Category: Uncategorized

Windows Mobile 6 – aka Crossbow

Posted on by ewand

I’ve been in Seattle all week at a technical conference and have been largely living on Windows Mobile devices … I have a QTek 8500 Smartphone (which is really nice and small Smartphone), a Palm Treo 750 (a Pocket PC with a smaller screen and built in thumboard) and an Orange SPV M3100 (larger PPC with slide out keyboard, Wifi etc). I’ve also been using Windows Mobile 6 (aka Crossbow) on a couple of other devices for ages… and have gotten really used to some of its new functionality regarding the way e-mail, calendar etc is handled when running against an Exchange 2007 server.

Jason (who was yesterday presenting to a room of 500 screaming and yelling people whilst – I kid you not – dressed as a pirate) has posted on his Mr Mobile! blog with a great summary of what’s new in Windows Mobile 6…

… now I can’t wait to see it hit the streets on some of the exciting devices that are out now or will be coming soon!

//Ewan

Sharepoint Services v3.0 Application Templates

Posted on by ewand

I noticed the other day that the first batch of templates have been published for Windows Sharepoint Services v3 – the free team site application that’s been upgraded dramatically as part of the Office 2007 release wave.

There are some interesting site admin template apps published on the Application Templates site, along with some details of forthcoming aerver admin templates (which are probably more generically useful, to be honest… things like expense reimbursement and vacation scheduling).

There are also WSS3.0-compatible versions of the old server templates available as part of the WSS2.0 upgrade toolkit, so if you can’t wait a few weeks for the rest of the new templates to make it onto the site, then check out the older ones here.

Can your phone system talk to Exchange 2007?

Posted on by ewand

It’s been online for a little while – I only really noticed recently, but there is a matrix of telecom PBX systems and VoIP gateways which can sit in front of them, in order to enable Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging.

The Telephony Advisor for Exchange 2007 goes into some detail around what needs to be understood in order to get UM running. There’s a link on there to the PBX Configuration Notes page, which not only details how the PBX/gateway needs to be configured, but shows a list (ordered by PBX) of what components and protocols are used, which versions of software are required etc.

It’s not an exhaustive list but is a starter – if you want to know whether your current phone system could be integrated into Exchange 2007, hae a look…

Do you want to talk to your Exchange Server?

Posted on by ewand

You might have seen demos of Exchange 2007 and the Unified Messaging capabilities (which are mondo-cool and so great to demonstrate to people that they’re sometimes open-mouthed in awe): if so, and you want to play with it yourself, then check out this great new resource:

https://signmeup.exchange2007demo.com/

Put in your email address, and you’ll be sent the details of your temporary (5-day) logon to the system, accessible from Outlook Web Access, Outlook (using “Outlook Anywhere” aka RPC/HTTP) or from a mobile device using ActiveSync.

Oh and you get a (US) phone number to call to test out the Outlook Voice Access function, which allows you to navigate your mailbox and interact with it either using a phone’s keypad or (if you’re an English speaker), with spoken commands.

If you’re not US based, you could sign up for the Windows Live Messenger/Verizon Web Calling service, which would allow you to call a US number for a lower cost (in the UK, about 1.5p a minute).

Vista Aero Glass – performance hit (or not)

Posted on by ewand

Just read an interesting analysis at http://firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_vista_aero_glass_performance/ where they tested a couple of different systems running Windows Vista with Aero Glass switched on and off. (Windows Aero – if you’re not aware of it by name – is the new user interface functionality, with transparent windows and the swish new effects present all through Vista)

The cynic in most techies would assume that flashy graphics mean hammering the system performance; I’ve known plenty of people who even switched off all the fancy UI features, on the basis that the machine would be a few % more responsive… remember the old advice on Windows 3.1 or 95 to not use a graphical desktop backdrop since that put an overhead on system performance?

Anyway, the FiringSquad results are predictably games-focused, but draw an interesting conclusion – graphical performance is, in some cases, marginally better with Aero switched on, and even in the cases where it isn’t, it’s only fractionally less so.

“Quite frankly, we were shocked by these results.”

So, the moral of the story is… switch on all the bells and whistles if you can 🙂

Sansa e280 – I took the plunge

Posted on by ewand

After my post last month about getting a new MP3 player, I went ahead and bought a Sansa e280 8Gb device from Amazon UK. In general I’m pretty pleased with it – battery life looks good, sound quality is good, it supports direct sync from Windows Media Player etc.

There are a couple of grumbles though – the touted ability to display Album Art is only available if you manually copy a file called “Album Art.jpg” into the folder on the device where the music lives… which is a fairly tedious process to go through IMHO. Come on Sansa … Windows Media player already stores AlbumArt<somenumber>.jpg files in the same folder – any chance you could come up with a sync utility which automates the copy process?

Oh, and the European models don’t have an FM radio… something I’d missed in the specs (assuming that it was the ability to record FM that was missing from European models, not the entire FM tuner). Ho hum, not a big deal but a minor niggle nevertheless.

Travel’s a curse

Posted on by ewand

We all know that travelling on business can be a pain, and the glamour of travelling on holiday has long since worn off…

… so I thought I’d share some useful travel websites to help ease the pain (if you feel that way, and haven’t seen them before)…

  • http://www.flyertalk.com – a must-have resource for any frequent flyers, to check out the skinny on mileage claims, scams, best way to get discount business class etc etc
     
  • http://www.checkmytrip.com – use your IATA booking reference number for flights to check that you’re definitely flying, and maybe even see how full the flight is (if your airline doesn’t give you that already)
     
  • http://www.tripadvisor.com – I’ve used this site loads of times to pick hotels (some of them, a bit off the beaten track) when on holiday, or just to figure out where to go/what to do
     
  • http://www.seatguru.com or http://www.seatexpert.com – are you sitting in a seat which won’t recline? By a bulkhead with no legroom? Look on these sites and you’ll find reviews (yes) of specific seats on a load of carriers’ planes….

I’ve already booked the summer holiday, and have used all of these sites in making sure I get the best deal 🙂

 

Ewan

Use NewSID on cloned virtualised machines

Posted on by ewand

I came across a problem recently when a colleague was building a virtual Windows Server environment, and was reminded of it the other night when on a webcast with Exchange MVPs, when one of the attendees said he was hitting issues with Exchange 2007 servers not finding the Active Directory properly.

The solution lay at the heart of how the VM environment had been built – using a single source “base” OS image which was then configured to join the domain and had Exchange installed on it, for each machine in the environment.

If you’re building a multi-machine environment, it saves a lot of time if you build a single image and make sure it’s all patched up through Windows Update etc, then it’s just a matter of installing the Exchange (or whatever) servers once you’ve joined a copy of the VM into the domain.

Trouble is, when you install a new server (such as the base OS build), it creates a unique Security Identified (SID) which stays the same even if the machine is renamed and domain membership changed – whilst you’ll typically be able to join a cloned machine into the same domain, and it might look like it’s working OK, numerous strange things can happen – making it look as if the trust between the machine and domain is broken, or having problems authenticating to resources.

NewSID is a free tool that Mark Russinovich developed while at Winternals/SysInternals, and is now available from Microsoft since the acquisition of Mark’s company. The trick is to run NewSID on your cloned machine before joining the domain, and it will create a new, random, SID which means you won’t get clobbered later on with the kind of problems described above.

(NB: It’s worth noting that NewSID isn’t supported for production use – for that, you should really SysPrep the machines instead).

//E

Exchange Archiving – to be, or not to be?

Posted on by ewand

A lot of customers have looked at archiving solutions for Exchange over the last few years, and the most common reason for doing so is to reduce the volume of data held on the Exchange server. This obviously brings benefits for the administrators – they don’t need to back so much “stuff” up every night, and they have a chance to use the archive for longer term compliance/discovery purposes. I’ve even seen customers using archives as a way of migrating content from another email system – eg company migrating from Novell Groupwise to Microsoft Exchange decides they would just bung all the Groupwise content into an archive so they can start with nice clean mailboxes on Exchange, but the users don’t lose access to their historical data.

Archiving does pose an interesting question, though – what if you’re just archiving all the garbage that people don’t delete? I’ve seen cases of companies who have an archival solution but have implemented no mailbox quotas, on the basis that the archive takes care of handling everything they don’t want to back up every day. Now this, to me, seems like a situation where the Exchange mailbox stores are going to be relatively static, but the archives are just going to grow indefinitely…

Exchange 2007 Managed Folders

There are some good papers and demos here on Managed Folders in Exchange 2007, and if used appropriately these capabilities could provide a decent alternative to archiving altogether, or could at least provide a way of throttling the amount of junk that ends up in the archive. A nice side effect is that “important” mail is kept online on the server, so is always accessible from any client (without needing to put additional plug-ins or install any other archive-aware software) such as OWA or even mobile devices.

I say this with some personal experience, since I’ve been using Managed Folders for a while now, in the real world. My mailbox sits in the Exchange Dogfood environment where the Exchange development group and Microsoft IT get to implement very early technology before it’s finished, and before it gets rolled out to everyone else in MS, let alone our customers. My mailbox was on Exchange “12” for a year before it released, and it is set to a gut-busting 2Gb quota, so I don’t really need to use PST files any more.

The approach to using managed folders is one where all mailbox content (and it’s possible to differentiate different types – eg having different rules for emails, calendar appointments, voicemail etc) would have some age limit set (eg 6 months), and on expiry of that time, the content gets “dealt with”. This could involve deleting the content, forwarding it somewhere (through journaling, perhaps sending to a different mail system, to a Sharepoint 2007 site, etc), or moving it from the main mailbox folder into one of the managed folders…

 These managed folders are defined on the server and applied to the user via a policy (so that users in different departments might see different folders from others), but it’s important to note that they are mailbox folders (ie they appear as regular-ish folders within the user’s mailbox, are only visible to the same people that might be able to see the mailbox itself – ie they’re not public folders of any sort -and count against the mailbox quota).

Retention limits can be set on both the “regular” mailbox folders (such that after 6 months, everything will get shifted into one of the managed folders), and also on the managed folders themselves… so in this example, everything from the Inbox etc would get shoved into the Cleanup Review managed folder, and after 30 days in there it will be deleted from the server. So the onus is now on the user to decide if they want to keep anything in that managed folder, and if so, move it to one of the other managed folders, which will typically have a longer retention period (eg HR records might be kept for 7 years).

I’d liken this approach to pushing the user into deciding what they need to keep, and basically assuming that anything which doesn’t get specifically tagged or categorised by the act of moving them to the correct place, is therefore assumed to be disposable and can be removed from the server. Of course, it could still be archived somewhere else for long-term storage. It’s a bit like when I was a kid – my mother would periodically come into my room and put anything left lying around into a bin bag and threaten to chuck it out… if I protested, she would retort “Well, if you wanted to keep it, you shouldn’t have left it lying on the floor now, should you??”

//E