Tag: Exchange

The lost art of the OOF

Posted on by ewand

Some time ago, I posted about how the ".sig" has faded from grandeur. I’d like to add the somewhat terminal dryness of the OOF message to that list, and propose a solution.

OOF is a Microsoft term for Out of Office. It should really be OOO, but is stuck in the days of the predecessor to MS Mail and Exchange. See http://msexchangeteam.com/search/SearchResults.aspx?q=oof for myriad stuff on OOFs, and here (on why it’s OOF and not OOO) for one of the first – and for a while, most-read – blog posts on the Exchange team blog.

I’ve seen a lot of OOFs in my time, and many are of a hugely unimaginative nature. Some are kind-of smart in that they convey the most information in the shortest amount of characters (eg "oof til 7/1 – mail jbloggs if urgent") whereas some have clearly been lovingly hand crafted.

When I worked in the Exchange product group, I sent a mail to one particular guy (who is ex-pat Brit but had been over in Redmond for some time) on the 16th December. Turns out, he’d gone "home" for "the holidays" and I got:

I am so on vacation. By the time I get back, I expect things will look different. See you on 1/17/05. I probably won’t ever read your email. Sorry.

There’s something refreshingly honest about that – it’s admitting that he’s not going to be on email for at least a month, by which time, anything he got sent in email will be out of date. Brilliant. Helps build a case for Instant Messaging if you ask me.

Probably the best OOF I’ve seen came from a somewhat eccentric Canadian (who once replied when I mentioned I’d seen him the previous evening in New Orleans, clearly having a Nice Time), "oh yeah… any night when I don’t end up in jail has to be a good night"). Enjoy…

It happened. I knew it would happen some day, but never dreamed it would happen so soon. I tried to hide it from everyone, but word got out and boy did I catch hell for it. Yes, as embarrassing as it is, I must confess before God and country that I was caught, red-handed, Getting Productive Work Done In The Office!

People, please: do try to control your Shock and Horror. I know we used to do real work Long Ago, but we’ve moved past that, haven’t we? It was an honest mistake; an accident in the truest sense of the word. I did my best to hide it from everyone and thought I was successful around the children and my more-dense co-workers. But there is only so long one can live a charade, and in the end, like a house of cards in a hurricane it came down, down, down…

To pay for my egregious act of productivity and practical effort, I’ve been sentenced to two days of offsite meetings by a jury of my direct management.

Yes, kiddies, that is Two Whole Days of unbridled Tag-Teaming, Outlining, Problem-Solving, Situation-Analysing, Team-Building, Proactively-Leveraging, Federating, Brainstorming Facilitation and Group Contemplation. Unpack the markers and the big pads of paper, Martha: we is gonna have an offsite!!

Can you already feel the sweat drip slowly down ewers of water; the ice cubes grumbling with frustration at their inevitable doom in a pastel room filled with inoffensive Corporate Art? Can you see the elegant buffet of Northwest Grilled Salmon Medallions lounging in a Light Cream Sauce over chirping steam trays, accented by a tossed salad of Garden Fresh Greens? Can you hear that first person raise their hand to state, two hours into to the discussion, that "Before we go any further, we need to define the problem" only to be followed seconds later by another person wondering "what are the criteria for success?"

Do you get the idea that at some point on the first day, I’ll be screaming out "BINGO!" to a very confused audience?

Ah; they’re used to it…

A co-worker once told me you could solve any team problem with a case of malt liquor, an afternoon of skeet shooting and a strip club. He’s no longer employed at the company (something to do with an offsite of his own gone terribly awry near the Montana state border) but I think he was on the right track.

Where I am going, there are no visiting hours, and even worse: no conjugal visits. I might be reachable at <number>. Heck, if it’s really important, email or text me. Rumour has it the gardener can smuggle those in hidden in his watering can…

See you on The Other Side,

ian

Now I ask only one thing. We must all put some degree of (professionally relevant) imagination into our OOFs. It’s only respectful to the poor sods still at work who’re sending us email whilst we enjoy a few days out, isn’t it?

Have a Happy New Year, everyone. And please, for the sake of the rest of us, make your OOFs mean something special. Or funny. Or whatever.

Bulk update Outlook Contacts’ phone numbers to be E.164 compliant

Posted on by ewand

Here’s a quick & dirty tool I put together for Outlook to be able to update all the phone numbers of contacts to make them E.164 compliant. It relates back to a post a while back around the challenges of formatting numbers ‘correctly’, particularly important once you get into using click-to-dial technologies such as Office Communication Server.

The tool itself is basic since it’s only really expected that people will run it once, to sort out the numbers of old contacts you might have. It will check all the contacts in a given folder and automatically fix the numbers up, but there are a few caveats…

  • It’s hard coded for UK numbers beginning +44 … though the code is pretty easy to get to if you know anything about Outlook forms, and you can modify it at will.
  • It doesn’t back up the contacts before modifying, so you might just want to copy your Contacts folder somewhere else before running, if you’re of a nervous disposition. I can verify that it hasn’t mangled any of my contacts and nobody in Microsoft who’s tried it has reported a problem.
  • It’s not exactly straightforward to install – but if you follow the instructions carefully, you’ll be OK.
  • The document in the ZIP file explaining how to install & run it, is in Word 2007 format (docx). If you still haven’t either upgraded or installed the compatibility pack to add OpenXML support to your older version of Office, there’s a link in the ZIP file to go straight to the download page.

A final word: this is completely unsupported, supplied “as is” etc. If it does mangle all your contacts up, just revert to your backup copy – and if you didn’t take a backup then you’ve only got yourself to blame.

Harsh but fair I think 🙂

Enjoy.

The logic converts “from” the format on the left to the format on the right… (_ denotes a space)

Old format number begins New format number begins
0 +44
(0 +44 (
+44_0 +44_
+44(0 +44(
+44 (0) +44
+440 +44
(0) +44_

Examples

old number New number
0118 909 1234 +44118 909 1234
(0118) 909 1234 +44 (118) 909 1234
+44 0118 909 1234 +44 118 909 1234
+44(0118) 909 1234 +44(118) 909 1234
+44 (0)118 909 1234 +44 118 909 1234
+440118 909 1234 +44118 909 1234
(0)118 909 1234 +44 118 909 1234

Drowning in a deluge of spam

Posted on by ewand

I’m sure everyone knows that email spam is a growing problem and that there’s not a great deal we can do to stop it entirely – initiatives like SenderID can help reduce the volume an organisation receives, and by using smart sender and recipient filtering* and connection filtering to drop inbound connections from known spammers or IP addresses that have been dynamically assigned, you can reduce things still further.

* The basic problem here is that by definition, mail arriving from the internet is anonymous. If you’ve ever looked at an SMTP conversation between two servers, you’ll see they’re just a bunch of clear-text commands, with the sending server saying “Hello“, then “I’ve got mail from <…>” and “it’s going to <…>” and followed by the body of the message. There’s nothing to stop anyone sending mail “From:” any address they choose… and anti-spoofing/anti-spam technology has to try to play catch up by filtering out the cases which don’t look legitimate, as well as by filtering content which appears dodgy.

At Microsoft, for example, our IT group filters any email which is coming from the outside and claiming to be “From:” any @microsoft.com address. The thinking is, there is no valid case where anything will ever traverse the internet legitimately coming from a Microsoft address, and enter the Microsoft network from outside via SMTP. So – if you’re a spammer trying to mail into Microsoft and pretending to be Bill, don’t bother. Your email will be “dropped on the floor”.

My own problem is that I have a personal email address which has been the same for about 13 years, and I was generally very careful about giving it out (registering on websites etc), but in recent years have relaxed my policy since the junk mail filters in Hotmail/MSN/Windows Live are generally pretty good and I got very little spam.

Now, some *&”%#!^ spammer has started spoofing mail from my address, and as a result I get a vast number of Non-Delivery Reports, Out of Office messages or notifications that my message has been junked since it looks too spammy. We’re talking anything up to 1,000 messages a day, which Hotmail manages to categorise as unwanted and sticks in my Junk folder, and maybe 50 or 60 that make it through to the inbox.

I’m sorry if you’ve ever had spam from my address – believe me, I don’t want to sell you Meds, offer you cheap replica watches, or present a solution for lengthening any anatomical components. Really, I’m quite happy working in IT.

I can’t think of what to do. I really don’t want to close the account since it’s a very short & sharp email address, and I use it for lots of legitimate non-work related things. I can’t stop someone pretending to be me, so I’m destined to be spending ages cleaning up my mailbox every week until the spammer gets bored and picks on some other address to spoof instead.

Unless anyone else knows different? Let me know if you have any suggestions which might stop the spammer and yet not cripple my own email address…

Careful what names you give to Outlook Contacts when using UM!

Posted on by ewand

This is a follow up to Friday’s post about what happens if you have Exchange Unified Messaging set up to send you notifications on missed call alerts (and on voicemail), using caller-ID to reverse lookup against the personal contacts folder.

Stephen Spence commented:

Fingers crossed nobody is using silly names for any of their contacts and finds out about this the hard way!

And he’s absolutely right – I tried renaming the contact I have for my wife (to “Mrs D!”), then called my desk number (whilst OOF was on), from her mobile.

Here’s what she got (viewed in her mailbox via Exchange 2003 OWA):

image

Just as well I wasn’t calling her “Trouble & Strife” or something like that 🙂

So, be careful… if you have UM and external  OOF turned on, don’t add people into your contacts with disparaging names in case they happen to phone you one day and find out, as Stephen says, the hard way….

I learned a cool thing about Exchange UM today

Posted on by ewand

I’ve seen this behaviour in practice before, but I don’t think it really clicked with me until Neil May from PostCTI (who was hosting our penultimate Exchange Unplugged event today) told me how pleased he was with it.


This functionality concerns the “missed call notification” feature of Exchange Unified Messaging – as well as the server telling you that you have a new voicemail, it will also tell you when someone has connected to UM but hung up before leaving a message.


In both cases (ie when someone leaves a message, or if they hang up beforehand), if the server can identify their caller ID as belonging to someone in your contacts, you’ll see the voicemail or the missed call notification as if it came from the person themselves (it’s actually Microsoft Exchange on behalf of <the caller>, but it primarily shows as if it came from the person directly).


image


So in this case, if I hit “reply” to the notification, it will send an email to the person that was identified as the source of the message. Cool, yes.


What’s nice, though, is that if I have my Out of Office message set, and someone calls me then either leaves a message or hangs up, when the notification lands in my Inbox and appears “From” them, their email address will be sent the Out of Office message I’ve set.


As it happens, I have a contact entry for my own mobile number, in my Outlook contacts folder, but set with my Hotmail email address. When I call my office extension from the mobile, it identifies the contact as the source of the call, and the return address is the Hotmail one, so the Out of Office message I set on my mailbox will be sent to the Hotmail account, since I had associated the mobile number that called me, with that address.


image 


Neil (who spends a lot of time on the road) said this was one of the most unexpectedly cool parts of Exchange UM – customers who call him up and don’t leave a message (but who he’s already added to his Outlook contacts), will get the Out of Office message as if they’d sent him email. So the next question they ask him is, “How can I get that for myself??”


Seeing this in reality brings the technology alive in a lot of users’ eyes.

Voicemail sizes on Exchange 2007

Posted on by ewand

A question we get asked a lot is regarding the sizing of voice mail messages in Exchange 2007. If you’re not familiar with the built-in voicemail capabilities, Exchange can function as a voice mail system (or Unified Messaging system, really – it’s a way of unifying voice and inbound fax messages with email).

image What’s particularly nice about this is that as far as Exchange is concerned, email and voicemails are just messages. I can respond to a voicemail (such as the one pictured here) by hitting reply, and Outlook (or OWA, or Windows Mobile etc) will create a email response to the “sender” of the voice message, assuming it can work out who they are based on the caller ID that was identified when the message was left.

Lots of people get nervous when thinking about holding voice mail in Exchange, worrying that the message sizes will burden their already overloaded mailboxes. In reality, the size is rarely a big deal – we tend not to get too many voicemails (I probably get less than 10 a week), at least in comparison to the volume of emails received. Add to this the fact that most voicemails are relatively short (and you set a limit on how long the system will let a caller ramble before cutting them off anyway: generally if it’s more than 2 minutes long, then it’s more of a soliloquy).

There are a few ways of encoding the voice content that Exchange will record as voice mails, and which option you choose might depend on how the users are going to be collecting the voice mails. Outlook, OWA and Windows Mobile can all play Windows Media (WMA) format files, so that’s the default – and offers the highest quality for minimum size of message – typically a couple of Kb per second or so (a combination of some overhead for the message, and then the encoding rate of the sample).

The options are to stick with WMA, or if you’re looking to interoperate playback of voice content with other telecoms equipment, you may want to encode using GSM 06.10 (an 8-bit compressed format derived from the GSM mobile specifications), or G.711 (a 16-bit PCM non-compressed format, defined as an ITU standard). Both GSM 06.10 and G.711 use the WAV format for representing the sound, and will deliver larger sound files than WMA.

There’s a nice explanation of the options over on http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998670.aspx, including this comparative graph of the file sizes:

Basically, don’t use G.711 unless you want *really* big voicemails… 

Finally, SP1 will add the option of using Microsoft’s RTAudio codec for playback to Office Communicator Phone Edition devices – part of the integration between OCS and Exchange 2007.

Holy smoke, it’s an explosive demo

Posted on by ewand

I’ve spent the last couple of days in London helping out with the first Exchimageange Unplugged 2007 events, which have gone really well. One attendee to the first session, held with BT at the Tate Modern, said in 15 years of working in IT, it was the best Microsoft event he’d ever been to. Let’s hope the rest can keep the standard so high.

Anyway, today’s event (in association with Dimension Data, at the Radisson Mayfair hotel) had an unexpectedly dramatic turn. Brett‘s demo server (used to run all the demos for the first 3 sessions, running numerous VMs in Virtual Server) gave a sudden burst of fan noise and emitted a puff of smoke, during the 2nd session. The noise continued throughout the session in bursts, and there was a funny ozone-like smell close to the box…

Somewhat amazingly, it carried on and he wisely decided to leave it on, until after the 3rd and final session was complete. Just as well, since after it was powered off, it wouldn’t come back online again – power supply failure, methinks.

Anyway, here’s Brett and Julian standing by with precautions, in case it happened during Julian’s brilliant unified messaging demo session.

P1000098

They got through that session and hopefully a replacement Shuttle box will have arrived before the third event of the week, tomorrow!

Microsoft launches “Online” hosted services

Posted on by ewand

In an attempt to clarify the whole online software branding, with “Live” being consumer oriented and “Online” being aimed at businesses, Microsoft launched a new service recently, but that may have gone unnoticed (what with other launch events such as PerformancePoint Server for business intelligence, or the Unified Communications launch of OCS and Exchange SP1 etc).


The new “Online” service (“Business Productivity Infrastructure“) is offering Exchange mailboxes, Sharepoint sites and Office Communication Server hosted presence & IM. Currently the service is aimed at larger enterprise customers, though it will be extended to smaller organisations in due course. The Exchange, Sharepoint and OCS parts are all available separately, under the titles Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online and Office Communications Online.


The whole online services offering can be a bit confusing – at one level, Microsoft sells “Exchange Hosted Services” (EHS), which is a hosted filtering, archiving and encryption service that routes inbound & outbound SMTP mail to/from an organisation, weeds out the spam and infected messages then delivers what’s left, optionally keeping a copy “in the cloud” for later access (eg for compliance purposes).image


In this EHS model, you can still run Exchange “on premise”, it’s just that the hosted filtering etc helps reduce the volume of inbound junk.


This kind of service differs from the hosted Exchange offerings from various partners, who will host Exchange mailboxes for you in their data centres. Hosted Exchange has been around in one form or another for years, and it makes a lot of sense for start up companies or smaller orgs who don’t want the overhead and up-front expense of buying & managing their own server in-house.


image


Rather than buying Exchange servers & licenses, with Hosted Exchange, the customers have a monthly subscription to the hosted provider, who provide all the service via a URL which can be used by Outlook or Outlook Web Access to connect. Hosted Exchange typically has a separate login for the end users, though in more advanced cases, the hosting provided may have a private network link back into the corporate network, allowing access to the corporate Active Directory.


There are hosting providers who will basically manage the server and the delivery of the service to your end users, but the licenses are owned by the customer directly – so in effect, you’d buy Exchange but instead of running it yourself, on your own premises, you outsource that operation to someone else, for a negotiated price.


The new Microsoft Exchange Online service effectively delivers hosted Exchange, but allows for customers who’ve already bought Exchange etc directly. In other words, you’d be able to go to a partner who re-sells the Exchange Online service, and buy the hosted service from them at a lower cost because you’ve already bought the rights to use the software (so the cost would be the operational part, not the software subscription).


This new service adds an extra choice, but it’s not going to replace Hosted Exchange – it’s quite likely that you’ll be able to get a more customised service directly from a hosting partner, and it might be less expensive than the Microsoft Online service too, depending on who’s offering it and where.

Windows Home Server – would you have it in your home?

Posted on by ewand

I just read an interesting article from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes on ZDNet about Windows Home Server, speculating whether there really was a market for such a device, and who would buy it.


Adrian’s point – and it is a valid one, if you know anything about what the “typical” home user might do and buy – is that your average Joe or Joanna isn’t going to march out and splash a few hundred quid on a box to back up all their home PCs, even if they’ve lost precious data before.


In an enterprise IT environment, disaster recovery has often been treated as a second-class citizen, until a disaster actually happens – after which point, it’s properly factored into things. I vividly recall making the case for DLT drives over DAT over 10 years ago, yet on cost grounds alone it looked like DAT could do the biz… until the crunch came, a disaster happened, it looked like the DR plan wasn’t quite up to scratch, and after that it was easy to get money to do DR properly.



Sad to say it, but 9/11 and the London 7/7 bombings in 2005 probably helped a lot of organisations realise that backup (and more importantly, recovery) was actually worth spending a bit of time & effort on. You only realise how important it is to have a contingency plan, when you’re faced with the real need to have – or to show you have – one.


As an aside, if you haven’t seen it yet, Microsoft announced Data Protection Manager 2007 recently, as a means to snapshot and backup various systems to low-cost disk backup. DPM could allow you to backup not just file systems, but Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL Server, using VSS snapshot technology. We’re now using it internally to back Exchange up to low-cost SAS drives, as well as other things.



I have a buddy who’s known as “Foggy” (from “Foghorn Leghorn”), so called because he had a loud voice on the phone when he first joined Microsoft in a Product Support Services role. If you’re interested in DPM2007, just let me know and I’ll put you in touch with him – he’s “Mr DPM” in the UK and is keen to tell everyone just how good it is.


ANYWAY.


Back to Home Server. I’ve been beta-testing the “Q”/”Quattro” product for a while, and I think the finished Home Server looks really good. Have I got one at home? Yes. But then, I only have one other PC at home (besides the corporate laptops that occupy the place, and a few old machines that spend most of their time powered off) so I’m not sure I’d shell out for a Home Server (when they’re comercially available) just to protect that one box, and serve it content.


image


What I’d wish for Home Server


I’d love it if Windows Home Server could be a Media Center – ie I could whack a couple of TV Tuners in the WHS box, and it would stream that content to other PCs or Media Center Extenders around the house. Think of it like a Windows Media Center Server, if you like. I might even think about sticking the box in the loft, next to the Coax-amplifier which distributes TV signals around the house – especially if Bluetooth or WiFi remotes from around the house could control the Server, making the MCE experience available on remote PCs, Extenders and directly on TVs themselves.


I’d also really like some OEM to bring out a device which was hardened and much more appliance-like, maybe with some other features – I’m thinking like a box which had a Powerline-ethernet style built-in power supply (and corresponding remote adapter(s)) which would mean I could stick the box anywhere there was power and not worry about signal or CAT-5 cabling back to the wired/wireless network that all the PCs are on. I was thinking it would be quite cool to have a Windows Home Server in the garage. My garage is separate from the house (by about 6 ft) so if the house burned down, there is a chance the garage wouldn’t (though there’s probably enough combustible material in the garage to make it happen the other way around).


I thought if I could put a WHS in the garage, it would mean I wouldn’t need to cool the box much (even in the summer, the garage is going to be cooler than many places, and in the winter, it’s positively COLD) and apart from the odd spider invading the box, it’d probably be pretty hazard-free.


So in an ideal world, a Home Server would be a solid-state box with no vents or fans, which can draw network access through its power supply. There might be one company – Tranquil PC – who’ll be able to offer this nirvana sooner than most. Tranquil PC have some very interesting fanless technology, but for a regular PC there’s a payoff in terms of performance (ie to run their box cool enough so it doesn’t need a fan, it’s not exactly cutting edge) and price (there’s a premium for the design and low-volume nature). For a home server, you’re not bothered about quad core processors with 8Gb of RAM, so Tranquil’s offerings could well be in the sweet spot. Time will tell if the price point people are willing to pay will match these expectations.


Coming back to the ZDNet article – Adrian reckons that the average home user will spend $30 on backup. I know I’ve had hard disk failures but probably only back up to the USB disk I already have, every couple of months. Who’s going to buy Home Server this year, in time for Christmas? Tech-savvy folk who have multiple PCs at home, I’d think – maybe families where each of the kids have their own PC, but not exactly the less tech-literate types.


Maybe the time for Home Server is when it can not only stream data to remote devices, back them up and make sure they’re appropriately patched – but when users in the home can have the Home Server record stuff from the TV and distribute it directly to their device for later viewing.


Maybe that’s v2 functionality, who knows?