Category Archives: UC&C

2013/01/06 · 11:08

Michael B. Smith’s list of Exchange 2013 gotchas

Fellow MVP and all-around ace Michael B. Smith just published an article accurately titled “Exchange Server 2013 Gotchas.” Rather than editorialize, I’ll just ask that you read the article and consider the list of issues he’s found.

I don’t agree that all the things he lists as faults are actually faults; for example, I have no problem with Outlook 2003 no longer being supported, and it doesn’t matter to me that installation is slow. Many of the other items he lists have fairly low impact, such as the absence of the Edge Transport role (which very few of my customers use) or the fact that there is no longer a separate UM role– very few organizations have enough concurrent calls to warrant investing in a dedicated UM server. No one likes to see functionality disappear, such as the loss of S/MIME support in OWA, but at the same time we’ve gotten a ton of new functionality (including offline mode and touch mode in OWA, to name two possible reasons why S/MIME was deprioritized.)

Having said that, there are a number of his points that I agree with wholeheartedly. The documentation is clearly not finished; there are many missing pieces, and this is compounded by Microsoft’s still-unresolved decision to change the way TechNet URLs work. The Exchange 2013 message hygiene functionality is useful but limited, and the fact that there is still no way to deploy Exchange 2013 into an existing Exchange 2007/2010 organization is difficult to swallow– Microsoft must know that this is a huge bottleneck for deployments, so there must be some very good reason why the needed coexistence patches have not yet been released.

I don’t think I’d agree with his opinion that “Exchange 2013 is not ready for prime time,” though. Shipping is a feature in itself, and while that’s no excuse to rush a poorly designed or unstable product out the door, I think that Microsoft generally does a good job of balancing market demand for releases against the engineering and support effort required to prepare those releases. With Kevin Allison’s many public statements about getting to a more stable, predictable release cadence for Exchange (both as an on-premises product and a service), I think the new normal is going to be seeing more frequent, more incremental releases. Exchange 2010 RTM, of course, lacked a number of features (such as the ability to manage public folders) that were added in SP1, so the idea of shipping what’s ready to hit a schedule and fleshing it out in an incremental release is nothing new.

Michael’s larger point is well taken: before you deploy Exchange 2013, you should be very sure that you understand how it differs from previous versions and how those differences may affect your messaging operations. As Tony and I work on Exchange 2013 Inside Out, we are taking careful note of the kinds of issues Michael points out, as well as how Microsoft responds to them; we’ll keep doing so throughout the release of Exchange 2010 SP3 and, eventually, Exchange 2013 SP1, to make sure that the book reflects the best available knowledge when it’s released later this year.

In possibly related news, if you’re interested in software engineering and release management issues, I suspect Steven Sinofsky’s new blog, Learning by Shipping, might be of interest to you.

Now, back to the unified messaging chapter… and go Seahawks!

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2012/12/21 · 10:21

Microsoft wins UK case vs Motorola Mobility/Google

Earlier this year I had the unique (to me) opportunity to serve as a technical expert witness in a court case in the UK. Tony’s already written about the case but I wanted to add my perspective.

I was contacted by Bird and Bird to see if I might be willing and able to act as a technical expert in a court case; that’s all they said at first. The nature of the questions they were asking soon clued me in that the case involved Exchange ActiveSync and multiple-point-of-presence (MPOP) support for presence publishing– two completely separate technologies which Motorola/Google had lumped together in this case.  .

My role was to perform a wire-level analysis of the protocols in question: EAS, SIP/SIMPLE as implemented in Lync, and the Windows Live Messenger protocol. For each of these protocols, my job was to produce an accurate, annotated packet capture showing exactly what happened when multiple devices synchronized with the same account, and when the status on one device changed.

This isn’t what most people think of when they think of expert testimony; in courtroom dramas and books, it always seems like the expert is being asked to provide an opinion, or being cross-examined on the validity of their opinion. No one wanted my opinion in this case (which is perfectly normal), just for me to to accurately and impartially report what was happening on the wire.

This proved to be incredibly interesting from a technical standpoint. Like most administrators, it had never really occurred to me to look into the depths of the EAS protocol itself to see exactly what bits were being passed on the wire. After a great deal of study of the ActiveSync protocol documentation and many a late night slaving away over Wireshark and Network Monitor captures, I’d produced a report that showed the actual network traffic that passed between client(s) and server for a variety of test scenarios, along with an explanation of the contents of the packets and how they related to user action on the device.

Along the way, I gained a new appreciation for the economy of design of these protocols– it’s surprising how efficient they are when you look at them at such a low level. (And a shout out to Eric Lawrence for his incredibly useful Fiddler tool, which made it much easier for me to get the required data into a usable format.) I found a few bugs in Wireshark, learned more than I wanted to about SSL provisioning on Windows Phone 7.5 devices, and generally had a grand time. I particularly enjoyed working with the attorneys at Bird and Bird, who were quite sharp and had lovely accents to boot. (I’m not sure they enjoyed my accent quite as much, but oh well.)

When I finished my report, I submitted it to Bird and Bird and that was the last I heard of the case until today, when Mr. Justice Arnold issued his ruling. It was submitted as part of Microsoft’s justification explaining why their implementations did not infringe on Motorola’s patent; the purpose of having an annotated set of packet captures was to clearly illustrate the differences between the claimed innovations in the patent and Microsoft’s implementation to show why Microsoft wasn’t infringing.

Florian Mueller has a good summary of the case that highlights something I didn’t know: the patent at issue is the only one on which an Android manufacturer is currently enforcing an injunction against Apple. I am no patent attorney, but it would seem that Apple might have grounds to have this injunction lifted. It will be interesting to see what happens in the related German court cases that Muller cites, but it’s hard for this layman to see any other likely result besides a Microsoft win… but we will see.

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2012/11/23 · 09:35

Lumia 920 day 11: brick city

Happy Thanksgiving! Today I am thankful for AT&T’s return service (and irked at myself for leaving my MacBook Pro charger in Huntsville– thus the brevity of this entry. Low battery concentrates the mind…)

On Windows Phone devices, Windows Live IDs (WLID), now better known as Microsoft accounts. are the master accounts used to control access to Microsoft services. You have to link a WLID to the phone to buy or update apps. Once you put a WLID on the phone, the only way to change the associated WLID is to wipe the phone to factory settings and start over. Because (long boring historical discussion elided), I had to change the e-mail address on my WLID. The Xbox, Skype, and Windows Phone Marketplace aspects of this change went smoothly (although the change itself was damn near impossible to effect; I ended up having to get a friend who works at MS to open an internal support case.) Tim did the same thing recently and found that even his Surface took the change without issue.

My phone, however, did not, so I had to reset it and put in the new WLID. I did this last night… only to find that the 920 apparently has a bug that bricks it when you do a hard reset. Ooooops.

I understand the existence of software bugs; Lord knows I’ve suffered through my share of them on iOS. I put the phone aside, took it to the AT&T store in Alexandria, Louisiana, and was immediately given a replacement with no fuss– the staff were super helpful and friendly.

Now, a brief digression: at the AT&T store I saw the HTC 8X for the first time. Wow! What a great-looking phone: it’s the same width and height as the 920 but much thinner and lighter. I may give the 920 the boot and get an 8X instead, despite its inferior camera and smaller onboard storage.

Anyway: I took the replacement phone home and started trying to restore its settings. All of my old text messages and photos seem to have synced back from the cloud, but app settings, and the apps themselves, have not. This Paul Thurrott article says that the “App List + Settings” backup “includes Internet Explorer Favorites, the list of installed apps, and ‘most’ device settings.” I haven’t seen any evidence of it restoring those things but maybe I’m just being impatient; I’ll wait a bit longer. SMS messages synced automatically and immediately, but maybe apps take longer? One thing that doesn’t seem to be included in sync at all is the arrangement of tiles on the home screen; that’s an unfortunate omission given that I had finally gotten everything put the way I wanted it!

Last night, before the WLID change, I’d tried to use the Windows Phone connector for Mac OS to back up the phone, but it crashed each time I plugged the phone in. This morning, when I plugged the new phone in, sync worked flawlessly. I lived through the flakiness of iTunes sync for many years, and I’m not happy about having to relive it, especially because the WP connector is only supported through Microsoft’s forums.

The 920 camera is superb; I’ll post some photos I’ve taken with it once things settle down here a bit. 

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2012/11/19 · 10:20

Announcing Exchange 2013 Inside Out

Big news, at least to me!

Tony Redmond and I are delighted to announce a new joint project: Exchange 2013 Inside Out, a two-volume set that we will write for Microsoft Press, with an anticipated publication date in fall 2013. Tony is writing part 1, which covers the mailbox server role, the store, DAG, compliance, modern public folders and site mailboxes. I’m writing part 2, which covers client access, connectivity, transport, unified messaging, and Office 365 integration. This division looks as if I got more work to do, but Tony assures everyone that he can easily fill a book on just one topic.

Why two books where Exchange 2010 Inside Out merited just one? Well, just look at that book and reflect that it contains some 400,000 words in a 2-pound tome. Apart from the weight, it takes a long time to write such a book and there are tons of changes and new material in Exchange 2013 that we want to cover. The option of writing a single 500,000 word volume was just not attractive. Thankfully Microsoft Press agreed with us.

We’ve deliberately decided to take our time writing. There’s no point in rushing out a book based on a product immediately after it is released because no real-world experience exists. Microsoft runs an excellent Technology Adoption Program (TAP) that helps the development group understand how new versions of Exchange behave in production environments through early deployments, but we prefer to see how the software evolves and behaves as it is deployed more widely. This can’t really happen until after Microsoft releases Exchange 2010 SP3 and whatever update is necessary for Exchange 2007 SP3 to allow coexistence with Exchange 2013. Writing based on a firm foundation of real-world deployment experience has always seemed to make a lot of sense to us and we see no reason to change now.

Although the two volumes of Exchange 2013 Inside Out will stand alone, we will absolutely make sure that each volume complements the other. We will be technical editors for each other’s volumes, giving us equal opportunity to insert bad jokes and Exchange war stories across the breadth of both volumes.

Mostly because we have no firm dates in mind, we’re not releasing any details of our schedule, we hope that we will be able to offer an early-access program to readers through the Microsoft Press prePress program, so stay tuned!

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2012/11/15 · 21:15

Lumia 920 days 2-5 review

I’m getting settled in to using the Lumia 920 as my daily phone. In some ways this is a big change, but in other ways it isn’t, as I’d been using the Lumia 800 a fair amount over the last few months as an alternate device.

Let me start by talking about connectivity. I’m not talking about just network connectivity, although that so far has been excellent. Even on AT&T’s crappy Bay Area network, I have yet to have a call drop or data service outage, even in notorious bad spots like right across the street from Pizz’a Chicago. No, I’m talking about physical and sync connectivity, beginning with sync connectivity.

I miss wireless sync; at least with Mac OS X, WP8 devices have to physically be plugged in to sync. The Windows Phone connector software has flaked out on me a few times this week. First it refused to sync anything at all, with only a useless error saying that some items couldn’t be synced. This turned out to be because of the OS X sandboxing feature, which prevents the WP connector from accessing music in the iTunes library folder. It’s easy to fix with the “Allow Access to Folder” command, but finding this out required a tedious slog through Microsoft’s support forum. Then yesterday, after updating to Office 2011 14.2.5, the WP connector started crashing each time I plugged the phone in. Back to the forum I went, where I found this article… that turned out not to be the problem. I posted the issue to the forum but haven’t gotten a response yet.

(At this point, lest you think me a hater, I would point out that Apple has exactly the same terrible support process: find an issue, post a plaintive query in their support forums, and hope that someone can help you out– or, alternatively, trek to the store and see if they can help you.)

Now, about the physical connection– the Lumia 920 uses a micro-USB connector. This is perfectly OK with me, as I have other devices that use the same connector, and I have Bluetooth audio streaming in my car. However, the port on the 920 is a little finicky; you have to push the connector firmly into it to ensure that it actually charges, as I found when I awoke one morning and found the phone dead because it hadn’t charged overnight while plugged in.

And speaking of battery life: I’d have to label it adequate. I get about a day’s worth of use, meaning that I leave home in the morning with a full charge and usually need to give the phone a snack sometime between 5 and 8 pm to get a full day’s use. This is essentially what I was getting from the iPhone 4, although the 920 has a bigger screen and LTE. Seems like a fair trade.

Oh, and one more miscellaneous hardware issue: the 920 screen shows fingerprints and smudges much more than the iPhone or Lumia 800. This is a bit annoying, but easily remedied.

The apps I’ve been using have continued to work well. I love the way that the Photos live tile displays my airplane photos; the motion of the live tile looks slick. The Facebook app has a number of annoyances, like insisting on scrolling up to the top of my news feed after I comment on or like any item in the feed.

My limited experience with the newly-released Skype app has been positive: it works well and looks good, though I haven’t tried it for any video calls yet.

The only app-related complaint I have involves Bluetooth music playback in the car: the phone will sometimes freeze for up to a minute. During that time I see the lock screen background, with nothing drawn on it, and the phone’s not responsive to the hardware controls, nor do the stereo controls trigger any action. This has happened three times so far, all at times when I got in the car, started it, and wanted to listen to music. I’m not sure what’s going on with it, but it’s definitely annoying.

Now, on to this installment of “Really?”: things that aren’t present in the hardware or software but really should be. I noticed that WP8 doesn’t seem to have a screen rotation lock, which is a bit of a hassle. I still really miss the hardware mute switch of the iPhone line. In fact, I will continue to miss it for a long time because of the ridiculous way that WP8 implements volume, at least as far as I can tell. If I turn the volume to mute so that the phone vibrates for alerts, that also turns off all sounds for everything on the phone– including Bluetooth audio and even listening to a voicemail message on the internal speaker. Phone calls aren’t affected, though, but this seems like a ridiculous design. I haven’t checked to see if there’s a separate volume level for headphone use, but I bet there isn’t.

Luckily alarms are unaffected, which reminds me of another missing feature: the ability to wake to music by setting a song as an alarm.

Apart from these quirks, the phone is a delight to use. I have the home screen set up the way I want it, and the pervasive use of live tiles really makes it easy for me to quickly see what’s what. The soft keyboard is a vast improvement over the one in iOS, and the autocorrect feature makes it absurdly simple to fix misspellings or to add new words to the dictionary. And I can’t say enough good about the color fidelity or display quality of the screen: it is simply gorgeous.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Huntsville, without my iPhone, so we’ll see how the WP8 experience stacks up for travel use. I’ve got MyTrips (a TripIt client) and the American Airlines app all loaded, so I expect good things.

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2012/11/01 · 10:23

Apple releases fix for EAS calendar hijacking bug

Good news: Apple just released iOS 6.0.1, the release notes for which say that the update fixes “a bug affecting Exchange meetings.” More details here.

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2012/10/30 · 11:02

Sandy shows that location does matter

I’m sure there will be zillions of other articles covering this in various trade publications, but right now, while I’m thinking about it, I wanted to dash off a couple of thoughts on how the cloud is affected by real clouds… like Hurricane Sandy.

I wanted to send an invoice to the Windows IT Pro folks for an article I had edited… but I couldn’t because the invoicing service I use was down. Ooops.

Over the last two days, I’ve gotten outage notifications from several of the services I depend on, including Trello and Harvest. As I write this on Tuesday, Harvest is back up, but Trello isn’t (nor is FogBugz, which is one of the candidates I’m considering for a hosted bug-tracking service). These outages are not unexpected; the NHC gave us all plenty of advance warning of Sandy’s likely impact. However, I was a little surprised to see how many services actually run on data centers in metro NYC. I have an intuition, but no proof, that the majority of these services are offered by small- to medium-scale companies that cannot yet afford their own dedicated data centers, which is to be expected. I predict that some of the services affected by this outage will move to relocate their services to another area, but some won’t; after all, no location is completely disaster-proof, and there are certainly benefits to having the services you offer hosted “near” your physical location.

The interesting issue is not that these services had failures; that’s to be expected. It is that as cloud service consumers, we now have to be aware of physical location in a way that “the cloud” is supposed to eliminate. File this under “cloud-related promises that turned out not to be completely true.”

Microsoft’s services, and Google’s, and Facebook’s, and Apple’s, and so on are all essentially location-independent. A metro-level failure caused by something like a hurricane or a major earthquake is a problem, but not necessarily one that end customers have to concern themselves with; there are always other data centers that can accommodate the load of the downed sites. In fact, this ability to provide continuity of service is one of the key drivers behind the architecture of Exchange 2010, and now Exchange 2013 extends continuity by simplifying the way load balancing works, thus making it easier to build larger stretched (“stretchier”?) sites. 

Not that that helps Harvest or Trello users, of course. So along with the tired-but-still-important advice to ensure that your location isn’t cut off from the cloud by single points of connectivity failure, let me add a recommendation that you periodically survey the service providers you depend on so that you know where their services are hosted and can make arrangements accordingly in case of disaster.

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2012/10/26 · 07:30

Postel’s Law, Exchange ActiveSync, and iOS 6

Over the last week the Exchange community has learned a bit more about problems with Apple’s Exchange ActiveSync implementation in iOS 6; Microsoft has released a KB article outlining the problem and suggesting some workarounds, and Tony Redmond this morning pointed to a TUAW article that I hadn’t previously seen which asserts that the hijacking problem is a known issue with previous versions of iOS.

Tony’s article is titled “The emerging need for more supervision over ActiveSync implementations.” It’s certainly hard to disagree with that basic premise. Just over 18 months ago, Microsoft launched an Exchange ActiveSync logo certification program with the goal of inducing third parties who sell EAS-compatible devices or software to verify that they properly implement the client side of EAS. A quick check of this page maintained by Microsoft’s legal department shows just over four dozen EAS licensees, but only 3 vendors are listed on the EAS logo page itself. There are several possible explanations, ranging from lack of vendor interest in getting certified to a Microsoft failure to update the contents of the page.

Whatever the reason, I think Tony is right that Microsoft needs to be more proactive in requiring their EAS licensees to perform more robust testing on their clients.

Furthermore, I’m starting to think that the certification and testing program isn’t sufficient in and of itself, which brings me to Postel’s Law.

Some years ago, I worked for a company that made e-mail encryption software. This was during a time when even basic SMTP interoperability between different vendors’ systems was not assured– the Electronic Mail Association had biannual “plugfests” where vendors such as Lotus, Microsoft, and Netscape got together to ensure that their products could exchange SMTP mail properly. Whenever we ran into an interop problem, my boss would cite Postel’s Law:

Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

It seems pretty clear that Apple’s iOS EAS implementation has bugs– long-standing ones, if the TUAW article is right– and that Apple has a responsibility to fix them. I am coming to the opinion, though, that the server-side EAS implementation is too lenient about what it accepts. For years Exchange administrators had to suffer through a dance that went something like this:

  1. A new version of Outlook would ship with a bug that would occasionally corrupt calendar or message items in some interesting way.
  2. The corrupted items would cause the client to crash; in more severe cases, they could also crash the store process or cause backups, mailbox exports, etc. to fail.
  3. The Exchange team would release a hotfix to keep that particular flavor of badly formed item from causing such a problem.
  4. The Outlook team would release a hotfix that would keep that version of Outlook from emitting that particular flavor of corruption.
  5. In the next release of Exchange, the team would add business logic to reject items with the specific flaws generated by Outlook.
  6. GOTO 1

Over time, the Exchange business logic got better, as did Outlook’s track record of not creating bad items in the first place. This approach has served Exchange administrators and users pretty well, and it’s clear that the lessons learned from this painful process have been applied in Exchange Web Services. For example, EWS will reject attempts to create calendar items with end dates that come before start dates– something that Outlook used to occasionally do out of sheer perversity.

However, it looks as though, at least in this specific case, EAS doesn’t have business logic in place to catch the modifications that lead to the hijacking behavior. That’s something that Microsoft can fix in three steps.

  • First, they can update the EAS spec so that it clearly defines which fields of each data item are to be considered read-only. This gives implementers a fair shot to understand where they may need to change their clients.
  • Second, they can update Exchange itself so that it rejects client requests that violate the updated spec.
  • Third, they can vigorously “encourage” their major ISV partners to test more aggressively against the updated spec. I have to wonder, for example, how much, if any, testing Apple has done against Exchange 2013…

I’ve been putting the blame on Apple for this problem, and while I don’t think that doing so is unfair or inaccurate, I also believe that the Exchange team can do a better job on the server side of blocking bad client requests, and I hope they’re madly planning how to do so in Exchange 2013 SP1.

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2012/10/19 · 21:40

More on bugs in iOS6 Exchange ActiveSync

As I hoped they would (but couldn’t mention in my previous post), Microsoft has weighed in with a KB article on the iOS 6 “hijacked meeting” bug. The article ID is 2768774, and it makes a couple of cogent points: first, that Microsoft is aware of, and is actively investigating, the bug. Second, that “Microsoft cannot mitigate this issue”; they recommend contacting Apple. The interesting part to me was the section on workarounds. Microsoft’s suggestions include:

  • telling users not to make calendar changes using the iOS app
  • recommending that users not update to iOS6 (as if! iOS device users are legendarily quick to update to new versions)
  • blocking iOS 6 devices using Exchange ActiveSync allow/block/quarantine
  • blocking users who have delegates, or who are granted delegate access, from using EAS
  • using POP/IMAP instead of EAS (this made me laugh out loud– really!)

I have been testing Savvy Software’s Agenda app recently and like it quite a bit. However, it, like almost all the other calendar apps of which I’m aware,  it uses the underlying iOS calendar data store and sync mechanism, so I’d expect it to fall victim to the same bug. NitroDesk has ported its Touchdown app to iOS (though its App Store reviews are pretty poor), and Emtrace has the MoxierMail EAS client (which I still need to review.) So pick your poison: none of Microsoft’s suggested workarounds are great, but their hands are tied. It’s pretty clear this is an Apple problem and it will be incumbent on Apple to fix it… which I am sure they will, eventually. 

 

 

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2012/10/17 · 23:00

iOS 6 and Exchange ActiveSync misbehavior

Brace yourself for a surprise: there’s at least one major bug in Apple’s Exchange ActiveSync client in iOS 6.

cue shocked silence…

This is not surprising, of course; EAS is a fairly complex protocol and Apple has displayed a somewhat cavalier attitude towards verifying that their EAS clients behave properly. If you don’t believe me, all you have to do is look at this list of known EAS issues with third-party devices and see how many of them involve iOS.

Anyway, the latest widely reported  issue is that meetings sometimes appear to be hijacked– Alice will send out a meeting invitation to Bob and Carole, but somehow Carole will end up as the meeting organizer, thus gaining the ability to cancel or change meetings.

The hijacking bug isn’t the only one; users have reported a few other iOS 6 EAS issues, including its apparent failure to handle the case where the user’s primary SMTP address is different from the user name (e.g. an SMTP address of paul@robichaux.net coupled with a UPN of paul.robichaux@robichaux.net, for example), but these other issues all have easy workarounds; meeting hijacking is the most pestiferous.

The usual pattern for these bugs is fairly predictable:

  1. Apple (or another EAS licensee) releases an update.
  2. People start complaining in various fora that some EAS-related functionality is broken. However, these reports are only rarely made directly to either Microsoft or the vendor.
  3. A critical mass of reports accumulates and begins to draw attention. This is often accelerated by the opening of support cases with either Microsoft or the ISV.
  4. The source of the problem is identified, a resolution is developed, and everything is fixed.
  5. GOTO 1

Now, stop laughing. That really is what usually happens. Note that Microsoft’s hands are somewhat tied during this process. Until they get feedback from customers that something is broken, they can’t very well investigate it. I imagine that it is very frustrating for the EAS team to see people blaming Exchange for what end up being bugs in the EAS client implementation. But I digress.

Tony points out a few nuances of how the process works, including suggestions for figuring out which devices are actually in use. (Note that one improvement in iOS 6 is that it reports a value for the DeviceOS property returned by Get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics; older versions just left that field blank.) Leaving that aside, though, it’s interesting to consider what’s known about the calendar hijacking bug. The best explanation I’ve seen, ironically, comes from the Z-Push development team. (Z-Push, you may recall, is an open-source EAS implementation that has nothing to do whatsoever with Exchange.) However, they are apparently first to market with a public explanation of the problem with iOS 6 that causes meeting hijacking. I won’t repeat it here; it’s worth reading the original. The root of the problem appears to be that iOS 6 emits meetings with zero attendees, and that Exchange accepts these as valid. I’m not sure whether Exchange’s acceptance is a desired behavior or not but I’m pretty sure that the device should never be emitting a zero-attendee meeting. It’s possible that there are cases where this is not true, which is why the Z-Push folks are holding their patch in QA for now instead of pushing it into the main tree of their product.

The tricky issue here, of course, is how to get the problem fixed for those of us who aren’t using Z-Push. Microsoft could conceivably make a change to Exchange’s business logic for calendar items, preventing ill-formed meeting items from being propagated. Apple could likewise fix their client so that it doesn’t send out ill-formed items in the first place. Both sides have an interest in providing a smooth EAS experience for iOS users, but each side has a different set of engineering and delivery constraints that make the process of actually getting the fix out to customers a challenge.

Microsoft hasn’t publicly said much about this bug, other than that it is being investigated. (And Apple, AFAIK, has said absolutely nothing about it, which is regrettably typical.) Your best bet is to keep an eye on KB 2563324 for updates so you’ll know when Microsoft believes they have a solid understanding of the problem and the best way to fix it.

Meanwhile, the Z-Push team claims that turning off the Exchange calendar attendant feature would eliminate the problem, at the cost of some useful functionality. The iOS 6 bug is rare enough in most environments that I’d advise living with it rather than giving up the attendant functionality, but that’s a choice you’ll have to make based on your users and their needs.

I wonder whether Emtrace’s MoxierMail client has this problem? I’ve got an evaluation copy but haven’t been able to evaluate it yet; might be time to move that up a couple of notches on the priority scale….

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2012/10/05 · 14:39

Help retrain veterans for IT jobs

Acuitus is working on a pilot project with the US Department of Veterans’ Affairs: we’re running an IT training school for unemployed veterans, using our proven Digital Tutor system to take them from little-to-no computer knowledge to being able to troubleshoot complex problems on Windows and Cisco IOS.

Our goal is to be able to train these vets so they can move right into entry-level IT and IT support positions. They will not be Exchange architects or CCIEs, but they will have very strong Windows and network troubleshooting skills that we think will make them immediately hirable.

If you work for a company with more than 750 employees, you can help.

The challenging part is figuring out exactly what to teach. That’s where you can help. I’ve got a survey that asks about your IT environment: what equipment and products you use and what skills you would expect an entry-level technician to have.  We’re using this to calibrate what we teach to make sure our graduates have the right skills to prepare them for jobs in the commercial world. Your responses won’t be shared publicly.

If you are willing to help, please e-mail me (paulr at acuitus dot com) to get a copy of the survey.

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2012/09/23 · 20:52

Made it to MEC!

I am super excited to be back in Orlando. Well, OK; not really. I am excited to be at the return of the Microsoft Exchange Conference, though I certainly wish it were being held in another city. The hotel so far has been quite nice; it is huge, very nicely appointed, and features custom MEC-themed room keys (though the in-room Internet has been a bit flaky; not at all uncommon I arrived too late to make the welcome reception (or registration), and as I am still finalizing my slides I opted to call room service and hole up for the night tonight. However, judging by reports on Twitter it seems that the folks who attended the reception both liked it and scored lots of interesting swag.

Speaking of Twitter, it’s remarkable how the widespread use of social media systems like Twitter have changed the conference-going experience… for the better, in my opinion. Back in the day, it was a novelty when I live-blogged events. Now that’s common– I expect to see Twitter blowing up tomorrow as attendees dissect the keynotes in real time. It can be a bit distracting trying to follow along while watching the keynote at the same time, but it’s well worth the effort. Tomorrow MEC features two keynotes: one given by Michael Atalla, from the Exchange marketing team, and the other a technical keynote presented by Ross Smith IV. The rest of the day is dedicated to other Exchange 2013 sessions delivered by Microsoft folks.

My own sessions are on Tuesday and Wednesday:

  • E14.303, “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Exchange Unified Messaging,” is at 1:30p on Tuesday and again at 10:15a on Wednesday
  • E14.302, “Developing Mobile Apps with Exchange Web Services,” is at 10:45a on Tuesday and again at 8:30a on Wednesday

I’ll also be at the MVP Happy Hours on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I’m looking forward both to seeing familiar faces from the Exchange world and meeting new people… drop by and say hello!

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2012/09/11 · 18:00

Salary history and pay stubs: just say no

Recently I was talking to a recruiter for a large consulting company. She was pursuing Exchange talent for a number of consultancy positions, and I was interested in learning more. Our initial conversations went well enough that we got to the point of discussing compensation, like so:

Her: What’s your current compensation?
Me: …

This is always a tricky question to handle for a number of reasons. The biggest, of course, is that it puts all the negotiating leverage in the hands of the recruiter. It’s a truism of salary negotiation that the first person to mention a concrete number gives away the advantage. While that may not always be true, in my experience it’s true often enough, and enough advantage is at stake, to treat it as gospel.

Suppose you’re an Exchange expert currently making $100,000/year. You don’t want to leave money on the table, but you also don’t want to blow your chance at the job by coming in too high. The recruiter asks you this question. What do you do?

There are lots of different ways to answer, ranging from the completely blunt (“I’m not going to tell you”) to the slightly coy (“It’s between $100,000 and $150,000”) to the seemingly helpful (“If you said $100,000, you’d be pretty close”) to the direct (“I currently make $100,000”).

My suggestion is to address this in one of two ways:

  • ignore the question and ask for a counterproposal (“What salary range are you offering for the position?”) This is useful because once the recruiter gives you a range, you have some idea of whether they’re fishing in the same pond as you.
  • stating a range that would be acceptable (“I’m looking for total compensation between $X and $Y.”) This gives you some flexibility; maybe you’d be willing to take a pay cut to get this particular gig, or maybe you know from talking to someone who works there that their salaries are supplemented by bonus or option programs.

The key for you as a job candidate is to remember this: you are worth what you are worth, and that may not necessarily match what you are being offered. There are lots of other ways to compute the value of a total compensation package, of course. For example, many folks would happily trade away some amount of salary for more telecommuting flexibility. Don’t forget to keep those non-monetary issues in mind when you’re considering what your “total compensation” actually looks like.

So anyway… before I could even answer her previous question, she hit me with another bombshell:

Her: Also, this company is a little different– I’ll need your two most recent pay stubs for income verification.
Me: That’s not gonna happen.

An iOS development mailing list I’m on just went through a very vigorous discussion on this very topic; summarizing briefly, the overwhelming consensus among the list members was to run, not walk, away from companies that do this. This appears to be a common tactic at large consulting shops, particularly those that do a lot of offshoring, and most particularly by those companies that are not US-based. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing.

For me personally, being asked to do this signals a distrust of my personal integrity. Why would I want to go to work at a place that starts our work relationship by saying “Because we don’t believe what you told us about salary, you need to show us your pay stubs?” It certainly sets a tone of mistrust that doesn’t bode well for the future. (n.b. note that I don’t blame the recruiter; her company’s policy is what it is, and she’s just doing her job.)

In this case, I was fine with dynamiting the interview by telling her up front that this is a deal-breaker. Other people might feel differently about it. I’m interested to hear from my readers about their insights and experiences with these issues given how common they are in the consulting world. (And, as always, you’re welcome to send me e-mail if you want your comments posted without attribution.

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2012/09/07 · 05:12

Backups and MEC

tl;dr edition: don’t let this happen to you.

I’ve been working on a couple of iOS applications for my upcoming talk at the Microsoft Exchange Conference. Since MEC starts in just over three weeks, this has become a matter of some importance.

Side note: I often talk about “the Exchange tribe” as a shorthand way to talk about the community with people who aren’t in it. The MEC team has posted a bunch of speaker photos which may help put some faces with the names. These pictures don’t show everything; for example, you can’t see Greg Taylor’s sense of humor, the color of Jeff Mealiffe’s most excellent glasses, exactly how much Scott Schnoll looks like SA Martinez from 311, or what Devin Ganger is trying to karate chop. The pictures are useful for recognizing who’s who, though the rumors that Ross Smith is making a set of MEC speaker trading cards is false as far as I know.

Last night, I unplugged my laptop, tossed it in my bag, and headed for SFO for the redeye to DFW, thence to Huntsville. This morning at DFW, I pulled out the laptop again to work on my code a bit. I had made a stupid mistake the other night: I created a class based on UIViewController instead of UITableViewController, which means that Xcode refused to link the class definition files with the view controller itself in the storyboard editor. That caused a variety of bad behavior, including an inability to link selectors for the “done” and “cancel” buttons in the view

I realized my mistake right after I had deleted the view so that I could recreate it. “No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just restore it with Time Machine.” This, despite the fact that my main Time Machine backup is on a disk back in Mountain View.

So, I tried to do that; I opened Time Machine, found my source folder (/Source/ExOOF in this case), and restored the folder from its most recent update at midnight. Switching back to Finder, I accidentally opened the project in Xcode. I quit Xcode and noticed that Finder was asking me whether I wanted to replace the folder or not. I said “yes” and was greeted by a mysterious Finder error.

Long story short, my working copy is now gone. I can’t restore the Time Machine copy either, as the local replica only contains the project file, not the source code.

“No problem,” says I. “That’s why I have CrashPlan.” A quick trip to the CrashPlan app revealed that… I back up /users/paulr only. When I first set up CrashPlan, I didn’t have anything in /source, so I didn’t back it up. Duh.

So, bottom line: my source code is safe and sound, on a disk on my desk in Mountain View that is completely inaccessible remotely. My app development will have to wait until I get back to Mountain View. I suppose I can work on the accompanying slides, but where’s the fun in that?

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2012/09/01 · 08:28

Director of Exchange technical marketing job open

Ever looked at Microsoft’s marketing efforts and said “hey, I can do better than that?” Here’s your chance:

This leadership position has responsibilities for Exchange Server and Exchange Online technical marketing. Scope includes driving the Exchange technical marketing team responsible for product planning in partnership with the Engineering team, the core product content / narrative and demos, industry expertise, ISV partner management, evangelism and press / analyst relations related to Exchange. This leadership role sits within the Office Technical Marketing team within the Office PMG organization. Specific Responsibilities include:

  • Team Leadership. Coach a high performing team to hit commitments and steward thoughtful career planning with employees. Influence stakeholders across marketing and engineering teams, embracing cross-boundary collaboration to influence peers and senior leaders. This position will also sit on the Office Technical Marketing leadership team, so active participation on driving the overall business is expected.
  • Defining the product and service value prop. Based on industry expertise and deep product/service understanding, define the positioning and messaging, core content and demos for Exchange Server and Exchange Online.
  • Product Planning/Strategy. Influence product plan and development strategy based on market data and customer insight. Partner with Engineering leaders, MOD Planning, and MOD PMG teams to defined v.next product/service requirements.
  • Ensure key ISV support for Exchange and Office 365. This leadership position carries extended commitments across both Exchange and Office 365 to ensure the key ISV partners are actively and properly supporting these offerings.
  • Competitive Analysis. Drive competitive analysis around industry-specific competitors related to Exchange including security, archiving and mobility. Use insights from analysts, partners, customers, and research to develop competitive response content for the field and product insight for the engineering team.

This sounds like something that would be right up the alley of a number of my regular readers (you know who you are!) Now’s your chance, as I’m sure this position won’t be open for long.

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