Paul's Down-Home Page

Jeremy Kelly of Microsoft has a great post on online maintenance over at his blog. If you’ve ever wondered what happens during the online maintenance window, now you can find out.

Finally! You can sign up to get Microsoft security bulletins through RSS. Thanks, guys.

During TechEd last week, Microsoft sneaked out a new white paper on Exchange 2003 journaling. It covers the new SP1 “envelope journaling” feature, as well as finally explaining where Exchange journaling doesn’t work. It also, at long last, describes how to deploy journaling as part of an overall DCAR solution. Good stuff.

Check this out: for 15+ years, the permissive action link system that controlled US land-based nuclear missiles was set to (drum roll): all zeroes. Really. Yikes!

Jeremy Reichman of the Rochester Institute of Technology has kindly collected a page of useful hints and FAQs related to using Entourage with RIT’s Exchange environment. You should also definitely see the Entourage Help Page, which is chock full of useful info on Entourage 2004. If you don’t read anything else, see the FAQ.

Just landed in Cincinnati and checked my evals: 7.72. Comments were mostly favorable; a few “not technical enough” and one angry “Microsoft does too support our products” from a VERITAS product manager. However, that means that John humbled me decisively (his Word session racked up an 8.21!) In fact, I was just below the average score for messaging sessions this year. I’ve got to do better next time.
Update: with 108 evaluations out of a total of 522 attendees, my final score was 7.78. Since the overall for messaging sessions was 7.85, I’m still a little under the curve.

• This year, the speaker shirts were color-coded so that MS employees and speakers had different colors. This is great, since it makes it much easier for attendees to find FTEs to bother question.
• A request from all those born and raised in the Southern tradition of good manners: please do not use, talk on, or answer your cell phone while you are in the bathroom. Thank you.
• The service at Dick’s Last Resort is as bad as it’s claimed. Unfortunately, the food is worse than reported.
• The speaker shirt is the first shirt I’ve ever owned with Spandex in it. It will, God willing, be the only shirt I ever own with Spandex.
• The San Diego airport has free WiFi service. I can get a signal sitting in my seat (6C) with the boarding door open, but it’s intermittent and doesn’t allow me to actually log on.

First thing yesterday, John and I met for breakfast at Cafe 222, where I had some excellent pancakes. The food at the San Diego convention center is pretty good, but it’s always nice to take a break from the HUGE CROWDS of people for which TechEd is justly famous, so we did.
I did a session and a half in the “Meet the Technologist” area yesterday, where I continued to be impressed with the level of questions we got. Lots of high-end, thoughtful technical questions, with very few of the howlers or RTFMs common in years past. The cabana idea has worked well, except when Navy SH-60s fly past outside.
Yesterday was my first spin through the exhibit hall. I got to meet with some folks from Quest/Aelita; they have an impressive line of management products that oddly doesn’t seem to be well known. The Authentica folks have an interesting product that can do digital rights management protection at the email gateway and via a web service– very cool stuff. I’ll write more about that when I have time to dig into it more.
Interestingly, the two overwhelming giveaway items this year were Xboxes and iPods. Some group of companies was giving away a MINI Cooper, which is kind of neat (although not as cool as the Mercedes SLK that was given away at TechTarget’s Enterprise Messaging Decisions show 🙂
Also on the show floor, I finally met John Osborn, executive editor at O’Reilly. We had a great discussion about Offfice development and books (which we extended later at the O’Reilly author party once JohnP got there). I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to turn some of the cool content we did for the Fabrikam project into a book, or two, to help build up our Office dev branding.
In a few minutes, I’m heading back over to Cafe 222 for another stack of pancakes, then it’s time to present MSG381 and fly to Cincinnati to rendezvous with my family. In the meantime, let it be known that JohnP’s Word dev session yesterday is holding steady at an excellent 8.09/9.00 rating, which is going to be tough for me to beat. However, the folks I linked to last week are still ruling: Steve Riley’s sessions have three of the top 10 slots, including an incredible 8.81! Go Steve!