2007-05-14 · 21:37

MS seeks focus group members for unified communications marketing

This just in from my pal Kevin Engman:

The Unified Communication Marketing team will be conducting six focus groups at Tech Ed, Orlando in June 2007 focusing on Unified Messaging and the IP telephony space. We are conducting focus groups to gain clarity concerning the roles and responsibilities in an IP telephony environment, given Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging and the public release of Beta 3 Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007.
We would like to talk to IT administrators and IT managers currently working in an enterprise environment, which is defined as an organization with 100+ servers and 500+ PCs. They may work as full time employees or as contracted vendors. We are looking for a group of IT administrators and IT managers who have experience with Microsoft products such as Exchange Unified Messaging, Office Communications Server 2007, Office Live meeting, Live Communications Server, etc. We are also interested in IT administrators and IT managers who have experience in an IP telephony environment and not strictly a TDM/legacy telephony environment, with expertise in IP telephony equipment from vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, and Nortel.
The sessions will be held at the Peabody Hotel in Bayhill II. The session times are as follows:
• Session 1: June 4th, 1:00pm-3:00pm – For IT administrators and IT managers who manage Microsoft LCS or Microsoft OCS pilots.
• Session 2: June 4th, 3:00pm-5:00pm – For IT administrators and IT managers who manage Microsoft LCS or Microsoft OCS pilots
• Session 3: June 5th, 3:00pm-5:00pm – For IT administrators and IT managers who manage Exchange Unified Messaging or Cisco Unified Messaging solutions
• Session 4: June 6th, 12:00pm-2:00pm – For IT administrators and IT managers who manage Exchange Unified Messaging or Cisco Unified Messaging solutions
• Session 5: June 7th, 1:30pm-3:30pm – For IT administrators and IT managers who manage Cisco, Avaya, Nortel or any other VOIP solution.
• Session 6: June 7th, 3:30pm-5:30pm – For IT administrators and IT managers who manage Cisco, Avaya, Nortel or any other VOIP solution.

If you’re interested, drop ucgfg@microsoft.com a line and let them know.

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2007-05-11 · 10:18

Restricting device sync in Exchange 2007

Say you have a user and you want to let them use Exchange ActiveSync with one device, but not another one. Exchange 2007 allows you to control device sync based on the device ID. Only devices whose device IDs appear on the magic list can sync; other devices cannot. (I guess that makes this feature the equivalent of the invite list at a Beverly Hills party.) Because the device ID restriction is per-mailbox, it also lets you keep users from swapping devices. To do this, use the Get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics cmdlet to get the device ID, then the Set-CASMailbox cmdlet with the ActiveSyncAllowedDeviceIDs switch to add this deviceID to the list of allowed devices. If the list is NULL, which is the default, a user can sync with any device. Multiple devices can be specified in the allow list separated by semicolons. (Thanks to Microsoft’s Vanitha Prabhakaran for the tip!)

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2007-05-05 · 10:59

Microsoft postmortem on ANI bug

Michael Howard has posted a great postmortem and lessons-learned piece on the animated cursor vulnerability recently patched in Windows. I love to see this kind of open discussion of how Microsoft’s security development lifecycle (SDL) is working in practice, and where MS feels that it can be improved. You don’t often see this level of disclosure from major IT vendors, and I think the industry (and our security) would be more robust if it became more common.

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2007-05-04 · 16:50

Speed up Vista Explorer

A great tip from my friend Liam Colvin:

I don’t know if you’re like me but I was experiencing slowness (like a 20-30 second delay) when opening an Explorer window to view files. You might have found this before me, but it took me some time fiddling with settings to figure it out.
I was trying all the usual ways to determine what was causing the delay in opening the explorer window: anti-virus, explorer extensions, etc – and nothing worked, very frustrating.
I looked extensively internally and searched the Internet, and the best I could find were issues with copying files down from servers causing delays due to SMB issues (there is a hotfix out there for that, by the way – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931770/en-us).
I finally found it after carefully reviewing the behavior of Explorer when it opened by monitoring the Explorer process with Filemon. I noticed that when Explorer went to open a folder (from a shortcut, for example), it parsed all the files in the root of the directory. Urk! This clearly took a long time.
I looked at the Folder Options under Control Panel and noticed the very first setting under the View tab: Always show Icons, never Thumbnails. It was not checked. I realized that Vista must read each file when opening the folder for a thumbnail and/or creates one. When I checked the Always show Icons, never Thumbnails, it reduced the time required to open each folder to 3 or 4 seconds.

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2007-04-16 · 09:48

BitLocker and disk decommissioning

What do you do with an old PC? Most of us just give it away; if you’re mindful of privacy issues, you might format the disk first. There have been lots of recent cases where organizations have failed to properly clean disks of confidential information before decommissioning the disks and selling or giving them away. The BitLocker Drive Encryption feature of Windows Vista can help solve this, though– when you decommission an encrypted volume, you can remove the keys (as detailed in this column) and render the volume permanently unreadable. Sweet!

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2007-04-16 · 09:12

Lots of firsts

This weekend, we had several firsts:

  • Tom had his first baseball practice. The league he’s in now allows stealing, bunts, and some other subtleties that they don’t use in the 8-and-under league. He and his teammates have a fair amount to learn (as do I). The only mar on an otherwise perfect practice was the fact that it was 40° and blustery. Hopefully the weather will improve soon!
  • David had his first young men’s campout. The Scouts went to the church granary, had an overnight campout, and did some service work around the granary and grounds. He came home happy but tired, because he stayed up all night (“most of the night”, in his words) talking to his pals.
  • David gave his first talk in church, on honesty. He’d prepared a talk, but (true to his genetics) he started extemporizing about halfway through. He did a great job, and I know he was relieved to have it out of the way.
  • Arlene made her first trip out of the house since her foot surgery– first to Meijer with Mom, then to church. She was getting a little stir crazy, so both excursions were welcome.

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2007-04-10 · 16:51

Expanded BitLocker FAQ

Microsoft updated their BitLocker FAQ, which now answers every question you’ve ever had about BitLocker (plus some you probably haven’t.)

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2007-03-26 · 13:34

Office Communications Server 2007 beta 3 goes public

As promised at the MVP Summit, Microsoft’s unified communications group today released the public beta of Office Communications Server 2007. Grab it here, or swing by the beta forums and see what’s happening. I’ll have lots more to say about OCS 2007, but right now I’m busy setting it up for the roadshow.

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2007-03-22 · 16:51

Getting ready for the roadshow

So Jim McBee and I are together again, this time in the Big Apple, for the upcoming Exchange 2007 roadshow. I just got some mail from one of the roadshow managers at Windows IT Pro:

I am looking forward to meeting/seeing you both in New York for the Exchange event next Tuesday! I have been asked to tell you that while we are doing all we can to make sure you have all you need for your presentations, please make a backup plan in case something goes wrong with the phone line or Internet connection during your presentations. If you have a canned demo that would be great, but if you don’t, please consider a backup plan, preferably one that does not involve strings of four-letter words

My backup plan is that we all go out and take in a Broadway show. Jim said his backup plan involves a puppet show. I guess that means we’re all covered.

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2007-03-22 · 11:14

MAPI gets a facelift

Well, maybe not a facelift, but it did get a new name: the Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol. I only found out about this because of a press release I got from Cemaphore touting the fact that they’re the first to license it. So, MAPI is dead as a name, but I suspect it’ll be a loooong time before those four letters are expurgated from all of the existing MS documentation and support materials.

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2007-03-21 · 11:07

Better LCS integration with Asterisk

Another cool UC&C tidbit: a company called m-networks apparently has a commercial (e.g. supported) product that acts as a call control gateway for linking Asterisk and Live Communications Server. I’m not sure how big the market for such solutions is but it’s good to see some of the ad-hoc hackery surrounding this particular integration supplemented by supported commercial products.

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2007-03-21 · 11:03

Mitel ships direct Exchange 2007 interconnect

This is very cool:
Mitel Delivers Direct SIP Connection to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging.

Mitel’s embedded SIP integration eliminates the need for a separate SIP gateway as a go-between from a 3300 ICP SIP connection to an Exchange Server 2007 resulting in support for multiple forms of Unified Communications including voice, email and fax. Mitel can deliver this capability to existing 3300 ICP customers through a software upgrade that simply delivers the SIP server’s (gateway) functionality resulting in reduced complexity, time and cost for our customers. Native support of SIP on the 3300 ICP enables customers to take full advantage of the deployment of open standards and maximize their investment either in a Mitel or a multi-vendor environment that supports an open standards approach.

This is great news because it saves the expense and hassle of buying a separate gateway product just to integrate with the PBX. Back in August of last year, I met with the Mitel folks and strongly encouraged them to pursue direct interop; I believe that vendors who can directly talk to Exchange 2007 servers are going to sell more PBXes than those that don’t. I like the Mitel 3300 quite a bit (so much so that we bought one for our new office) and I’m pleased to see Mitel getting some first-mover advantage in this market.

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2007-03-15 · 21:42

The Phony Marine: A Novel (Lehrer)

by Jim Lehrer

Short book, thus a short review. This is a finely crafted story told by an extremely competent talespinner. Hugo Marder, a men’s clothing salesman, has always wanted to be a Marine. When he buys a Silver Star on eBay and wears it, suddenly people start treating him like someone who matters. He plunges himself into Marine Corps lore in an attempt to match the background of a real Marine, and he faces some circumstances that help define who he really is. Lehrer takes a fresh look at what it means to be a hero and how our culture treats its heroes. It’s a quick, but fun, read that leaves you with some substance once you’re done. Semper fi.

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2007-03-15 · 16:41

The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute

by Michael Ruhlman

Four years ago, I reviewed Ruhlman’s Walk on Water. That year, Julie gave me this book. Until recently, it sat unread on my shelf. What a mistake! Ruhlman has written a superbly readable narrative of what it’s like to study at the Culinary Institute of America, someplace I never imagined giving a hoot about. I am very much a meat-and-potatoes (or, more accurately, boudin-and-rice) kind of person. I’m not a foodie, and you never could have convinced me that I’d devour a book about cooking school– but I did. Ruhlman writes with a keen eye for detail, a snappy sense of pacing, and a willingness to philosophize about himself and the culinary field that I found simultaneously refreshing and reflective. Highly recommended, even if you prefer Burger King to Bourdain.

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2007-03-15 · 16:40

What I actually said about Outlook performance

So, Eric Lai quoted me in another Computerworld article, this one on slow Outlook performance. However, he left out a couple of important parts of what I actually said. I told him that I’ve had problems with one particular Exchange account (I use three) on one of the several machines that I use Outlook 2007 on. The machine in question happens to be a Windows Vista (x86) machine that I bought in January, flattened, and did clean installs of Vista and Office on. Other Exchange profiles on the same machine work fine. The same Exchange account on Outlook 2007 on my XP machines work fine. Removing and recreating the profile on the Vista machine doesn’t solve the problem, hence my comment about there being something I don’t understand about the problem in this case. The Exchange server in question doesn’t belong to me, so I can’t run any of my usual troubleshooting tools on it.

I was also careful to point out to Eric that I’m not an Outlook MVP, and that he should speak to some Outlook MVPs for his story. That’s too bad, as I’m sure they would have been able to give a better perspective on that actual performance issues involved.

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