Microsoft has posted a very useful document called “Certificate Use in Exchange 2007 Server” that outlines pretty much everything you need to know about how Exchange 2007 uses certificates. In particular, it nicely explains the use of subject alternative name (SAN) certificates. Check it out.
Certificate Use in Exchange 2007 Server
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Filed under General Tech Stuff, UC&C
Tech Toy of the Week (3/27/08): GN 9350 headset
Here’s how much I like the GN 9350
The 9350 is a lightweight wireless headset that features two connections: a USB plug that enables it to work with Communicator or other computer applications, plus a conventional headset connector. Two buttons on the headset base let you switch back and forth between modes. This allows you to quickly switch between a regular desk phone and applications like Skype, Mac Messenger, or Office Communicator.
Audio quality is excellent, as is range. My base unit is on my desk, in the northeast corner of the second floor. I can talk on the phone from anywhere in the yard, or even in the southwest corner of the basement. I particularly like this feature for long phone calls, as it means I can grab a diet Coke when I need one. (Sadly, there’s no mute button on the headset itself, so ix-nay on wearing it into the athroom-bay.) I easily get a full 9 hours of battery life, and the battery is replaceable so you can keep a spare on hand.
The 9350 features two headbands: one goes over the top of the head, and the other wraps around the back. I prefer the wraparound, but I appreciate that I got to make the choice. There’s also an optional remote handset lifter, the RHL-1000. I haven’t bought one because it’s only useful if you’re close enough to the phone to hear it ring, which generally I’m not.
At an MSRP of $299, this is an expensive piece of equipment (though you can find refurb units at Hello Direct for $199 or so). However, it’s made a huge difference in my ability to talk for long periods on the phone, which has ultimately made me quite a bit more productive. I give it two thumbs up.
Filed under General Tech Stuff, Reviews
Happy anniversary, Flying Bean!
Mad props to John and Becky, who are celebrating the first anniversary of the Flying Bean. I’m not a coffee drinker, but I am an aviation enthusiast, so I love going there. John and Becky are superbly friendly, and they actively support the local community. (Plus they make great hot chocolate!)
Filed under Friends & Family
Tough travel day
So, I left my partner meeting early today to get home before the snow. First we arrived early but had to wait about half an hour for an open gate. Then I found that I’d lost my drivers’ license, so the fine folks at Alamo wouldn’t give me my rental car without it. They called me a cab, only to find out that it was some random guy (not a licensed cab) who already had a fare… in downtown Detroit. Somewhere along the way, I also managed to lose my headphones. Plus I missed supper. Grrrr.
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Exchange and OCS licensing
Microsoft licensing confuses lots of people, me included. Fellow Exchange MVP Michael B. Smith has two great posts covering Exchange licensing and OCS licensing. They make for interesting reading if you’re not up on the intricacies of these licensing terms.
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Debby Robichaux Verret, 1944-2008
We just got back from a draining trip to visit my aunt Debby, Dad’s sister. She was diagnosed earlier this year with small cell lung cancer, no doubt brought on by a combination of a lifetime of smoking and a lifetime of living in Louisiana. Recently her health worsened quite a bit, so we moved up our plan to visit her during the kids’ spring break. Instead, Arlene and Tom left Thursday (TOL-CVG-ATL-BTR) and Matt, David, and I left first thing Friday (DTW-IAH-LFT). It took a lot of fancy dancing on the part of Delta’s Medallion desk, but we ended up with five frequent-flyer tickets, though we couldn’t get in to New Orleans because of the Jazz Festival. Sadly, Debby passed away early Friday morning, so we extended our trip to attend her funeral on Monday.
Debby was a very practical, level-headed woman with a wonderful sense of humor. When I was a kid, she used to call me “Professor” because of my bad habit of correcting everyone around me (fortunately I don’t do that much any more!) I wish I had videotaped her description of her trip to Rome to visit the Pope last year; she had us all in hysterics with her descriptions of Italian men and her banter with the priest from her home parish who organized the pilgrimage. She really helped a lot as we struggled to come to terms with Dad’s death last year, and I will forever be indebted to her for teaching my dear wife how to cook a number of Cajun dishes, as well as how she welcomed Arlene into the family and made her feel immediately at ease.
It was really great to see everyone, though it was under sad circumstances. (Well, OK, I admit it: I was only somewhat pleased to see John, Lee Anne’s dad there. He kept going on about how great Texas is for some reason.) On the bright side, we got to meet Doug’s wife Shawn (who is a real keeper! welcome to the family, Shawn!), and all of us got to play with Russ and Allyson. That helped take the sting out some.
Having recently experienced it myself, I know how hard it is to lose a parent, the more so because Jody and Eric lost their dad in 1986. That puts them in the unenviable position of having to handle all the estate details themselves, precisely at the time when it’s most difficult to do so. Fathers Ron and Pat conducted a beautiful funeral mass, and that helped, as did having so many extended family members around. As always at any family gathering, the food was excellent. We made a side trip to Dave’s Cajun Kitchen, which I recommend in the strongest possible terms.
Filed under Friends & Family
Tech Toy of the Week: 3/19/08
I’m inaugurating a new feature here: the Tech Toy of the Week. Heaven knows I have enough of them to post a short weely review of one of them.
This week: the Speck line of cases for laptops. In particular, the SeeThru cases, which are essentially plastic clamshells that snap around your laptop to protect the actual case from abrasions and dirt. I have the clear SeeThru for my MacBook Pro (see some example photos here) and it works very well. Minor annoyance: the clear color shows dirt. I should probably have gotten the red one instead; the colored ones look great with the monochrome silver color scheme of the MBP. Speck also makes lots of other cases for laptops (notably the Sony Vaio series), iPods, and iPhones. Check ’em out.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff, Reviews
Maybe it’s brain surgery after all
Craig Hockenberry is a smart guy. He’s been around for a while, and has an impressive track record in the Mac software world. I don’t, but that’s not going to stop me from arguing with him about background apps on the iPhone. His argument has two parts.
Part 1 (here) essentially says that gackground apps will kill the battery life and usability of the iPhone by allowing application developers to willy-nilly make network connections, thus keeping the device radios on more than needed (or wanted).
Part 2 (here) says that even if we could magically solve the problems he describes in part 1, the user experience on the device would quickly get out of hand.
Why don’t I agree with part 1? I have experienced just the opposite with Windows Mobile. There’s a great deal of institutional knowledge around exactly these two problems in the Windows Mobile world. I get better battery life with my Treo 750 running Windows Mobile 6 than I do with my iPhone, despite the fact that the Treo has an HSDPA radio. This is despite the fact that I run a number of always-on apps on my Treo, including Communicator Mobile and Outlook Mobile with Direct Push enabled. If you take a look at the Direct Push protocol, you’ll see that it’s designed to keep a connection alive while still allowing the radio to go dormant when there’s not actually any information to transfer. The same thing is true of the UC AJAX protocol that Communicator Mobile uses. This is not a new idea, and Microsoft’s not the first to implement it. Craig’s argument– that ill-behaved or poorly written applications will kill your battery faster than Eliot Spitzer’s political career– is true. However, that’s not necessarily an argument in favor of blocking background applications. Let people ship background applications, then let the market decide which ones should survive based on their performance. (Note to Craig and others: remember, when we get that Exchange ActiveSync support we’ve all been jonesing for… it’s a persistent network connection!)
I give Craig’s arguments in part 2 a little more credence. The iPhone offers a lovely UI, as pleasant to look at and touch as any other well-designed, well-engineered artifact (whether a Glock, an engine block, or a summer frock.) It is a bit painful to think of having all sorts of buzzing, boinging, and screen flashing horning in on SJ’s Zen-like user experience. However, Apple has already solved this problem, at least in part: look at the way that the SMS, phone, and e-mail applications notify users of available data by using a number superimposed on the application icon. This paradigm works well for some sorts of applications. For others, the solution isn’t to ban applications from posting notifications– Craig rightly points out that several different notification-brokering APIs exist on the desktop Mac platform. So where’s the API for the iPhone? Where’s the mobile equivalent of Growl, or (better yet) a supported framework from Apple? That’s essentially what WM has, and it allows application developers to post notifications that the user can control. My Treo makes one distinct sound for a new SMS, one for a new e-mail (well, actually, two: for high-priority e-mails, Voice Command reads me the subject line), and one for a device or calendar alarm. Simple, powerful, and easy to customize. Given how good a job Apple has done with almost every other aspect of the iPhone UI, it sure seems like a problem they could solve if they wanted to.
I’m personally very disappointed by Apple’s decision not to allow background apps. I was planning on using UC AJAX to build an OCS client for the iPhone, but I probably won’t bother if there’s no way to background applications; a foreground-only IM client would be pretty worthless. I do have a few other projects in mind, though…
Filed under General Tech Stuff
Apple licenses Exchange ActiveSync
Finally, they admit it: Microsoft licenses Exchange ActiveSync to Apple for use in the iPhone. (For a play-by-play of the announcement, see Engadget.) This is great news for both Apple and the Exchange team, but much less so for the Windows Mobile team. I suspect that they have a few aces up their sleeve, though. First is SCMDM, which ups the ante for mobile device management by adding Group Policy Object support for Windows Mobile devices. When you can domain-join a mobile device and push policy to it using the same tools you use for desktops and servers, that’s the dream scenario for managed enterprises. The iPhone software update won’t support SCMDM’s policy extensions, and I’m betting that it won’t implement 100% of the Exchange 2007 version of Exchange ActiveSync policies either. Of course, the Windows Mobile team has their own set of surprises planned for their next release. We’ll have to wait and see.
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, iPhone, Windows Mobile
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Exchange 2007 SP1 setup error
On Friday, I set myself up for the hat trick: I was going to upgrade my primary desktop to Mac OS 10.5, my work laptop to Vista SP1, and my home Exchange server to 2007 SP1. I only got one of the three done because I ended up busy with actual, y’know, work— my Exchange box was the only one I got around to. However, during the upgrade, I faced an annoying problem: the Exchange setup utility failed when it tried to upgrade the UM service.
I checked the event log and found that the UM service was failing with event ID 1183. As far as I can tell, that’s a totally undocumented error. It turns out that, when the UM service attempted to issue itself a new self-signed certificate, the service was throwing an error and crashing with an unhandled exception. Because the UM service wouldn’t start, Exchange Setup (quite sensibly, IMHO) wouldn’t continue.
The fix ended up being to restore the correct permissions on c:\documents and settings\all users\application data\microsoft\crypto\rsa\machinekeys. This is the location of the computer account’s personal certificate store, and for some reason, the permissions on it were incorrect. Adding NETWORK SERVICE:F and Domain Admins:F back to the ACL fixed the problem and allowed the setup utility to finish its work. (The longer-term fix comes in two parts: fix New-ExchangeCertificate so it doesn’t fail with an unhandled exception in that case, and then figure out who borked the permissions on that folder.)
What about the Leopard and Vista upgrades? Hey, tomorrow’s another day!
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Unified Messaging
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Filed under UC&C
Dodge Charger mini-review
On my most recent trip to Seattle, Avis gave me a Dodge Charger. It was in the SE Plus trim, which means it had the V-6 engine and satellite radio (which didn’t work, of course). It’s an aggressive-looking car, so I was hoping that it would be fun to drive, too. I put about 150 miles on it during my trip, in a mix of about 50% in-town driving and 50% Interstate cruising. The verdict: meh.
Sure, it was fun to drive. The default engine gave it enough pep to merge into Seattle traffic without difficulty. However, it didn’t have the punchy feel I was hoping for. No doubt the V-8 Hemi-powered version would do better. The interior felt cheap, with lots of slabs of chintzy-looking plastic. The seats were excellent, and there’s good forward and side visibility for the driver. Rear visibility is not so good, though.
This particular car had about 27K miles on it, and it was already suffering from a notorious Chrysler problem: hip-hop braking. I’ve owned six Chrysler vehicles over the years, and all of them have had problems with warping of brake rotors before their time. Hitting the brakes on this car from 45-65mph caused a noticable bouncing sensation. Not very confidence-inspiring.
The most notable thing about the car: when Devin, Kevin, Tim, PaulF, and I went to lunch, the rear-seat passengers couldn’t reach the door locks to let themselves out. The locks are actually behind the plane of the rear seat, so you need to be able to reach over your outboard shoulder to unlock them– and that wasn’t possible with 3 people in the back seat. It’s the next best thing to child locks!
So, while I didn’t mind getting this particular vehicle, it would be OK if I didn’t ever drive another one.
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Filed under Travel
HOWTO send voice mail to distribution lists
You probably already know how to use Outlook Voice Access to listen to your messages, get calendar information, and so on. Did you know that you could use it to send voice mail messages to distribution lists? It’s true. Check it out:all you have to do is dial into OVA, say “Directory”, then say the name of the distribution list. Record the message, say “send this message”, and you’re done!
A few tips on things you should be aware of:
- The distribution list is actually a dynamic grammar for Speech Server. It’s rebuilt daily. When you create a new DL it won’t immediately be included in the grammar. Check C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\UnifiedMessaging\grammars\en\distribution.cfg to make sure the DL is there. You can force a rebuild with Set-UMServer -GrammarGenerationSchedule.
- Take a look at C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\UnifiedMessaging\temp\distribution.grxm if you want to know whether the DL is included.
- By default, Exchange will automatically create grammar entries for DL names. If you don’t want this behavior, edit C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Bin\globcfg.xml and set EnableDistributionListGrammarGeneration to false.
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Vista UAC and application names
While working on the UC Metro project, we ran into a really odd situation, and I wanted to blog about it so that hopefully others can avoid the problem.
We created a sample application using WPF. The test machine we were using had UAC turned off because we also had to run some debugging tools that wouldn’t run with UAC. Our sample application worked great, but when we turned on UAC it would require elevation, and then fail. We couldn’t figure out why, so Mike Jensen (one of our super smart programmers) created a new project with the same name and started subtracting files, one by one. Same problem.
Then Mike decided to try changing the project name, which had previously been “WpfDispatchBaseApplication”. Voila! It worked perfectly with UAC on. It turns out that there are some magic words that will trigger a UAC elevation prompt if Vista sees them in the application name. See here for an example: “update” is one of the magic terms. This is by design, and you can fix it in two ways: include an application manifest, or don’t use any magic words. We decided that “Litware Service Call Manager” better reflected what the sample app was actually doing, so we stuck with it, but from now on we’ll use manifests… even for our samples.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Mailbox quotas and Exchange Unified Messaging
I was wondering about this the other day: what happens when someone attempts to leave a voice mail message on an Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging server when the target mailbox is full?
It turns out that Microsoft helpfully documented this already: if the mailbox is nearly full (such that the VM would make the mailbox go over quota), it’s still delivered. If the mailbox is already over quota, the UM server tells the caller that the mailbox is full, and the caller isn’t allowed to leave a message. This may be actually useful if you want to create an announcement-only mailbox, but I haven’t tested doing so yet to ensure that it behaves as expected.
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Unified Communications, Unified Messaging
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Bacon cups
This is a great way to make me eat more salad: serve it in a container made entirely of bacon. Methinks I’ve found a new site to add to my aggregator. (Julie, let’s try this at the next family get-together!)
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Filed under Friends & Family
