Ethan McConnell has a long post on the Exchange team blog covering how to set up the Windows Mobile emulators for testing various Exchange features. Early last month he snuck in an update: a link to the Windows Mobile 6.5 emulator images. If you’re interested in the differences between WM 6.1 and 6.5, this is probably the best way to satisfy your curiosity for the time being; I don’t think there are any actual WM 6.5 devices shipping yet.
Windows Mobile 6.5 emulator images
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Filed under General Tech Stuff, UC&C
OWA redirects with URL rewriting
From the “you learn something new every day, whether you want to or not” file: there’s an IIS extension that lets you doURL rewriting. Chris Lehr has a blog post explaining how to use it to send users to the correct OWA virtual directory no matter what (or almost no matter what) URL they enter. This is a lot cleaner than the other methods I’ve seen described in the past.
Heading to SJC
We have been having a wonderful family visit in Alexandria, complete with lots of great food and family time. Now I am at AEX enroute SJC. I was supposed to fly AEX-MEM-MSP-SJC but the MEM-MSP was cancelled due to mechanical problems. Too bad Northwest didn’t tell me until check-in. They wanted to reroute me to SFO, which would put me in at almost midnight. Instead I’m going aEX-MEM-IAH-SJC, which should be OK. Then tomorrow, New Job City!
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Filed under Travel
Exchange UM broadcast / distribution voice mail
Microsoft’s Dave Howe posted a great tip to his blog: how to allow users to send voicemail messages to multiple users. This is often called “broadcast” or “distribution” voicemail, because the sender specifies a single address that expands into multiple recipients– just like a conventional distribution group in Exchange. The process is pretty straightforward: you create a new AD distribution group for the target recipients, update the UM grammar files that Exchange UM uses for speech recognition, and start sending messages.
Some must-have iPhone apps for the kids
[ Update: rewritten because the original’s links were bad. I deleted it, and now people who clicked on the original link are getting 500’d ]
Arlene and I upgraded our iPhones to the 3GS model last night, and David got a 3G 8GB to replace his ooold Nokia flip. Tom is awaiting the arrival of his iPod Touch. With that in mind I wanted to link to a few apps that I frequently use. This isn’t a complete or exhaustive list, but it’s a start.
- The Scriptures, a free app that renders the standard works of the LDS Church (Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and Doctrine and Covenants), complete with footnotes and a really helpful search feature.
- The Mormon Channel, which provides a number of LDS Church-sponsored audio and information feeds, including full text of Church magazines, scriptures, and content from General Conference sessions. Interestingly, this is a community-developed app— I’m signing up to work on it. (It’s free.)
- The Weather Channel: all the local forecasts you could possibly want, supported by ads. There’s an ad-free Max version for $4 that adds beach forecasts, radar maps, and some other stuff
- feX for Facebook: syncs your Facebook friends list with your iPhone address book (and thus, by extension, with Exchange or whatever you’re using on the back end). This is the fastest way to get pictures of your contacts, not to mention their birthdays and so on. It’s well worth the $0.99 cost.
- TweetDeck: a great free Twitter client. It’s supposed to be able to sync with the desktop version, but I haven’t gotten it to work properly yet.
- Blog with iBlogger is $10. However, it’s by far the best blogging client I’ve found for the iPhone. It handles multiple blogs with aplomb and can easily post text and photos. I haven’t tried posting any videos yet, though.
- Shazam, a free app that identifies songs for you then lets you quickly buy them from iTunes. Perfect for places where they often play music you don’t recognize.
- iPhlix for remotely controlling my Netflix queue (including adding and removing items; well worth its $3 price) and its partner in crime, the free U-verse TV remote control app. Between these two I can remotely record or request shows or movies no matter where I am (e.g. in the back of an airplane somewhere).
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Filed under Friends & Family, General Tech Stuff
The lowdown on Exchange 2010 fax
You may have heard that Exchange 2010 won’t support inbound fax. I have yet to find an Exchange 2007 deployment that actually uses Exchange UM faxing for one simple reason: it’s inbound-only. If you have to do all the work of deploying an outbound fax solution anyway, the value of inbound fax support in Exchange UM is quite a bit lower.
Exchange 2010 won’t create fax messages itself. However, there’s a twist: you can outsource your fax over IP (FoIP) capabilities. Exchange 2010 will honor any existing Exchange 2007 UM fax configuration properties, and it will continue to recognize fax CNG tones. However, instead of answering the call itself, UM will look at a new configuration property defined on UM mailbox policy objects: FaxServerURI. If this property exists, UM will try to hand off the call to the specified fax solution. The external fax solution will establish a fax media session with the sender, create a fax message, and send it to the UM-enabled user’s mailbox.
Messages created by this approach will look basically just like Exchange 2007 UM fax messages, and they’ll appear in the Fax search folder just as existing messages do.
The foregoing discussion might lead you to wonder who’s going to offer FoIP services that work with Exchange 2010. I haven’t seen a list yet. However, Concord Technologies sent out a press release at the Worldwide Partner Conference touting the fact that they’d be offering an Exchange 2010-compatible solution, so I guess we can count them in.
Filed under UC&C
We’re moving to California
(Mental playlist for this entry: Led Zep’s Going to California; Fatboy Slim’s Kalifornia; Take California by the Propellerheads; the Royal Gigolos remix of California Dreamin’; close out with the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Dani California).
From the title of this post and the playlist above, you might have figured it out: we’re not moving to Seattle, but instead to somewhere in the wild, wild Bay Area. Worse, I’m leaving 3Sharp and joining another company altogether. Shock! Horror! How did this happen?
It’s complicated.
Since my dad’s death in 2007 I’ve been thinking more about who I am and what I do. In my early career, I built software, a process that has tangible (and hopefully executable) results. In my current role, I spend a lot of time researching how things work, and the good and bad aspects of various technologies, and communicating my learnings to people in different ways. Over time I began to feel as though I was losing the passion that had made me successful at 3Sharp. I still enjoyed tinkering with new technologies (yeah, Exchange 2010, I’m looking at you), but I felt as though my inner fire was turning into banked coals instead of a roaring inferno.
At the same time, 3Sharp has been growing and changing in some new and exciting ways. Some unforeseen (and very much unwanted) changes in our business meant that we had to lay people off– people I valued as friends and for whose welfare I felt responsible. That was a hard pill to swallow for me. At the same time, PKS, and its related technologies, have been strong areas for us, as has the work we’ve done focused on Office and SharePoint. The only way I could help move that work forward was by driving 3Sharp’s sales and marketing efforts, but I quickly found that– compared to the other things I knew how to do– that I was neither very excited by nor very good at these critical things.
When Acuitus approached me to do some on-site training for them in Monterey, I jumped at the chance because Jim McBee (my longtime friend and a great American) had told me they were doing some interesting things. After the training was over, I flew down to San Jose to talk to them about hiring 3Sharp to do some additional work. During that time I got more hands-on experience with their digital tutor, and learned more about their long-term plans. Instead of hiring 3Sharp, they offered me a job.
After a lot of soul searching, and many long conversations with Arlene, I decided to accept their offer. I’d been approached by other companies before, including competitors of 3Sharp and companies that wanted Exchange talent in-house. This offer was different, though. What tipped the scale is this: I firmly believe that what Acuitus is doing will revolutionize the way computer-based learning works and how it’s used. Working there will give me some unmatchable opportunities to build and do things that can make a lasting impact for millions of people. That was too much to resist!
There are a lot of scary parts to this change: I’m uprooting my family to move someplace that none of us have ever wanted to live, going back to working in an office instead of from home most of the time, and having to prove my skills and worth all over again from scratch. Instead of the established support system we would have had in Seattle, we’re starting over in a new, and very different, environment from what we’re used to. These things are all hard.
The change is hard for another reason. I think of my partners in 3Sharp– Paul, Peter, and John– like brothers. Telling them that I was leaving was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to face. I have learned so much from them that I owe them a debt I can’t ever repay, not that leaving them is helping to repay it any! However, I believe in their talent and drive, and I know that 3Sharp will continue to thrive and prosper under their care.
However, sometimes it takes work to move on to the next stage of whatever the Lord has planned for us. That’s what I’m trying to keep in mind as we go through the process of looking at ridiculously overpriced houses and figuring out how we’ll make the leap to this new environment. I’ve added a new category called “California” for posts just about the transition, even. Onward…
Filed under California, Musings
Respite care for Alzheimer’s sufferers in Toledo
Jeri Wendt, a friend of mine from Perrysburg Rotary, sent me this note, and I wanted to share it. If you have a loved one with Alzheimer’s in metro Toledo, please look into Paul’s Peers and support them in any way you can.
When you come across something that you care about and think others may benefit from you just HAVE to pass on the good word… so, please take a minute and read about something that makes my life so much better.
For those who don’t know, my mom has Alzheimer’s. My older brother and I share in her care and luckily for us, about three years ago, we discovered Paul’s Peers Respite Care in Maumee where we take her four days a week. (See attached article featuring me and Mom!). Paul’s Peers is a senior day-care center whose main purpose is caring for elderly people who need assistance. This includes people with Alzheimer’s. It is a place to drop off your loved one knowing they will be cared for by the kindest people you would ever hope to meet. For $35 a day you have up to eight hours of free time for yourself and in our case, Mom gets a day away from us. (A win-win situation!)
I am sending this to you in case you know of someone who would be interested in this program. Due to the economy, many people aren’t working now and are staying at home with their loved ones eliminating the need for elder care during the day. Much to our dismay, Paul’s Peers has had to temporarily stop care on Tuesdays due to lack of enrollment. So… if you have a spouse, parent, grandparent or know of someone who could use this service please let them know. It is a program offered as much for the care giver as it is the recipient.
We would not be able to have my Mom stay at home were it not for this “gem”. We drop her off at 9:00 in the morning and her day begins with a continental breakfast, (donated by Panera Bread), and David, the assistant director, reading the newspaper and discussing current events. The rest of the day the incredible staff keeps things interesting by mild exercises, playing games and cards, watching old movies and listening to music with weekly entertainment such as an accordion player or a story teller. Other events are bi-weekly manicures, trips to the movie theater, crafts, tea parties, church every Wednesday and visits from the children’s day-care. The staff patiently learns the likes and dislikes of each participant and gently works with them accordingly. It didn’t take them long to find out my mom is an avid gin-rummy player who is tough to beat!
There you have it… now you know. If you don’t have the need right now maybe sometime in the future you will have a friend who is at wits end and needs a break. You can offer them a solution.
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
310 Elizabeth Street
Maumee
(419) 893-3381
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Filed under Friends & Family, General Stuff
Plague Year (Carlson)
This isn’t exactly a horror novel, but it was horrifying. It scared the pants off me. I don’t want to say too much about it to avoid spoiling any potential surprises. Carlson tells the story of a nanotech plague, and its few survivors, in a spare, fast style. There are plot twists aplenty, and neither the heroes nor villains are as simple as they might first appear. Strongly recommended if you like science fiction, apocalyptic fiction, or well-written and scary fiction.
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Filed under Reviews
Meeting forward notifications in Exchange 2010
Back in May I wrote about meeting forward notifications and how Exchange 2007 processes them. This feature is largely unchanged in Exchange 2010, with one very nice exception. In the new OWA options interface, the Calendar tab sports a checkbox labeled “Delete notifcations about forwarded meetings”. If you check it, that has the same effect as running Set-MailboxCalendarSettings -RemoveForwardedMeetingNotifications $true on your mailbox.
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Filed under UC&C
Z-Push considered harmful
So Devin posted about Z-Push, the cool-sound open-source implementation of Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) protocol. Here’s the problem: the Z-Push folks kinda forgot to buy a license for EAS, and I have a problem with that. After years of complaints that Microsoft wasn’t being open and sharing its protocols, they started to document the behavior of their protocols and offer some of them for licensing, EAS included. That’s good, right? It’s good enough for Apple, Google, and the many other companies that licensed EAS, anyway. However, apparently Zarafa wanted the benefit of Microsoft’s labors without being willing to pay for it, so they built their own implementation. I don’t think that’s fair, and I don’t think the technical coolness of Z-Push should obscure the fact that Zarafa is stealing something that isn’t theirs.
This is what I said in 2002:
Hey, Linux guys: if you want to beat Microsoft, do it by making something better, not by copying their investment.
What happened to Lemonade? How about Funambol? It’s not as though the FOSS world lacks for sync protocols; they just decided that Microsoft’s commercially successful, fully licensable protocol would better suit their needs, so they took it. It boggles the mind. It would be one thing if the protocol were fully open to all implementers, but it’s not. If you don’t like the licensing terms, build your own protocol– that’s not hard to understand, is it?
Live Meeting Lotus Notes plugin
From the I-had-no-idea-this-existed department: Microsoft has a downloadable Lotus Notes plugin that provides integrated support for scheduling Live Meeting sessions and meetings hosted by OCS 2007. (It doesn’t yet support OCS 2007 R2, sad to say.)
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Filed under UC&C
E-mail overload and enterprise attention management
Craig Roth has a great blog post up on e-mail overload and how “attention management” technologies can help reduce the burden on us puny humans. I thought I’d take a stab at describing how Outlook, Entourage, and Exchange 2010 implement attention management technologies. (You’ll probably want to refer to this map as you read the below points). I’ve taken Craig’s bulleted list and added notes about how Exchange + Outlook support (or don’t support) each proposed attention management feature.
- Scheduled delivery: Outlook and Exchange have supported scheduled sending for some time; you can schedule a message to be sent “not before” a certain time, or just in the next send/receive. However, there’s no built-in way to schedule receiving. This would be fairly simple to implement via an Outlook plugin (or Entourage AppleScript) that switches the client to offline mode until it’s time to pick up new mail.
- Maintain whitelists to bypass blocks and delays: this would be tricky to implement if scheduled delivery were implemented using my crude method of going offline, and I’m not sure how useful it would be anyway.
- “Move to discussion” greys out “reply”: A “move to discussion” feature would be a great addition to Outlook, and (from Microsoft’s perspective) would be desirable as a way to drive people to SharePoint.
- Automated routing and prioritizing: this is a wicked-hard problem. Microsoft’s solving it by letting you build workflows that manage e-mail, so that organizations can build workflows to handle incoming e-mail, IM, and voice traffic according to whatever rules make sense. This isn’t really an end-user-targeted capability, though.
- Un-bury turning off or freezing of “toasts”: I prefer to work with toasts turned off altogether, but I understand that some people want them. Craig’s right, though, that it should be easier to toggle this functionality. One easy thing for Microsoft to do would be to integrate “do not disturb” mode in Communicator with the Outlook equivalent. This already sort-of-works (e.g. during a full-screen PowerPoint presentation you don’t get toasts) but it could be made better.
- Enable e-mail hyperlinking: does anyone remember the Exchange 2000 Web Storage System? Every item in the store had its own uniquely addressable URL, but this turned out to be pretty much useless in the real world. This is less an attention management issue than an e-mail data management issue; there’s little storage penalty to forwarding messages once they already exist.
- Enable role-based profiles: Craig’s idea is to provide a mechanism for defining standard profiles that control attention-related policies. Based on my experience, I think this would go over poorly, as most executives insist on having highly personalized workspaces. Regardless of what I think, though, Microsoft doesn’t provide a way to do this at present.
- Enable sender tagged e-mails: this is one area where the tools available in Outlook and Exchange far outpace their actual use. I need to do a separate post on message classifications, retention tags, and all the other sender-tagging goodness.
- Stop attachment abuse: Outlook already supports sending documents to a document workspace or shared library, although this feature is buried somewhat (and Entourage doesn’t have it at all, sadly).
- Presence-enable recipient lists: Outlook already does this, in spades. The below picture shows a number of Outlook’s built-in presence capabilities, including automatic display of presence icons for presence-enabled users, enhanced status (like “away for XXX” or out-of-office messages), and click-to-communicate with multiple communications modes.
- Enable group-based rules: Exchange and Outlook don’t currently do this, although you can simulate some aspects of it with query-based distribution groups. Honestly, though, this strikes me as only marginally useful; I’d probably rank it close to last in terms of which features I’d rather see first.
- Turn e-mail into generic small-content tool: Not a bad idea, although I think you could use a much lighter-weight tool like the excellent Windows Live Writer to do this more easily.
- Manage multiple inboxes: this is a tremendously useful feature of Entourage, which has long supported multiple Exchange accounts. Outlook 2010 is reported to support multiple Exchange accounts too; I’ll post a more detailed article on this once Microsoft releases publicly-available bits.
- Provide inbox analytics: this sounds like the kind of cool but not-very-practical feature that analysts love 🙂 I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, but it’s not clear to me that having analytical data is actually going to change anyone’s use or misuse of e-mail.
- Token systems: see previous bullet. What if you run out of tokens? Do you just quit work for the rest of the day?
- Remind sender if no reply: I have to do this manually, either through CRM or a manual task, so I’d love a button that would automatically create a task to remind me to follow up if no reply is received by a certain date. This would be simple to script in either Entourage or Outlook.
There are a couple of Outlook and Exchange features that Craig didn’t mention that I think fit into his taxonomy. Chief among them is the new “Ignore” functionality in Outlook 2010 and OWA 2010; when you ignore a thread, the client silently creates a server-side rule to automatically delete messages in the same conversation, so that you just don’t see them. (An alternate name for this feature, the “mute button”, better describes it IMHO). It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft makes a move to include more attention management functionality in future versions of Office and Exchange. I bet they will, given MSR’s investment in this research area, but we’ll have to wait for Office/Exchange v.Next to see for sure.
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Filed under UC&C
The iPhone as a mail device, 3.0 edition
[ Updated on 23 June 2009 to fix a couple of mistakes and add a few new tidbits ]
Last summer I wrote a post about the utility of the iPhone 2.0 as an e-mail device for people, like me, who are heavy e-mail users. Now that the 3.0 release of the iPhone OS is upon us, I wanted to post an update to see what Apple’s fixed, or not, from the original complaints. I had hoped to get some hands-on time with a Palm Pre as well, but haven’t quite made it there yet. However, I have spent some time using the version of Outlook Mobile from Windows Mobile 6.5, so that’s now my baseline standard for comparison.
Executive summary: Apple invested a ton of time in the 3.0 release, but most of it went to other aspects of the OS, not into the messaging and calendaring experience.
Policy and account control
I didn’t spot any changes here. The big one I was hoping for was the ability to create and manage multiple Exchange ActiveSync accounts. Sadly, Apple didn’t include this. The extended policies in EAS version 12 (like forced disablement of the camera or Bluetooth) still aren’t supported. You still can’t install your own certificates, either.
[Update]: As Chris Haaker pointed out in the comments, you can indeed disable the camera using Exchange 2007 EAS; for a complete list of the policies 3.0 supports, see this doc at Apple’s site; and, of course, you can install your own certs by e-mailing them to the device, using the over-the-air configuration utility, or distributing profiles with the utility. In addition, Apple improved certificate support quite a bit: 3.0 adds the ability to provide client certs for authentication, and it now uses OCSP for checking certificate validity online instead of depending on static CRLs.
E-mail
In my initial review, I started with basic e-mail operations. These are essentially unchanged: the look and feel of the Mail application is identical to the 2.0 version for the most part. The annoying automatic expansion of EVERY SINGLE FOLDER YOU HAVE is still there. You still cannot delete messages while the iPhone is offline. Instead of fixing this issue, Apple has chosen to deactivate the “delete” icon on the message toolbar. However, when you’re in the message list view, you can still use the swipe-to-delete gesture, or the Edit button, to delete a message… and then you get the same error that the message can’t be moved to the trash. Fail.
You can queue replies or forwards while offline, which is a welcome improvement.
One area where Windows Mobile 6.5 really shines in comparison to the iPhone is in the new conversation view for e-mail. There are a number of other WM 6.5 mail improvements that I won’t cover here; suffice to say that the new Outlook Mobile extends Microsoft’s lead by providing a better pro-level e-mail experience than the iPhone 3.0 does. Apple could definitely improve things just by using the correct EAS verbs for reply and forward, though, which they still don’t do
Oh, that bug with not properly sending IMAP EXPUNGE commands to remove deleted messages: still there. I guess Apple thinks it’s a feature.
Calendar
If you didn’t like the iPhone 2.0 calendaring experience, you won’t find much to change your mind here. You can now create meeting invitations for your Exchange calendar (but not for your MobileMe calendar, a baffling omission given that MobileMe is marketed as a service useful for families). I am hopeful that the forthcoming Exchange support in Apple’s Snow Leopard OS will force Apple to make iCal more useful, and that those changes will ripple out to the iPhone. Until then, though, Windows Mobile still kills the iPhone in calendaring usability.
Speaking of usability: since my original review I found a few more annoyances:
- meeting cancellation notices show up on your calendar as “Canceled:whatever“; there’s no way for you to use the cancellation notice to remove the event.
- If you receive an invitation on the device, then accept it from the desktop or OWA, it will still show up in the calendar app as a pending invite until you try to open it.
- You still can’t see .ics files that arrive in IMAP-connected Exchange accounts. Fortunately, Exchange 2010 includes an OWA link in meeting invites, so you can click the link to jump into OWA and accept the invitation there.
[Update] One nice addition that I forgot to mention: when you get an invitation, you can see where it falls on your calendar, and there’s a new disclosure chevron next to meetings you create that lets you view the status of the invitees (provided you’re using Exchange 2007).
Tasks
Nope. This is another promised Snow Leopard feature that will hopefully make an appearance on the iPhone at some point. In the meantime, I’ve been using imTasks, which works flawlessly with all of my Exchange accounts. I also tried TaskTask, which has a somewhat nicer interface but which hasn’t worked very well for me.
Contacts
Steve Foskett summarizes this better than I could. Bottom line: it’s like the Mac OS X Address Book in your pocket, with all the good and bad that entails. No support for contact public folders, no way to add a GAL contact to your own contact list, and a 100% chance of getting duplicates if you use Entourage + Sync Services to sync contacts to the device through MobileMe.
New iPhone 3GS features [UPDATE]
Apple says that the 3GS has “hardware encryption”. It’s not really clear exactly what this means. In the enterprise deployment guide, This blog entry suggests that remote wipe is so much faster on the 3GS because it’s essentially a decommissioning operation– erase the master encryption key for the device and you’ve effectively erased all its data. I haven’t seen any confirmation of that, though, and it’s not clear what other value there is to encrypting data on the device given that apps are sandboxed and there’s effectively no external storage. (You also can’t force encryption on with EAS, as you can on Windows Mobile).
Filed under UC&C
The Appeal (Grisham)
Let me save you the effort of reading this cynical and depressing book: the good guys lose. All of them, in fact: the lawyers who go nearly half a million dollars in debt financing their client’s suit against an egregious polluter, the plaintiff herself, a Mississippi Supreme Court justice running for re-election, and even the candidate who replaces her. The only winner is a slimy, money-grubbing billionaire. I don’t expect every book I read to be Pollyanna, but I was surprised by the degree of cynical commentary that Grisham slipped in here. Not recommended.
Paul's Down-Home Page 