Paul's Down-Home Page

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 →

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

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.

As promised, here’s my TechNet Radio segment. I hope you find it as much fun to listen to as I did to record!

WMA file | MP3 file