Category Archives: Musings

What a cool idea! This guy wrote an Exchange event sink to take incoming attachments from Vonage’s voice mail service and transcode them using a codec natively supported by Windows Media Player on both the desktop and on mobile devices. I wish I’d thought of that.

I’m waiting for my new T-Mobile MDA to get here. In the meantime, I’ve gathered a few useful links:

• How to back up and restore ROM images on the Wizard (and still more on the same topic)
• The Wizard tweaks wiki
• This thread on essential free downloads for the Wizard
• A great review of the Cingular 8125 (same device, different carrier), with details on customization and tweaks
• A comprehensive set of notes from a guy who switched to the MDA from a Treo and wanted to customize the MDA for as much one-handed operation as possible

Before the device gets here, I need a new cert for my Exchange FE (some WM5 devices don’t like self-signed certs), and I have a few dozen things to download to prep the install 🙂 In particular, my first step will probably be to put an MSFP ROM on the device so I can use DirectPush. That will be invaluable when I travel.

Update: just ordered a 2GB miniSD card for the MDA, which got here about 30 minutes ago. I’m backing up the ROMs right now preparatory to installing the MSFP AKU2 image.

Well, mine are, anyway. (For once, I got this done before Jim McBee… yay me!) The sessions:

• EXC04, Cookbook Reloaded: Cool Exchange Scripting with Monad: a 200-level introduction to the new Monad shell and how you can use it with both Exchange 2003 and Exchange 12.
• EXC10, Improving Your Message Security: an overview of what CIA really means and how to get better confidentiality and integrity for your Exchange environment. One slide on E12 security features.
• EXC17, Using Continuous Backup: coverage of storage- and host-based continuous backup solutions for Exchange, including a discussion of local continuous replication (LCR) and clustered continuous replication (CCR) in Exchange 12.

Wow, busy day yesterday! I got up early, hit the hotel gym (man, I love those elliptical machines!), had a huge breakfast with Devin and Missy, and hit my room. I say “my room” because I was in it for three sessions back-to-back: one on continuous backup, one on Exchange security, and one on scripting with Monad. All three were well attended, and I got a ton of questions in each session. Some of the questions were pretty thought-provoking, too, which is always fun.
Atypically, I didn’t spend much time on the exhibit floor; I went to Devin’s Sender ID session (which I’ll be delivering in Nice), and we had a short book signing at the show bookstore. (Thanks to those of you who came by!) I missed the MVP get-together because I had planned what I thought would be a short trip via water taxi to Epcot for a souvenir run. Turns out that the water taxi takes you to the Epcot entrance on the opposite side of the lagoon from the front gate, and there’s no gift shop there. By the time I made it back from the hotel, I was too tired to do anything but order room service (which was excellent) and start working on the list of session submissions for the fall Exchange Connections show. If you’ve submitted proposals, I hope to let you hear something back by week’s end.
A couple of observations: first, I was surprised that no one in any of my 3 sessions (close to 400 people in total) was running 5.5. That’s a very good sign. There was a lot of interest in Monad, with tons of questions about what specific tools the Exchange team would be shipping in beta 2. Cemaphore and Mimosa have gained a lot of name recognition since the fall San Diego show. Finally, I didn’t win the Harley Sportster that the show organizers gave away. Maybe next time…

Here’s an interesting idea: a small, silent spam-filtering appliance for the home. The folks at SpamCube may be on to something here– if, that is, their filtering works well. For $150 MSRP, it’s probably worth a good look, especially if their filtering works. (Their site does some unfortunate handwaving about “AI“, which always makes me suspicious!)

Morgan Stanley is in the news again because one of its former employees (who coincidentally was central in the Perelman affair) is suing for wrongful termination. Messaging Pipeline says it best:

A saga of inappropriate, incompetent, and potentially illegal conduct continues to unfold at Morgan Stanley, with the company’s own E-mail trail at the center of it all.

Man, I hate it when that happens. The plaintiff, Arthur Riel, claims that he was terminated after pointing out inappropriate emails, including requests by the CTO to fix things so no one except the CEO’s direct reports could email him. The company claims that Riel misused his access as head of the company’s archiving project to spy on others. I don’t know who’s right, but it’s clear that a) this case will get uglier before it’s resolved; b) there are probably other similar Lurking Horrors waiting in other companies’ archiving and retention efforts; and c) if I were a corporate counsel I’d be boning up on messaging case law.

Last week, I went to a press briefing to find out what had become of FrontBridge. The answer: a lot!

This press release sums it up nicely; the former FrontBridge services are now known as “Exchange Hosted Services” (EHS). Not a great name, since one of the first orders of business in the briefing was to clear up the difference between hosted Exchange services and EHS. That was easy enough, but imagine having to have that conversation over, and over, and over, and … well, you get the idea.

There are four EHS components: archiving, filtering, continuity, and encryption. The EHS filtering service combines all of the previously unbundled FrontBridge offerings into a single whole. The other services are, to me, more interesting because they provide pay-as-you-go options for services that formerly would have been required to be self-hosted. For example, the encryption service provides a simple way to send encrypted mail to outside recipients who may not have the capability to receive encrypted mail: you send a mail, the service captures it and sends the recipient an SSL-protected link, and the recipient clicks the link to go to the mail. This is a simple and effective approach that, in the past, would have required a hefty investment in Tumbleweed‘s products. The continuity component is interesting, too, although I’d have to give the nod to MessageOne’s EMS product because it supports calendar and contact data, has better synchronization options, and offers BlackBerry support.

My Exchange UPDATE column this week has more details (I’ll link to it once it goes live); the bottom line, though, is that the FrontBridge acquisition is complete, the new EHS products are commercially available and competitively priced, and they offer some interesting capabilities. In fact, you could even use EHS to provide filtering and policy enforcement for non-Exchange systems like Domino and OCS (both of which lack any serious built-in capabilities).

The Anti-Phishing Working Group has posted their phishing trends report for January 2006. The group reports 9,715 unique phishing sites in the month of January, up almost 35% from December 2005. That’s pretty scary. It’s interesting to see what major collaboration and messaging vendors are doing to address the problem, too: IBM and Oracle are ignoring the problem, while Microsoft’s already added anti-phishing features to Outlook 2003 SP2 and has shown both server- and client-based solutions for Office 2007 and Exchange 12.

From Chris Scharff, a pointer to Hz, a new service that works with mobile devices. You send mail to a special email address (like, say, hzFlightInfo@hz.com), and you get back a set of requested information. This is akin to the IM bots that let you do web searches or get product information, but it doesn’t require a special client, and it doesn’t require you to have data service on your device– if you can get email, you can get Hz service. There are agents for geolocation services (where’s the nearest ATM?), travel (is my flight delayed? when’s the next flight from point A to point B?) and others. I’ll be playing with this to see how well it works in practice.

My main homie Jim McBee has been working on a new e-book for RealTime Publishers: the Tips and Tricks Guide to Secure Messaging. It’s available as a free download (registration required) from Microsoft.

Jim also has a new book coming out May 1 — Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Advanced Administration (see?) It’s basically the second edition of Exchange Server 2003 24Seven, so it’s probably going to be worth picking up.

Arik Hesserdahl at BusinessWeek says that Apple needs a security czar. So does Microsoft’s Stephen Toulouse. So, I sent Steve Jobs a letter touting my qualifications for the job. We’ll see what happens.

I used to have separate categories for posts about Workplace and Oracle Collaboration Suite, but now that I’m starting to work with Zimbra and Scalix, I figured I’d lump all the non-Exchange material into a single category so that people who aren’t interested will only have one category to skip. Thus, the new “Non-Exchange” category.

Devin, Missy, and I will be doing a book signing for the Exchange Server Cookbook at the Orlando Exchange Connections show next month. The signing’s at 3:30p on 10 April; see O’Reilly’s page for details. C’mon by and say hello!

This is super cool: Microsoft’s started a series of Exchange podcasts (in both WMA and MP3, naturally!). This is a very smart move on the Exchange team’s part, since it will unlock their webcast content and deliver it to a much broader audience. I was hoping to find the Exchange 12 preview webcasts from last week in podcast form; no word on whether that content will be added later.