Now this is pretty slick: a Visio 2007 connector that can connect to an Exchange topology and automatically generate a set of topology diagrams drawn from what it finds on the network. I’ll be looking forward to seeing how this works in more complex environments than my own single-server lab in the basement.
MS releases Visio connector for Exchange 2007
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Filed under UC&C
Famous by association
My friend Jason Buffington (XBL: DarkJediHunter) is now famous after writing this review of SceneIt! for Xbox.com. We loves us some SceneIt here, and I encourage you to check it out if you like family games or movies.
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Filed under Friends & Family, General Tech Stuff
Missing Connections
I thought I’d posted on this Tuesday night, but apparently I didn’t. Anyway…
I’ve been speaking on Exchange and other topics professionally for about ten years. During that time, I’ve probably spoken at more than a hundred events, ranging from the small to the gargantuan, and I’ve only cancelled one. Tuesday afternoon, I made the really difficult decision to cancel another, my appearance at Connections. My wife has been ill for the last week or so, and I just wasn’t comfortable leaving her alone. She’s feeling somewhat better now, and three of my four sessions were covered by people who are even smarter than I am (thanks to Jim, Jüergen, and John!) so I feel better about my decision. I still hated to miss Connections, though, and I’m really looking forward to the Vegas version! My apologies to anyone who was disappointed by my absence. I hope it never happens again 🙂
Filed under General Stuff
TastesLikeRealFood.com
Arlene just found an ad for a new gluten-free product supplier: TastesLikeRealFood.com. They sell several kinds of imported flours and mixes from Norway. With a name like that, no doubt their stuff is good, so we ordered the sampler to try it out.
Filed under Friends & Family, General Stuff
Mac Messenger 7.0 releases
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So this is what the future looks like. Microsoft released Mac Messenger 7.0 yesterday. The big deal about this release is its support for OCS 2007. In fact, if you’re not an OCS user, there aren’t a lot of new features here (though you can set nicknames for Live Messenger contacts, a useful feature). However, if you are using OCS, there’s a ton of good stuff.
Let’s start with the obvious: there are some new icons in the toolbar that weren’t there before. You can now place, and answer, audio and video calls through OCS. For example, if someone on my team calls me with Communicator, I’ll get a toast telling me that there’s an inbound audio call,and I can answer it, then escalate it to a video call at any time. Second, you may notice that the “pawn”-style presence icons from previous versions have been replaced with the OCS-style “jellybean” icons. The coloring and shading of these icons is subtly different from those in Communicator, but they fit in well with the overall UI. The large jellybean next to the account name lets you change your presence status to the states supported by OCS: available, busy, do not disturb, “be right back”, and away. As in previous versions of Messenger, you can choose whether or not you want to synchronize the presence states of your MSN Messenger and OCS accounts, although these states don’t necessarily have a 1:1 mapping. |
| Third, there’s a way to search the GAL! The search field works just like you’d expect: when you enter a full or partial name, you get a list of results in a search pane at the top. I haven’t been able to get this feature to work for federated contacts yet (although I can add federated contacts directly if I know their e-mail address). The utility of the GAL search feature varies according to the size of your GAL: the bigger the GAL, the more useful this feature is.
Fourth, we finally get support for multiple points of presence (MPOP). If you’re logged in to more than one OCS endpoint (say, a Tanjay phone and Messenger), all of the endpoints will publish their local presence states to OCS, and OCS will aggregate them and publish a composite presence state. For example, let’s say that I’m using my Tanjay to place an outbound call. Its presence will show as “in a call”, but my Messenger presence may be “available”. OCS will take both states into consideration, decide that “in a call” trumps “available”, and publish a presence for others to see of “in a call”. This is particularly useful when you consider that OCS has a mobile client (Communicator Mobile), a web client (Communicator Web Access), and two desktop clients, plus devices like the Tanjay. It’s common for a single user to be logged in at more than one place. One feature I haven’t tested at all is Bonjour support, in both the OCS and personal portions of the client. This might be great if you work for a large company or frequently travel to places where there are lots of other Mac users; neither of those is true of me, so I have no idea if this feature works or is useful. Stay tuned; I’ll try it on my next couple of business trips and report back on what happens. There are some Communicator/OCS features that aren’t included in this release. For one, you cannot place outbound PSTN calls like you can in Communicator. there’s no way to change the access level of a contact or to tag a contact for status change alerts. At present, there’s no way to join an OCS-hosted conference; Messenger has very limited AppleScript support, and it is not as well-integrated with Entourage as it could be. Overall, though, this is a solid release, and the price ($0) is certainly hard to beat. |
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Filed under UC&C
HOWTO set the UM codec on a per-user basis
Exchange 2007 supports three codecs for Unified Messaging voice messages. I knew that you could choose which codec Exchange uses at the dial plan level, but until recently, I didn’t know that you could change this setting for individual users. The key is to use the CallAnsweringAudioCodec switch with the Set-UMMailbox command, like this:
Get-UMMailbox “paul” -CallAnsweringAudioCodec gsm
Of course, you can do lots of more interesting things with this cmdlet by using filters or other means to apply this setting to a group of users… say, your Entourage users, who can’t listen to UM voice mails recorded with the default WMA codec.
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Unified Communications, Unified Messaging
MVP Summit wrap-up
One of the tough things about the MVP Summit is that practically everything there is covered under NDA. That makes it hard to adequately convey how cool some of the stuff we saw and learned was. Suffice it to say that it’s going to be an exciting year in the unified communications world, and I’ve got lots of article topics queued up for the future!
My summit attendance pattern is a little atypical: I usually skip all of the executive keynotes, so this year’s organization was perfect– the keynotes were on the last day instead of the first. Monday had some open/birds-of-a-feather sessions, so I used that time to fly in and hit the office, where I spent some time planning the details of how we’re using (and customizing) Microsoft CRM. CRM makes me frustrated because I know so little about how to use it, and I’m not a professional salesman. However, I’m excited about better automating our sales process, as well as some of the UC integration features that we can deliver.
Tuesday and Wednesday were all deep technical days. I can’t say much about those, except that they were awesome. Thanks to the Exchange and OCS product teams for coming to talk to us!
Thursday was executive keynote day. I skipped the keynotes and flew home on the Wednesday red-eye, but after reading the transcript of Steve Ballmer’s talk it doesn’t look like I missed anything.
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Security no match for good looking women and chocolate
But you probably knew that already.
A survey out today by the organizers of the tech-security conference Infosecurity Europe found that 21% of 576 London office workers stopped on the street were willing to share their computer passwords with a good looking woman holding a clipboard. People were offered a chocolate bar in exchange for the information. More than half of the people surveyed said they used the same password for everything.
There are a lot of skeptical comments over at the WSJ blog. However, a friend of mine who is a well-known figure in the security community said this in e-mail:
…we did a similar chocolate bar or $2 pen hand out in London to collect passwords. Our gathering password rate was 84%. We then contacted each security domain (we asked for their related email address to send them a free voucher entry for more candy bars). We asked the domain administrators (ISPs, businesses, etc.) to simply review the list and send back the percentage of correct collected passwords. Our response rate from the domain administrators was only 30% or so…I can’t remember the exact number…but it was less than half and more than a quarter. The ones that did respond confirmed that over 60% were the actual passwords.
To this day, if I hadn’t participated in the survey and collected the results myself, I would not have believed it.
So, clearly if you want to fish for passwords, your odds of getting something useful in exchange for a chocolate bar and a few minutes of face time with a good-looking woman are pretty darn good. Scary!
At the MVP Summit
Wow.
My mind is being blown by some of the things the Exchange team is showing us. One of the best things about being an Exchange MVP is that we have a really good rapport with the product group. Some groups have bad intra-group relationships, and others have friction between the product group and the MVPs. In this case, though, the product team does a stellar job of soliciting and accepting feedback, and it’s been to both our benefits. Can’t wait to talk about some of the things they’re showing!
(and funny side note: the space bar on my MacBook Pro is sticking, so I keep typing compound words like “keeptyping” and “productplan”. This makes me feel vaguely German.)
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Filed under General Tech Stuff, Travel, UC&C
Nintendo: great customer experience
David managed to break his Nintendo DS Lite; he snapped off part of the headphone plug fairly deep inside the jack. I didn’t want to tackle taking it apart, and I’d heard rumors on the intertubes that Nintendo offered drop-off service. Because Nintendo customer service center. It’s conveniently located a few blocks away from Microsoft’s campus, so I took the broken DS with me and drove over there yesterday afternoon. It took less than 10 minutes for me to walk in, show the busticated DS to the friendly guy behind the counter, and get a refurb unit with a fresh 1-year warranty. David is now back in business. This is the best customer service experience I’ve ever had at a store– I wish Microsoft would take some lessons from this and apply them to the Xbox 360 service process.
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Filed under General Stuff, General Tech Stuff
So what’s the other 30% made of?
I’m in coach on a Delta flight from Cincinnati to Seattle. Delta recently started a new food-for-sale program called EATS. The folks over at FlyerTalk seem to like it pretty well. I had Chik-Fil-A in CVG, and I’m headed to a lunch meeting, so I didn’t want a full meal, but I did buy a Clif Mojo bar. It’s pretty good– sort of like a light pretzel with some peanut chunks. However, I’m a little disconcerted by the label, which has a blazon proclaiming “70% organic”. What does that mean? Is the other 30% inorganic? Did I just get my RDA of aluminum and silicon? Should I have only eaten the first 2/3rds of the bar and left the remaining 33% behind to make sure I didn’t eat anything unhealthy?
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Filed under General Tech Stuff, Musings
Live from INTERACT: It’s Mac Messenger 7.0
Eileen Brown of Microsoft was kind enough to organize a bloggers’ lunch at INTERACT 2008 today. There was a good crowd, including some folks I knew and many that I hadn’t previously met. I got there late and had to leave early, but in between, we got a great presentation on the inner workings of the Exchange team blog, plus a panel discussion with several senior Microsoft folks from the Unified Communications Group. As a closing surprise, we got permission to talk about a previously unannounced product that has heretofore been under deep NDA: the Mac business unit at Microsoft is close to releasing a new version of Mac Messenger, version 7.0, that adds some impressive new functionality.
Like earlier versions, the new Messenger release can simultaneously connect to the Windows Live Messenger service and corporate IM networks. In this case, Messenger adds support for OCS 2007 using the same enhanced presence model that Office Communicator uses. Better yet, it supports voice and video with other OCS users! I’ve been using this feature for a while and it rocks. Combine it with OCS’ ability to federate contacts across multiple organizations, and it rocks even more. Voice and video quality in my tests has been excellent, and the OCS support carries on Messenger’s tradition of providing a very Mac-ish user experience. I hope to get permission to post some screenshots in the next day or two; more news when there is news.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff, UC&C
Ouch!
The boys and I went to grappling class this Saturday, for the first time in a while. It showed 🙂
Our school does grappling in an hour-long block, starting with about 20 minutes of position rounds. In these rounds, you’re not allowed to actually force your opponent to submit, and we usually use those times to practice. I was rollin’ with Jerry, who is about my height but quite a bit stronger, so I was a bit tired by the time we got done with that part of the class. Next, we do 15 minutes or so of instruction and drill; the instructor will teach a move or technique, and we’ll partner up and practice it. Missing this has hurt my performance the most, because I’ve fallen behind in my technical knowledge. This was well demonstrated when we went to the final part of the class: freestyle grappling, with submissions not only allowed but encouraged. In my first round, Adam (who’s about my build but a bit shorter) tapped me out twice. In my second round, I managed to prevent my opponent from submitting me, but that was because it was my son Tom 🙂 I hope to do better next week.
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Getting ready for INTERACT2008
This week, I’m getting ready to attend INTERACT2008, Microsoft’s new community event for unified communications. I think of it as a replacement for the long-departed and much-missed Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC), but it’s not really the same thing. INTERACT is more focused, with a much higher technical session level. Press aren’t invited, but MVPs and other community influencers are. There should be a large presence from Microsoft’s engineering teams, which is always good. The whole event is structured around trying to reinforce the growing MS UC&C community and help it grow– a worthwhile goal.
I’m presenting two sessions and proctoring a hands-on lab. The sessions are both on UC development: one on the APIs you can use across various parts of Microsoft’s UC product line, and one on Exchange Web Services. The hands-on lab is really cool: it’s a distillation of the two days’ worth of labs that 3Sharp built as part of the UC Metro project for Microsoft. If you come do the labs, you’ll be getting the same training that Microsoft provides its ISV partners. If you’re going to be at INTERACT, drop me a line and let me know.
Technorati Tags: 3sharp, Exchange 2007, Unified Communications, Unified Messaging
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Filed under General Tech Stuff, Travel, UC&C
Windows Mobile 6.1 announced
I knew it was coming, but I missed the formal announcement. Microsoft has the details here, along with this handy feature comparison chart. Notable improvements in 6.1 include support for System Center Mobile Device Manager, cut-and-paste support for non-touchscreen devices, Exchange account auto-discovery, and a revamped home screen interface for non-touchscreen devices. There’s a list of devices that will receive the upgrade. Sadly, my Treo 750 isn’t on it, so no SCMDM love for me.
Technorati Tags: Windows Mobile
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