch is posting a long review of the entire Office 2004 suite. It’s not done yet, but the first part— which, conveniently, covers Entourage in depth– is ready now.

At the 2002 MEC, John and I were both presenting multiple sessions, and we had a little friendly competition to see who did better. (I honestly don’t remember the results; I just remember how psyched he was at successfully evading the wrath of the demo gods). This year, he has a crushing four sessions, all deeply technical (BPR310 is “Office Developer: Programming XML Solutions”, BPR311 is “Office Developer: Programming Word XML Solutions”, BPRC14 is “Building High Performance InfoPath Solutions”, while I have but one (MSG381,”Designing a High Availability Exchange 2003 Solution”) , so I have somewhat of an advantage. Both of us have some hard work to do to catch the top guns from last year’s TechEd, though.

This sounds cool: a get-together for developers at the San Diego Automotive Museum. The big draw: remote-control racing, with trophies. I won’t be there, since it’s before I arrive, but I definitely think John should go.

Ed’s at it again. Rather than waste my time with a long rebuttal, let me just say this: I generally prefer to spend my time explaining technical things that help people understand Exchange better rather than pointing out shortcomings in competing products. I could go on at length about what’s wrong with Notes and Domino, but why bother? So, it bothers me when Ed takes an explanatory technical article and twists it around in an attempt to make his competitive point, but hey, he’s preaching to a choir of Notes admins, so I shouldn’t be surprised.
Well, OK, just one rebuttal point: since the column was on geoclustering, I didn’t mention the many software replication products [e.g. DoubleTake] that are being used to provide geographically distributed DR without geoclustering; I also didn’t mention ballpark hot dogs, ‘57 Chevrolet Bel Air coupes, or lots of other things that don’t relate to geoclustering. Ed’s guilty of claiming that there’s no other way to solve the problem, which isn’t what I said. These replication products have their own limitations, as does Domino replication, but they’re not germane to a column on geoclustering, so I didn’t mention them.
Update: edited to fix a typo and to turn comments back on. Ecto sometimes randomly changes the “allow comments” and “format line breaks” flags between posts, and I don’t always catch it.

I’ve been using Office 2004 for Mac OS X for the last six months or so. It’s awesome. Don’t take my word for it; go get the 30-day “test drive” version and see for yourself.

It’s fun to see people asking for help cracking Yahoo passwords, but enough’s enough. I’ve closed comments on that article. (Side note: I seemed to get more than my fair share of people with Indian names asking for cracking services… odd.)

I’m starting a topic for Entourage 2004 troubleshooting issues and FAQs, since I’m getting several dozen hits a day from Google on “Entourage 2004” and “Entourage 2004 Exchange”. First, remember that there’s an active Microsoft presence in the Entourage newsgroup, where some of this material is drawn from.

• If you’re using Exchange 5.5, you can’t use Entourage 2004 in Exchange mode. Exchange mode requires WebDAV, which is only supported by Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003. You can still use IMAP for mail, but you won’t be able to sync calendar and contact data with the server.
• If you don’t know what server name to put into the “Public folder server” field, try the name of your Outlook Web Access server with “/public/” on the end of it.
• If your OWA requires you to use https:// to get to it, you’ll need to check the “DAV service requires secure connection (SSL)” checkbox on the Advanced tab of the Exchange account properties dialog.
• Entourage 2004 can act as a delegate, but you have to use Outlook for Windows to set up delegate access. I plan to write an article explaining how to do this (in my spare time… bwahahaha).
• If you send a meeting invitation from Outlook, and it arrives as an .ics file in Entourage, the “Accept” and “Decline” buttons may not appear. This is because of a bug in Outlook, and the Entourage team knows about it already.
• Only the basic Contacts and Calendar folders are supported– Entourage doesn’t allow you to create subfolders of those folders, or to put contacts and calendar items in other folders elsewhere.
• You can’t adjust server-side settings (including the “out of office” state or server-based rules) from Entourage; you’ll need to use Outlook or OWA.

If there’s a specific question you want answered, feel free to leave a comment here and I’ll try to help you.

The fine folks over at SearchExchange (in collaboration with MS Press) have excerpted chapter 13 from Secure Messaging with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003— that just happens to be the Outlook security chapter. Their excerpt, “20 Tips on Securing Outlook in 20 Minutes“, is well worth reading. It includes information on how to set up Outlook to use Windows Rights Management (including info on how to create your own RM templates), as well as information on controlling S/MIME through GPO templates, and how to set up and use RPC-over-HTTPs. f you like the chapter, buy the whole thing!