Category Archives: UC&C

2009-05-03 · 23:53

Exchange 2010: information protection and control

There’s a whole lot to talk about from an information protection standpoint in Exchange 2010. The two biggest features I want to talk about are transport protection encryption (TPE) and protected voice mail. Oddly enough, these two are related even though they may not seem to be.

Transport protection encryption is what Microsoft calls the new integration between Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) and Exchange transport rules. Simply put, you can define transport rules that automatically apply AD RMS templates to messages in transit. You can use the same predicates and conditions available to transport rules in Exchange 2007. However, there are now actions that let you automatically apply a selected RMS template to messages that match the conditions and exceptions in your rules. For example, you could automatically apply a “company confidential” template to any messages sent to your outside law firm– not a bad idea given the ease of accidentally sending messages where they don’t belong.

Outlook Protection Rules is a new client-side feature (implemented via an add-in for Outlook 2010). The add-in allows you to apply a transport rule-like mechanism to get client-side protection. For example, you can push an Outlook protection rule that automatically applies a certain AD RMS template to a message before it’s sent. The user may or may not be able to override the rule, depending on whether you made it mandatory or not. When you use these rules, the message is protected at the desktop so that administrators can’t read it. This is useful protection for scenarios where a third-party hosted service (like, oh, this one) might otherwise be able to gain access to sensitive items.

In Exchange 2010, the transport and journaling components can read IRM-protected messages. This means that these messages can be journaled, indexed, filtered, and so on, and that transport agents can apply signatures, disclaimers, and message hygiene policies.

Another thing that’s very, very cool: AD RMS is supported in OWA 2010 and on non-Windows Mobile devices. This builds on the AD RMS prelicensing agent shipped with Exchange 2007 SP1, which will proactively request a license for protected content before delivering the message containing that content to your mailbox. The client access server (CAS) will request the license and, on the fly, render the message for the client’s display.

Now, I promised to mention protected voice mail. Many legacy voice mail systems let you mark messages as private, but Exchange 2007 didn’t include this feature. Exchange 2010 does, though. It’s implemented using AD RMS; when a caller marks a message as private, the UM server applies a do-not-forward template to the message before it’s submitted to the hub transport server. (Often-asked question: can you use other RMS templates instead of do-not-forward? No, you can’t.)

Moderation is another awfully interesting feature, but I’ll have to write about it later– my dinner, a bag of tasty microwave popcorn, is done!

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2009-05-03 · 02:14

Monterey training week 1 wrapup

Yay! I survived the first week of my training in Monterey! A few random observations:

  • Training people 1:1 for 10-12 hours a day is quite demanding. I have to give my students a break every hour or so, not because they need it but because I need it. The energy and enthusiasm of the sailors I’m working with is definitely motivating, though.
  • Exchange 2003 looks really old after a year of working with Exchange 2010. It’s a little scary, in fact, how old some of the hardware and software that the Navy has to use is; some of the shipboard routers our sailors depend on are so old that the manufacturer doesn’t support them any longer.
  • Our lunch and dinner meals are catered by the local Whole Foods. Those folks can definitely cook, but it’s not as good as Arlene’s home cooking. Thankfully they’re not providing desserts, or I’d probably blow up.
  • I had forgotten what apartment life was like. Arlene and I lived in an apartment the first year and a half of our marriage, but that was a long time ago! The apartment I’m in has noisy upstairs neighbors, plus a cat infestation that results in nightly catfights somewhere not far outside my bedroom window. On the other hand, it’s nice to not be in a hotel; I have a real kitchen.
  • In Monterey, apparently caffeine-free diet Coke is illegal, because I sure can’t find it anywhere.
  • The Monterey Bay Aquarium really is as good as you’ve heard. However, it wasn’t much fun going there without the kids. It’s just not the same without my family around!

Today I spent some time driving around the city (which didn’t take long, hemmed in as it is by Monterey Bay). I toured the aquarium for about two hours (photos here), dropped by the local Goodwill to pick out a couple of new shirts, found a place to do my laundry, and so on. I briefly debated going to see the new X-Men movie but opted instead for some Whole Foods organic microwave popcorn and some more of season 2 of The Wire. Tomorrow I’ll be attending the Monterey ward, then my old friend Chris Larsen and I are going to get together and do some sightseeing. It should be a nice relaxing day, which is important given that I start teaching again bright and early Monday.

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2009-04-30 · 11:27

Great MailTips introduction

I had planned to write a long, detailed post on MailTips, but… well, you know the old saying: “you snooze, you lose.” I was beaten to it by EJ, who happens to be the MailTips program manager at Microsoft. If you want to get a sense of what MailTips are and how they work, see his post at the Exchange team blog. However, note that MailTips require support in the client (OWA 2010 or Outlook 2010) and on the server. The public beta version of Exchange 2010 has the server support, but not the OWA support, so you won’t be able to test them yourself unless and until Microsoft releases a more recent server build to the public.

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2009-04-28 · 10:35

INTERACT 2009 keynote recap

Moz Hussein, Rajesh Jha, and Gurdeep Singh Pall delivered the INTERACT 2009 keynote. (I was liveblogging it, but couldn’t post it until after the event, then I forgot.)

Rajesh: software + services is a “very pragmatic, and I think in some ways, inevitable, part of every organization’s array of things to think about.” Every org has to decide what’s best for it based on constraints, goals, compliance requirements, etc. S+S means “no technology ultimatum” imposed by the vendor: you can move workload between the cloud and premises in whatever mix makes sense for you. “We think about 40% of organizations don’t offer e-mail or advanced communication services to their employees”– target for Deskless Worker Services. Experiences from running Exchange 2010 dogfood for Exchange Labs has provided great feedback, including accelerated innovation and stability.

Gurdeep: what’s OCS doing around services? “First and foremost, we’re letting Exchange go in and figure out our problems!” (this got a big laugh.) IM and presence being offered starting 15 April for Office Communications Online standard edition customers.

Rajesh: Consumer technologies aren’t manageable, but consumerization of IT is real– it’s happening. Every university, college, high school student is used to gigabyte mailboxes. Technology that works for the older generation may not be what you need to attract and retain the newer generation.

Gurdeep: “I’ll never forgive marketing folks for changing the INTERACT format.” (chuckles) Lots of change and transformation in the voice market, all going on with the backdrop of “the biggest economic event we’ll see in our lifetimes.” It’s both concerning and a great opportunity.

Moz: what does the economy mean for IT pros?

Gurdeep: a lot of things are out of our control. People deal with that in different ways. Within Microsoft, we discussed how to deal with this. Researched the Great Depression, including figuring out how many of the Fortune 100 survived and/or grew. Common thread: innovation and transformation (e.g. Sears transformed from exclusive mail-order to rural customers to a mix of mail-order and retail). Things to do: manage costs “like you’ve never done before”, but be careful not to eat away muscle– during a rebound, that’s when you’ll fail. #1 step typically is changing how you do things.

Moz: what does “unified” really mean?

Gurdeep: NYC is an amazing city. Latest discovery: you can buy great, amazing brand-name bags right on the street for real cheap! (laughs) What’s interesting: those were cheap imitations. Problem in this industry: we have expensive imitations in the UC space. After intro of UC technology, benefits have driven wide adoption of “unified” as a moniker, but lots of so-called UC systems are the results of acquisitions– multiple user experiences, multiple back-ends, complicated provisioning. Important for buyers to be savvy about what’s unified and what isn’t. Don’t be fooled by checkbox comparisons. How many distinct user experiences are users going to be subjected to? Video conferencing systems are semi-widespread, but why aren’t they used more? They’re too hard to use! MS focus on single directory, single set of components, single management experience provides a true unified experience. How did a billion people get on the Internet? Self-driven– you couldn’t intentionally train a billion people to do anything if you wanted to.

Moz: how are Exchange and OCS getting closer together?

Gurdeep: we’re already tied together in many ways: directory, common contacts, etc. “If you have Exchange 2007 deployed, then adding OCS 2007 R2, is much easier now than it has been in the past.” Still some areas of mismatch (like Powershell; Powershell support coming to OCS in the next release). As we move forward, we’re looking at other integration points, but “you cannot push this too far”– handling for different content types like voice and e-mail are fundamentally different.

Rajesh: my favorite OCS feature is that they’re going to be adding PowerShell, “giving everyone a unified way to manage. That’s a great example where we’re working towards giving you more common tools across workloads.”

Gurdeep: my favorite Exchange feature: 70% IOPS reduction from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007, then a further 50% reduction from 2007 to Exchange 2010.

Moz: how should people be approaching the architecture for UC?

Gurdeep: I have all these disparate systems for conferencing, video, etc. I made disparate decisions to buy them because they’re separate silos. Microsoft’s UC vision unifies all these things, but you can’t just throw away what you already have. First priority: develop an overall UC architecture vision to get a “magnetic north”. If you’re ready to resign your expensive contract for audioconferencing service, having an architecture helps you consider rolling out OCS for that– and once the infrastructure is in place, you can easily and quickly add new capabilities. IM and presence are core features that are easy to get up and running. For many of your users, ask the question: is that desk phone still necessary? Would you rather buy a $300 netbook or a $300 IP phone? Lifetime costs for phones are baked into the system– you have to discover and eliminate them. Simple rule: if you can get down to 1 of anything, likely you’ll be paying less for it. PBX industry is a lot like the mainframe industry: vertically integrated, single source. Once they sold you the mainframe, they had you! “Don’t buy the mainframe!” The decisions you make now will lock you in for the next 5-6 years. Don’t get locked in, and be savvy about the cost and changes that are there.

Moz: as you think about the role of the IT pro, what’s the to-do list for prospering in the current situation?

Rajesh: Very important to have a vision of where you want to go. Economic environment imposes constraints. Resource constraints can be a huge clarifying factor: we force ourselves to impose constraints and use them to make progress on longer-term plans. Admins lead by understanding their organizational goals and technologies, then driving changes.

Gurdeep: no one ever calls telecom managers to ask them to help move solutions forward– they call to yell that phones are down. Change in roles: have to figure out how to get ahead and move the business forward. Many examples: if the economic situation stays like this, companies will have to ask whether it makes sense to have expensive real estate.

Moz: we’re announcing Exchange 14 tomorrow. What 3 things do you most want to talk about?

Rajesh: Let me do 4! Super-excited about Exchange 2010. Available in public beta on 15 April. First key investment: important for us to keep the end user in mind. What we do to make them productive translates into cost savings. $650 billion/yr lost to e-mail interruptions (based on Basex): 25% of IW workday is responding to e-mail. We give you access from broad range of mobile phones and browsers, but we also provide tools to manage information overload. MailTips, voice mail preview, “ignore conversation”. Archiving and compliance improvements.

Gurdeep: having IM contacts built into OWA is a very cool feature too.

Q&A

What are some of the developer opportunities for this combined platform?

Gurdeep: taking a software-centric approach opens up a lot of opportunities. Developer opportunity really isn’t there on traditional PBX systems.Single biggest opportunity for transformation isn’t replacing voice with OCS– it’s to allow you to think across all the software in your enterprise with communications-enabled business processes (CEBP). A word of caution: enterprise developers speak a different language! Example: “MSExpense is a tool that we use so that when you spend money we cause you pain.” We’re working with the internal app developers to IM and presence-enable MSExpense so the app can use presence status to alert people and make routing decisions.

Rajesh: Mac Business Unit moving to Exchange Web Services for Entourage. We’re also trying to get RIM to move their services over to EWS instead of MAPI.

How is Microsoft using software + services?

Rajesh: We’re moving some of our internal users over to the services platform. We’re using the high availability and DAS work that we’ve been doing for customers internally as a proving ground.

What are some of the biggest blockers to software + services?

Gurdeep: go back to 1997– knowing what you know now, would you buy a mainframe? There are industries where software as an application can become a blocker.

Rajesh: if you have a good sense of where you want to be a few years out, that helps inform what you should do now.

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2009-04-26 · 11:28

Exchange 2010 database naming

The fact that Exchange 2010 includes database availability groups has some implications that you may not have thought of. Most of them, I hadn’t thought of either, which is why it’s great that there are smart people like Ross Smith IV (the original; accept no substitutes). Ross sent some suggested practices for Exchange 2010 database naming to TAP admins, and I wanted to share them.

Here’s the deal: in Exchange 2007 and earlier, mailbox and public folder databases are children of server objects. That means that you can uniquely identify a database by a combination of its name (which may not be unique throughout the forest) and its server name (which is guaranteed by AD to be unique). In Exchange 2010, the database is no longer “owned” by a particular server. Instead, it’s a member of a DAG, and it may actually become active on any server in the DAG at any time. That means that your database names shouldn’t include the name of the server. DAGs can span AD sites, too, so guess what: don’t use the AD site name (or the name of the physical datacenter) either. Otherwise the name of the database may not correspond in any way to where the database is actually active.

Finally, consider carefully whether you want to include the name of the organization or company. This has nothing to do with DAGs per se, but rather with the overhead of updating database names after a merger, acquisition, or rebranding. Unless, of course, you work for Contoso, in which case you should be OK.

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2009-04-22 · 12:10

Installing Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging

Following up on my post from the other day where I linked to Scott’s step-by-step install instructions: my homeboys at Gold Systems have posted a step-by-step install guide covering installing the Exchange UM role in Exchange 2010. The big difference from a regular install is that you need the Windows Server 2008 Desktop Experience feature, because it includes the necessary audio codecs.

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2009-04-15 · 17:13

Following up on training investment

I got some great feedback via e-mail from my previous post about the value of Microsoft’s MCM training. Shortly after I posted, Devin wrote a long and detailed post on the actual economics of getting an MCM: what it costs vs what you can potentially earn. In conjunction with his argument, I wanted to point out that the OCS MCM class is now on sale for its next two rotations: R2 (April 27-May 16) has a 50% “public beta” discount, and R3 (June 8-27) has a 30% discount. If only I had time to go!

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2009-04-15 · 14:54

Exchange 2010: Availability

Scott Schnoll and his posse delivered a great session on availability technology in Exchange 2010 at INTERACT yesterday. We’ve been using this technology for a while now at 3Sharp, and it really is very, very cool.

So, the really big availability news in Exchange 2010 is the introduction of a new construct, the database availability group (DAG). The DAG is a collection of up to 16 servers, each of which can contain a replica of a mailbox database. For example, I could put MDB1, MDB2, and MDB3 on server1, MDB2 and MDB4 on server2, MDB1 and MDB3 on server 3, and so on.

Mailbox databases are now the target object for failover– instead of having an entire mailbox server failover using Windows clustering, the mailbox database itself fails over to another server within the same DAG. For example, MDB1 can move from server1 to server3, either automatically or manually.

Essentially, this is a mechanism for replicating mailbox databases between servers, something that the Exchange admin community has been asking for for years! Some highlights:

  • Log shipping no longer uses SMB; instead it uses the ESE streaming API for seeding [ed: hat tip Scott Schnoll for the correction], which is considerably more efficient, and raw TCP sockets for replication. In Exchange 2007, there was one SMB session for all databases on a server. In Exchange 2010, there’s one TCP socket per database, so scalability and parallelization are greatly improved.
  • This provides HA for systems that are built on top of DAS; in fact, it’s optimized for DAS. You can use dedicated storage per node; replication means that you can use JBODs without even using RAID.
  • DAGs can span AD sites, subnets, and so on (although all servers in the DAG must be in the same AD domain). You can control and throttle DAG replication at the network level or using the DAG controls for log lag.
  • The setup experience is completely different than SCC. To enable a DAG, you create a DAG and then add database replicas to it. You don’t have to manually create any of the failover mechanisms, install any Windows prerequisites, or any of the stuff you’d have to do with single-copy clusters (SCC).

The advent of the DAG means that some legacy features are disappearing. First, there are no storage groups in Exchange 2010– each database has its own associated set of logs. Second, SCC is dead (e.g. no longer supported). Personally, I won’t miss it.

Interesting question posed by Josh Maher: do you still need backups? We debated this hotly at the MVP Summit. Microsoft’s position is that some organizations may choose to do fewer backups once they deploy DAGs because their databases are already distributed across multiple servers in multiple sites. Of course, this distribution doesn’t protect you against logical errors in the database, which to me weakens the argument that you don’t need backups. Microsoft itself doesn’t do backups internally any longer. They don’t have business requirements to recover long-term archived mail.

Public folders: no changes, except that you can no longer use continuous replication for public folders. You can put a PF database on a server that’s in a DAG, but you can’t put the PF database itself into the DAG. Because Exchange 2007 limited you to having a single PF database per CCR-protected storage group, this isn’t actually a loss.

More to come on this topic– heaven knows there will be a lot of interesting stuff to explore as people start experimenting with DAGs in their lab. As for us, we’re about to expand our Redmond DAG by adding a server in Toledo to give us site resiliency too– should be fun!

UPDATE 15 Apr 1405 PDT: Ewan Dalton has more on the new features here.

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2009-04-15 · 03:18

It’s official: Exchange Server 2010

It’s been killing me not to talk about this, but now I can! On April 15, Microsoft will officially release a public beta of Exchange 2010 (formerly code-named “Exchange 14”). There are so many improvements in the product that I can’t decide which ones to talk about first. I’ll be updating this post to link to my own blog posts, as well as to interesting posts from other Exchange folks, so you’ll see it update frequently.

Update [2233 PST 14 Apr]: the Exchange 2010 beta bits are now available for download!

Update [0549 PST 15 Apr]: the docs are up as well, and Scott Schnoll has posted a step-by-step install guide.

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2009-04-14 · 17:26

INTERACT 2009, part 1

Last year, INTERACT was a fantastic physical conference held in San Diego (a hard location to beat!) This year, Microsoft’s changed things up. There are separate, and mostly concurrent, events in Reading, UK, Boston, and Redmond, plus an online virtual event. I flew in yesterday and am now in the middle of an Exchange high availability session. There are two parallel tracks: one covering Exchange 14, and one covering OCS 2007 R2 topics. I’m mostly attending the Exchange sessions, but there are some pretty nifty OCS sessions as well.

The weather’s been weird since I got here; yesterday as I was driving to the Microsoft campus, I drove into a good-sized hailstorm. The hailstones were small, but there were enough of them to perceptibly whiten the ground. Fortunately it stopped hailing before I had to get out of the car!

I’m preparing a series of blog posts on various topics that I’ll post over the next few days. Some of these posts have some really exciting stuff in them that hasn’t been publicly disclosed yet, so stay tuned!

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2009-04-14 · 17:20

Exchange 2010: OWA

Man, it’s been killing me not to talk about OWA 2010. Take a look at this screenshot:

Exchange2010-OWA-1.png

First: this shot’s taken from Safari 4.0 beta 2 on the Mac. That’s right: OWA fully supports Safari on Mac OS X (not Windows) and Firefox on the Mac and Windows, along with IE 7+ on Windows. (I can’t remember if Linux Firefox is supported or not; I think so but I might be wrong). Safari and Firefox get the full premium OWA experience, with drag-and-drop, spell checking, notifications, and the rest.

Second: check out the presence jellybean in the upper-right corner. OWA is now integrated with OCS. In this case, the screenshot shows my mailbox hosted on Exchange Labs, which features Windows Live Messenger integration. Notice that my Messenger contact list appears in the lower-left side of the navigation bar, and that next to Arlene’s name in the message pane, you can see her presence jellybean. (Take a good look at the context menu on the jellybean, too– looks a lot like the one in Outlook, doesn’t it?)

Microsoft’s video showed conversation view very briefly, but this is one of my all-time favorite Exchange features. Here’s what it looks like in OWA 2010:

Exchange2010-OWA-2.png

So, for the conversation titled “Introduction”, I can see all the messages in the thread, with the first non-deleted message automatically highlighted. The conversation view automatically includes deleted messages, sent items, and messages that I’ve filed in other folders, so I can get a sense of the conversation’s length and spread. The view in the message list (on the left) shows how the thread branches (not much, in this case) and the location of each message; the conversation view itself on the right shows the active message, along with controls to expand other messages. Of course, I can select, move, and delete messages either individually or as an entire conversation.

Now, some of you may be scoffing right now, saying “wait a minute– gmail has had conversation views for a long time.” That’s true. OWA’s view is richer; it displays more visual information and is easier to navigate than gmail’s current implementation. Take a look at these two screenshots to see what I’m talking about. The first shows a conversation originally imported from gmail as it appears in OWA 2010; the second shows it in gmail.

Exchange2010-OWA-5.png Exchange2010-OWA-4.png

Speaking of gmail, OWA 2010 can aggregate and display in your inbox mail from multiple services, too. Check out what one of the Exchange Labs options pages looks like:

Exchange2010-OWA-3.png

There are quite a few things to look at here. First, notice the account information pane, which allows users to set their own address, phone numbers, and so on. As an Exchange admin, I can control whether users may do so or not, but letting them do so has some obvious cost and time savings benefits for the IT staff. Second, apropos of self-service, check out the “Shortcuts” area on the right side of the screen: users can quickly get access to do a number of things directly from within OWA, like setting up Direct Push or creating server-side rules. Finally, notice the “Other Accounts” section; I’ve set up a link with my gmail account so that mail sent to my gmail address shows up in my Exchange Labs inbox. (OWA 2010 also lets you select the address from which mail is sent, much as Entourage does on the Mac, so I can send messages that appear to be from my domain or from gmail).

I could go on with features. For example, the message list isn’t paged any longer– it scrolls from beginning to end, just like Entourage or Outlook, seamlessly loading messages when necessary. There are tons of other little grace notes like this, but you’ll have to wait for RTM to see some of them!

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2009-04-09 · 16:12

Now’s the time to invest in training

The media’s been flooded with news about various kinds of job training, including Microsoft’s Elevate America program and various state programs targeted at autoworkers, manufacturing workers, and so on. This makes sense, given that the economic mess we’re currently in means that there’s a lot of turmoil and uncertainty about jobs at all levels. Getting better training almost always makes sense, especially if that training helps increase your market value.

Greg Taylor, who runs the Microsoft Certified Master for Exchange program, just e-mailed me to say that he only has 2 open slots in the next MCM | Exchange course, starting May 4. We’ve had a lively debate about whether the MCM certification is actually valuable, in the sense that it’s worth what it costs. After seeing the back-and-forth between people like Tony Redmond (who owns H-P’s Microsoft consulting business), Gary Cooper, and Devin, the answer is clear: yes.

How is that possible? Simple. First, you get training that’s literally not available anywhere else. A couple of weeks ago, I was there when Tim McMichael was teaching CCR and SCR. In the back of the room were Scott Schnoll and Ross Smith IV. It would be difficult to conceive of a better group to teach the real-world intricacies of how CCR and SCR can be deployed.

More importantly, when H-P (or IBM, or Dell, or other large shops) go in to a customer, the customer already knows them. They’re not facing the problem of trying to convince a customer that a smaller, lesser-known shop can do a great job– and can justify its bill rates. On the other hand, for smaller consultancies, MCM | Exchange is a terrific way to immediately lock the competence flag to 1. As Microsoft continues to evangelize the program, this effect will grow. That’s why I’d jump into this rotation if I could… but I can’t. However, you, dear reader, can. It’s true that the training is about $13,000 (plus your living expenses). However, I believe strongly that for independents and smaller shops, you can sbsolutely recoup this value, and more. Check out the page, and if you’re interested in signing up, ping me directly and I’ll put you in touch with Greg.

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2009-03-16 · 14:17

Two continuous cluster replication white papers

Missy has been pretty busy lately. Apart from working incredibly hard on some very cool Exchange 14-related stuff, she recently completed two white papers. The first one examines the interplay between continuous cluster replication (CCR) and direct attached storage, in an attempt to answer the question of whether you have to use SANs for efficient and safe CCR deployment. The second examines the pros and cons of CCR versus single copy cluster (SCC) deployment. Both of them are worth reading if you’re interested in using CCR with Exchange.

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2009-03-13 · 16:30

Moving to Seattle

I can’t believe I’ve forgotten to blog about this, but apparently I did: we’re moving to Seattle.

When: it depends on when our house sells. It’s on the market now. We’ve had a few showings, with good feedback thus far. In fact, as I was writing this, we got notice of another showing tomorrow, and we have an open house on Sunday. Houses are selling better in Perrysburg and Sylvania than in the overall metro Toledo area, so we’ll have to see what happens. We might get a buyer tomorrow, or it might be in 2010. This uncertainty would normally be driving me CRAZY but it hasn’t been too bad (see below to find out why).

How: we don’t know yet. Ideally the house here would sell before the kids start school in the Seattle area (so, before about 1 September); that way we could move without the disruption inherent in a mid-year move. We’ll probably do the U-Pack thing again, at least for most of our furniture, then hire a real mover for anything fragile or valuable. That’s probably the best balance between cost, hassle, and breakage. As of right now we’re planning to drive cross-country to actually get there, but we’ll have to see what the weather’s like when we get ready to go. Matt and I want to hit the C.M. Russell museum’s bison exhibit on the way if at all possible, and according to Tim and Julie there are lots of other cool things to do en route.  

Why: this is a simple question, but with a complicated answer. We moved here in 2002 to be closer to my parents after my dad had an unexpected blood clot that hospitalized him; Tim being here was an unexpected bonus. We quickly grew to love Perrysburg. People here have a great sense of community, our local church ward is full of wonderful people, the schools are excellent, and it’s a vibrant place with excellent services.

Over the last 18 months or so, though, I’ve gradually developed the realization that it would be best for 3Sharp if I were in Redmond more often, even permanently. After Dad’s accident, Mom decided to move down to Louisiana, and with Tim gone too, much of the initial reason to live here was gone. Arlene and I started talking about the possibility of moving several months ago, but neither of us took it seriously– we agreed to put off a serious exploration until after New Year’s Day. So, we did, and all was well.

I thought about moving, and made some desultory (and, frankly, rather lazy) attempts to pray for guidance, but to no avail. Shortly after the first of the year, we had a Sunday School lesson that covered Doctrine and Covenants section 9. I was already generally familiar with the principle: the Lord expects us to do the legwork, examine alternatives and options, and make decisions using the brains He gave us. We can always seek confirmation of our decision, but that’s not the same as asking Him to tell you what to do. That was the missing ingredient.

So, I went back and started really thinking about it seriously. What were the pros? (Where to begin? Much less travel for me; great opportunities for growth for the whole family; proximity to the temple; beautiful scenery; new things to explore; a really diverse environment for the boys, a whole new part of the country to explore, more gluten-free foods…) What were the cons? (Housing costs, obviously, plus the upheaval of dragging everyone across the country, particularly for Arlene) On balance, I decided that the pros outweighed the cons, so I told Arlene what I’d been thinking about. She too had been giving the idea a more serious look. Once we started praying about it, it became clear that moving was the right thing for our family to do– but that it would happen when it happened, not necessarily on our schedule.

Where: somewhere on the east side of the metro area. Our office is in Redmond, so I’d like to be reasonably close to it. There are some great bargains in Snoqualmie and other nearby areas, but I don’t know if I’m ready to take on a 30+ minute commute each way after nearly 11 years of commuting from the breakfast room to my office down the hall. I’ll be in the office some days and working from home some days, so that will help make the transition easier. We’ve been making heavy use of Redfin to look for houses: partly because it’s effective, and partly because it’s fun to window-shop.

More news when there is news– now I have to go clean up my office before the showing tomorrow.

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2009-03-10 · 09:18

Unified communication news roundup, March 09 edition

I’ve been collecting bits and pieces of information that were too short to make meaningful posts on their own– now I’ve mashed them together to make a semi-meaningful post.

First, OCS/LCS guru Joe Schurman has a new book out: Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications. As soon as I got Dustin Hannifin’s mail announcing it, I ordered it.

Second, I found that Microsoft has an extensive listing of products that have been certified as supported with OCS 2007 R2 under the Unified Communications Open Interoperability Program. There’s a lot of interesting stuff there (including the fact that I’m a revision behind on my 3300 firmware).

Third, OCS and Speech Server MVP Marshall Harrison launched a new site, GotUC.net. It’s a portal dedicated to the OCS development community. It’s still fairly new, so there isn’t much there, but I expect that to change over time– drop by and say hi.

I also need to write a summary of my MVP Summit experiences, but that will have to wait until later.

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