Paul's Down-Home Page

Did you know that there’s a blog maintained by the Entourage team at Microsoft’s Mac business unit? Me neither. But they do, and a little bird tells me that they’re going to start updating it much more regularly. Drop by and add it to your aggregator if you use or support Entourage.

Cool stuff from the PDC: the developer roadmap for E12 was unveiled at PDC today. Terry Myerson has a post on it at the Exchange team blog, or you can just go straight to the PowerPoint deck from the session. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, since the Cookbook depends on WMI and CDOEXM.

Let’s say you wanted to set every calendar in your organization to grant all users “reviewer” rights. This makes it easy to see detailed calendar data instead of just pure free/busy information. There’s no direct way to do this through CDOEXM or WMI, but Glen Scales has come up with a solution that uses the Exchange 5.5 acl.dll. Check it out here.

I actually had real work to do this week, so I couldn’t attend the PDC. That’s too bad, because there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening there. For example, MS today took the wraps off Windows Workflow Services, their platform for workflow integration. There are some interesting touches that I think will help distinguish their offering from their competitors, including integration with Visual Studio and a marketplace for workflow actions (which MS is calling “activities”.) When I get some time, I’ll have to dig into this and see what’s what.

In related news, MS also started talking about changes to InfoPath (hint: no more requirement for a client-side application) and their new Office server platforms. It’s very interesting that they’re focusing on BI and content management as first-class tasks in the new release; we’ll have to wait and see what capabilities they’re able to get in for the 1.0 release.

There’s a fascinating article in the most recent issue of RISKS Digest about anomalies and Byzantine failures in flight control systems. I can’t explain it nearly as well as Peter Ladkin, who wrote it, so I won’t try. Although Exchange and Windows aren’t generally vulnerable to Byzantine faults, it’s a fascinating area of study in security-critical systems: how do you design systems that keep working when their inputs are lying?

I’ve been heads-down on some deadline-critical work, so I hadn’t followed the Notes/Dominio 7 release as closely as I evidently should have. I woke this morning to find out that— oops— IBM isn’t shipping DB2 support in Notes 7. See Ed Brill’s page for his take on it, including the news that you can apply for access to the DB2 functionality. I have to wonder whether there are secret criteria for the application process; I guess I’ll find out when I apply. It’s too bad that this feature didn’t make the cut, although IBM had a tough decision: slip to keep the feature or ship without it. Given the customer uncertainty over the impact of moving to DB2 as part of Workplace, I’m sure they would have liked to ship this feature on schedule.

Interestingly, the reason Ed cites for not shipping the feature is that not enough customers were testing it. Microsoft has worked long and hard to build a real-world customer testing program, the Technology Adoption Program (or TAP). TAP customers run pre-release builds of Exchange in production, with full support from PSS. Of course, MS also dogfoods new releases in their own environment; between the TAP and internal MS users, my recollection is that there were about 150,000 mailboxes running live on Exchange 2003 during the latter part of its dev cycle. I expect to see the same thing– probably with bigger numbers– for Exchange 12. Perhaps IBM should consider a similar approach.

Pace this ZDNet story, which describes how MessageOne has seen a spike in workload with the unwanted arrival of Katrina in the New Orleans-Biloxi-Gulfport-Pensacola strip. The article makes an excellent point: the time to get a recovery or continuance solution in place is before the bad weather starts. Just like flood insurance, if you wait too long you won’t be able to get protection in time.

All I can say is “wow!” There are a ton of new features and enhancements– very impressive for a point release. Please let me know if you find anything that doesn’t work properly.