Paul's Down-Home Page

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?

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.