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.
IBM Lotus launches Domino team blog
Nice to see IBM getting with the program; they’ve just relaunched the Domino team blog. I hope it focuses on substantive technical information (like the Microsoft Exchange team blog) instead of marketing argumentation; we have enough of that already.
Technorati Tags: Collaboration
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Filed under UC&C
Getting mailbox sizes via script
Back in May, an attendee at one of my webcasts asked if I could point her to a script for querying mailbox sizes on a set of Exchange servers. I flagged her message to remind me to answer it and (drum roll) am just now getting to that folder of flagged items.
So, the answer is: you can start with this script from Michael B. Smith; it will give you the mailbox size information without touching the last login date on the mailbox. It doesn’t constrain output to a range of dates, but that should be a fairly simple addition.
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Verizon EVDO in Toledo
Last night I had a long conversation with my friend Chris Miller about EVDO; he’s a Nextel user and is thinking about switching his company’s service to another carrier. At the time, my Treo 700w was showing 1xRTT service, as it usually does in the Perrysburg area. This morning, when I was letting the phone sync after being turned off overnight, I noticed that I was now getting an EVDO service icon– so apparently Verizon has quietly turned on EVDO in at least parts of the Toledo metro area. It may be because I live close to the VZW store at Levis Commons, but I’m not going to complain.
Update: my house is back to 1xRTT, but when I drove into Maumee there’s EVDO coverage at least as far north as the corner of Conant and Illinois.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
10-10-06: TechNet Radio interview
As promised, here’s my TechNet Radio segment. I hope you find it as much fun to listen to as I did to record!
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DirecTV to add Toledo local HD
Well, this is a nice surprise: according to Multichannel News, DirecTV will be adding local-into-local HD service for Toledo (and several other similarly-sized markets) by years’ end. I don’t have any of the MPEG-4 equipment that would be required to get LIL, and I have a perfectly good HD antenna anyway. Even if I had the equipment, I’d still stick with over-the-air because then I can record it easily, using either Windows Media Center or the El Gato eyeTV HD gadget I just got in the mail. Look for a full review soon… well, OK; “soon” really means “after baseball season is over, or the Tigers are eliminated, whichever comes first”.
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Filed under HDTV and Home Theater
PowerShell in Virtual Server
Still catching up on my blog backlog…
Virtual Server comes in very, very handy at 3Sharp, because much of the work we do involves building VMs for various tasks. However, I’ve never really cared for its management interface. I’m not a big fan of web-based management interfaces for system management, and the VS interface is kinda blah (though the VMRC client is handy). I just found these two articles describing the PowerShell support that’s coming in the next release of Virtual Server. I’m looking forward to being able to better manage VMs using PowerShell, and to tide me over, there are some tasty improvements in Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 (but what a terrible product name!)
Technorati Tags: PowerShell
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How Microsoft IT fights viruses and spam
I’m a big fan of Microsoft’s “IT Showcase” series, which highlights how Microsoft uses its own technologies (aka “eats its own dog food”, or just “dogfoods”) to solve business problems. I didn’t know they’d expanded the showcase to include podcasts, though. This episode covers some of the key points of Microsoft’s spam, virus, and e-mail security infrastructure. Pretty interesting stuff, including a discussion of how they’re using Exchange 2007’s Edge Transport role as their primary perimeter system.
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Free Exchange 2007 training
Microsoft’s Walter Stiers posted this on his blog last week, and I’m just now getting around to it. The bottom line: you can get some Microsoft-led online Exchange 2007 training for free by hitting the Exchange learning portal. This is a great deal for IT folks and a good move for MS– it’s often difficult to get training into a budget this late in the year.
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Opening beer bottles… with a helicopter
I thought competitive eating was a crazy sport, but little did I know that there was something crazier. Check out this video of a competition that revolves around opening beer bottles with a helicopter. I think I’ll stick with playing soccer.
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Filed under FAIL
PowerShell development environment
I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but this integrated development environment (IDE) for PowerShell looks extremely cool. Having a debugger, syntax highlighting, and Intellisense for PowerShell would be really handy for building, say, a PowerShell version of the cookbook…
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Hardware failures galore
It’s been a tough two or three weeks here, at least for computer hardware.
First, I flattened my trusty ThinkPad. Ryan Femling, my coworker, says you can easily go two or more years without performance problems on a stable Windows install. He’s right; I got just over three years out of the install, but for some reason, the machine had decided that it would permanently disable both its wireless card and its onboard Ethernet port. That made it, if not useless, much less useful. There wasn’t anything wrong with the hardware; some combination of Windows patches and software installs/removals apparently whacked the driver. A clean install using IBM’s recovery partition certainly fixed things up.
The next weekend, I came back from Michigan to find my only x64 machine (an Athlon 3800+ in an ASUS A8N) was beeping every two or three seconds. All the fans spin up normally, but the machine just sits there and won’t POST. I haven’t started diagnosing it yet.
Two nights ago, our electrician was here doing some work. He had to take down house power, so I cleanly shut down all my servers. When the power came back on, my primary file server wouldn’t boot. After a little troubleshooting, I found that the video card was at fault; after I removed, cleaned, and reseated it, I was back in business. Coincidentally, Windows maven Ed Bott had the same problem two weeks ago, and his post is what reminded me to check the video card first, so I’m passing the tip on.
And another thing, which I originally forgot: I lost a 16-port network switch early Wednesday morning. It was making a cool frying-bacon sound when I came downstairs; this is annoying since it’s the link to the ground floor of the house. Until I replace it, no Internet in Arlene’s workroom.
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Filed under General Stuff
Walter Glenn has a blog
Thanks to Technorati, I just found that Walter Glenn has a blog; with characteristic modesty, he hasn’t been plugging it anywhere, so I found it through searching for links to my own blog! Walter and I first worked together on an MCSE guide for Exchange 5.5 back in 1998 or so. He’s a great guy and knows a ton about Windows and Exchange. His blog is focused on simple tips for making Windows easier to use– check it out.
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TechNet Radio interview
I just got off the phone with Chris Avis of Microsoft’s TechNet Radio podcast series; we chatted about Exchange 2007, PowerShell, unified messaging, and my lame Xbox 360 skills. The podcast will go live next Tuesday; I’ll post a link to it when it’s up.
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How’d we pick the products for the anti-phishing test?
I’ve gotten several inquiries about how we selected the products we tested in the anti-phishing technology evaluation. That’s a fair question; some companies are unhappy that they were included, and some that they weren’t.
When we defined the parameters for the testing, we selected the vendors that had either browser-based toolbar add-ons or built-in anti-phishing technology in the browser as of May 2006 and that (in our opinion or by market data) had a significant usage presence. There are dozens of products that meet the first test, but not that many that meet the second. We picked the top 8 based on our understanding of actual usage and deployment. I didn’t want to include payware products because the original objective was for us to help Microsoft understand how well IE 7 worked compared to its biggest competitors– and in this market segment, payware products are at a disadvantage.
Would we have preferred to test all the products? Sure. The team at Carnegie Mellon that did a similar study (with a smaller list of products and a smaller set of URLs) said the same thing. However, we had to draw the line somewhere. When we redo the tests, we’ll probably change the product mix around; I’d expect to see Firefox 2.0 included, and maybe some of the commercial products.
To address Symantec’s complaint, I’d make two points. First, Norton Confidential wasn’t announced until June, so how could we have included it? You’re making the Firefox argument. We only tested products that were publicly available at the start of our time period; we excluded Norton Internet Security 2006 because it was commercial (and I suspect that if we’d tested the 2006 version, we’d be hearing that we should’ve tested the 2007 version instead. Sic transit gloria annual releases…)
Second, it’s pretty worthless to have a blog but not allow comments or trackbacks. That’s not a blog, it’s a monologue. Whatever you think of the quality of Microsoft’s products (including IE), you have to admit that they have aggressively embraced blogging as a way to communicate directly with customers– something I’d like to see more security companies emulate.
Update: fixed the link to McAfee’s SiteAdvisor blog.
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