Category Archives: UC&C

Today I powered up and configured the Intel/Eicon PIMG gateway, which links the Mitel 3300 ICP with Exchange 2007. However, this has exposed a major structural problem.

My current office is divided into two halves: in one half, I have a shelving unit that has the 3300, all of my servers, and some related stuff-n-junk (like a KVM switch, an old Dell keyboard, and an ancient 17″ CRT). In the other half, I have my main network switch, my phone panel, and my work machines. Both sides are already networked together, but:

• the 3300 can provide Power over Ethernet (PoE) to the Mitel phones, without which they won’t work. (Mitel makes a desk sled that powers the phones but I don’t have any of those).
• I need to run two analog lines from the phone panel to the 3300, then back again; the ASU in the 3300 will let it answer the analog extensions and do call transfer, forwarding, etc. between the digital and analog lines– very cool
• I really need a phone on my desk
• The 3300 is way noisier than any other piece of equipment in my office

Thus I get to choose between “lots of cables on the floor” or “unrelenting fan noise”. Not a great choice. In a couple of weeks when my upstairs office is finished, the question will be moot, so for now I’m going to leave the 3300 where it is and run one long net cable to it so I can power a desk phone. Analog line integration will have to wait for now.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Mitel, Unified Messaging

Yes, it’s that time of year again! Even though we haven’t even started the fall 2006 Exchange Connections show, I’m already looking for session proposals for the spring 2007 show (1-4 April in Orlando– finally, a time that coincides with my kids’ spring school break!).

Our goal is to have about 50% coverage of Exchange 2007, Office 2007, and SharePoint 2007 and about 50% on Exchange 2003, Office 2003, and related topics like Live Communications Server, deployment, and security. We’re interested in sessions that cover all aspects of Microsoft’s communications and collaboration stack: security, development, management, operations, migration, and integration.

If you’re interested in speaking, please send me 3-5 short abstracts and a brief speaker bio. I need these by EOD Wednesday, November 1. (Thanks to Nino for correcting the date!)

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, ExchConn

Great post at the Exchange team blog covering how server and recipient filtering work in the new Exchange Management Console. Don’t confuse this kind of filtering with recipient filtering in the anti-spam stack; same name but two entirely different things.

I’m a satisfied GoDaddy customer, but I’m a little unhappy with them at the moment. This morning, I tried to buy one of their 6-in-1 SSL certificates. Why? I wanted to be able to use one cert for autodiscover.robichaux.net and mail.robichaux.net. I figured the 6-in-1 would let me do so because the wording on the 6-in-1 order page says you can register up to six matching domains. I figured that they’d allow multiple subject alternative names, which is what I wanted. What they actually mean, though, is that you can register the same domain in up to six different TLDs… not quite the same thing. I really don’t want to buy a wildcard cert; I think I’ll probably just stick with the self-signed cert if I can’t buy an inexpensive cert with multiple subject alternative names.

You may have been wondering how Microsoft’s going to package (or, to verb a useful noun, SKU) SharePoint 2007. The official SharePoint team blog has the answer, sort of. The article links to a nifty spreadsheet that covers the primary differences between SharePoint 2003, SharePoint Server 2007, and the various SKUs of SharePoint 2007. Worth reading if you follow SharePoint as a collaboration technology.

Over at his InfoWorld blog, Dave Rosenberg makes an awfully interesting assertion: Zimbra’s well on the way to becoming a billion-dollar business. However, he uses some way faulty math to get there: he takes at face value Zimbra’s claim of 4 million paid mailboxes, then multiplies it by the $25/mailbox MSRP to get an annualized revenue of $100 million. From there, hey, it’s only an order of magnitude to get to $1 billion, right?

Continue reading →

During Exchange setup, one of the questions you have to answer is whether there are any pre-Outlook 2007 clients in your environment. (I wrote briefly about this before in the context of Office Communicator.) However, do you know what happens when you click “yes” or “no”?

If you click “yes”, the setup program will create a public folder database, in which you’ll find the familiar Schedule+ Free/Busy and Offline Address Book folders. This shouldn’t be a surprise; Outlook 2003 and earlier versions require these folders, so you’d expect Exchange to create them. If you click “no”, the public folder database isn’t created, so pre-Outlook 2007 versions can’t get free/busy data or download the OAB. However, what I didn’t know until today is that the Exchange store will also block MAPI connections from older versions of Outlook when you say “no”. Why? Because if those clients did connect, they’d have a terrible experience, with no free/busy or OAB support. To reduce the support hassle for themselves and Exchange 2007 admins, MS decided just to block the connection. To fix this, just add a public folder store to your server and voila! you’re golden.

I’ve been busy with a raft of other projects, but yesterday I finally unboxed the Mitel 3300 and the Intel/Eicon/Dialogic gateway and stacked them on my equipment rack. (Disclosure: it’s not a rack, it’s a shelving unit. Deal with it.)

The 3300 CXI that I have includes a ton of options and optional hardware. I don’t know enough about Mitel’s product line to distinguish between what’s in this box versus what you typically get when you buy one. However, this unit includes the PRI module that you need to talk to the PIMG, and it includes an Analog Support Unit (ASU) for connecting to analog phone lines. It also includes the software entitlements for embedded voice mail, wake-up calls, and a bunch of other nifty features that a) I don’t know how to use and b) probably won’t be writing about.

Continue reading →

I’ve already done one Exchange 2007 UM deployment for a customer who wanted it set up in their lab. However, now I’m branching out and deploying it again… at my house.

Mitel was kind enough to loan me a 3300 ICP to use as the centerpiece of my system, along with a couple of IP phones (including the verrry cool Navigator). Along with that, I have an Intel PIMG gateway, my trusty Exchange 2007 server, and a large stack of notes and screenshots on how to get everything working together.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be setting everything up and documenting the experience, both here and in a forthcoming e-book on setting up Exchange 2007 UM and Live Communications Server 2005 with Mitel hardware. Stay tuned for more details! (One valuable tidbit: the status lights on the 3300 are supposed to be red during normal operation– a bit of a change from what we usually expect in hardware!)

Wow, I’m not sure how I missed this (but it did end up in my “to blog” folder, so that’s something!) The team at Microsoft that covers Notes application coexistence and migration has a really cool example of how Notes can work with Microsoft applications: you can get and show presence information from Communicator within Notes applications! How cool is that?

Chris Haaker has a post that links to three podcasts (1, 2, 3) (or blogcasts, if you prefer) showing Exchange Unified Messaging in action. Eileen Brown, the Microsoft UK evangelist who recorded them, says “the sound quality is terrible” and promises to re-record them. However, they’re still a good listen if you haven’t heard the UM system before.

The Forefront Security family of products supports using more than one scanning engine at a time. This is a big advantage, since it adds a significant degree of protection against new threats. This support is coordinated through the Forefront Security Engine Manager, which provides administrators with tools for monitoring the status of installed engines, controlling which engines run, and adjusting the actions Forefront takes when an engine needs to be updated or fails during operation.

Forefront can make use to up to five engines at a time. Perhaps coincidentally, the standard edition of Forefront includes five engines:

• The Microsoft antimalware engine, based on technology Microsoft acquired when it purchased GeCAD in 2004
• The Computer Associates (CA) Vet and InoculateIT engines
• The Norman Data Defense engine
• The Sophos Virus Detection engine

If you buy the Exchange Enterprise Client Access License (CAL), you also get to use four additional engines included only with the Enterprise CAL: AhnLabs, Authentium’s Command Antivirus engine, Kaspersky Labs’s engine, and VirusBuster AntiVirus. During installation, Forefront randomly chooses a set of four engines; administrators can use the suggested combination or pick a different set.

In a future post, I’ll have a lot more to say about which engine combinations make the most sense for different uses.

If you’ve used Office Communicator, you may have noticed that it doesn’t allow clickable hyperlinks. This is a reasonable decision by MS made to limit the spread of malware that uses IM as a transport, but it’s still a pain in the butt for many environments, including us. Doug has the solution: a simple registry change will restore links to full click-a-bility.

Dear Ed,

I’ve been fortunate to be one of the conference chairs for Exchange Connections for a couple of years now. This year’s show will be especially good for several reasons:

• Lots of Exchange 2007 content: some from Microsoft, some from industry experts like Pierre Bijaoui, Kevin Laahs, Devin Ganger, and Jim McBee
• It’s co-located with Windows Connections and a host of other DevConnections offerings (including conferences on ASP.NET and mobile devices, two popular topics in the MS world)
• It’s in Vegas. Duh.

As a regular reader of (and commenter on) your blog, I know that you’re is well-acquainted with Microsoft’s marketing and positioning for Exchange. However (and forgive me for saying so) I think you and your readers might benefit if you understood the technology behind Exchange a little better. Heaven knows I see people posting howlers at your site occasionally. Thus this invitation: come join us in Vegas!

Your travel schedule says you’re going to be in Alberta. HP and US both have direct flights YEG-LAS for around $200. As conference chair, I’ll comp your registration, and you can wander around and talk to people– attendees and speakers alike– to get their unvarnished feedback on the good and the bad about Microsoft’s 2007 product lineup. It’s the same reason MS always sends people to Lotusphere and IBM sends people to TechEd, only with a very different audience and vibe.

Just drop me some e-mail and I’ll get your registration processed. Heck, I’ll even buy you dinner.

It looks like there will be 3 separate Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) exams for Exchange 2007; MS is revamping their exams as part of the move from the MCSE to the new Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) certification. However, they don’t seem to have released any more details on the exams, which is a little disappointing given how close we are to the product’s launch. Hopefully they’ll publish the exam syllabus fairly soon so we can all start studying 🙂