2011-10-10 · 17:45

A few pictures from Fleet Week 2011

The boys and I made a pilgrimage to Fleet Week 2011 in San Francisco this past weekend. Selected photos are here. We drove to Pier 30 and parked, where we started with a tour of the USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6), which was well-provisioned with a nice selection of Marine vehicles and aircraft. Among other things, the boys got to check out a HiMARS truck, where thanks to Marine Cpl. Lamb from the great state of Tennessee the boys got to see a cellphone video he took of a fire mission in Afghanistan; a V-22, an AH-1Z Cobra (which I hadn’t seen before), and a variety of crew-served and individual weapons. The boys also got to hear an unusual call on the 1MC: “Man down, man down, man down on the flight deck!” A visitor tripped over a tiedown chain, so the Navy surged a bunch of corpsman to make sure he wasn’t hurt. They liked that quite a bit.

A quick taxi ride took us over to Marina Green for the airshow proper.

Having learned my lesson from last year, I’d rented a Sigma 50-500mm lens from LensRentals.com. I figured that this lens, which was every bit as big and heavy as advertised, would do a better job of capturing the action than my own 70-300. Sure enough, it did, but with a couple of caveats. It turns out that it’s a lot harder to take pictures of fast-moving aircraft with a telephoto lens than you might think. This problem was compounded by the fact that autofocus on the Sigma is fairly slow. Accordingly, I had a hard time getting pictures that were both well-framed and well-focused. However, some of them came out quite well.. I deleted the others, that being the major advantage of a digital camera. Tom and I between us took almost 600 pictures, about 150 of which were good enough to make the initial cut. I’ve posted a few of the better ones on my Flickr “airplanes” set.

Side note about LensRentals.com: I could not have been more pleased with their prices or service. I will definitely use them again, possibly for the Veterans’ Day airshow that the Blue Angels traditionally put on at NAS Pensacola. I recommend them highly.

The taxi ride on the way back might have been the highlight of the show: we had the same crazy, gravel-voiced, wrong-side-of-the-road-driving-on driver who scared the stuffing out of us last year. The odds against getting the same driver two years in a row must have been very high but… well, there it was. We survived, barely, and the four of us laughed uncontrollably for several minutes after exiting the cab. Whether the laughter was from relief at our survival or amusement at running into the same guy two years running, I couldn’t say.

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2011-10-10 · 11:38

Testing speech grammars with Exchange Unified Messaging

One of the things i teach in the MCM UM curriculum is the fact that Exchange UM has a phonetic name attribute that you can use to adjust how the system pronounces unusual names like “Robichaux” or “Szcezpanski.” MVP (and now Exchange MCM!) Jeff Guillet shared an article with me during the MCM R10 UM class that explains how to preview the pronunciation you’re going to get from a given phonetic value– I’d always done it with trial and error, but Jeff’s method is better. See Jeff’s article for background on how the phonetic system works, and learn how to preview pronunciation as a bonus.

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2011-10-05 · 13:55

Exchange MCM R10 wrapup and a reminder about Exchange Maestro

Fellow Exchange MVP Jeff Guillet just finished rotation 10 (R10) of the Microsoft Certified Master program for Exchange. His writeup gives an excellent overview of what the program’s really like: intense and focused learning, now 7 days per week. It is very hard work, but the quality of the work that MCM candidates do with the skills and knowledge they get at MCM speaks for itself.

But suppose that you can’t spare the time or money to attend an MCM rotation? Good news: Tony Redmond and I have one more Exchange Maestro class coming up at the end of October in Greenwich, CT. For a limited time, using the registration code “FAN” will net you $250 off registration. (When I say “limited”, what I really mean is that I don’t know when Penton will stop honoring the code so I encourage you not to dawdle; the class is nearly full.)

But further suppose that you aren’t able to attend this Maestro event– after all, Connecticut in the fall isn’t for everyone. Good news: don’t forget that Tony and I are co-presenting a one-day workshop on planning and executing Exchange 2010 migrations as a pre-conference session at the Fall Exchange Connections show. In one action-packed day, we’ll cover the migration-related highlights from the Maestro curriculum, plus Tony will tell jokes. Trust me when I say that his jokes are not to be missed. Plus, it’s Halloween that day, so if I can persuade Tony to agree we might have a costume contest for attendees. I mean, who wouldn’t want to dress up in costume for Halloween in Las Vegas? That’s certainly on my bucket list. Feel free to leave costume suggestions for me in the comments section of this post.

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2011-10-05 · 07:54

Webcast: Office 365 vs Google Apps

Tony has been writing about Office 365 quite a bit lately, including a few discussions of pros and cons of Office 365 versus Google Apps, its chief competitor. (IBM Lotus would really like to imagine that they’re competing effectively in this space but I’ve seen no evidence that they’re doing so. Sorry, guys.)

On that theme, I wanted to mention a webcast I’m doing with the Windows IT Pro folks. Paul Thurrott, Jeff James, and I will be joined by a special guest, Matt James (no relation to Jeff). Matt’s a satisfied Google Apps customer, and we’re looking forward to getting his perspective on how these two application stacks, well, stack up.

To register for the webcast, drop by the vConference site and sign up. I hope to see you there!

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2011-09-22 · 03:05

Thursday trivia #40

As always, Marines lead the way.

Top engineering schools compared to schools from Hogwarts. (Hint: Stanford is like Gryffindor.)

Would you send your English-only kids to a Russian-language-only school? I’m not sure I would. But this story makes some interesting points related to expectation and achievement– something I deal with daily when working on products at Acuitus. I have a lot more to say about this and hope to be able to someday.

This interactive map of submarine cables is very, very cool. There are cables in places you might not have expected, like 8 of them running to Alaska.

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2011-09-19 · 07:22

MCM Exchange rotation 10 notes

This weekend, I taught the unified messaging portion of rotation 10 of the Microsoft Certified Master | Exchange program. This was quite a milestone in a couple of ways. First, it’s rotation 10. That means that there are now more than 200 Exchange Masters graduates running around loose and applying the things I’ve taught them. (There aren’t that many actual MCM credential holders, as not every attendee passes the exams necessary to earn the credential.)

Second, this is the first time the Exchange MCM course has run for seven days each week. In the past, the classes have met Monday through Friday from 8am to 5pm, and often much later, with weekends reserved for study, lab work, and life maintenance– laundry, grocery shopping, and so on. The theory for this rotation is that moving to a schedule of seven class days with shorter days would be an improvement. In the past I’ve taught UM on the first day of the third week; this time I taught on class day 7. The students had already had a couple of much longer-than-expected days during the preceding week, but I attribute that to some new lab elements that were being debugged as part of this rotation. Their schedule should settle down a bit.

This rotation is small– only 4 students are in Redmond, with a dozen or so remote students attending via Lync meetings. This fostered a really intimate teaching atmosphere, which was further enhanced by our off-campus trip for lunch (Microsoft’s cafeterias are closed on weekends). I cut down the amount of material in my presentation a bit; this time the attendees only had 3 labs and about 125 slides to digest. We finished about 5:15pm, and I left them well-prepared both for the UM portion of the exam and to get through the next two weeks thinking “wow, these other instructors are way better than that UM guy.” Exchange MVP and MCM R10 candidate Jeff Guillet posted a summary of his first week in class, which you might enjoy if you want to see things from the students’ perspective.

Registration is now ongoing for the November rotation. If you’ve been considering whether to try for your MCM credential, this would be a good time to register; contact me for details if you’re interested.

On a more personal note, for this rotation I was able to get in a day early and spend some time with people I like: my former parter at 3Sharp, Paul Flynn, and I had a delicious lunch at Purple, (a favorite of mine; try the apple, walnut, and Stilton salad!), and then I met my brother Tim and his lovely wife Julie for Julie’s first trip to the pistol range, some time playing with their three cats, and a delicious Italian dinner at Paolo’s (where I’d never been but hope to return.) When I first started traveling to Seattle more than a dozen years ago, each trip was an exciting odyssey, with new people, sights, and places to encounter and explore. Even after the newness wore off, I still enjoyed the feel of visiting the big city– Toledo and its environs aren’t small, exactly, but metro Seattle is a much bigger and more diverse place. Now that I live in the Bay Area, I’m a little saddened to recognize that I don’t have exactly that same feeling towards Seattle. Living in the big city means that visiting there doesn’t have that same country-mouse-goes-to-town vibe. On the other hand, I still love the scenery there: the mountains (when visible), the pattern of the waters on Elliott Bay and Lake Washington, the thousand shades of green that blanket the hills and streets… there’s a lot to see there even if you’re on the east side. My many visits mean that it’s a comfortable and familiar place, too, which is valuable in itself. I’ll definitely be back!

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2011-09-18 · 09:25

The Detachment (Eisler)

I’ve written about Barry Eisler’s books before. Executive summary: I love ’em. The plotting, pacing, and atmospherics are top-notch. His characters’ motivations are logical, meaning that their actions are plausible (however ill-considered they may be.) He writes crisply, without excessive baggage. And of late, his books have been increasingly topical.

The central plot behind The Detachment is that a shadowy cabal is apparently plotting a coup attempt against the US government. I say “apparently” because there’s conflicting evidence, and some of those involved are, shall we say, not entirely forthcoming about their motives or plans. I don’t want to say much more about the plot than that, other than that it’s well-supported by real-world events. Eisler continues his habit of including a few pages of references to descriptions of those events, too, perhaps as a guard against accusations that his imagination’s overwrought.

Most of the characters from Eisler’s previous work are here: John Rain, Dox, Ben Treven, and Daniel Larison, and Scott Horton, along with a few lesser folks. I have to say that I find it jarring to see Larison and Horton used as character names given their real-world prominence as bloggers. It wasn’t so bad in the first book where Eisler did it, but it started bugging me from about page 10 in this book.

That’s about the only fault I can find with The Detachment, though. Completely apart from the quality of the writing, I applaud Eisler for his foray into self-publishing. He’s clearly put his money where his mouth is by pricing and shipping his books on his own. The Kindle edition was $6. $6, I say! That’s half the cost of a movie ticket for something that provided several hours more entertainment than the average movie, plus it automatically showed up on my Kindle the day of its release.

Apart from making me happy, Eisler’s decision to self-publish meant that he could cut down the cycle time for publishing and get the book out sooner; the book felt fresh because in the first few pages, there’s a mention of the Tohoku earthquake (which you may know better as the Fukushima earthquake), and there are a number of other fairly recent topical references embedded in the text. I’m delighted to report that, unlike most mainstream titles, there were very few typos or grammatical errors in the text. Anyone who claims that self-publishing will inevitably lead to lower-quality books isn’t playing straight. It certainly doesn’t have to.

In closing, three grace notes: first, I love it that he threw in a Piaggio P180; I admire N7PA every single time I see it at the Palo Alto airport. Second, Eisler’s sex scenes in prior books have drawn lots of attention. There’s only one such scene here; it’s only about three lines long, and it made me laugh so hard that the passengers around me on my SJC-SEA flight looked at me as though I were crazy. Third, the book is available for Kindle users a few weeks before the paperback version ships, which (as a die-hard Kindler) I appreciate.

Verdict: very highly recommended, but you should probably read his other books first for context. (Secondary verdict: Alex Berenson, please call Eisler and figure out how to self-publish your books from now on too.)

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2011-09-16 · 16:52

17 mistakes, Exchange, and thin provisioning

Justin Vashisht, whom I’ve never met but already like, unleashed a really good article on his blog this week: the 17 biggest mistakes made in Exchange 2010 deployment. His article stands well on its own; you could maybe quibble over the ordering of the items, but all of the things he cites are potential mistakes that you can easily make if you’re not careful or experienced. (Actually, I think the preferred phrase is now “operationally mature.”)

Justin’s list includes a few things that have been recent topics of discussion in the MCM community lately, and I wanted to call those out for attention because they’re important.

First, two warnings that you can’t get something for nothing:

  • Be very careful with allowing memory overcommitment (or, as Microsoft calls it, dynamic memory). Hyper-V and VMware both allow you to allocate more than the total amount of physical RAM across your VMs; that is, on a server with 64GB of RAM you could allow your VMs to consume more than 64GB. Virtual memory is certainly useful, but Exchange doesn’t like it much. Exchange 2010’s storage engine will consume as much RAM as it can get, backing off and releasing RAM only if the page fault rate increases excessively. The problem is that virtualized Exchange instances don’t see the page fault rate increasing– when you enable overcommitment, swapping happens on the host, not the guests. Memory overcommitment is mostly a cost-saving measure, and there are other, better ways to save money on your Exchange deployments. That’s why Microsoft recommends against using overcommitment on Exchange, but for some reason the word doesn’t seem to have gotten out very well.
  • Avoid thin provisioning of storage. The idea behind thin provisioning is sound: you authorize a pool of storage for an application, but you don’t actually allocate it until it’s needed. (Cue the joke about the old man whose son wanted to go to college; when the son expressed his desire, the old man said “Well, son, you have my permission.”) While the up-front savings are tempting, thin provisioning makes it very, very hard to predict exactly what your storage usage or performance patterns will look like.. not to mention that it makes stress testing difficult or impossible. Justin mentions the performance burden of on-the-fly storage allocation in his mistake #7, and that’s a sound reason to avoid it too.

The third thing I want to mention is something that you may already have heard, but it bears repeating. Stress test your storage system before deployment. This should go without saying; the fact that it’s on Justin’s list (and a similar list I’ve seen circulating around Microsoft) tells me that not everyone’s gotten the memo. You must, must, MUST test your storage hardware using both jetstress and loadgen to ensure that it will respond properly under load. There is no substitute, shortcut, or workaround that will excuse you from this requirement. If you don’t test it, you can’t know whether you’ll get suitable performance under load… and if you can’t know that, how do you know whether you’re spending your money wisely?

The rest of Justin’s list is good reading too, and I commend it to your attention. I also should mention that the last Exchange Maestro event of 2011 is right around the corner, so if you’re looking for more, shall we say, direct guidance on what to do, and not do, with Exchange, perhaps you should join us there.

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2011-09-15 · 15:49

Thursday trivia #39

Wow.. long time, no post. I’m getting ready to embark on a large project down in the home of Naval Aviation and that, along with visiting the boys every other weekend and trying to finish my pilot’s license, has kept me super busy. Without further delay, here’s this installment of Thursday trivia.

  • I can’t overstate how many birds there are in and around the Palo Alto airport. Tons of geese and huge clouds of gulls make the already-challenging process of navigating the traffic pattern for takeoffs and landings even more tricky. However, I stand by my belief that if I can fly safely in the congested, controlled, bird-filled skies here in the Bay Area that everywhere else will seem easy by comparison.
  • As much as I like the U-Verse feature set, the picture quality here in Mountain View is pretty poor on some channels. It’s impossible to tell if this is because the source material is poor or because U-Verse is stepping on it, but it’s definitely a downer. For example, “The Simpsons” on Fox looks good, but older episodes on the local CW affiliate are terrible. Most sports channels are medium- to poor-quality. Even Showtime isn’t great. Makes me miss Buckeye.
  • I’ve really enjoyed using Spotify to check out new music, in large part because so much of it is awful and I can quickly find that out for free. And, of course, C89.5 is a regular part of my listening routine.
  • Fleet Week is almost upon us again. Last year was great; I hope I’m in town for this year’s edition.
  • Windows 8 looks really slick, but I’m probably more excited about the improvements in the server edition. 2300+ PowerShell cmdlets? Yes, please!
  • Too many projects, not enough time…

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2011-08-25 · 20:17

Henge Dock mini-review

As part of my ongoing downsizing, I sent both my 2008 MacBook Pro and my 2006 Mac Pro to the great used computer yard in the sky and consolidated to a single 2011 MBP. After years of using ThinkPads with docking stations (and being well pleased therewith), I went looking for a Mac equivalent. When I’m home, most of the time I’ll be working at my desk, but when I’m not home the MBP needs to go with me, and I didn’t want to mess with endless plugging and unplugging of cables.

A friend at Microsoft mentioned the Henge line of docks, so I ordered one to try it out. I liked their look, and I liked the fact that there are no mechanical parts (like the old NewerTech claw-style dock I had back in the day.)

When the dock arrived (promptly, I might add), I immediately got to setting it up. Here’s what it looks like with the cables installed:

cables through slots

Each cable is installed in a slot cut into the dock. You fasten the cable connector into the slot with a setscrew. Henge includes extension cables that fit into the slots; the idea is that you put in the extension cables you want connected, fasten their setscrews, and dock your laptop. I quickly assembled everything and docked my laptop. Although it fit, it wouldn’t wake up from sleep. The MacBook Pro requires 3 things to wake with the lid closed: the power adapter, a keyboard or mouse, and a video display must all be connected. I quickly determined that this wasn’t happening, but I couldn’t tell which because the shape of the dock prevents you from seeing the plugs. I put it aside for another day, then last night, I decided to experiment some more to try to get the dock working.

I pulled the cables through the dock openings so there was enough slack to plug everything in without fully docking the laptop. This let me verify that everything was plugged in. I have the MagSafe, 2 USB, DisplayPort, and audio out cables in place. This took me a while because I accidentally pushed the head of the video cable all the way through the dock opening and then couldn’t get it back through! After a bunch of fiddling, I finally got the connector back where it belonged.

Flushed with success, once that was done, I was able to ease the plugs back into the dock openings and screw them into place. I docked the laptop, woke it up, and enjoyed working with it for a couple of hours.

Unfortunately, the video adapter (I’m using Apple’s DisplayPort-to-VGA) wouldn’t seat until I manually jiggled it. The plug fits in the opening in the dock, but in its default position it’s ever-so-slightly misaligned with the opening in the MBP case, so it won’t seat unless I rock the MBP back and forth.

After some jiggling and rocking (boy, that sounds wrong), I got it to seat and worked with my machine docked all last night. This morning, I undocked it and tried to redock it, and the same problem– the USB plugs engaged (so the external keyboard was active) but the video plug didn’t seat properly.

When I e-mailed them, Henge told me that some Apple VGA adapters are sized funny and that I could either try another adapter or trim the one I had to remove some of the excess plastic. They kindly offered me a discount coupon for their brand of adapter, which is basically an extension cable that simplifies the routing quite a bit. I have a Monoprice DVI adapter that I’m going to test tonight. I like the industrial design of the dock, but if I can’t make it work reliably, back it goes.

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2011-08-25 · 09:56

Thursday trivia #38

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2011-08-21 · 10:28

Microsoft is loosely coupled

Something that Tony wrote about the other day got my mental wheels spinning. He wrote a pointed explanation of the seemingly inexplicable fact that IE9 and the Exchange Management Console don’t work together. This is no fault of the Exchange team; the EMC is built on top of the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) core, and it’s the MMC that has a problem with IE9.

Tony pointed out that the problem in this case is due to poor coordination between two different teams. That’s true, but it’s actually a symptom of a deeper problem that Microsoft has: it’s made up of a bunch of loosely coupled business units. Each unit has its own business challenges, its own resource constraints, and its own strategy for winning in the marketplace. That seems reasonable on its face; after all, the challenges, constraints, and strategies for the Xbox team aren’t at all like the ones for the Exchange team, and both are different from the Dynamics CRM team.

The real problem arises when these items collide, or even when they fail to align. The IE9-MMC problem is one example. It certainly looks like the IE9 team released with an incompatibility that should have been fixed before release. Did their schedule constraints drive that release? Maybe. That leads to the bigger question of what Microsoft’s strategy is with IE– how does it drive revenue for Microsoft, or prevent them from losing revenue? Given that their biggest browser competitors, Chrome and Firefox, are both free, it’s not clear to me what strategic importance IE has.

Then consider the alignment of the Windows Phone 7 team and the Bing business unit. Bing is very tightly integrated into WP7; this would seem to put the lie to my claim that many of Microsoft’s problems are due to loose coupling. Au contraire; this case proves it. The WP7 release schedule (and market constraints) are almost completely decoupled from Bing. The desire to get tight integration between Bing services and the OS led the WP7 team to take a dependency on Bing that has resulted in new Bing features being released first for iOS. That’s not 100% accurate, as there are some technical constraints around the first release of the WP7 SDK that played a role too, but it’s a close enough approximation. Or consider PhotoSynth, not yet available for WP7 because the SDK doesn’t yet support the features it needs.

Exchange and Outlook have been down this road before. If you think back to the ill-fated Local Information Store (code-named “Rosebud”) in Office XP, you’ll see the same pattern at work: the release schedules and business objectives of the Office and Exchange team weren’t in alignment, and that led to schedule slips and feature cuts on both sides. Each time Exchange or Office release a new version, both sides have to coordinate to ensure that their “better together” strategy continues to bear fruit. “Better together” is one of the few clearly articulated and executed strategies that Microsoft has had over the last few years; in fact, it’s expanded to draw Lync in as well. Of course, the Lync team has had its own challenges, as witness the continuing lack of mobile Lync clients for iOS, Android, and WP7, or the lack for that matter of a desktop Linux client.

It’s a tough problem to solve.

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2011-08-20 · 16:21

AutoSlash and why you should be using it

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you probably know about travel sites that focus on airfare and hotels. Priceline, of course, has become a pop-culture icon (thanks to good ol’ Mr. Shatner), and Kayak, which I’ve used since before its official launch, has been advertising heavily too. Then there’s Expedia, Hotels.com, and a host of others.

Most of the innovation in this space has focused on air travel. This makes sense, given that it’s probably the biggest travel expense most of us are likely to run into. The now-familiar matrix map is just one example; for another, check out Hipmunk‘s unique method of showing flights based on the degree of agony they cause.

However, I haven’t been pleased with the state of car rental bookings until now. Each rental company has their own site, and they all tend to be brittle, ugly, and hard to navigate. Enter AutoSlash, a car rental search engine that has a simple, clean layout for booking cars. “Big deal,” you say. “I don’t mind clumsy web sites if they save me a few bucks.” That’s the real value of AutoSlash: once you book a reservation, their engine continues to search for a better deal. For example, I just reserved a car for an upcoming trip. I got a better rate from AutoSlash than using the super-discount code I normally use with Avis. About 15 minutes later, I got an e-mail from AutoSlash that said:

We found a better rate on your upcoming Hertz rental in Seattle on 9/17/2011 (AutoSlash Trip ID: XXXXXXXXX).
You were originally booked at $132.61, and the price has now dropped to $110.19. We’ve automatically re-booked your rental at the lower rate. You’ve saved $22.42 without even lifting a finger!

So, let’s recap: with zero effort on my part, these guys saved me enough money to buy myself dinner and a movie! There are other sites, like Yapta, that purport to do the same thing for airfares, but there the complication is that airlines typically charge a stiff change fee. In fairness, Yapta, FareCompare, and their ilk are great for tracking fares to see how much they cost before you buy, or checking historical price records, but they don’t often save you any actual money. Orbitz does something similar for hotel bookings, but (at least with Marriott and Hilton) you often get better deals booking directly with the hotel property instead of using a search site, so I’ve never actually gotten any money back from them.

AutoSlash is how I’ll be doing my rental car bookings from now on. Because it’s free, I encourage you to try it too. (I’m just a happy customer; they’re not paying me or anything.)

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2011-08-11 · 08:14

Thursday trivia #37

  • From the “I get e-mail” department:

    Good Afternoon Paul-

    GIS technology is playing an important role to help improve the wine industry by taking the guesswork out of where to plant vineyards for peak production.

    The wine industry’s reliance of GIS technology has increased the need for GIS professionals. A typical vineyard worker or winemaker often has three to 20 actual jobs, one of which may be executing GIS tasks.

    As more organizations around the world use geographic information systems, earning a bachelor’s degree online in GIS will prepare students to enter and/or move up in this rapidly growing field.

    American Sentinel University’s accredited associate and bachelor’s online degrees in GIS are designed to position students for success in this important field.

  • Apparently squirrels cause 17% of the damage to fiber-optic cables nationwide.
  • Looks like LinkedIn is raiding its users’ privacy too, just like Facebook. Here’s how to turn the feature off.
  • It’s been 9 months since the Lync 2010 launch. Microsoft has still not released any public details about their Lync clients for iOS (although I understand that select customers are being briefed under NDA). This is ridiculous, as third parties are starting to release their own clients.
  • Tony has a good summary of the preparation for our final (for now) Exchange Maestro workshop.
  • Not a surprise: “The kind of risk-seeking behavior that motivates certain people to fly personal aircraft may also make them effective corporate leaders, according to a new study co-authored by professors from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Oregon.”

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2011-08-09 · 15:29

Advice to Exchange ActiveSync developers

Now the folks at Apple, Google, and other ISVs who develop Exchange ActiveSync clients no longer have excuses for bugs and misfeatures in their clients. Why? Because Katarzyna Puchala of Microsoft (already one of my favorite Microsofties thanks to her work as part of the Exchange unified messaging team) has posted three very detailed articles on how clients should behave when synchronizing with Exchange servers:

That means, third parties, that there are no longer any credible excuses for why your clients do things like randomly delete meeting requests, or fail to work with EAS autodiscover. Sadly these articles come after the release of OS X Lion, and past the point at which EAS bugs are likely to meet the release bar for iOS 5… but I can always hope that the first service release for each of those operating systems will include fixes to make their EAS implementations act right.

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