Once again, the iPhone rules the press with a heavy dollop of enticing news.
There’s a lot here on the surface and a lot below the surface. Let’s scratch the surface first.
The announcements about Apple licensing ActiveSync are interesting. There was lots of speculation in this regard and greetz to those who called it. I myself lost a bet. I was thinking that Apple might actually thumb their nose at ActiveSync and employ webdav for Exchange 2003 (much like Entourage) or web services for Exchange 2007. Of course, that would not be a quick route to policy controls on the device itself (i.e. remote kill), so ActiveSync makes the most business sense both in time and money. It’s a good investment. I was just hoping they wouldn’t just… well, because.
Here’s one of those technical blog posts that I’ve been meaning to post for a while now, but did not have the chance to do. Since I’m sitting here in the Baltimore airport next to a German-looking girl with extremely long hair, I’ve decided to work on the blog post so I do not appear to be admiring her hair.
On one of my visits to a NASA center, I was asked to look at a desktop situation that had really, really puzzled the local desktop techs. They had migrated the user to our mail system from the legacy system. The profile had been converted over to the new mail system, rather than a full wipe and reload of Outlook settings and whatnot (like we recommend).
HUNTSVILLE, AL: A creature formed by excess cable in a data center has been slain by an intrepid systems administrator armed with a caution sign.
The creature, which formed after floor tiles were opened for the first time in 7 years, spoke to the systems administrators working in the area and taunted them with “trash talk.”
“It told me I couldn’t network my way out of a paper bag,” said Mortimer Franklin, a Windows 2003 systems administrator. “That really upset me, because I was right in the middle of following the wizard to install Exchange 2003. I know how to follow directions, so its claims just weren’t true.” Mr. Franklin was so offended by the taunting of the creature that he put down the clipboard containing instructions on how to do his job and informed security.
I was one of the engineers on the call documented here from last weekend. This was the Friday night from hell.
I won’t rehash the technical details of what happened. If you want to know the tech piece of it, head to the link. There’s no need to restate it – besides, it would bring back memories that might cause me to draw my own blood and scrawl nasty proverbs on the wall.
Proving that Mary Jo Foley knows absolutely nothing about what she’s writing, she claims to have “inside information” that Apple will announce it has licensed Exchange ActiveSync so they can hook up to Exchange servers.
Article is here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=534
Why do I say she’s an idiot?
Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the iPhone already does POP or IMAP and Exchange supports this out of the box. Granted, it doesn’t support it well (that’s a story for another day kids), but it supports it. So, sorry Mr. IT Manager… come Friday, you will have those big boss cheeseheads scrambling to get their email from your Exchange server; security be damned.
Greetings again from WWDC 2007.
Those of you who know me know that I’ve made my living thus far as a Windows admin. I’ve always had a particular bent toward messaging technologies and I do have certifications in the Microsoft space to prove that I can architect these solutions.
The project I am working on now has made me take a second and more objective look at Exchange server. For a long time, I’ve heard Microsoft trainers and other folks complain bitterly about Microsoft Exchange. Most of the complaints started around Exchange 2000, when Exchange merged in with Active Directory. The complaints get worse as the enterprise grows. Exchange 2003 has some real issues with clustering and large deployments. I’m hoping many of these issues are resolved in Exchange 2007, but as I’ve not had the chance to dive into that just yet I cannot speak for any improvements.
I spoke with a developer here at WWDC who is deploying Exchange 2007. He said that the Linux/UNIX folks on Evolution are finding it impossible to use due to some kind of webdav issues introduced with Exchange 2007.
I’ve not yet had a chance to test/play with this to look into it deeper. I will get a chance to do so next month. However, as I said before, Exchange 2007 introduced web services for working with your mail and that’s where Evolution needs to go. Webdav is officially deprecated in 2007 and will be completely absent from the next Exchange server. Evolution needs to uhh… evolve.
That’s a loss for Microsoft – OSS Ramblings
Congratulations to Tony, who has succeeded in migrating his company off of Microsoft Exchange an onto an open source replacement. Check out his blog to see how it was pulled off.
Granted, they probably aren’t using shared calendaring much – but still, an interesting project for any small business out there.
So, in the last entry I mentioned that a lot of people use the delegation feature in Exchange when their workflow and business processes could benefit from the use of sharing permissions instead. Why would it be useful for you to implement this workaround? Let’s clarify a little bit.
Many companies today are finding the RPC over HTTPs (a.k.a. Outlook Anywhere in 2007) scenario to be quite an interesting deployment method. I’m here to tell you, battle scarred and worn… I’ve deployed RPC over HTTPs as the primary topology for an Exchange environment. We’re talking 80% of the population. It presents some unique challenges, but we won’t go into all of those here and now. Ask me later sometime about non-paged pool memory and I’ll share horror stories with you.
There’s a monster post on the Exchange blog about problems with assigning delegates and/or updating distribution list memberships from the Outlook client.
I can say that we’ve definitely suffered from some of the goofy issues in this article. One item they do not cover is that as a general rule, you should not be assigning more than 4 delegates to your mailbox if you can help it. All too often, people use the delegation feature to work through a business process that can be solved with simple sharing permissions.
