Vermyndax vermyndax

I’m all about negativity today. Sorry.

Anyway, I’ve had something nagging at me for a while now and I think I’ve just figured it out. Powershell is Microsoft‘s answer to having a dumb command line through the Win95 – Win2003 years and it’s quite powerful, as the name implies. Microsoft likes it so much that they makes most of the Exchange 2007 administration efforts in the Exchange Management Shell, a derivative of Powershell that contains Exchange-specific cmdlets.

One item you’ve probably learned by now if you’re an Exchange admin working on a 2007 deployment is that Microsoft has changed the behavior of the recipient update policy.  Most of you won’t care about this and that’s just fine.  You shouldn’t.  I would dare say that if your Exchange environment is engineered well and planned out the way Microsoft probably expects it to be, you should have almost no issues whatsoever.

Continuing my recent tradition of expressing what are likely to be fairly unpopular opinions with my peers, tonight I’m going to rag on Google‘s “Chrome” project and tell you why this is a Bad Idea ™.  I’ll try to keep this short (update: I failed).  This is considered to be a discussion starter, not a final statement.  I’ll probably elaborate on these discussion points on the next NO CARRIER, so be sure and give me some feedback here.

This post is focused on those of you who have decided to deploy Exchange in a resource forest.  You’re in for tears.  While the resource forest is technically a supported deployment method for Exchange, I’m going to point out what can go wrong in your Exchange world that will keep your admins up at night.

Let’s start with the definition of a resource forest, just in case you’re not sure.  The resource forest approach means that you have one Active Directory forest where your user accounts live and another Active Directory forest where your application (Exchange, in this case) lives.  You have user accounts in the resource forest that are disabled and then externally associated with the users in the user forest.  This of course, requires a trust between the two forests, which you likely have anyway, right?  Right.

The net is abuzz tonight as MobileMe users recieve more notices that MobileMe still isn’t what Apple had hoped it would be, so it’s offering 60 days more for free.

Paul Thurrott has already played the part of the cynic and provided a rather insightful metaphor, but I’m going to come down on the positive side and say that MobileMe has been a wonderful experience for me.  Not only has it been wonderful, it’s turned my iPhone into something I can only describe as a thing of glory.

I have this blog post percolating in my head in which I will impart unto you my knowledge of using several tools on the Mac and PC for syncing your calendar, email, tasks and contact information. It’s a pretty large post and probably deserves to be its own article. I want to offer suggestions on how to accomplish many syncing scenarios for several situations that might fit your bill. I’ve experimented with enough of these syncing utilities to know what works best and what doesn’t… well, for me anyway. If it works for me, it’s gotta work for someone else, so I will write it up in the hopes that it will help someone who has one foot in the Mac world and one foot in the PC world.

I was just installing the latest Java update on my Windows VM and noticed that it was pushing me to install OpenOffice. Not only did it offer to do this for me, it checked the box by default.

I unchecked it, then while receiving the Java update I was fed an ad on why OpenOffice is good.

The press would be eviscerating Microsoft for doing this in an update – why aren’t we saying anything to Sun? Is it because they’re “not evil” in some respect?

This may work for Vista SP1 also, but it may not. I just know that it solved my Windows XP SP3 issue.

On my Mac Pro at home, I have a 100gb partition set up for dual-booting Windows XP with Boot Camp. I also have Parallels set up to use this BC partition in a VM.

While in the native Boot Camp install of Parallels, I installed SP3 for Windows XP (after updating to Boot Camp 2.1, this is IMPORTANT as it updates the drivers on your machine). Fortunately, my machine survived just fine, so I moved back into OS X.

I’m sitting here in the Memphis airport with my gen-1 iPhone downloading AIM over Edge from the new App Store. How neat is that? It’s open, go get it, folks.

If you enable sync services in Entourage 2008 to sync your calendar data to iCal and use something like Omnifocus for task management, try this.

Set up Omnifocus to sync your work-related contexts to the “Entourage” calendar in iCal that Entourage created when you enabled sync services there. Now sync your tasks. Notice how they show up in iCal and Apple Mail as to-do’s. That’s nice.

Now open Entourage 2008 and go to your tasks folder. View the goodness. Now that’s nicer.