Paul's Down-Home Page

I was surprised to see a letter to the editor in this month’s Windows IT Pro complaining about the magazine’s lack of Notes and Domino coverage. The writer is right; I don’t think I’ve ever seen an article about Notes or Domino in the magazine, and I’ve been reading it since it launched 10 years ago (and writing for it nearly that long!) (And occasionally, when I mention Domino or Workplace, everyone complains…)

Continue reading →

Via Jack Dausman, news that IBM’s released the first public draft of their redbook on migrating from Exchange 2003 to Domino. It probably deserves a book review, but I don’t know if I’ll have time to get to it for a while yet.

Nathan Breskin-Auer has a great summary of the “light” version of Outlook Web Access 2007 at the Exchange team blog. I’m disappointed that there isn’t a Tasks module in OWA light, since I use both tasks and Macintoshes heavily.

I’m also disappointed that Microsoft isn’t going to certify OWA Premium for use with Firefox. This may seem odd, given that I’m not a huge Firefox fan. I understand that it’s a resource issue; the OWA team chose to spend their efforts on adding features instead of adding support for a browser that is lightly used (if at all) within their target customer base. However, not shipping Firefox support is bad for three reasons:

• it belies the power of OWA’s AJAX implementation, which would work well with any modern AJAX-capable browser.
• Microsoft’s competitors (including Domino Web Access, Zimbra, and Scalix) support Firefox
• The education / university market has lots of Firefox adoption, and it’s also a market that Microsoft’s trying to crack

Maybe for SP1? Of course, the program team’s answer is likely to remain the same: “when we see customer demand”. Fair enough.

As part of my grand unified communications adventure (more on which later), I needed to get reverse number lookup (RNL) working with LCS. RNL is a simple concept: when you get a phone call from extension 1001, you want your computer to identify the caller as John Smith, not as ‘1001’.

Communicator looks up numbers using one of two sources:

• the address book produced by the Address Book Service on the LCS server; this is generated daily from whatever you’ve got in Active Directory.
• contacts in the user’s local Outlook address book (or Windows address book)

When you place a call to a Communicator user, the PBX sends a CSTA message that includes a device identifier, like this:

<deviceIdentifier>tel:1001; phonecontext=pbx.litware.com</deviceIdentifier>

(or maybe <deviceIdentifier> tel:+16175552702;ext=52702</deviceIdentifier>

Communicator will try to match the device identifier against one of the numbers it can see in the address book or the Outlook contact. If it matches, it displays the caller info; if not, you just get the number. You can add this information manually, but the preferred way to do this is to put the callers’ numbers into a multivalued attribute called proxyAddresses. However, we were in somewhat of a hurry. The simplest solution for us was to add the “TEL” URI of the associated extension into the “home” phone number field of each user object. This would more sensibly be done by a script, but for our lab environment, which only has a handful of extensions, it was a quick solution.

Continue reading →

I’m a huge fan of the Exchange team’s blog because it includes a wealth of technical information that you can’t find anywhere else. They don’t waste a lot of time with marketing fluff, and the folks who post there run the gamut from product support to developers to product managers. The Unified Communications Group at MS recently launched their own blog, which I hope will live up to the same standard.

Since I’m used to seeing my byline in print magazines, I don’t usually get too excited about it. However, I was surprised (and pleased!) to see that the Solution Accelerator for Exchange Consolidation and Migration won an Honorable Mention in Windows IT Pro‘s Readers’ Choice awards. This is especially cool because it was a write-in nomination! Missy Koslosky, Devin Ganger, and I worked really, really hard on this guide, and it’s great to see that it’s been useful to people.

Argh. This bit me, even though I knew better. I set up a managed custom folder, created a folder policy for it, and waited patiently for the folder to appear in a user mailbox. It didn’t. Why? Because I hadn’t set a schedule for the managed folder assistant, that’s why. Fortunately, a quick run of start-ManagedFolderAssistant solved the problem.