Site Sections
Posts
254
Comments
120
Trackbacks
120
April 2007 Entries
A quick Exchange 2007 advice retraction

I recently discovered that I've been unintentionally dispensing incorrect advice about a new Exchange 2007 Edge Transport feature. My shame at getting it wrong is only moderated by knowing I'm in good company. Fellow Exchange MVP Jim McBee recently posted to his blog on this same topic, and so I'll just quote him here:

The feature is just "safe senders"; safe sender list aggregation does not include the user's blocked senders. As Microsoft's Ross Smith pointed out to me, that is why it is called "safe sender list aggregation." :-)

So if you see me talking about how Edge does safe/blocked sender aggregation, ignore the "blocked sender" part, because that's my inner idiot poking out and saying hello.

posted @ Thursday, April 12, 2007 2:22 PM | Feedback (0)
Catching up with the Exchange 2007 roadshow

As I mentioned in my previous post, I just returned from Denver where I was a speaker at the Microsoft Unified Communications: Featuring Exchange Server 2007 roadshow. While I'm not big on travel, I definitely enjoyed Denver; I like the city only slightly less than I like the Pacific Northwest and I got to hang out with my co-presenter (and Exchange rockstar) Jim McBee.

The New York, Atlanta, and Denver events are done, the Chicago event is happening as I type, but there are still six more dates. Dates listed in bold are ones I'll be presenting at:

  • San Francisco - April 17, 2007
  • Anaheim - April 19, 2007
  • Dallas - April 24, 2007
  • Boston - April 26, 2007
  • Phoenix - May 15, 2007
  • Washington DC - May 17, 2007

The cost for the event is only $99; register at the link above. If you want more details about Exchange 2007 and the show is coming near you, then go register now. Events are filling up!

As you can see, between my regular deadlines and my upcoming travel, I'm staying busy for the rest of the month -- but I'm going to work in time to walk through some nifty PowerShell hints and tips I picked up while finalizing my PowerShell session for Exchange Connections, including a great feature I was shown by Microsoft's Evan Dodds.

posted @ Thursday, April 12, 2007 2:10 PM | Feedback (0)
Update on Exchange 2007 Edge Transport configuration

Low-frequency updates continue to be the word of the month, much to my chagrin; I've got an aggressive travel schedule (well, aggressive for me at any rate) this month, combined with leather-clad, spike-studded deadlines on projects. After doing Exchange Connections in Orlando last week, I just got back from Denver after speaking at the Windows IT Pro Exchange 2007 roadshow.

Back in January, I noticed and posted about a curious assumption I'd found in the Exchange 2007 docs that Edge Transport servers would be dual-homed on both the Internet and the internal network, instead of having a single network interface in the perimeter network. I pointed out that this really didn't gain you any benefits and made things more complicated, and I made sure to pass this feedback on to Microsoft.

Well, they've responded: the most recent update of the Exchange 2007 documentation shows that the dual-interface assumption has been removed from the relevant topic. It's nice to know I wasn't missing something! Thank you, Microsoft, for the response.

posted @ Thursday, April 12, 2007 1:56 PM | Feedback (0)
Post-Connections post

Another Exchange Connections event has come and gone. As nice as the venues are, I really wish the spring Connections events weren't in Orlando -- the town itself is spread out, limiting how easy it is to get out of the event venue for a couple of hours and go do anything on your down time. I was lucky enough to get direct flights to and from Orlando, thus limiting the amount of horsing around I had to do in airports, but the flights are correspondingly longer. consequently, even though I managed to snag an aisle seat in an exit row on my flight back (with no one in the center seat), I awoke today with a killer migraine, a lovely parting gift from seat 15C.

The other thing I lucked out on this year was getting to do all of my sessions on the same day. That may sound like a lot of work -- and it is -- but there's a large amount of mental energy I have to invest in getting ready to go up on stage and present, so only having to do that workup once (and sustain it for the day) actually ends up being easier on me. Here are the slide decks for my presentations, along with comments:

  • EXC16: DCAR with Exchange
    I received an interesting comment from several of the attendees at this session, which was that they were not originally going to come to this session because the acronym DCAR meant nothing to them. I know that few people in this industry use it other than Paul and I, so I need to see what I can do about that.
    Key take-away from this session: as far as Exchange 2007 comes with out-of-the-box functionality aimed at discovery, compliance, archival, and retention, you still need third-party software to do a proper job of it -- and you need to consider these activities all as facets of the single larger task of messaging data management. Thing I learned from this session: my job gives me the luxury of examining these types of tasks and looking for the bigger picture, but the people who work to keep production environments running don't often have the time. I need to not be afraid of talking about things I think are "obvious," because they may be coming from a new perspective some of my attendees don't get the chance to share. In return, they share their experience and perspective with me, which helps me better fine-tune my message for others.

  • EXC17: 10 Tips to Make Your Exchange Server a Good Net Neighbor
    This was a nice small session, the perfect wrap-up for the day, although I wonder if attendance was hurt slightly by the fact that it was the last session of the day. Nevertheless, I think there were some good questions and discussions, and I've definitely got some ideas for future blog posts (and possibly magazine articles).
    Key take-away from this session: you can significantly enhance the reputation your domains gather by thinking about how your Exchange organization interacts with the rest of the Internet and making some appropriate changes.
    Thing I learned from this session: so much of our understanding of email best practices in the end comes back to a fundamental understanding of proper DNS theory and operation -- a subject that far too many admins do not have adequate grounding in. Especially in the Windows community, DNS tends to get treated as a black box, and someone who learns how Active Directory integrates with DNS may not learn that some of the assumptions AD makes about DNS are only valid in the context of an AD domain.

  • EXC18: Iron Chef: Using Powershell with Exchange 2003
    Definitely the one that took the vast majority of my mental prep time; I hadn't realized when I proposed this session what a challenge it would be. On the other hand, I'm glad I did it, and I'll be breaking it down into a series of detailed blog posts in the coming weeks.
    Key take-away from this session: cmdlets make things so much simpler, but once you've got your data in a PowerShell object you can still do some amazing stuff in a very small amount of script.
    Thing I learned from this session: logistics are everything in the success of a presentation; the problems I had with my demos came not from the scripts, which I was re-writing until an hour before the session, but from my last-minute decision to run the slides off the provided machine and run the demo scripting off my laptop. As a result, my practice run (which involved switching in and out of an RDP session) was useless and the attendees kept having to remind me to switch the screen to the right machine. I'm just glad they seemed to take it in good humor.

posted @ Thursday, April 05, 2007 5:27 PM | Feedback (1)
News

Devin has moved on
to new adventures.
This blog is preserved
for historical purposes.

Please follow his
personal blog at:
Devin on Earth

Virtual Devin
Article Categories
Archives
Post Categories
Data Protection
DCAR
Exchange
Other
Security
Unified Communications
Windows