Category Archives: UC&C

2009-03-06 · 00:51

On the Microsoft Certified Master program

Brent Ozar posted an interesting piece on the value of the MCM credential. He argues that the value in being an MCM comes primarily to people who already have the ability to act as a force multiplier, making the people around them more effective. That’s one of the reasons that I’m happy that Devin’s earned his MCM; he has great potential to use what he’s learned to provide a field effect that will really help our customers.

I’m going to be teaching the Exchange UM portion of the MCM Exchange class, starting either in March or May. I’ve decided to hold off on going through the whole program until we’ve finished our move to Seattle; it’ll be much easier without the added hassle of being away from home. I’m tempted to skip the Exchange 2007 MCM and wait for the Exchange 14 version (which, of course, is a ways off), and instead go for the MCM OCS certification. Jens’ description is very tantalizing.

BTW, the MCM team has a great blog. If you’re at all interested in the MCM program, you should check it out.

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2009-03-03 · 12:46

Outlook 2007 programming chapters online

Long-time Outlook MVP Sue Mosher (who is a really interesting person besides!) wrote Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming: Jumpstart for Power Users and Administrators
a year or two ago, and Microsoft just put three chapters online from it. If you’re doing Outlook development at all, this will probably be a valuable read. Sue points out that the chapter on working with item bodies has a lot of information that she’s never seen published anywhere else.

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2009-03-03 · 12:24

At the MVP Summit

I’m excited to be at this year’s MVP Summit. (In fact, I’m in an Exchange 14-themed session right now). The summit team has their own blog, and lots of other MVPs are blogging about it. I have a huge backlog of blog entries to write, but I won’t be blogging much about the specific sessions because they’re under NDA. Too bad, because there are some E14 features that totally rock my socks off.

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2009-01-21 · 09:39

Lotus to license Exchange ActiveSync (updated)

Apparently IBM has decided that the best way to get mobile e-mail out of Notes/Domino is to license their primary competitor’s protocol! Network World ran a story today (“Lotus Notes/iPhone users to get their wish: real-time e-mail access“) claiming that IBM will include Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) support in a future release of Lotus Notes Traveler, IBM’s existing mobility solution. (Ed Brill mentioned it this morning, when I was revising this draft, too.)

This is fascinating for several reasons. First, it further solidifies EAS’ position as the dominant mobile sync protocol for e-mail, calendar, and contact data. When your biggest competitors (like Apple and Nokia in mobile devices and now IBM in collaboration software) come hat in hand to license your stuff, that’s a good sign. The original decision to license EAS to outside parties some years ago looks better and better– especially in light of the EU’s continued and bizarre insistence that Microsoft isn’t documenting and opening its protocols enough.

Second, this move implies some things about the state of the relationship between IBM (or at least the Lotus division) and Apple. IBM certainly has enough skilled developers to build their own equivalent of EAS, and to get it to run comfortably on the iPhone. Apparently, though, they don’t have the market leverage to get Apple to ship that protocol as a peer of EAS, or to allow IBM to evade the SDK restrictions on backgrounding. Of course, Apple only added EAS support in the first place to give them another attack (a submission, if you will, to borrow a little BJJ lingo) against RIM and WM. Apple apparently doesn’t feel the need to have a similar move up their sleeve for those shops running Notes.

Third, follow the money. I couldn’t find any evidence of an IBM-Microsoft cross-license for patents (which makes perfect sense given the companies’ respective stances on Linux). IBM doesn’t break out many separate numbers for sales of individual products, but given what I know about EAS licensing I expect that they’ll have to pay Microsoft a per-unit fee for the server software that implements EAS on the Domino side. That in turn gives Microsoft some interesting data they didn’t have before: how many licenses of Traveler IBM is selling. Oh, and cash money, too.

Fourth, can you imagine the field day Microsoft’s sales and marketing team is going to have with this? This is like one of those “write your own caption” contests.

Fifth, this represents a win for Windows Mobile too. Now they too can work seamlessly with Domino installations with no additional client software.

Meta-thought: IBM must have really wanted to get Notes on the iPhone. Why? It’s hard to imagine that it’s because of the huge overlap between Notes users and iPhone users, because I don’t believe such an overlap exists. Could this be an attempt by IBM to cash in on some of the halo generated by the iPhone? Does the iPhone coattail effect make up for having to license a protocol from the hated Redmondites? I guess we’ll have to wait and see…

Update: IBM’s actual press release is here. I like the phrase in the intro paragraph: “…intended support for Microsoft Active Sync”. I wonder what “intended” means in this context?

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2009-01-20 · 11:21

Microsoft releases public beta of Entourage EWS

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that Microsoft had announced their plans to release an Exchange Web Services-based version of Entourage 2008. Well, they’ve gone and done it: this Mactopia page has the link you need to sign in to Microsoft Connect and get the beta bits. Just to reiterate: you won’t see any major changes in the user interface, because there aren’t any. Consider this release to be the UI of Entourage 2008 with a completely different (and much improved!) mechanism for talking to Exchange under the hood.

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2009-01-14 · 06:50

Microsoft announces Exchange “14”

Nice one! Microsoft announced the existence of Exchange 14 (the successor to Exchange 2007) today. With Lotusphere on the horizon, I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. My home domain is hosted on Exchange 14 through Exchange Labs, and I’ve been working with it quite a bit for a number of projects. There are some very exciting things in it, and I’m looking forward to being able to talk about it more.

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2009-01-12 · 14:53

Extremely detailed summary of what’s new in Exchange

Wow. Rob Sealock, a technical account manager at Microsoft, posted an incredibly detailed list of Exchange fixes and updates for the month of December. I sure hope he keeps these posts up.

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2009-01-11 · 20:44

Two interesting virtualization news items

First, VMWare released a very interesting white paper covering their Exchange 2007 migration, which just so happened to include a lot of virtualization. They got a significant consolidation ratio in moving from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007, and they further improved it by packing 4 VMs onto each physical server. They’re using CCR in combination with VMware’s HA, DRS, and VMotion features. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit IMHO is that they’re using virtual tape drives to back up to virtual tapes using the ESE streaming APIs!
Second, the beta of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is available. There’s a lot of very tasty goodness there, including failover clustering, live migration, and 32-core support. Mmm, mmm, good!

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2009-01-06 · 23:35

Entourage to get Exchange Web Services support

Great news from Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit: they’ll be releasing a version of Entourage that uses Exchange Web Services. This is great news because WebDAV, the protocol that previous versions of Entourage have used, doesn’t provide full support for every type of Exchange data item. The Exchange Web Services (EWS) version of Entourage will support full synchronization of tasks, notes, and categories with servers running Exchange Server 2007 SP1 or later. This should please some of the folks who have been lamenting the lack of Exchange sync functionality in Entourage. The best part: they’ll release this as a free update to Entourage later this year.

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2008-12-10 · 13:10

StackSafe survey: get a SBUX card or win an iPod

StackSafe just sent me a request; they’re doing a survey of Exchange administrators (hosted by SurveyMonkey). The first 50 respondents get a Starbucks’ gift card, and they’ll draw someone at random to win an iPod Touch. It’s not a sales survey, and they’ve promised not to spam anyone. They’ve also promised to make the survey data available to me, and I’ll post it here once I get it. Take the survey here if you’re interested.

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2008-11-26 · 15:22

Cutting off e-mail for former employees

Say you’ve fired someone, or laid them off, or sadly waved goodbye as they left of their own volition. How can you effectively prevent them from accessing your Exchange servers once they’re gone?

Most connections to an Exchange server are persistent, in the sense that once the client’s authenticated the connection will remain open. This allows the client to continue to send and receive mail… the exact opposite of what you want. You might think that disabling the Active Directory account for the user would do the trick, and it will indeed prevent other logons from succeeding. However, for about two hours, existing logons will continue to work. Here’s what to do to instead:

  1. Disable the user’s mailbox. This prevents new logons to the mailbox.
  2. Set the Send Prohibit quota to 0. This prevents the user from sending new mail; the quota change takes effect immediately.
  3. Move the user’s mailbox to another database. This will immediately disconnect all open mailbox connections from any client.

Voilà! Problem solved. (Hat tip: Scott Schnoll)

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2008-11-26 · 10:16

PowerShell 101 event 11 December

I’m going to be doing a three-part “PowerShell 101” webcast for Windows IT Pro on 11 December. It’s pretty basic stuff, appropriate for those who are just getting started with PowerShell and the Exchange Management Shell (EMS). However, I will be doing a longer, more in-depth series of webcasts starting in February. For more details, see this link.

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2008-11-18 · 15:37

Enterprise Content Management white papers

This has taken me shamefully long to post, but 3Sharp’s own EricaT has just had four white papers on enterprise content management published on Microsoft’s web site:

If you’re interested in using MOSS for ECM, you should definitely check these out.

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2008-11-12 · 21:58

Exchange Connections fall 2008

This year, my attendance at Exchange Connections was shorter than usual– I arrived Tuesday afternoon, presented most of the day on Wednesday, and then had to head up to 3Sharp in Redmond for a day of meetings with customers and our new PR agency, Hardy Communications.

The flight from Detroit to Vegas was uneventful, unless you count the guy two rows behind me who was snoring like a Poulan. I was actually concerned for his health. I didn’t see any signs of the Delta takeover; the FAs were as friendly as they ever are on NWA. Unfortunately, just before boarding I discovered that I’d forgotten my headphones and my iPhone sync cable. Sadly, that meant I was forced to work for the entire flight! (Arlene sent the missing gear to me, so I was equipped before my flight to Seattle).

This was a two-laptop trip: I brought both my T61 running Windows Server 2008 and my MacBook Pro. The MBP gave me a solid 3.5 hours of fairly heavy activity. For the few minutes I was using the T61, Windows’ battery estimator gave me an estimated life of 2:21. That’s not great, but part of the problem is that I’ve only ever had the big IBM/Lenovo battery, not the smaller conformal one. I’ll have to do a more even comparison in the future. (Also: my Win2008 installation won’t let me hibernate, which is a big pain in the butt sometimes).

My first session on Exchange Online went well, including some cool demos. The questions I got were pretty good, though there were a few I couldn’t answer. (My favorite: will Exchange Online support the BlackBerry? Yeah, when pigs fly!)

PowerShell 101 was, as always, a blast. It’s such a fun presentation to give because I enjoy seeing people “get it” as they start to internalize all the stuff they can do with the Exchange Management Shell.

Apart from that, I didn’t see or do much. My room at THE Hotel smelled like smoke; I had a good lunch with my Windows IT Pro peeps at Border Grill, and now I’m heading to Seattle.

Update: I forgot to mention that the Society of Exploration Geophysicists was in town for their 78th annual convention. Fun crowd! The geophysicists tended to be well-dressed and very talkative, with lots of hallway groupings, and a surprising number of women.

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2008-11-05 · 16:39

AppAssure releases Exchange Observer

I’m glad to be able to talk about this finally! AppAssure has just released a free tool called Exchange Observer (registration required for download). This tool will automatically inspect your Exchange topology to find all Exchange 2003-hosted storage groups and databases, then give you a nifty tree view showing the status of each database. This is a simple, low-impact way to monitor all the servers in your org. Give it a try.

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