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Tip o’ the Week #1– New Mail desktop alerts

Posted on (Updated by ewand

In an attempt to resurrect this blog (again… I know, I know…), I’ve decided to repurpose some “Tip o’ the Week” emails that I’ve written and published for an internal Microsoft audience. Some of the internal ToW’s are very specific to Microsoft so I’ll probably skip them. Others will need polishing up a bit to make them useful for the external reader, but I hope the process will be worthwhile.

The style of the ToW is informal, tends to be exxample-heavy and (I hope) densely useful – ie. in not many words, that takes a short time to read, the reader will generally learn at least one useful thing. Feedback I’ve had from Microsoft people who read these weekly emails has been so encouraging that it made me want to share them with others. I hope you like them – do give me feedback either way…

Tip o’ the Week #1

In this inaugural Tip o’ the Week, here’s a simple fix to prevent distraction during your working day.

Outlook 2007 introduced a really neat way of showing you a preview of incoming mail. It was so much more helpful than the simple “new mail” envelope, or the noisy bong to tell you that something new has just landed in your inbox.

SWITCH IT OFF. Seriously.

At least try switching it off to see how you get on. Though it’s really cool and everything, it is arguably the most distracting thing within the Office System.

To turn off, simply right click on the Outlook icon in your system tray, then click on the Show New Mail Desktop Alert, to stop it.

If you absolutely can’t live without it, reverse the process and you’ll be back to normal.
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OCS Custom Status updates – another update

Posted on by ewand

Some time ago, I wrote on OCS custom status fields and how to implement them…

Well, security changes in the way Office Communicator works mean that, by default, the client needs to download its configuration file from a secure location. This has caused a problem for a good many people who used to rely on the status file being on their hard disk.

If you don’t have access to a web site that can publish a file via SSL, then I’ve posted a few other samples here… thanks to Matt McSpirit for the tip on how to do it 🙂 I struggled for a while by using SkyDrive to do it, but the eventual URL kept changing – now I can host a bunch of these files on the blog server!

Applying the settings
Here is the Registry file which will configure Communicator to use the “Microsoft UK” custom status below. If you’re happy with that, just

  • Sign out of Communicator entirely, close the application (right click on the Communicator icon in the system tray, choose Exit).
  • Click on the Registry link above, choose “Run” from the dialog, then confirm that you want to allow the registry settings to be applied.
  • Restart Communicator again – if everything works, you’ll see custom status appear by clicking on the big coloured blob in the top left…

image

If you’d rather use a different set of statuses, try downloading the registry file and save it somewhere, drag/drop it it into a new, blank Notepad window, and replace the URL with one of the following ones… then save it, and apply the settings as above.

Serious

Generic

Amusing

Microsoft UK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OCS Ewand

Posted on by ewand

Ewan D placeholder –


  <?xml version=”1.0″ ?>


– <customStates xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/09/2005/communicator/customStates“ xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance“ xsi:schemaLocation=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/09/2005/communicator/customStates http://livecommteam/sites/main/ice/Wave%2012%20Docs/CustomActivities.xsd“>



– <customState ID=”1“ availability=”online“>



  <activity LCID=”1033“>In TVP</activity>

  </customState>


– <customState ID=”2“ availability=”busy“>



  <activity LCID=”1033“>Actually pretty busy</activity>

  </customState>


– <customState ID=”3“ availability=”online“>



  <activity LCID=”1033“>Working from home</activity>

  </customState>


– <customState ID=”4“ availability=”do-not-disturb“>



  <activity LCID=”1033“>Presenting and Projecting</activity>

  </customState>

  </customStates>

ewand.xml

Snipping tool for OneNote users

Posted on by ewand

Following on somewhat from my off-topic Walking in the Country post, I thought I’d recount one useful tip that helps in grabbing the maps (or any other screen content, for that matter . at least anything that isn’t rights-protected).

If you have OneNote installed, press WindowsKey+S to initiate a snapshot, just like the Windows Snipping Tool. OneNote 2007 snaps the selected area of the screen into an unfiled note, and you can copy/paste the content from there to whatever application you like.

OneNote 2010 – which will be included with all versions of Office 2010 when it’s realeased later this year – even has the option of just copying the content to clipboard right away, rather than putting it into a OneNote file first.

image

OneNote is a great app which has a devoted set of followers out there – many Heart it, apparently.

Going for a walk in the country

Posted on by ewand

I know it’s been a bit quiet in recent weeks here, but I figured I could chip in the now traditional New Year random post, which might of interest outside of the working day. Here’s last year’s post on how to wash you car.

During the Christmas and New Year holidays, I’ve been doing a bit of walking – going out for a few hours in the countryside, occasionally taking in the odd pub en route, that kind of thing. Over the last few months, I’ve come across several invaluable aids to finding and navigating some great walks.

If you search online for “walking in <name of area>”, you’ll probably find plenty of links to ramblers associations or other groups wanting to tell you about or sell you access to maps and documented walks. Ditto, there are thousands of books with details of walking in the UK . and very good I’m sure they are too.

I discovered the AA’s web site to be a particularly great source of free info, though – the walks are usually very well documented . though they make no sense when you’re reading them at the PC, they make perfect sense when on the walk itself (instructions like “walk along the edge of the field to a style, then cross the next field and two styles to a metal gate, turn left and cross a bridge to another field” don’t make for easy imagining, but when you’re at the edge of the field looking at the styles, it’s just right).

The AA “Walks and Bike Rides” site

Have a look on this site and see what there is in your neck of the woods. It’s been a brilliant source of inspiration for us. What I normally do, though, is to take the text from the AA site and copy/paste into a Word document – set the margins nice and tight, paste the text in with giant font size and copy/paste any maps they show from the AA page. and it’s easy to print out double-sided on a sheet of paper or two and take it with you on the walk.

image

What’s really got me out of trouble a couple of times, though, is Bing Maps. The most recent revamp includes the ability to display Ordnance Survey maps data (in the UK) as an alternative to Road & Satellite maps. Simply go to your favourite destination and from the “Road” drop-down, you should be able to view OS Landranger and OS Explorer maps (depending on your zoom level – if the OS option is grayed out, try zooming in or out to see what happens). image

Ordnance Survey Explorer maps are great, listing all manner of bridleways, byways, rights of way etc. But manhandling an A2 sized bit of folded paper when out and about is a bit cumbersome. these Bing Maps let you copy just the bit you’re interested in, and if you paste into your Word document, you could even have the OS version of the map on the back of the AA map & directions. Perfect.

image

I’ve also got a Windows Phone device which has the Bing for mobile available – and since the device has a GPS, it can show aerial views of where we are currently. Manually cross referenced with the OS maps, it’s got me out of trouble on more than a few occasions – knowing we’d missed some turning on a designated path, but been confident enough of making it back to the path just a few hundred meters ahead. I hope some future version allows the showing of real OS maps on the mobile screen . now that would be sweet.

Have a play with the OS features on Bing Maps – it’s truly brilliant, and might teach you a load of stuff about your own manor.

Exchange in the cloud or on the ground?

Posted on by ewand

Following the price cut on the desperately-in-need-of-renaming BPOS services recently, I’ve been talking with a few people about the where the tipping point might be for running Exchange in house vs using some form of hosted provision.


Low_Cloud[1]


There are plenty of reasons why a hosted offering makes sense. More and more end-users are away from the office (using web access, mobile devices or VPN-less connectivity such as “Outlook Anywhere” that’s been part of Outlook for the last 6 years), and as the user end-point is increasingly mobile, it starts to matter a lot less where the server end is.


In the first 3 versions of Exchange (4.0, 5.0 and 5.5, released in 1997 and 1998), the accepted rule was that servers would be placed in the same location as clumps of users (say, if you have more than 30 users in a remote office and anything other than a great WAN connection, you’d drop an Exchange server on-site).


Since the client and server maintained a constant connection with each other (using MAPI over RPC, if you’re interested), and since wide area networks for most companies were in the few hundred kilobits between sites, the default was pretty much that servers tended to be in the same physical location as the users.


As network capacity improved (and costs fell), combined with server capability improvements (and price reductions, and technology like Outlook cached mode and the shift to using web access as an alternative), it became more feasible for organisations to centralise and consolidate Exchange into one or a few physical locations – such as Microsoft famously did, by moving from many locations in Exchange 2000 to just 3 in Exchange 2003.


So, the position we’re now at is, it pretty much doesn’t matter to an end user whether they’re connecting over a company wide-area network to a remote Exchange server, or if they’re connecting over the internet to one that sits in someone else’s datacenter.


If you’re an organisation with a few hundred users, then you probably don’t have a dedicated Exchange administrator who does nothing but feed and water the email system. Moving to an online hosted model such as Microsoft Online or one of the many “Hosted Exchange” partners who offer a more tailored service, could mean a significantly lower cost of operations when measured over the next few years.


Since Hosted Exchange providers and Microsoft Online will both move towards Exchange 2010 in the near future, it’s something that every current Exchange user should consider – is it time to consider moving some or all of your estate to a hosted environment, or you do have specific requirements around backup retention or data control, that you absolutely need to have your own servers on your own soil? If the latter, then maybe “cloud” based email isn’t for you, but Exchange 2010 “on-premise” would be the right choice.


As part of this discussion, of course, there’s the question of whether all of one or all of the other is the correct approach – a blended model could be the ideal, where some users are on-premise and others (maybe the less demanding) are hosted in the cloud.