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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?

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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.

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.

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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?