I’ll be at TechEd 2007 in Orlando from today until Wednesday. I’m presenting Wednesday afternoon (2pm, SEC323, about how Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange works). I also have a ton of things to see and people to meet; my first stop will probably be the TLC to see the Tanjay, Catalina, and RoundTable devices that MS will be showing off. See you there!
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007
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I really wanted to like this book. It got good reviews, and it was written by a well-known author whose works I hadn’t sampled before. Unfortunately, I found it turgid, slow-moving, and flat-out boring. Couldn’t finish. Off to the donation pile it goes.
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Wow, this is a fascinating video clip of a guy whose job it is to fix high-tension power lines. Not for the faint of heart! (It’s from Straight Up: Helicopters in Action
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Glad to see someone else in the press picking up on this: Michael Osterman just posted an article wherein he points out that claims that 25% of the Exchange installed base will migrate to Linux are, shall we say, overblown.
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007
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Filed under UC&C
So I’ve gotten three or four requests for detailed instructions on how to fix the situation that happens when you say “no” when Exchange 2007 setup asks if you have any pre-Outlook 2007 clients. In that case, Exchange doesn’t create a public folder store, but you need one for legacy client support. To fix this problem, here’s what to do in a brand-new Exchange environment:
Once the database has been created, stop and restart the MSExchangeIS service.
If you already have Exchange servers, you shouldn’t need to do this. If you decide that you want your Exchange 2007 server to publish free/busy and OAB information through public folders, follow the steps above, then see this article for information on how to add replicas of the needed folders to the Exchange 2007 server.
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007
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This video shows home prices, adjusted for inflation, since 1890– as a roller-coaster ride.
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I looked all over the place to find documentation on how to set up Office SharePoint Server 2007 to hold journal reports generated by Exchange 2007. I finally found it after paging through about 10 zillion Google results. Here, for your edification, is the topic I found: “Plan e-mail message records retention” in the MOSS 2007 planning & architecture docs. With a little luck, soon Google, Live Search, et al will pick this article up so that searching for something sensible like “sharepoint 2007 exchange journal reports” will find it.
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007
Not bad for an airplane book. Coban tells his story with great pacing and snappy dialogue, but there are too many coincidences and (never thought I’d say this) son gratuitious plot twists that are visible from about a mile away. I suspect his later Myron Bolitar books are probably better; next time I’m in an airport perhaps I’ll find out.
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Wow, it’s been nearly two weeks since my last blog post, and longer than that if you count the time since I actually posted anything interesting. Consider this a catch-up post for all the stuff that’s happened since the beginning of April or thereabouts.
Family reunion: after the New York roadshow event, I flew down to Jackson and met up with the rest of the family; we drove down to Alexandria for a day and thence to Houma. We had a wonderful time seeing both halves of the family and eating some amazing food. (I still haven’t unloaded my pictures from my camera, but I’ll try to get that done in the next few days.) It was especially good to see some of the Houma relatives whom I’d never met (like Jody & Eric’s kids) or hadn’t seen in a long time (pretty much everyone else!) Disclaimer: I still haven’t unloaded my camera pictures or photocopied the 1″ stack of family history data that Aunt Debby gave me. Yes, I’m behind.
Exchange Connections: we left New Orleans on April Fool’s Day and headed to Orlando for Exchange Connections. Great show, although I didn’t see as much of it as usual. Arlene and the boys came with me, and we spent a fair amount of time at Disney. I’d stacked all my sessions on one day, so apart from a few breakfast and dinner meetings with people I didn’t get out and about as much as I usually do.
Disney World: wow. We’ll never go during spring break again, I hope. It was insanely crowded. David and I rode the new Expedition Everest ride, and someone was kind enough to hook us up with some Dream FastPass tickets at MGM so we could get in to some of the more crowded rides (like Lights, Motors, Action!) The “Finding Nemo” musical at Animal Kingdom was excellent, and we enjoyed the dining as well. A special treat: we stayed at the Renaissance Orlando near Sea World for two nights. It’s undergoing renovation, but the guest rooms had already been redone, and they were superb! (Arlene and the boys made a side trip to Sea World one day. Their verdict: not worth the money or bother.)
Tons of work: where to begin?! Recounting all the things I’ve been doing would be too much like actual work. I can say that the Data Encryption Toolkit is in the bag and will be launched very soon (good thing, given that even companies that should know better sometimes lose data). The Exchange roadshow is nearly done (tomorrow, it’s DC; yesterday it was Phoenix), and I have a few other things in work that are keeping me maxed out until about the end of June.
Everything else: of course, there’s ongoing family life too. Tom’s baseball season officially kicked off, Matt’s soccer season is in full swing (or full kick, or whatever), and karate continues apace.
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I’ve been waiting for this since Thanksgiving. Microsoft’s finally started releasing details of the devices its partners are building for use with Office Communications Server 2007. It’s important to note that individual partners, including Polycom, NEC, and LG-Nortel, are building these, but that Microsoft is providing the “Communicator Phone Experience” software for some devices. CPE is a radical departure from the standard model of having a button-driven user interface on the phone that talks to the PBX; CPE-equipped phones have a friendly Communicator-like GUI and rely on direct communications with the OCS server to get configuration and presence information. (In fact, you log on to these phones using your Windows credentials– how cool is that?)
Some pictures to whet your appetite are at Microsoft’s UC press gallery. I’ve requested review units of the Polycom phones and will report back here once I’ve had a chance to experiment with using them.
Technorati Tags: Unified Messaging
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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.
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Unified Messaging
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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!)
Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007
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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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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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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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