Paul's Down-Home Page

I was really excited to see a huge new set of guides for configuring various PBX systems to work with Exchange UM. However, once I started looking at the configuration notes, I found that they’re still pretty basic (and in some cases empty). However, it’s encouraging that Microsoft is planning to work with its partners to get better configuration guidance out there.

Sometimes you actually want one account to have access to all the mailboxes in a database, on the store, or in an organization. In Exchange 5.5, you could just use the service account; in Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003, you have to resort to various kinds of tomfoolery. In Exchange 2003, the Domain Admins and Enterprise Admins security groups (and the built-in Administrator account) actually have an explicit deny ACE that prevents you from using these accounts to gain service access. What about Exchange 2007?

Continue reading →

Today I powered up and configured the Intel/Eicon PIMG gateway, which links the Mitel 3300 ICP with Exchange 2007. However, this has exposed a major structural problem.

My current office is divided into two halves: in one half, I have a shelving unit that has the 3300, all of my servers, and some related stuff-n-junk (like a KVM switch, an old Dell keyboard, and an ancient 17″ CRT). In the other half, I have my main network switch, my phone panel, and my work machines. Both sides are already networked together, but:

• the 3300 can provide Power over Ethernet (PoE) to the Mitel phones, without which they won’t work. (Mitel makes a desk sled that powers the phones but I don’t have any of those).
• I need to run two analog lines from the phone panel to the 3300, then back again; the ASU in the 3300 will let it answer the analog extensions and do call transfer, forwarding, etc. between the digital and analog lines– very cool
• I really need a phone on my desk
• The 3300 is way noisier than any other piece of equipment in my office

Thus I get to choose between “lots of cables on the floor” or “unrelenting fan noise”. Not a great choice. In a couple of weeks when my upstairs office is finished, the question will be moot, so for now I’m going to leave the 3300 where it is and run one long net cable to it so I can power a desk phone. Analog line integration will have to wait for now.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Mitel, Unified Messaging

Yes, it’s that time of year again! Even though we haven’t even started the fall 2006 Exchange Connections show, I’m already looking for session proposals for the spring 2007 show (1-4 April in Orlando– finally, a time that coincides with my kids’ spring school break!).

Our goal is to have about 50% coverage of Exchange 2007, Office 2007, and SharePoint 2007 and about 50% on Exchange 2003, Office 2003, and related topics like Live Communications Server, deployment, and security. We’re interested in sessions that cover all aspects of Microsoft’s communications and collaboration stack: security, development, management, operations, migration, and integration.

If you’re interested in speaking, please send me 3-5 short abstracts and a brief speaker bio. I need these by EOD Wednesday, November 1. (Thanks to Nino for correcting the date!)

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, ExchConn

Great post at the Exchange team blog covering how server and recipient filtering work in the new Exchange Management Console. Don’t confuse this kind of filtering with recipient filtering in the anti-spam stack; same name but two entirely different things.

I’m a satisfied GoDaddy customer, but I’m a little unhappy with them at the moment. This morning, I tried to buy one of their 6-in-1 SSL certificates. Why? I wanted to be able to use one cert for autodiscover.robichaux.net and mail.robichaux.net. I figured the 6-in-1 would let me do so because the wording on the 6-in-1 order page says you can register up to six matching domains. I figured that they’d allow multiple subject alternative names, which is what I wanted. What they actually mean, though, is that you can register the same domain in up to six different TLDs… not quite the same thing. I really don’t want to buy a wildcard cert; I think I’ll probably just stick with the self-signed cert if I can’t buy an inexpensive cert with multiple subject alternative names.

You may have been wondering how Microsoft’s going to package (or, to verb a useful noun, SKU) SharePoint 2007. The official SharePoint team blog has the answer, sort of. The article links to a nifty spreadsheet that covers the primary differences between SharePoint 2003, SharePoint Server 2007, and the various SKUs of SharePoint 2007. Worth reading if you follow SharePoint as a collaboration technology.

Over at his InfoWorld blog, Dave Rosenberg makes an awfully interesting assertion: Zimbra’s well on the way to becoming a billion-dollar business. However, he uses some way faulty math to get there: he takes at face value Zimbra’s claim of 4 million paid mailboxes, then multiplies it by the $25/mailbox MSRP to get an annualized revenue of $100 million. From there, hey, it’s only an order of magnitude to get to $1 billion, right?

Continue reading →

During Exchange setup, one of the questions you have to answer is whether there are any pre-Outlook 2007 clients in your environment. (I wrote briefly about this before in the context of Office Communicator.) However, do you know what happens when you click “yes” or “no”?

If you click “yes”, the setup program will create a public folder database, in which you’ll find the familiar Schedule+ Free/Busy and Offline Address Book folders. This shouldn’t be a surprise; Outlook 2003 and earlier versions require these folders, so you’d expect Exchange to create them. If you click “no”, the public folder database isn’t created, so pre-Outlook 2007 versions can’t get free/busy data or download the OAB. However, what I didn’t know until today is that the Exchange store will also block MAPI connections from older versions of Outlook when you say “no”. Why? Because if those clients did connect, they’d have a terrible experience, with no free/busy or OAB support. To reduce the support hassle for themselves and Exchange 2007 admins, MS decided just to block the connection. To fix this, just add a public folder store to your server and voila! you’re golden.