Friday, November 14, 2008
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Update (11/15/08 1240PST): Fixed the URLs in the links to point to the actual decks. Sorry!
Time this year has flown! Hard to believe that I've just finished up my last conference for the year -- Exchange Connections Fall at the fabulous Mandalay Bay resort and conference center in Las Vegas. This was my second trip to Vegas this year (the first was in May for the Exchange/DPM session at MMS), and I really prefer the city in November: far fewer people, much more pleasant temperatures.
I gave the following three sessions yesterday:
- (EXC16) The Collaboration Blender -- This session is adapted from the Outlook and SharePoint: Playing Well Together article I wrote for Windows IT Pro magazine (subscription required). Exchange and SharePoint are both touted as collaboration solutions and have some overlapping functionality, so this session explores some of the overlaps and compares and contrasts what each is good for. (In other words, we spend a lot of time talking about Exchange public folders.) And where does Outlook fit into this mess? There's even a handy summary table!
- (EXC17) Exchange Virtualization -- As I confessed to my attendees, this session was a gamble that paid off. Back when I proposed the topic, there was no official statement of Microsoft support for Exchange virtualization (no, "Don't!" doesn't really count). I guessed that by the time November rolled around, Hyper-V would have finally shipped and they'd have shifted that stance -- and I was right. Because I focus more on the Hyper-V side of things, I invited VMWare to send a representative to the session to present their take on the subject. The resulting session was very good, and I learned a bunch of things too.
- (EXC18) Exchange Protection using Data Protection Manager -- Although a lot of the content here was the same material that I've already presented this year (what, 4-5 times now?), I did have to make some changes thanks to the brilliant curve ball that Jason Buffington and his crew in the DPM team threw me. You see, Connections now has all Microsoft speakers speak on one day (imaginatively named "Microsoft Day" for some reason), and that day was Tuesday. While Jason couldn't be here, Karandeep Anand (who is the DPM bomb!) was -- and I've been trading decks and VMs and material back and forth with Jason and Karandeep for over a year now. Rather than give a less brilliant copy of the session Karandeep had already done, I added in some new material focusing on the internals of the Exchange store and how that affects Exchange protection, removed the demo, and really attacked the topic from the Exchange side of things. I think it worked. Either that or it was people staying to get free copies of the DPM book that my publisher thoughtfully provided.
A lot of my fellow speakers dread speaking on the last day, but I've found that I've come to enjoy it. Sure, you have smaller attendance numbers -- but the people who are there (especially if you get lucky enough to do the last session on the last day) are the people who really want to be there. I also encourage questions from the audience during the presentation, with the caveat that if they're too detailed or going to be answered later I'll defer them; I like the interactivity. I usually learn something from my attendees, which makes it a good time for everyone.
Back to the grind. I know I've been way too quiet on the blogfront lately, and I promise, I've got some fresh new content in the works. First, though, I have to catch up on the paying work. For some reason, my corporate overlords seem to expect me to do billable work too, not just speak and blog. Ah, well. At least I didn't get RickRolled on my birthday!
Friday, October 31, 2008
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I have gotten a lot of email from people who wished me well and wanted to find out the status of my recent Masters rotation. I'm working on a bigger write-up, but here's the short form:
- It was intense. I had a ton of fun, I learned more than I thought I could, and I met a lot of great people who are scary smart. I was also exhausted after it was all said and done.
- It was worth the money. Paul breaks it down for you here, and I agree with every data point. I think it's fair to ignore the cost of travel, because no matter where you go for training, you'd have to pay it.
- I'm not yet a Master. There's four tests you have to pass, and I only nailed three of them. I'm now patiently waiting word for retests, as are several of my classmates, and then we'll knock 'em dead.
Thank you, everyone, for your well-wishes and questions. As I said, I'm working on a longer post or series of posts, but those will be a bit delayed in coming because I want to run them by the folks at the MCM/MCA program to make sure that I'm not talking about stuff I shouldn't be.
Friday, October 03, 2008
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For the next three weeks, I'll be squirreled away in a hidden location, having my brains surgically removed and replaced with a quantum-computing device filled with Exchange knowledge. Good times!
Seriously, though, I'll be off to the October rotation of the three-week Microsoft Certified Master: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 program. The Master certification is a new certification that Microsoft is rolling out, placed between the MCITP and MCA certifications. It's so new, in fact, that it doesn't yet appear on the Find a Microsoft Certification by Technology page.
So, newness established, what does this Master certification entail? First, it's not your typical Microsoft certification.
To ensure that people going through this experience are ready for it, they're actually screening candidates. For the Exchange Master program, the published criteria are:
- 5+ years Exchange 2003
- 1+ years Exchange 2007
- Thorough understanding of Exchange design/architecture, AD, DNS, and core network services
- Certification as a MCITP: Enterprise Messaging (Exchange 2007 exams 70-236, 70-237, and 70-238)
- Certification as a MCSE Windows 2003 or MCTS: Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Configuration (exam 70-640)
Scrape all that together, and what do you get?
- Three weeks of "highly intensive classroom training" -- and by all reports, they're not kidding when they say that. I've been through plenty of Microsoft classes, and for this one, my corporate lords have completely cleared the decks for me.
- Three computerized written tests (I assume one per week). I have no idea what these are going to be like, but after having done three exams in the past month, I really hope they're a notch above the standard Microsoft certification exam.
- One lab-based exam (administered at the end). Now, I really like the thought of hands-on tests; one of the best job interviews I ever went through included a hands-on test. However, they're a lot more stressful precisely because you can't fake things or puzzle out the the right answer through careful elimination. You have to know your stuff.
Assuming I survive and my head doesn't asplode, in a month I'll get to call myself an Exchange Master. This, of course, leads to the obvious question: do I get an apprentice? If so, I have a suggestion:
I really want an apprentice. I think I deserve one. You listening, 3Sharp?
One of the projects I've been working on recently involves managing Windows Mobile devices; Tim and I have gotten to spend a bit of time playing with some very cool software. However, we both noticed that Windows Mobile makes some tasks unnecessarily complicated, such as verifying basic network connectivity. For example, can you tell me how to do any of the following under WM 6.0:
- Determine which network interfaces you have running at any given moment
- Determine the actual IP address configuration a network interface has
- Run basic connectivity tools such as ping and traceroute to validate that your device can talk to other network devices
Thanks to a tip from someone at Microsoft, I was introduced to the lovely free tools provided by Enterprise Mobile, including the spiffy Windows Mobile IP Utility. This lovely tool gives you a great view of what's going on network-wise with your device...including see the pseudo-devices that are created when you cradle your device (and the funky networking that goes on there).
They also make the GUI CAB Signing Utility, which is especially useful if you're pushing software applications out to your Windows Mobile device and want them signed. It's basically a GUI wrapper around the .NET Framework's signtool.exe binary, allowing you to easilly select one or more .CAB files, pick an appropriate certificate from your Personal certificate store (must have the Code Signing capability), select the output directory, and let it rip. I've got a screenshot of it in action in this separate picture over here. For some reason, my computer keeps giving me a signtool error, but the folks at Enterprise Mobile have contacted me and are going to help me troubleshoot this issue over the next few days. Very cool for them!
Friday, September 26, 2008
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I've been in study mode a lot lately, as I've been preparing for an upcoming class I'll be going to. In the process, I've had to loop around and pick up several MCP exams I'd not gotten. Today, I'm studying Active Directory.
I knew that you could push applications out to computers via GPO, and I knew there were two different ways of doing it: publishing and assigning. What I could never keep straight, until now, was what the differences were. One choice offers the program in Add/Remove Programs and the user must go in and click Install; the other adds it to the Start Menu (and performs the installation the first time the user starts the application). As an added wrinkle, one option is available to both user policies and computer policies, while the other is available only to user policies.
Well, I finally came up with a mnemonic to help me keep 'em straight:
PUblishing Permits the User to install. That is, you can only publish to User policies, and it offers the choice to the user to install it (via Add/Remove Programs).
ASsignment Automatically Sets up the program. That is, you can assign a program and know it will be added to the Start menu, and (by elimination) can be done both to a user and to a computer.
Hope this helps!
Friday, August 29, 2008
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You may have missed this interesting blog post this morning amidst all the political kerfuffle, so let me sum up: the next version of OCS will only support x64 platforms.
This isn't the big deal it would have been for OCS 2007. A lot of the initial FUD around the 64-bit-only move in Exchange 2007 turned out to be mere steam. While there were some initial challenges involved in managing the new 64-bit Exchange deployment from 32-bit machines, Microsoft got a lot of the licensing figured out and released the appropriate sets of tools to allow management of Exchange 2007 from both 32-bit and 64-bit environments. I fully expect that the OCS group has been paying close attention to all of this and taken good notes.
There's no denying that Exchange 2007 benefits from the "64-bit only in production" stance -- and with the release of Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, not to mention Microsoft's updated support statement for virtualization environments, the need for 32-bit environments is going away. My biggest reason for wanting 32-bit Exchange environments was so I could run demos under Virtual Server; now that I have Hyper-V, I'm probably not in any rush to go back to Virtual Server and the 32-bit limitation. 64-bit hardware is the norm today, and the x64 Windows variants are solid and mainstream enough for my dedicated application servers. (Maybe not so for the desktop quite yet, but still getting there rapidly.)
The one thing I'm skeptical about, though, is whether the move to 64-bits is really going to reduce the total number of servers in the deployment. In Exchange 2007, I only saw the server reductions in very large environments; the mailbox-per-server gains we got from 64-bits was offset by the explicit breakout of roles and the business needs that drove redundant configurations like CCR (which meant no co-locating roles with the Mailbox role) and multiple HT/CAS servers. I'm wondering how this is going to play out with the next version of OCS, where it already has so many distinct roles in play.
What I *hope* to see is that the maximum capacity of each server role (such as the number of users per pool or the number of streams per mediation server) can be driven upwards; this makes the large datacenter configuration options much more attractive, because it does translate to a reduced number of servers. However, for organizations that still have relatively low bandwidth separating their various locations, 64-bits won't do much to help; OCS deployment planning is very dependent on bandwidth, and is often the top limit on scalability long before the limits of the 32-bit Windows environment.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
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There are a lot of people out there who want to try to get around Microsoft's recommended configuration for the OCS Edge Server roles. For whatever reason, they don't like the thought of have two network interfaces, one on a publicly routable IP network, the other on the private network. I've talked in the past about some of the reasons why this configuration is not only recommended, but actually a good idea, but let's just say it took a lot of talking and thinking before I accepted that notion.
MVP Jeff Schertz has done a fantastic job of walking through the various permutations people have come up with, separating what will work from what won't, and explaining the pros and cons of each variant. I highly recommend this post.
I also want to amplify a point he makes: having multiple interfaces (whether physical or virtual) on the same subnet will cause interesting and otherwise inexplicable weirdness on a Windows machine. I'll write up the situation I'm seeing in a bit (not OCS!), but let me be clear: it's caused me all sorts of problems. Run, do not walk, away from any "solution" that requires this.
Monday, July 28, 2008
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Continuing from my previous post on MOS...
I didn't really mention this in the previous post, but MOS is designed to provide a hosted alternative to the server-side applications. One of the goals is to continue working with existing native clients and client access methods, so (for example) you can access your Exchange Online mailbox through OWA (running from MOS), through Outlook, or even through EAS/Windows Mobile. In order to do this, though, your client applications need to know how to talk to MOS and provide the proper credentials.
You can do this the hard way or the easy way. The hard way is running around and reconfiguring each application by hand and teaching your users how to use a separate set of credentials. The easy way is to use the MOS Sign-In tool, a little .NET 3.0 application that runs on the client desktop. It interacts with Outlook 2007 RTM/SP1, LiveMeeting 8, and IE7+.
When this application is run, it will invite the user to logon to MOS. The first time they do so, they're required to change their password. It then detects the apporpriate applications, offers to configure them to work with MOS, and then just sits quietly on the desktop, providing a seamless SSO experience.
To be continued...
I'm at an airlift here in Redmond for the new Microsoft Online Services (MOS), Microsoft's hosted services platform. Right now, MOS offers a combination of hosted Exchange (OWA, Outlook, and even EAS!), hosted SharePoint, and Live Meeting. We've just gone through an overview of the service, and it looks cool -- enough so that I'm now seriously considering switching my personal domains over to it (especially since they offer the ability to synchronize with your Active Directory deployment).
MOS is currently in beta and you can go sign up for a time-limited trial. There's only a certain number of trial accounts active at any given time, so your trial request may not be provisioned immediately; however, you can go to https://mocp.microsoftonline.com and sign up for one. You'll need a Windows Live account.
As you might imagine, MOS allows you to associate one or more DNS domains with your online account. When you register for your account, you're asked for a domain. This domain is not verified and, in fact, seems to be used simply as an internal administrative tag -- once your account and service is set up, you have to specifically add DNS domains. Adding them is a fairly simple process:
- Register your domain name with a registrar.
- Provision your domain with a DNS provider (often combined with step 1).
- Add the domain name to your MOS Admin Center.
- Run the verification wizard and add the auto-generated CNAME to your domain's DNS zone.
- Validate the domain in the MOS Admin Center.
- Start provisioning users with this domain, enable inbound e-mail on this domain, etc.
The verfication step is an important piece, because this helps MOS make sure that you're using a domain you're actually in control of. Otherwise, malicious people could sign in and hijack your domain, which would suck. The way Microsoft does this is actually simple and elegant: they generate a unique CNAME record (that looks very much like a GUID), and ask you to add this CNAME record, pointing back to a server under their control, to your zone. This has lots of advantages:
- It's pragmatic. If you can add a CNAME record to a zone file, you effectively control the domain.
- It avoids the nastiness that can result in WHOIS-based verification and allows people who register domains to continue using proxy companies, hiding their personal info from WHOIS spammers.
- It's relatively easy. You simply have to add a simple record to your DNS; if you can't do this (or your DNS hoster can't do it for you), then you have much bigger problems managing your DNS and verifying your DNS domain under MOS is the least of your problems.
- It's low-impact. The generated CNAME is highly unlikely to be queried during normal operations by your users; only MOS is likely to be looking for it. It doesn't require you to repoint your MX records or otherwise make major modifications to your infrastructure if all you want to do is start using online SharePoint and Live Meeting.
Note that just because you add a domain to MOS doesn't mean you have to use it for email! That's a separate operation, which is a two-step process of enabling inbound email for that domain and then updating your MX records appropriately.
More on other MOS functionality coming later...big thanks to the event staff for their kind permission for me to blog!
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
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While I was away on vacation last week, Microsoft finally released the DPM 2007 Rollup packages to Microsoft Downloads. (I blame Jason Buffington; I'm sure he waited until I was out of office.) There are both x86 and x64 packages; both require you to download three separate files.
In addition to various bug fixes, this rollup (also known as a "feature pack") provides the following new functionality:
- Official support for protecting Windows Server 2008 servers (and supported applications, such as Exchange Server 2007, running on Windows 2008), including protecting the system state.
- You get support for backing up clustered Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 environments. Before, the cluster itself was not seen as a cluster by DPM, and depending on your configuration you may have needed to do some funky scripting.
- Better tape handling. You can now share tape libraries between multiple DPM servers, reducing the cost of long-term tape retention and allowing better utilization of high-end tape libraries. You can also put multiple protection groups on a single tape; DPM 2007 RTM would start a new tape as it began writing each protection group, even if the previous tape was not fully used. This could get expensive.
I haven't yet been able to confirm whether the cleaning tape bug Tim noted has been fixed in this update, but I suspect not.
Applying this update is a four-step process:
- Install the main DPM update (DataProtectionManager2007-KB949779.exe)on your DPM servers.
- Install the SQL Server update (SqlPrep-KB949779.msp) on the machine hosting the SQL Server database for DPM. In a default install, this is the same machine that is your DPM server.
- Update the agents on your protected servers to version 2.0.8107.0. You can push them out through the console or manually run the .msp update package on your protected machines (using any supported push mechanism). You will need to restart the protected machines for the new agent version to take effect.
- Update the DPM Management Shell update (DPMManagementShell2007-KB949779.msp) on all of your DPM management stations (including the DPM servers themselves).
Although the official instructions give the update steps in the previous order, I have run all three udpates on my lab DPM servers before updating the agents on my protected servers, and as long as Microsoft doesn't say that's not supported, that's the way I'd recommend doing it -- that way, all of your PowerShell tasks are using the updates even if you don't have all the protection agents pushed out yet.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
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Everyone's being so coy in the Windows blogosphere today. "As you may have heard..." Heck with that; this is wicked cool. Hyper-V has Released To Manufacturing ... and is already available for download. As the link explains, it'll start coming down the Windows Update pipe July 8th. If you don't want your Windows Server 2008 machine to be updated yet, don't be blindly accepting updates.
Why wouldn't you want to get it first thing?
- You're running a previous version of Hyper-V. If so, be aware that upgrading your VMs is not automatic. It's not a horrible process, but it will take some time. You have to manually export each VM, remove the VMs from the server, upgrade the server, re-import the VMs, then update the Integration Services. The more VMs you have, the more time this will take.
- You're running some software that is not yet compatible with Hyper-V RTM but works with an earlier build. In this case, you want to wait until that software has a patch available.
I fit into both categories. I think I'm going to wait until I'm back from vacation to do it.
Oh, yes, just because Hyper-V is now RTM doesn't mean that you can go run to install Exchange 2007 on it in production. See Scott Schnoll's post for more info.
As IT professionals, we are more than often prone to fall to the perils of magical thinking. (I'm sure this is a side-effect of being human, which is a pesky and bothersome condition I will have to do something about one of these days.) Magical thinking in this context is when we have not internalized the intricacies of a problem and instead rely on formulas rather than true understanding to come up with solutions.
At one ISP I used to work at, we had a glorious reclaimed piece of technology, an Auspex NS-5500 file server. Every now and then on reboot, this old beast of a machine would fail to boot up; the cure was to open the cover over the drive cage and give it a good swift whack. We all assumed that this was because one of the drive connectors was a bit loose, but when our "magic" fix failed to work one night I discovered that it was in fact because one of the screws holding things in place was missing, allowing the drive bay to sag just a tiny bit. It was this tiny bit of sag that put just enough stress on the connector for drive 0. Had we actually opened the case up earlier, we'd have been able to solve the problem -- and prevent a year of whacking the server.
All too often, I see magical thinking in the field of security. Case in point: I recently heard about a gentleman who has a client that is requesting ETRN support be added back to Exchange 2007, either natively or through an add-on. They want to deploy the Edge role in their DMZ, have it queue up mail for the internal organization, and then have their Hub Transports (in the internal protected network) initiate a connection out to de-queue the messages using the ETRN SMTP extension. The reason they want this is that they've done due diligence and read some very thorough documents about computer network zones and have come to the conclusion that all network connections must be initiated from the most secure network. This, they say, removes the threat of malware taking over the Edge server in the DMZ and allowing an attacker to use it as a launching point to the protected network.
Now, the recommendation for connections to be initiated from a more secure network to a less secure network is a good general baseline to follow when it makes sense. However, it is not realistic in all cases (if we followed this to the letter, nobody would be able to receive e-mail from external senders except through random polling of Internet SMTP hosts, which is not at all scalable). This is doubly true if you don't understand how the underlying protocols work. Case in point: ETRN, defined by RFC 1985, "SMTP Service Extension for Remote Message Queue Starting". Quoting from section 3, "The Remote Queue Processing Declaration service extension" (emphasis added):
To save money, many small companies want to only maintain transient connections to their service providers. In addition, there are some situations where the client sites depend on their mail arriving quickly, so forcing the queues on the server belonging to their service provider may be more desirable than waiting for the retry timeout to occur.
Both of these situations could currently be fixed using the TURN command defined in [1], if it were not for a large security loophole in the TURN command. As it stands, the TURN command will reverse the direction of the SMTP connection and assume that the remote host is being honest about what its name is. The security loophole is that there is no documented stipulation for checking the authenticity of the remote host name, as given in the HELO or EHLO command. As such, most SMTP and ESMTP implementations do not implement the TURN command to avoid this security loophole.
This has been addressed in the design of the ETRN command. This extended turn command was written with the points in the first paragraph in mind, yet paying attention to the problems that currently exist with the TURN command. The security loophole is avoided by asking the server to start a new connection aimed at the specified client.
See the problem? ETRN was not designed to solve a security problem; it was designed to solve a financial problem back in days when always-on bandwidth was a lot more expensive and most ISPs metered traffic. It masquerades as solving a security problem only because it's designed to avoid a loophole in an insecure and exploitable feature. As a result, ETRN won't solve the problem these people want it to solve; all it does is tell the system in the DMZ to initiate a new connection to the Hub Transport servers. It doesn't reuse the existing connection initiated by the Hub Transport servers. They can't use a firewall rule to block outgoing access from the Edge to the Hub Transport and be safe, because they'll cut off all incoming traffic.
However, let us for a moment assume that it did work the way they wanted it to: my Hub Transport initiates an outbound SMTP session to the Edge. In this session, HT is the SMTP client, ET is the SMTP server. As soon as HT issues the ETRN command, they still have to swap roles -- HT is now using the SMTP server code paths, while the ET is using the SMTP client code paths. Any theoretical vulnerabilities that are in the HT SMTP implementation are still going to be there, still exposed to the message traffic about to be sent down the connection, still open to exploitation.
This is the magical thinking: firewalls and a DMZ will protect my traffic. This is not true; firewalls and networks zones are two components of a complete security plan. Neither firewalls nor network zones can protect legitimate traffic, nor are they designed to; they are designed to allow you to designate which traffic is legitimate. If you want to secure that traffic, you need to turn to other measures.
Monday, June 23, 2008
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Things got hairy enough last week that I forgot to post, but my hosting provider got the problem sorted out and the website is back online.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
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If you've tried to get to masteringdpm.com in the past couple of days, you may have gotten a cryptic error message instead of a site with DPM goodness. I'm working with my hosting provider to get it put back up ASAP and will post again once it's back up.
While I was at the Tech-Ed NA IT Pro conference last week, Jason Buffington and I took the chance to invade the Tech-Ed Online fishbowl studio and record a quick Tech-Talk on using DPM. You can now view it online on the Tech-Ed IT Pro page and the Library page, or stream it directly. Now that Tech-Ed's over, maybe we'll both find the time to be on Xbox Live at the same time so we can continue our discussion in Call of Duty 4...
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
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Just a quick shout-out to fellow 3Sharpie Mike Rand, who just posted his first post to the 3Sharp blog site last week. Mike's a super-smart developer here with mad SharePoint skills; I can't imagine why he hasn't blogged sooner than this, but I hope to see him posting more frequently! He's also pretty good at foosball.
To reinforce yesterday's post about Exchange Web Services (EWS), I wanted to draw your attention to the Exchange Developer Roadmap posted on May 22 2008 on the Exchange API-spotting blog.
There shouldn't really be any surprises here, but there were a couple of items I wanted to highlight. First:
Given this commitment to Web services and our goal of making Exchange Web Services the richest developer interface for Exchange... (emphasis added)
Next:
Here's a preview of some of the functionality that we plan to add to the next release of Exchange Web Services:
- Access to Folder Associated Items (FAI) and read/write access to user settings (Devin: this page in the MAPI reference indicates that FAIs are things like views and forms. I believe that this also fixes a known quirk of EWS that keeps you from creating Outlook-visible search folders that use certain property paths. I believe this also gives access to server-side rules, if they're not already accessible through a separate part of the API.)
- Management of Personal Distribution Lists (Devin: very cool.)
- Throttling capabilities that give Exchange administrators control over system resource consumption (Devin: this will be very nice for helping keep poorly written applications from taking down the Exchange servers.)
- A powerful and easy-to-use server-to-server authentication model to enable building portals and enterprise mash-ups (Devin: let's hope this can ease some of the pain of building Exchange-aware SharePoint sites, at least those that don't require direct access to private mailbox content.)
- An easy-to-use Microsoft .NET API that fully wraps the Web service calls, which makes Web service development even easier (Devin: I'll be interested in seeing how this stacks up against third-party offerings like the Independentsoft EWS client offering.)
Then they go on to list the APIs that will get removed (Exchange WebDAV, Store Events, CDO 3.0/CDOEx, and ExOLEDB) and moved to "extended support" (Exchange Server MAPI Client, CDO 1.2.1). Don't get too excited by the MAPI client -- it's not what you think:
Provides server applications a MAPI runtime for accessing Exchange.
Note: This is not the Outlook MAPI Client library that is included with Outlook.
and
Outlook's Exchange MAPI Store provider, available in the Outlook MAPI Client library can also be used to access an Exchange mailbox or public folder.
If you're going to start writing Exchange-aware applications, you should probably start looking at EWS first for future compatibility. If you're trying to support Exchange 2003 at the same time...good luck.
Monday, June 16, 2008
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I just got word that Independentsoft has come out with a beta version of an EWS client API for the .NET Framework and .NET Compact Framework. I've not looked at it yet, but I'm particularly hopeful about having a good way to work with EWS from Windows Mobile devices.
Exchange Web Services (EWS), introduced in Exchange 2007 and enhanced in Exchange 2007 SP1, is Microsoft preferred interface for all future programmatic reach into the Exchange store. While EWS is a Web service, it can be pretty complicated to work with. Luckily, we've done some work with EWS here at 3Sharp; Paul's been presenting some developer training sessions on EWS in partnership with Microsoft. We've found that Inside Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Web Services
has been a valuable reference on EWS.
One of the challenges for EWS development is that the schema and object model is pretty complex when compared with the typical Web service, enough so that you need to use special Visual Studio proxy classes when you use .NET to work with EWS. This, by the way, is very likely the cause of the compatibility issue I found between EWS and SharePoint Designer -- Designer's proxy classes aren't the EWS-aware ones.
Monday, June 09, 2008
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The talented people at 3Sharp are one of the best reasons to work here. Our Platforms Group is just one piece of the pie here; we've got some top-tier development talent who can make SharePoint stand up and dance. Those guys down the hall have been working hard on a little surprise they like to call the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint, which Microsoft has just released on Codeplex as indicated in their press release. 3Sharpies John Peltonen, David Gerhardt, and Paul Robichaux are also blogging about it, so if you’re interested, check them out.
I've been hearing bits and pieces, but last week I got to sit down and take a good look at what they're doing. Wow. This is some cool stuff that is going to make sharing podcasts, video talks, and other knowledge sharing content a lot easier. I can't wait until I can start using it; I've already lined up some content that I can put up and I'm already thinking of some more I can do.
If you haven't seen me in person recently, you may not realize I'm a heretic. Yes, that's right -- I use an Apple 15" MacBook Pro with Vista as my laptop. It took some jiggling to get it all working -- an upgrade to Leopard (OS X 10.5) for the final release of BootCamp, an upgrade to Vista SP1, and finding a stable version of the Atheros wireless drivers -- but it's now reliable and fast.
There are some downsides to this particular laptop. It's only gives me 2GB of RAM, which means that I can't run a typical VM configuration (DC, DPM, Exchange) and still have enough power to run PowerPoint like I could under XP. The battery life is okay but not great; I run out on long flights.
I'm off to Tech-Ed this week, so I stopped by the Apple store in Bellevue Square Sunday to pick up a spare battery for the flight. I've had bad experiences at this store in the past; I don't give off the right vibe(or maybe I just look light a tightwad) and can't get seem to get the attention of the staff. I took a chance, though, and walked in the store.
This time, my customer service experience was great. I caught the eye of Associate 1; although he was busy with another customer, he called for help; I didn't even see him do it. A minute later, Associate 2 walks up to me. "I understand you're looking for a 15" MacBook Pro battery." Pleasantly shocked, I followed him over to the appropriate shelf and soon had the battery in hand. "Is there anything else I can help you with, or are you ready to check out?"
If you've not been into an Apple store recently, they're doing something absolutely sweet. Each customer service associate has a hip-mounted scanner/cardreader. They scan your merchandise on the spot, take and run your credit card, and ask you for an email address to send the receipt to. Boom -- it's all done, your card is charged, and you don't have to stand in line at the counter unless you're doing cash or check. This is a great concept I'd love to see other stores use. My receipt hit my Exchange account (and thus my Windows Mobile phone) as I was walking out of the store.
I love living in the future.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
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Just a quick note to let you all know that the Protecting Exchange Server with DPM 2007 white paper is available for download from Microsoft. This is the same white paper I worked on for them last year, but freshly revised to include more guidance around mailbox-level recovery.
I'll be giving a talk around this topic next week at Tech-Ed (IT Pro) in Orlando, session number MGT369. Hope to see you there! (Yes, this is the same talk I did at Exchange Connections in Orlando and in MMS in Vegas a month ago; it seems to be a popular session!)
Monday, June 02, 2008
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This is pretty cool -- I didn't even notice this at first! Hyper-V RC1 is now available for download through the Microsoft Download center or through Windows Update as an optional update. One of the nice changes here is that you now install the Hyper-V Integration Services on Windows 2008 guest machines the same way as any other operating system (before, you'd have to install the Hyper-V patch itself as a separate action).
That would be why my Windows Server 2008 machine wanted an extra reboot this afternoon...
...so I'll throw in a fourth for good measure. Rather than try to write a full-length post about each of these, I'm just going to give you a quick bullet list:
Friday, May 09, 2008
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A lot of you may have missed this: Microsoft just released a new white paper for Exchange,
Outlook Anywhere Scalability with Outlook 2007, Outlook 2003, and Exchange 2007. This paper should give you some detailed guidance goodness on scaling your CAS servers, and also talks about the port exhaustion issues that lead to upper scalability limits.
Devin talks about several Exchange certificate-related tidbits.