Category Archives: Musings

Sweet! Microsoft has an annual security conference called BlueHat (see MikeHow’s comments on the 2005 version), and this year they’ve started a blog to cover it. Sadly, the blog is a retrospective, since the conference was actually last week. Still, this should make for intersting reading.

Cool script from the Windows Mobile team blog; it creates a CertificateStore CAB file, containing the root certificate of your choice, directly from the command line.

Sage advice from Jesper: don’t worry about clearing the page file (I love his list of things to be worried about). The setting to clear the page file at shutdown has always seemed like security theater to me, so I’m glad to see him point it out.

We’re hiring! First, I need a good Exchange administrator with strong writing skills. The position’s in Seattle. Contact me directly if you’re interested.

Second, we need some Office solution developers. Dave Gerhardt’s got the full scoop at his blog. (Note that in your cover letter, we want details of a product demo you’ve actually worked on or built!)

Coming very soon: a week’s worth of webcasts on Exchange 12. Harold Wong’s blog has the details.

On March 1, Microsoft announced that it was making Exchange 12 beta 1 available to TechNet and MSDN subscribers as a community technology preview (CTP). When beta 1 first began, late last year, it was a private beta restricted to about 1400 Microsoft customers, all of whom had to be nominated by Microsoft employees. MVPs and a few third-party developers were also nominated, but—even including participants in the Technology Adoption Program (TAP)—only a relative handful of the tens of thousands of Exchange-using sites were in on the beta. That’s about to change dramatically, since there are more than 200,000 TechNet and MSDN subscribers, all of whom will have access to beta 1.

This isn’t the first time Microsoft’s offered a CTP; you may remember that Exchange 2003 SP2 was released as a CTP in August 2005. As with the SP2 CTP, the Exchange 12 CTP is being released so customers can get familiar with it in their own environments. It’s not supported for production use (obviously), and Microsoft has already told beta 1 customers that they won’t be able to upgrade from beta 1 directly to the released version.

As part of the CTP announcement, the product team also announced that beta 2, coming later this year, will be a public beta, so we’ll all be able to discuss it to our hearts’ content. Until then, both reviewers (which technically means me) and CTP participants are bound by the relevant NDAs and EULAs.

One thing that’s no longer under NDA: Microsoft’s finally starting to talk publicly about the new continuous replication features in Exchange 12. There are two flavors of continuous replication: local continuous replication (LCR) copies transaction log data to a second local volume, essentially giving you a protected local copy of your data. Clustered continuous replication (CCR) is cooler; with CCR, cluster nodes don’t have to share disk resources, meaning that geographically dispersed clusters get much, much easier to design and deploy. Look for more on LCR and CCR in future columns.

Interestingly, the CTP builds will be made available in both 32- and 64-bit versions. This is a smart move on Microsoft’s part, because customers that haven’t decided on their forward path from Exchange 2000 (or even Exchange 5.5) will be able to evaluate Exchange 12 features (if only in an early state) on the hardware they already have. I don’t expect any changes in their previous commitment to release the production version of Exchange 12 as a 64-bit-only product, though.

MSDN subscribers can download the Exchange 12 CTP starting today, while TechNet subscribers will get the bits as part of their March delivery. If you’re not already a subscriber to one of these two programs, you can subscribe through Microsoft’s web site.

Microsoft today released the new version of their Application Analyzer tool for Lotus Domino applications. It features a new UI, better reporting, and a customizable XML-based system for customizing the analysis it does and the ensuing recommendations. This version of the tool uses the four-phase process that MS has defined and refined since the last App Analyzer release. There’s also an accompanying best practices guide. I’m looking forward to seeing customer feedback on these tools; the previous versions of the app analyzer had some shortcomings that I hope the new version fully addresses. In particular, I’m interested in seeing Paul Mooney‘s take on it.

Microsoft is making two pretty interesting announcements today. Stay tuned for more details.

Update: now you know what the first one is.