2009-10-07 · 15:32

Official California: the DMV

So yesterday I had my first real “official California” experience. You’ve probably heard all about the state government here: the problems with bloated pensions, the budget, the knuckleheads in Sacramento, and so forth. I was worried about having to deal with the DMV, because– really– does any state have a good one?

First I hit this extremely useful unofficial DMV guide. It was a lifesaver. The fun started when I wanted to make an appointment. The web-based interface for doing so is ugly, but functional, (and hey, at least they have one, unlike Ohio), but I was really surprised to find that the soonest I could schedule an appointment was… yesterday, or almost three weeks from my scheduling attempt. There weren’t any better times available at any of the other offices that are quasi-near my office, so I decided to wait the three weeks instead of trying to show up and get in.

Second hurdle: you need to fill out a form 44 to get your license, but you can’t get one online; they’re all individually barcoded. So much for being prepared. Anyway, I showed up yesterday (about 15 minutes late, sad to say). When I got there, I waited in line for 5 minutes or so, got a copy of form 44, and was sent to fill it out. After filling it out, I got back in line, spent some time with the nice appointments lady (10 min, say), sat and waited for 10 minutes, went to a different window to have my documents verified and pay, went to yet another window to wait in line to get my picture taken (10 min), got a rules-of-the-road test form, took the test, and waited for it to be graded (15 min). At the end of all this, I walked out $30 poorer with a paper “provisional license” and a promise that my real license would be in the mail in two or three weeks.

Was it bad? No, but a far cry from the efficiency and speed of even the Bowling Green office of the Ohio DMV. I still have to go back and register our vehicles, too. Le sigh.

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2009-09-20 · 22:02

Bryan & Katie’s wedding

Right now I’m on a Southwest flight from PDX back to SJC after a great trip to see Bryan and Katie’s wedding. Bryan, of course, is better known as Dr. Bryan J. Rice, high muckety-muck of X-ray lithography for SEMATECH, and, not incidentally, one of my oldest friends. I’ve known him since my senior year in high school, when we had the good fortune to have the same physics class/ We spent countless hours together working on cars, studying at college (he got his bachelor’s in computer science and a masters’ in physics in the same amount of time it took me to get a bachelor’s alone!), and generally palling around.

David and I left San Jose Friday evening and flew into PDX, where we picked up our rental and headed for the Hotel B. The bride’s sister had recommended it; its primary virtues were its low rate ($40/night on Priceline, although they’re exaggerating if they think it’s a three-star property) and its proximity to Bryan’s house, where the wedding was to be held. Overall it was nothing special: the rooms were adequately clean and reasonably well-maintained, except for the incredibly squeaky floors. On the other hand it’s right across the street from the Hillsboro airport, which just happens to have a large contingent of helicopters that fly pretty much all day. For most people that would be an unwelcome nuisance but for us it was a bonus.

First thing Saturday morning we headed over to Pine State Biscuits. Summary: A++++ would eat again. In fact, if I lived in Seattle, i”d drive to Portland just to eat there. In fact I”m considering planning a trip up from Morgan HIll to eat there. Turns out they were recently on the Food Network, and i can see why. Large portions, delicious biscuits, and the best stewed apples– tender without being mushy, and not sickly-sweet– I’ve ever had. (Plus the waitress pictured here kept calling David “darling” and batting her eyes at him.) After being thus filled, we headed over to Powell’s, another reason why i feel like a future visit to Portland is in order. What a fantastic place! David and I each got a few books. I would happily have bought more, save that I lack time to read them all (I did get the 2009 edition of “The Best American Science Writing“, the 2007 version of which I thoroughly enjoyed). I figure I can squeeze that in.

Then, the wedding. Bryan really put on the dog for this event; his backyard was groomed and manicured within an inch of its life, and it was absolutely perfect for the ceremony. The weather, which had been yucky-but-typical in the morning, improved markedly, with clear skies, a light breeze, and plenty of sunshine. I took video of the entire ceremony, but haven’t had a chance to edit it yet. In the meantime, here are some pictures to tide you over. We had a lovely dinner and got to meet a few of Bryan’s co-workers from Intel, as well as seeing some familiar faces from his family. I’m really glad we were able to attend, even though I’m sorry Arlene had to miss it. (but I get to see her and the boys this week! yay!!)

Today was quiet; we found the Brookwood Ward in Hillsboro and went to Sacrament meeting, hit Pine State again (figuring, correctly, that eating there would cover us for both breakfast and lunch), and went back to the hotel to get David’s forgotten retainer. At that point, we decided it would be more fun to take the Portland MAX light rail to the airport, so I returned our car at the airport (remember, it’s right across the street!) and we trained it back to PDX. Tonight for dinner it’s pasta-in-a-bag, followed by the last part of “Torchwood: Children of Earth,” then up and at ’em tomorrow.

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2009-09-07 · 17:47

California roundup: one month in

Today is Labor Day, which means it’s the start of the third full week that David and I have been living in California, and my fifth overall. I miss Arlene, Matt, and Tom so much! I can’t wait to see them again on the 25th, right before we close the sale of our house in Ohio.

A few assorted thoughts on being a newly-minted Californian.

  1. I am adapting to traffic and commute times. Note that I didn’t say I liked them, just that it seems like I’m getting used to them again, much as when I lived in Atlanta. David has seminary each school day at 0650, so once I drop him off I can usually be at my office between 0745 and 0800. That usually makes me the first one in, which is fine with me. On days when he has football practice, he’s done about 1830, which leaves me plenty of time to leave the office and still get him on time. Of course, once Arlene, Matt, and Tom are here I’ll be able to take the train more often.
  2. Speaking of which: I took the train last week to get back to Morgan Hill after dropping off my rental car. It worked fine. It’s about 40 miles each way from Morgan Hill to my office. The Saab gets about 28 mpg in mixed city/highway driving, so figure (5 * 40 * 2) / 28 ~= 14 gallons of gas per week, or about $44 at today’s gas price. Train tickets cost $7.75 each way, or $52.75 for an 8-ride pass, or $205 for a monthly pass. Thus I’m paying a slight premium to be able to sit and work, or read, or whatever instead of just sitting in traffic. Not a bad trade, it seems.
  3. It seems like these guys are everywhere. I see at least three or four cruisers each day going to and from work. Kinda makes the Ohio Highway Patrol look like slackers.
  4. The weather seems to have two states: pleasant and hot.

Work? Work is awesome. I am still enthralled with what I’m doing in three respects. First, we have an extremely talented and smart team. Second, I continue to be impressed with the tutoring engine and what I’m leaning from it. Third, I am having great fun setting up our experimental Exchange 2010 environment. Compared to what we have now, Exchange 2010 is light-years ahead. It’s like moving from this to this.

Our typical daily routine is to get up around 0545, shower, and grab breakfast at the hotel. I drop David off at seminary, drive to work, work, and then pick him up again after football. We’ve really done a good job of eating in: turkey burgers, salmon, pasta-in-a-bag, and so on are all typical fare. Arlene sent us a crock pot but I broke it about 2 minutes after it got here, so that hasn’t been much help. We definitely miss her cooking!

Weekends have been quite a bit more relaxed. Saturday David and I went to the 144th annual Scottish Highland Gathering and Games. It was everything we hoped for: there were pipers, the Marine Band San Diego, Scottish Heavy Athletics, and sheep-dog trials. Sadly I didn’t get to have a Scottish egg, as the line was about 45 minutes long. Apart from that, though, it was delightful, and it’s nice to know they’ll be in the same place at the same weekend next year in case we get a hankering to go back. Sunday we did essentially nothing except attending church, devouring a Costco take-and-bake five-meat pizza we bought Saturday, and driving around to look at houses we found on RealtyTrac. For our evening entertainment, we watched the first part of “Torchwood: Children of Earth” (brilliant so far!) and an episode from the first season of House. We’ve also been reading a lot; the library system here is quite well-stocked and has many of the amenities we came to expect from Way Library.

Today David has some friends from church over to swim in the hotel pool while I write. Interestingly, even though today’s a holiday, he still has football practice at the usual time, so once I drop him off I’m going to look at a couple of rental houses. Right now we’re leaning towards renting for a year, letting our equity from the Ohio house marinate in a nice CD while we wait to find exactly the perfect house. Tomorrow it’s back to the weekday routine!

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2009-09-06 · 17:48

AppleInsider gets it wrong on Snow Leopard Mail

Ahh, the joys of the internets. Today’s treat for your delectation: this piece by Daniel Eran Dilger in AppleInsider about Snow Leopard’s Exchange support. Sadly, it’s riddled with factual inaccuracies.

In the software business, Microsoft has long known the importance of owning the client end. It worked hard to displace Netscape’s web browser in the late 90s, not because there was any money to be made in giving away browser clients, but because it knew that whoever controlled the client could set up proprietary demands for a specific web server. That’s what Netscape had worked to do as it gave away its web browser in hopes that it could make money selling Netscape web servers; Microsoft first took control of the client with Internet Explorer and then began tying its IE client to its own IIS on the server side with features that gave companies reasons to buy all of their server software from Microsoft.

I think this misstates what actually happened. Microsoft wasn’t trying to push IIS by tying IE to it. Instead, they were trying to prevent Netscape, and more broadly browser-based apps, from throwing Windows off the desktop 15 years later, Microsoft is still fighting that same battle, although against different opponents. For a web server to be useful, it must communicate with many different clients. For a browser to be useful, it must communicate with many
different servers. That’s the whole rationale behind the use of HTTP and HTML, for crying out loud.

Now we move on from matters of interpretation to matters of actual fact.

Apple’s support for Exchange and its promotion of its own Exchange alternatives are two sides of the same coin, in the sense that they use the same technologies. Apple built its support for Exchange using WebDAV, the open specification that Microsoft supports on Exchange Server as a way to deliver messages to mobile clients. Apple did not license Microsoft’s Windows-only “Exchange Active Sync” software; it merely licensed the rights to implement a compatible EAS conduit with Exchange. Apple owns the Snow Leopard software that talks to Exchange.

Unfortunately, this is just plain wrong in several ways.

  • Apple doesn’t use WebDAV for Snow Leopard. Instead, they use Exchange Web Services, a SOAP-based interface that delivers almost all of the functionality in the now-ancient MAPI stack. Microsoft shipped WebDAV support in Exchange 2000 in the apparent hope that they’d be able to do away with MAPI as the primary Outlook/Exchange protocol. Turns out that WebDAV– an open standard that Microsoft adapted in the name of interoperability– turned out to be a spectacularly bad choice from a performance and functionality standpoint. Unfortunately, Entourage used DAV. This limited Entourage’s functionality (but more on that later.>
  • Exchange ActiveSync isn’t a “Windows-only” protocol. It’s a well-described sync standard that can be licensed by device makers who want to talk to Exchange (Palm, Apple, SonyEricsson, and Nokia all have), or that can be licensed by server makers who want EAS devices to talk to their servers (IBM Lotus is the best example here.)
  • Snow Leopard doesn’t use Exchange ActiveSync.

On to another matter of interpretation:

This effort to support everything from integrated client software owned by Apple makes Snow Leopard’s support for Exchange of use to everyone, even if they don’t use Exchange. The client work Apple has invested in making Macs Exchange-friendly also improves the features available via MobileMe, Snow Leopard Server, and even some other third party services such as those from Google and Yahoo.

Snow Leopard’s support for Exchange only works with, well, Exchange. It certainly doesn’t work with Gmail or Yahoo. It’s questionable how well it even works with Snow Leopard Server. I’m reserving judgement until we get our 10.6 server set up at work so I can test it first hand.

Now, to jump back to something at the beginning of the article. Dilger says:

Microsoft has responded with the announcement that it will now be delivering a real (but still scaled back) version of Outlook for the Mac again, after a decade of giving enterprise Mac users a third rate alternative in Entourage, but Microsoft’s efforts to win back Mac clients may come too late to prevent the significant erosion of one of the primary reasons companies have to pay for Office on the Mac.

It’s ironic that Dilger labels Entourage as “third rate” given how many Entourage features are missing from Snow Leopard’s clients. However, Snow Leopard’s client implementation is nowhere near the functionality of what’s currently in Entourage, and I don’t think that’s likely to change when Microsoft ships their Mac version of Outlook.

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2009-09-02 · 00:01

HOWTO make an Xbox 360 get a DHCP address from OS X Internet Sharing

This had me puzzled for a bit: I set up a TV and Xbox in our hotel room and tried to get on Xbox Live through the wireless connection on my MacBook Pro. The Xbox stubbornly refused to pull an IP address from the Mac. After a little Bing-fu I found this article, which explains how to fix it. It works like a champ!

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2009-08-30 · 17:18

First look: Snow Leopard and Exchange

Given that I’m in Palo Alto, and that probably half of my coworkers use Macs, it’s no surprise that I installed Snow Leopard today. I’m not going to review the OS, or even the Exchange capability, but here are a few notes based on my long-time Entourage use (and not a little time spent with Outlook 2010 over the past few months). Herewith my thoughts:

  • The first thing I noticed: Mail.app is smokin’ fast compared to Entourage EWS. I mean, we’re talking lightning. EWS has much improved sync performance compared to DAV sync, but Mail.app leaves it in the dust when it comes to scrolling, searching, and message rendering. I haven’t tried to compare the two programs’ sync speed (and probably won’t, since it’s mostly relevant when you set up a new account).
  • Speaking of setup: I was able to set up 4 Exchange accounts in about 10 seconds each: enter e-mail address and password, then let Autodiscover do the rest. EWS Autodiscover works well most of the time, but occasionally it will fail to detect an account.
  • By default, Mail creates a single unified Inbox view– exactly what I use in Entourage (and what I wish for in Outlook 2010). However, nowhere can I find where Mail tells me how many messages are in a folder, something I like to keep track of.
  • I like it that Mail.app uses the same sounds for sent and received mail that the iPhone does. On the other hand, I dislike the fact that you can’t change these sounds (on either platform). C’mon, Apple.
  • Ironically, older versions of Mail would hide some Exchange folders when you connected because Mail couldn’t handle them. Guess what? This version fails to hide some folders, such as “Conversation Action Settings” and “Quick Step Settings”, that Outlook 2010 creates as ostensibly hidden folders in your mailbox root. Oops.
  • Entourage seems to do a better job of masking temporary connectivity problems. When Mail.app decides that one of my servers is unreachable, it grays out that server’s entire folder tree and puts the little tilde-looking icon next to the account name. By contrast, Entourage will discreetly add “(Not Connected)” to the account name and leave it at that.
  • iCal… well, what can I say? I still don’t like it after all these years. Yes, it syncs with my Exchange calendars now, but its visual display is ugly compared to Entourage (especially for overlapping events), it’s lacking in features, and the task support appears to have been hastily bolted on.
  • I’ve never been a user of the Address Book app. Given the way this version works, I’m not about to start. Too much wasted white space and too many missing features. For example, want to see someone’s management chain? Too bad, Address Book doesn’t show that. Feel like searching the GAL? Sorry, no can do (at least not that I can find.)

There are other problems, too– no support for setting your out-of-office status, for example. In terms of fit and finish, there are lots of little grace notes that Entourage gets right but that Apple stumbled with. To show just one example, take a look at these two screen shots, one for each program.

Microsoft EntourageScreenSnapz001.png   iCalScreenSnapz001.png

IMHO, Entourage does a better job all around. It tells me that my machine and my appointment are in different time zones. It clearly shows the important data about when my test meeting’s invitees are available. Once you type in an invitee’s name, there’s no way to delete the event in iCal unless you remove all invitees first. Attempting to close the window gives you a chance to edit or send the invite, but not get rid of it altogether. (Bonus: thought it was interesting that Entourage could get and display Atalla’s status (OOF, in this case) but that iCal couldn’t, even though I took the screen shots on the same machine and more or less at the same time.)

More broadly I don’t like going back to the world of having three separate apps for PIM functions. It reminds me of Sidekick for DOS. I much prefer the Outlook/Entourage model of having several different (but related) data types in one place. What makes this worse is that there’s relatively little integration among the Snow Leopard apps. For example, if you’re looking at a contact in Address Book and want to send that person a mail message– too bad. There’s no way to do so. You can, however, right-click an e-mail address in Mail to open that address’ contact card.

Still more broadly, these applications are not very flexible or customizable compared to Entourage. For example, let’s say you want your message reading pane on the right. Too bad! There’s no way in Mail.app to customize it; you need WideMail or something like it, of which there is no Snow Leopard version (yet).

So, Snow Leopard delivers what Apple promised: basic Exchange integration. There are so many things that they’ve left out, though, that I remain disappointed, and I’m thinking that the Microsoft Mac Business Unit has a huge lead already as they move into full-scale development of Outlook for Mac

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2009-08-21 · 16:13

iDialog iPhone OCS client

The fine folks at Modality Systems in the UK just released iDialog, an iPhone client for OCS 2007 and OCS 2007 R2. Executive summary: I like it and think it was worth the $10.

Modality have a good FAQ that addresses questions about what the program does. In short, it does everything you could do from within Communicator Web Access. For example, you can send and receive text IM messages, see your contacts’ presence state, search the GAL, and control incoming OCS enterprise voice calls.

IMG_0161
my own contact card has some editable propertiesIMG_0163
other users’ cards have the standard card properties.		 I tested iDialog this morning to see how well it worked. The overall experience was quite good; my contacts appeared as I expected.To the left, you can see what my user’s contact card looks like. iDialog uses a similar view for your contact card as it does for those of other users, with the difference that you can edit some fields of yours (like the Note and Location fields). To change your presence status, tap the jellybean icon in the upper-left corner of the screen and you’ll see the familiar OCS presence states.

You can see the iDialog toolbar at the bottom of the screenshot, too. It’s as self-explanatory as can be (though a bit plain-looking). Tapping the Chats icon takes you to a list of current conversations, each of which shows you how many pending messages you haven’t yet responded to.

When you look at the contact card for one of your contacts (or someone that you look up in the GAL), you get a wealth of information (a la Outlook 2007/2010) about the person: their presence level, how long they’ve been away, their free-until/busy-until state (although the “free-busy at…” text is a bit confusing at first), and so on. Tapping a contact’s e-mail address launches a new mail message (incidentally quitting iDialog), and tapping a phone number opens the built-in phone app to place a call over the GSM network (provided you’re on a phone; you can’t do this on an iPod Touch).

GAL searching worked fine in my limited tests: type in all or part of a user’s name and you’ll get a list of matches back. I’ve seen a few reports of crashing during searches, but I couldn’t reproduce those myself.
The conversation view itself looks a lot like the built-in Messages app, but the bubble sizes and colors are just slightly off. I attribute that to Modality’s decision to include more information than Messages does, including the name of the sender of each comment and the time at which it was sent. Check the shot on the right of an active chat session to see what I mean.There’s a lot going on here. You can see the name of the person I’m talking to (well, at least part of it), along with a navigation control to go back to the chat list. The Options button allows you to invite additional users or quit the chat (though there’s currently no way to kick a user from a multi-party conference). iDialog provides the same “… is typing a message” prompt that CWA does, too, a nice touch. However, what dominates the view of an active session is Apple’s soft keyboard, taking up fully half of the available screen. That makes it harder than necessary to follow what’s going on. I’d prefer to see the keyboard only when I start typing, a la Apple’s SMS application. IMG_0165

 

MPOP worked fine; during my conversations I remained logged in to Communicator. The experience had a few odd points. Mysteriously, my status was once automatically set to Do Not Disturb, although because I was logged in to Communicator at the same time this may not have had anything to do with iDialog.

iDialog doesn’t seem to have a way to edit the phone forwarding settings you currently have in place, so I had to use CWA to turn off my default forwarding. Once I had done so, though, iDialog notified me of incoming calls and let me forward them to pre-defined numbers, just as CWA or Communicator would.

A suggestions to the Modality gang for future releases: when entering an IM in the 1.0.0 release, if the IM is longer than the width of the text view, the text view scrolls right. A better (IMHO) way to do this is to do what the iPhone’s native apps do and grow the height of the text bubble. This can easily be accomplished using TTTextController from Joe Hewitt‘s excellent Three20 library.

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2009-08-20 · 12:29

Automatically installing Exchange 2010 prerequisites

Exchange 2010 has a daunting list of prerequisites. Although the installer is pretty good about catching missing items, it’s a hassle to start an install, wait a few minutes, and then notice it complaining that you’re missing a required component or hotfix. This problem is made worse by the fact that there are slightly different prerequisites for some server roles on some operating systems.

Fellow Exchange MVP Dejan Foro has a great solution: a pair of scripts that automate the installation of the prerequisites for you. You still have to download them all, but the script takes care of installing the right bits in the right places at the right times. I particularly like the "turbo" script, which just slams the prerequisites into place without asking you any annoying questions. Check the scripts out—I think you’ll like them.

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2009-08-18 · 09:04

Exchange 2010 release candidate build now available

Great news from Michael Atalla on the Exchange team blog: the release candidate for Exchange 2010 is now available for download. The RC is feature complete, meaning that everything that will be in the final build has been implemented, though there may still be bugs. I can say that based on my experience with Exchange 2010 in the TAP, and a user of the Outlook Live service, it’s pretty darn solid. Check it out!

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2009-08-14 · 12:26

Me and my Gateway LT3103U

I know, I know. I’ve complained in the past about the limited value of netbooks, and now… well, confession time: I bought one, a Gateway LT3103U. I’m going to be using my MacBook Pro as my primary machine, which means I want to leave it plugged in to its monitor etc. at home. Because I’ll be commuting by Caltrain I wanted something small and portable to use for light writing, surfing, and so on.

I asked a large social alias at Microsoft for recommendations and got back a dozen or so. Some recommendations were based on price, some on battery life, and some on overall price/performance. I don’t need ultra-long battery life, and while I won’t say price was no object, I didn’t feel like it was the most important factor.

Why the LT3103U? In a word, the screen. It’s a beautiful, clear, sharp 1366 x 768. I experimented with a few 1024 x 600 screens at my local {Best Buy, Costco} but they were just too darn small. The Gateway also has a pretty nice full-size keyboard. It’s no Lenovo, but it’s miles better than most of the ones I tested. Performance with Win 7 is quite nice. Would an Atom N270 be faster? Maybe, but on the other hand I’d have to suffer the squinty little screens common on those devices. (Here’s an LT3103U review for your consideration.)

I found instructions to make a bootable Win 7 USB stick and built a Windows 7 Ultimate x64 stick. It worked flawlessly, and I commend the instructions to your attention. I don’t know how long the install took because I started it right before bed, but it was done when I got up 🙂

Chris Moates had notes on getting Win 7 drivers set up for the LT3103U. I didn’t burn the Gateway driver DVD (I don’t have a USB burner), so I just ran Windows Update on a wired connection. It found the correct ATI and wireless drivers with no problem, so all my hardware is fully functional (although I haven’t tested multitouch; that may require the Synaptics touchpad driver).

Now I need to install Windows Live Writer on it and see how it blogs 🙂

Update: I took it back to Best Buy. It was a delightful little machine, but it was just too small– the keyboard and screen are both better suited to someone with Arlene’s hand size than mine.

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2009-08-13 · 18:23

Signing up for beta MS Learning exams

If you’ve ever taken a Microsoft certification exam, you might wonder where they come from. Do storks bring them? Are they made by elves?

Not quite. They’re developed by teams of subject matter experts (SMEs). Some of these SMEs work for MIcrosoft, and some come from the broader IT community. The exam development process is too long and boring to talk about in depth; there are several phases to it, starting with “hey, kids, let’s put on an exam” and culminating with the rollout of the finished exam.

Along the way, there are usually beta opportunities, where the nearly-finished test is made available to a limited pool of test users who can give feedback to the test development team (i.e. “hey, question 45 is too vague!” or “there’s no correct answer to question 15.”) For the first time that I know of, Microsoft has opened a public call for SMEs who want to volunteer to work on exam development and to get early access to exam betas. If you’re at all interested, visit this site to get directions for signing up. (Hint: it involves Microsoft’s Connect web site!)

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2009-08-13 · 17:23

Twitter plugin test, again, AGAIN

Bah. This is getting tiresome.

Update: thanks to the server gods, posts made with the MT interface (or scheduled for later posting) now tweet like they’re supposed to. All hail Brian and Greg!

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2009-08-13 · 16:49

Twitter plugin test, again

This testing is getting pretty tiresome.

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2009-08-13 · 16:47

MS releases Entourage EWS, changes name to Outlook

Big news on the Mac e-mail front.

First, Microsoft has released the Exchange Web Services (EWS) edition of Entourage, which you may remember from back in January. If you’ve been using the beta version, you will almost certainly be pleased with the vast improvements in sync speed since the beta. MS has also fixed a number of annoying sync bugs. Remember, the EWS version requires that you have Exchange 2007 SP1 with update rollup (UR) UR4 or later.

Next, MS announced today that the next version of Mac Office will contain… not Entourage but Outlook for the Mac. They have not yet announced the exact details of what “Outlook” means in the Mac context (except to say that it includes support for AD RMS), but the Entourage Outlook for Mac team is well aware of the major features that Outlook for WIndows has, and based on my discussions with them I am pretty optimistic about what we’ll see in the next version.

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2009-08-10 · 12:54

20% discount on Microsoft Certified Master: Exchange September rotation

Neato! I just got mail from Greg Taylor, head of the MCM: Exchange program. They’re offering a $3,550 discount on the upcoming Exchange 2007 rotation (September 21-October 10). Register here to get the discount. Disclaimer: I teach the UM portion of the MCM class, and Greg’s offering instructors a bounty for new registrants, so I benefit directly when people sign up. However, the training is so good that you should disregard my interests altogether and sign up anyway. (If you do, please drop me an e-mail to let me know!)

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