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.
Ad hoc travel
Normally I plan my trips well in advance, but not this time! I went to San Jose to meet with a customer on short notice. How did my routine differ?
First, I packed ultralight. Toiletres and fresh clothes went into my laptop bag, meaning that I didn’t need a separate bag.
Second, I went reservationless. I dent reserve my rental car until I was on the airplane. I didn’t reserve my hotel until I was parked in its parking lot. This was slightly nervewracking, but it gave me maximum flexibility to accomodate my customer’s schedule.
Now I just want to get home!
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New OCS 2007 R2 virtualization white paper
I mentioned this during my TechEd session (which, btw, will also be the topic of a TechNet webcast in August), but I forgot to link to it. There’s a pretty good white paper available explaining the ins and outs of virtualizing OCS 2007 R2. In skimming it I was surprised to find that Microsoft doesn’t support virtualizing the update server; I’ll have a more in-depth analysis once I have a chance to read it more thoroughly.
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TechEd, days 2 and 3
Tuesday, day 2 at TechEd, was one of the busiest days I’ve had in a while. I spent part of the morning preparing for my afternoon Interactive Theater session on Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online offering, then worked a three-hour booth shift, this time in the Protection and Compliance booth. I was a little surprised with the number of questions that centered on Active Directory Rights Management Services; lots of people wanted to know more about Outlook protection rules (the new feature that lets you push a policy to Outlook clients that requires them to apply specific RMS templates to certain messages) and transport rules for RMS application. We also had a few archiving and cross-mailbox-search questions too, although not as many as I expected going in.
In the afternoon, I held UNC01-INT, a live demo and chalk talk on the Business Productivity Online suite. It was fairly well attended; I’d guess that there were about 40 people in the room. Thankfully my demos all went well; I showed the Microsoft Online Customer Portal, which you use for signup, billing, and so on, as well as the “my company” portal and the BPO single-sign-on agent. For the web-based portions of the demo, I used Windows 7 RC with IE8, and it performed flawlessly– a good sign for the stability and utility of the release version.
The Business Productivity Online team scheduled a thank-you dinner at Ciudad for the people who spoke on BPO topics, and they were kind enough to invite me to join them. At my end of the table, I had a former commercial fisherman who was born and raised in Alaska, a man who worked two summers in college as a commercial fisherman in Alaska, and an avid fisherman from Seattle. You can probably guess what we talked about!
Wednesday was the big enchilada: UNC304, my talk on OCS deployment and management. However, before I could do that session, I had another turn of booth duty, this time in the deployment and management booth. I could distill the bulk of the questions I got into two individual queries: Is it true that you can do online mailbox moves in Exchange 2010, and if I’m using Exchange 2003 right now, should I move to Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010? These were popular enough questions that I’m working on separate posts for them.
The session itself went well, although I was in one of the cavernous 600-seat rooms, so it felt kind of empty. I demoed the OCS 2007 R2 topology planning tool and showed some screen shots of the new device management console (having neglected to bring a real device with me to manage!) Afterwards I got into a long discussion with some folks from the University of Florida about how their helpdesk might use OCS, plus I met Tyler Regas for the first time face-to-face. Following the session, I had to duck out and grab a taxi to the airport to catch my flight home.
One post-show update: in UNC304, I mentioned the client interoperability matrix for using multiple points of presence, or MPOP. Microsoft’s Peter Schmatz was kind enough to send along an updated link to the most recent matrix; it’s here.
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TechEd, day 1
Monday was my first full day of TechEd. It was pretty uneventful; I worked a shift in the Technical Learning Center at the “Anywhere Access” booth, along with Microsoft’s Adam Glick. We got quite a few questions about general Exchange 2010 features, but not that many that were specific to the booth area. (This pattern would prove to repeat itself over the next few days). After my booth shift was over, I attended some MVP deep-dive technical sessions that Robin Martin-Emerson, our MVP lead, had arranged with the product team. The most interesting one to me was the one that covered the detailed process of moving from on-premises Exchange to the Exchange Online service. I’ll have more to say about that in a future post.
After the MVP sessions ended, I went back to the hotel and did some preparation work for my sessions, and went to an MVP dinner with Rajesh Jha (Microsoft’s corporate VP in charge of Exchange) and a number of members of his team. Dinner was good (the Palm is supposedly famous as a celebrity hangout), but the conversation was better– we had a number of spirited conversations about topics as diverse as mixed martial arts, baseball, and LA traffic. All in all, a pretty good day; the cab ride home (six MVPs, one cab) was a great finish.
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Exchange 2010 UM supports MP3!
I can’t believe I forgot to mention this before, but there’s an extremely cool new feature in Exchange 2010’s unified messaging engine. Exchange 2007 supported three different audio codecs for UM: WMA, GSM 06.10, and GSM G.711. You could pick a codec for individual users, but that wasn’t a great solution for non-Windows Mobile devices.
Exchange 2010 changes this support; it now comes with MP3 support, and MP3 is the default codec used for voice messages. This greatly improves the experience of working with voice messages by making them easier to open and manage. Try it, you’ll like it!
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Meeting forward notifications in Exchange 2007
Exchange 2007 has a nifty feature that can nonetheless be annoying: it generates tattle-tale messages that tell you when someone forwards a meeting notification. Say that Alice schedules a meeting with Bob, and Bob forwards the invite to Carol. When Exchange sees the forward, it generates a notification in Alice’s Inbox. (Or, in this case, Paul schedules a meeting with Anup, who forwards it to James).
One problem with this feature: you can’t turn it off! I’m not sure why the Exchange team designed things this way, but they did. However, there are two mitigations.
You can prevent Exchange from sending the messages to external domains with the set-remoteDomain cmdlet (Set-RemoteDomain -MeetingForwardNotificationEnabled $false will do the trick). This allows you to avoid spamming your correspondents with notifications when you forward a meeting invite internally.
You can also force Exchange to automatically move a user’s meeting forward notifications to her Deleted Items folder with Set-MailboxCalendarSettings -RemoveForwardedMeetingNotifications $true. If this switch were enabled on my account, when Anup forwards my invite to James, I wouldn’t see the forward notification.
(Note: I haven’t checked to see what changes, if any, Exchange 2010 makes to this area. More info once I’ve had a chance to do some digging.)
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TechEd, day 0: my schedule
Actually, I’m a day late– I should have posted this last night, but I was too tired! I had an uneventful flight from DTW-LAX on a crowded but bearable NW A320, then a remarkably expensive yet reasonably safe taxi ride to the Sheraton Los Angeles downtown.
I’m in Los Angeles for TechEd 2009, where I’m presenting and working in the Exchange booth. Today I’ve got a couple of phone meetings with my 3Sharp posse, then a session in the “Anywhere Access” section of the Exchange booth from 1115 to 1445. Following that, I plan to attend a set of MVP deep-dive sessions that the product group is putting on, then I’ll be able to take a short break before having dinner with some folks from the Exchange product team.
Tomorrow things heat up: I have booth duty (this time in the “Protection and Compliance” area) from 0930 to 1230, followed by a session (UNC01-INT) from 1445-1600 in the Interactive Theater “Yellow 1” area on Microsoft’s Exchange Online offering. I plan to do a bunch of demos there, so if you’re interested in how Exchange Online works, stop by!
Wednesday I have booth duty again (0930-1230 in “Deployment and Management”), after which I’m doing a session (UNC304) on OCS 2007 R2 deployment and management. That should be fun, but I’ll be watching the clock (and trying hard to finish on time, something I rarely do) in order to make my flight home.
If you’re in the area, feel free to stop by and say hello!
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Employees don’t get to make retention policy
As I said in a recent webcast, if you depend on employees to implement whatever your e-discovery and retention policies are, you don’t have a policy; you have a set of suggestions. It looks like Judge David Nuffer of the US Federal District Court for Utah agrees. In the case at hand, the plaintiff, Dr Philip Adams, was suing ASUS for patent infringement. ASUS failed to produce a number of records that Adams alleged should have been produced. Upon investigation, it turned out that ASUS largely left compliance with discovery policies up to individual employees, some of whom didn’t do a very good job of actually following those policies. Individual employees were responsible for deciding what information to keep, then storing it locally on their computers– but they were also responsible for preserving information when they got new computers (which, given that ASUS makes computers, probably happened more often than it does for most of us!) Here’s part of what the judge said:
The culpability in this case appears at this time to be founded in ASUS’ questionable information management practices. A court–and more importantly, a litigant–is not required to simply accept whatever information management practices a party may have. A practice may be unreasonable, given responsibilities to third parties. While a party may design its information management practices to suit its business purposes, one of those business purposes must be accountability to third parties.
In plain English, that means that it’s not OK to assume that your employees will always do the correct thing to safeguard critical business information. This decision is great news for archiving vendors, of course, but it should also be a warning to those who depend solely on employee actions (even when combined with messaging records management) to protect their interests. Two simple takeaways:
- If you don’t have a records management / discovery policy, you’d better get one because letting individuals make up policy on their own is now proven to fail
- If you already have a policy, you’d better have an automated means of implementing and enforcing it.
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Exchange 2010: information protection and control
There’s a whole lot to talk about from an information protection standpoint in Exchange 2010. The two biggest features I want to talk about are transport protection encryption (TPE) and protected voice mail. Oddly enough, these two are related even though they may not seem to be.
Transport protection encryption is what Microsoft calls the new integration between Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) and Exchange transport rules. Simply put, you can define transport rules that automatically apply AD RMS templates to messages in transit. You can use the same predicates and conditions available to transport rules in Exchange 2007. However, there are now actions that let you automatically apply a selected RMS template to messages that match the conditions and exceptions in your rules. For example, you could automatically apply a “company confidential” template to any messages sent to your outside law firm– not a bad idea given the ease of accidentally sending messages where they don’t belong.
Outlook Protection Rules is a new client-side feature (implemented via an add-in for Outlook 2010). The add-in allows you to apply a transport rule-like mechanism to get client-side protection. For example, you can push an Outlook protection rule that automatically applies a certain AD RMS template to a message before it’s sent. The user may or may not be able to override the rule, depending on whether you made it mandatory or not. When you use these rules, the message is protected at the desktop so that administrators can’t read it. This is useful protection for scenarios where a third-party hosted service (like, oh, this one) might otherwise be able to gain access to sensitive items.
In Exchange 2010, the transport and journaling components can read IRM-protected messages. This means that these messages can be journaled, indexed, filtered, and so on, and that transport agents can apply signatures, disclaimers, and message hygiene policies.
Another thing that’s very, very cool: AD RMS is supported in OWA 2010 and on non-Windows Mobile devices. This builds on the AD RMS prelicensing agent shipped with Exchange 2007 SP1, which will proactively request a license for protected content before delivering the message containing that content to your mailbox. The client access server (CAS) will request the license and, on the fly, render the message for the client’s display.
Now, I promised to mention protected voice mail. Many legacy voice mail systems let you mark messages as private, but Exchange 2007 didn’t include this feature. Exchange 2010 does, though. It’s implemented using AD RMS; when a caller marks a message as private, the UM server applies a do-not-forward template to the message before it’s submitted to the hub transport server. (Often-asked question: can you use other RMS templates instead of do-not-forward? No, you can’t.)
Moderation is another awfully interesting feature, but I’ll have to write about it later– my dinner, a bag of tasty microwave popcorn, is done!
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“It takes work”
While in Monterey, I had the chance to attend the local ward. I’d forgotten that it was the first weekend of the month, so I was a bit surprised to discover myself in the midst of a testimony meeting. One testimony in particular caught my ear. A young woman (whom I’ll call Jackie) got up and said that her husband was gone, “but not for that long– it’s only for four months!” That made my complaining about a two-week business trip seem very minor in comparison. She went on to tell the story of Barbara, a family friend who, though somewhat eccentric, was unfailingly cheerful and outgoing. Barbara was well known in her ward for cheerful and willing service to others. She was going through a rough patch, and the speaker said she thought to visit Barbara and cheer her up. Barbara greeted her at the door with hair askew, no makeup, and swollen cheeks from a recent visit to the dentist. However, Barbara’s greeting was as heartfelt and cheerful as always. Jackie marvelled at this and said “Barbara, how can you always be so cheerful?” Barbara’s reply, delivered by Jackie with a wonderful swooping voice, was simple: “Well, it takes work!“
Jackie’s point was simple: we can choose whether to be happy, or not. We can choose to be positive about our circumstances, or not. We can be thankful for what we have, or we can complain and lament what we don’t have. Being positive and cheerful is as much a choice as deciding what clothes to wear in the morning. That’s not to say that it’s always easy to choose that mindset. We’re all often tempted to be bitter, angry, resentful, or just plain unhappy. Sometimes we have good reasons for these feelings; other times, we take small things and blow them out of proportion, then use them as justification for these feelings. These are choices we get to make. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent– for that matter, they can’t make you feel anything else either!
I am a firm believer in this principle. Most people, I think, are as happy as they make up their minds to be. While this is probably a gospel principle, it sure isn’t exclusive to Latter-day Saints. Some of the kindest, most service-oriented, happiest people I’ve ever known are those who despite poor health or other circumstances choose to be that way! I’m reminded of Sister Morgan, an elderly lady in our ward who is probably the most positive person I’ve ever met. She always seems to be in good spirits,and if she ever wasn’t she’d probably be thinking about what good spirits she’d like to be in. I try to emulate her example, and y’know what? It works, but it takes work.
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Twitter integration test 1
This is a simple test to see whether MT properly runs the MT-Twitter plugin when I post a new item. (I know that Ecto’s plugin works already.) (Update 1: nope, it didn’t work.)
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A grand day out with Chris
Today I got a chance to see a dear old friend, Chris Larsen. Chris and I were roommates in college, but the last time I saw him was at his wedding in 2002 (see here, here, and here). I’ve had several business trips planned to the Bay Area, but each of them has been cancelled for some reason or other. This was the first time that I was actually going to be in the neighborhood (sort of), so we’d made plans to link up. He came down and met me after church.
For lunch, we hit the Persian Grill. I noticed it yesterday when at the laundromat, but it was closed until dinnertime. I had the makhsoos, which was excellent (I also tried the spiced yogurt, which wasn’t bad). As we were talking, I said something about Perrysburg and a man at the next table overheard us– he’s from Perrysburg, and his friend is a former Toledo resident. It’s a small, small world!
We then drove the 17 Mile Drive. The weather was fairly poor– around 55°F with heavy fog. We couldn’t really see much of anything until we got near Spanish Point, and even then there was so much overcast that the sea and sky blended pretty much seamlessly. I got a few good pictures of the beach and water, along with the below shot of the Lone Cypress. along the way, we had a great time talking about energy policy, nuclear reactors, the economics of coal-fired power, and the EPA. In other words, just a garden-variety conversation 🙂
After 17 Mile, we headed over to Cannery Row and hit Ghiradelli’s for some ice cream. Chris tried to talk me into ordering the Earthquake, a $30, 8-scoop concoction. Wisely, I declined (though I did ask if they had one I could photograph for the kids!) Chris had his laptop, so he showed me recent photos of his family. I retaliated by whipping out my iPhone and subjecting him to pictures from our whale watching trip and our recent spring break visit to Louisiana. We walked around Cannery Row for a while, still talking about abstruse technical topics, then visited at my apartment for a while. I issued an advance invitation to come visit us in Seattle, and he kindly volunteered to be a trail and mountain guide for the boys and I so we can visit some of the excellent scenery in central California. All in all, it was a great visit, long overdue. I look forward to the next time I get to see him!
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Monterey training week 1 wrapup
Yay! I survived the first week of my training in Monterey! A few random observations:
- Training people 1:1 for 10-12 hours a day is quite demanding. I have to give my students a break every hour or so, not because they need it but because I need it. The energy and enthusiasm of the sailors I’m working with is definitely motivating, though.
- Exchange 2003 looks really old after a year of working with Exchange 2010. It’s a little scary, in fact, how old some of the hardware and software that the Navy has to use is; some of the shipboard routers our sailors depend on are so old that the manufacturer doesn’t support them any longer.
- Our lunch and dinner meals are catered by the local Whole Foods. Those folks can definitely cook, but it’s not as good as Arlene’s home cooking. Thankfully they’re not providing desserts, or I’d probably blow up.
- I had forgotten what apartment life was like. Arlene and I lived in an apartment the first year and a half of our marriage, but that was a long time ago! The apartment I’m in has noisy upstairs neighbors, plus a cat infestation that results in nightly catfights somewhere not far outside my bedroom window. On the other hand, it’s nice to not be in a hotel; I have a real kitchen.
- In Monterey, apparently caffeine-free diet Coke is illegal, because I sure can’t find it anywhere.
- The Monterey Bay Aquarium really is as good as you’ve heard. However, it wasn’t much fun going there without the kids. It’s just not the same without my family around!
Today I spent some time driving around the city (which didn’t take long, hemmed in as it is by Monterey Bay). I toured the aquarium for about two hours (photos here), dropped by the local Goodwill to pick out a couple of new shirts, found a place to do my laundry, and so on. I briefly debated going to see the new X-Men movie but opted instead for some Whole Foods organic microwave popcorn and some more of season 2 of The Wire. Tomorrow I’ll be attending the Monterey ward, then my old friend Chris Larsen and I are going to get together and do some sightseeing. It should be a nice relaxing day, which is important given that I start teaching again bright and early Monday.
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Great MailTips introduction
I had planned to write a long, detailed post on MailTips, but… well, you know the old saying: “you snooze, you lose.” I was beaten to it by EJ, who happens to be the MailTips program manager at Microsoft. If you want to get a sense of what MailTips are and how they work, see his post at the Exchange team blog. However, note that MailTips require support in the client (OWA 2010 or Outlook 2010) and on the server. The public beta version of Exchange 2010 has the server support, but not the OWA support, so you won’t be able to test them yourself unless and until Microsoft releases a more recent server build to the public.
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Paul's Down-Home Page 