Paul's Down-Home Page

I’ve been busy with a raft of other projects, but yesterday I finally unboxed the Mitel 3300 and the Intel/Eicon/Dialogic gateway and stacked them on my equipment rack. (Disclosure: it’s not a rack, it’s a shelving unit. Deal with it.)

The 3300 CXI that I have includes a ton of options and optional hardware. I don’t know enough about Mitel’s product line to distinguish between what’s in this box versus what you typically get when you buy one. However, this unit includes the PRI module that you need to talk to the PIMG, and it includes an Analog Support Unit (ASU) for connecting to analog phone lines. It also includes the software entitlements for embedded voice mail, wake-up calls, and a bunch of other nifty features that a) I don’t know how to use and b) probably won’t be writing about.

Continue reading →

I’ve already done one Exchange 2007 UM deployment for a customer who wanted it set up in their lab. However, now I’m branching out and deploying it again… at my house.

Mitel was kind enough to loan me a 3300 ICP to use as the centerpiece of my system, along with a couple of IP phones (including the verrry cool Navigator). Along with that, I have an Intel PIMG gateway, my trusty Exchange 2007 server, and a large stack of notes and screenshots on how to get everything working together.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be setting everything up and documenting the experience, both here and in a forthcoming e-book on setting up Exchange 2007 UM and Live Communications Server 2005 with Mitel hardware. Stay tuned for more details! (One valuable tidbit: the status lights on the 3300 are supposed to be red during normal operation– a bit of a change from what we usually expect in hardware!)

Wow, I’m not sure how I missed this (but it did end up in my “to blog” folder, so that’s something!) The team at Microsoft that covers Notes application coexistence and migration has a really cool example of how Notes can work with Microsoft applications: you can get and show presence information from Communicator within Notes applications! How cool is that?

Chris Haaker has a post that links to three podcasts (1, 2, 3) (or blogcasts, if you prefer) showing Exchange Unified Messaging in action. Eileen Brown, the Microsoft UK evangelist who recorded them, says “the sound quality is terrible” and promises to re-record them. However, they’re still a good listen if you haven’t heard the UM system before.

The Forefront Security family of products supports using more than one scanning engine at a time. This is a big advantage, since it adds a significant degree of protection against new threats. This support is coordinated through the Forefront Security Engine Manager, which provides administrators with tools for monitoring the status of installed engines, controlling which engines run, and adjusting the actions Forefront takes when an engine needs to be updated or fails during operation.

Forefront can make use to up to five engines at a time. Perhaps coincidentally, the standard edition of Forefront includes five engines:

• The Microsoft antimalware engine, based on technology Microsoft acquired when it purchased GeCAD in 2004
• The Computer Associates (CA) Vet and InoculateIT engines
• The Norman Data Defense engine
• The Sophos Virus Detection engine

If you buy the Exchange Enterprise Client Access License (CAL), you also get to use four additional engines included only with the Enterprise CAL: AhnLabs, Authentium’s Command Antivirus engine, Kaspersky Labs’s engine, and VirusBuster AntiVirus. During installation, Forefront randomly chooses a set of four engines; administrators can use the suggested combination or pick a different set.

In a future post, I’ll have a lot more to say about which engine combinations make the most sense for different uses.

If you’ve used Office Communicator, you may have noticed that it doesn’t allow clickable hyperlinks. This is a reasonable decision by MS made to limit the spread of malware that uses IM as a transport, but it’s still a pain in the butt for many environments, including us. Doug has the solution: a simple registry change will restore links to full click-a-bility.

Dear Ed,

I’ve been fortunate to be one of the conference chairs for Exchange Connections for a couple of years now. This year’s show will be especially good for several reasons:

• Lots of Exchange 2007 content: some from Microsoft, some from industry experts like Pierre Bijaoui, Kevin Laahs, Devin Ganger, and Jim McBee
• It’s co-located with Windows Connections and a host of other DevConnections offerings (including conferences on ASP.NET and mobile devices, two popular topics in the MS world)
• It’s in Vegas. Duh.

As a regular reader of (and commenter on) your blog, I know that you’re is well-acquainted with Microsoft’s marketing and positioning for Exchange. However (and forgive me for saying so) I think you and your readers might benefit if you understood the technology behind Exchange a little better. Heaven knows I see people posting howlers at your site occasionally. Thus this invitation: come join us in Vegas!

Your travel schedule says you’re going to be in Alberta. HP and US both have direct flights YEG-LAS for around $200. As conference chair, I’ll comp your registration, and you can wander around and talk to people– attendees and speakers alike– to get their unvarnished feedback on the good and the bad about Microsoft’s 2007 product lineup. It’s the same reason MS always sends people to Lotusphere and IBM sends people to TechEd, only with a very different audience and vibe.

Just drop me some e-mail and I’ll get your registration processed. Heck, I’ll even buy you dinner.

It looks like there will be 3 separate Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) exams for Exchange 2007; MS is revamping their exams as part of the move from the MCSE to the new Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) certification. However, they don’t seem to have released any more details on the exams, which is a little disappointing given how close we are to the product’s launch. Hopefully they’ll publish the exam syllabus fairly soon so we can all start studying 🙂

In my experience, Exchange’s message tracking functionality is pretty darn useful. I don’t use it often, but when I do, it’s a great timesaver. However, the existing Exchange 2003 GUI is a little clunky; sometimes it would be nice to be able to quickly get the status of a message directly from the command line.

Continue reading →