Paul's Down-Home Page

It turns out that Windows Mobile devices have unique device IDs. This comes about because WM is part of the Windows CE family, so each WM device has a two-part unique ID. The first 4 bytes represent a device family (e.g. all, say, HTC S730s will have the same 4-byte value). The remaining 12 bytes are supposed to be globally unique to all devices from the manufacturer, so that two (say) Palm Treo 750s will have two different device IDs. These IDs are not the same as the IMEI or phone number (in part because not every device will have an IMEI or phone number– consider a WiFi-only device that syncs to EAS).

There are several different uses for the device ID. From an Exchange perspective, the two biggest ones are:

• looking at the IIS logs on the CAS server to see when a particular device synced and what happened when it tried (e.g. are there errors? did the sync complete? when was the last sync?) Some of this information is visible on the Mobile Devices tab of the OWA’s Option page, or you can get it using the get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics cmdlet.
• provisioning access by device. For example, you can allow only a specified device to connect for a user, which prevents them from using other (presumably unsupported or unauthorized) devices. To do this, you use the set-CASMailbox cmdlet with the ActiveSyncAllowedDeviceIDs switch.

Technorati Tags: Windows Mobile

Jason Henderson of Microsoft just turned me on to this book: Inside Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Web Services. I’ve ordered it, of course, and will report back on how good it is once I’ve had a chance to sit down and dig into it.

Now, this is just plain wrong. The two most recent versions of the Lotus Notes clients won’t run when Vista User Account Control is enabled. This is despite the fact that IBM claims that Notes 8 is fully compatible with Vista. IBM recommends turning off UAC, which means you actually have to make your desktop less secure to run it.

Upon further investigation, it looks like nsd.exe is the actual component that doesn’t work when UAC is enabled. It looks like the only necessary change would be for NSD to ship with a manifest that uses the requireAdministrator flag to signal that the executable needs to run with elevated privileges. This is pretty straightforward, so I wonder if there’s some other issue that makes NSD, or another Notes component, fail under UAC. UAC support is required to get Vista logo certification, but I don’t have a Notes box handy to see whether IBM is claiming the logo or not.

So, shame on IBM for missing this elementary requirement– VIsta was out far enough in advance of Notes 8’s release for IBM to have sufficient time to support UAC. Shame on Microsoft, too, for not taking proactive action to make sure that such a widely used application would work properly with UAC.

(Bonus vuln: this buffer overflow in the Notes client viewer for 1-2-3 files. It requires a patch, which you must get from IBM support. Too bad IBM doesn’t make its patches freely downloadable.)

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, Unified Communications

I’m still really enamored of the Microsoft RoundTable conferencing camera. IMHO it’s a real breakthrough, and I can’t wait until we can get one of our own and start using it regularly for the meetings I have to attend. We faced a problem for the roadshows, though: the RoundTable is an odd shape and doesn’t disassemble for transport. I couldn’t see shipping a $3000 device in a cardboard box, so I did some digging. As far as I can tell, there’s only one company that makes RoundTable-specific cases. Titan Cases of Seattle. We ordered one, and it wasn’t cheap (about $335). However, just look at the darn thing. It’s practically indestructible. In fact, it should say “CRAFTSMAN” on the front.

Titan offers two models: one with wheels and one without. We took the wheel-less one in hopes that it would be easier to take aboard airplanes. It’s done an admirable job so far, but we’ll be ordering the next one in 3Sharp green.