When you are going to hear a Microsoft employee dance around your the answer to your question, they will always begin the sentence with a pause… and then a little stutter… then: “So…”
Just saying.
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.
There’s something interesting going on over at There’s something interesting going on over at one of my daily haunts for keeping up with the everchanging world of IT.
I really like the administrator of the site (Digital Dave) and by and large the site has been a fun resource. Some of the less advanced Windows users hang out on there and they do get help. However, an interesting thing has started to occur over there.
So this morning, I decided to try to get to the bottom of what causes iChat AV to fail with my router. I was testing with my stepfather who also has a WRT54GS router (by Linksys).
I read on the Apple site that some routers break when using UPnP, but in general, they have a list of ports to forward. Since I’m planning on multiple Macs in the house, forwarding ports to a single system isn’t going to work for me. I disabled UPnP, then used a remote assistance session on my PC to do the same on my stepfather’s router. Then I returned to the Mac, fired up iChat, and bang, what do you know… that resolved it… without forwarding any ports. I can now have an iChat session with my Mac to my stepfather’s PC without issue.
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.
The hot post today that has the blogosphere churning is this essay by Paul Graham entitled “Microsoft is Dead.”
I like the way the author of this post has just suddenly realized that Microsoft’s business model is in trouble. I had an epiphany much like this while I was in the very den of the mothership itself. While standing on the third floor of building 25 in Microsoft’s Redmond campus… fighting with their products to get some test data put through on our… unusual deployment of their products… came the word that Apple went Intel. That’s when I had the epiphany: Microsoft is toast. Thus begins their slow, painful demise as people wake up to the innovations happening elsewhere. Microsoft’s lack of supporting standards and their blind eye toward security… combined with failing in just about every endeavour except Windows and Office… was finally starting to do them in.
There’s an enlightening and interesting article up on InformationWeek discussing the Leopard server product. It’s basically a guy who headed out to the sites covering public information on Leopard server and summarized it. It’s still a good read. My favorite piece? Clustering for email and iCal servers!
One thing the author did mention is that while it’s compelling for SMB, Leopard server isn’t shaping up to be an enterprise-bound powerhouse. I would agree in that respect, but I diverge away from this when he declares that Apple just clearly isn’t aiming for this market.
My motivational transportation has sprung a leak and suffered a flat. I’m at work, but could give a damn if I get anything done. The weather is too nice outside. I’ve not been able to shake the sleepy haze this morning and I have a tinge of a headache. It’s one of those headaches that you get when your assbone digs into the fluff of your chair so much that it starts to harm your circulation and you feel minor little spasms in the back of your head. Top that off with being quite hungry and knowing that you have several meetings to attend in the afternoon, it makes for a flat tire.
