With the release of Exchange Server 2010, organizations that are on Exchange 2007 are weighing when they are going to shift to Exchange 2010 to take advantage of the new features of capabilities, and organizations who are on earlier versions (like Exchange 2003 or even Exchange 2000) are considering their options to leapfrog over Exchange 2007 and go straight to Exchange 2010. Read more
Prior to TechEd Europe this coming week, a number of third party vendors have made announcements. One of these is F5, who on November 3 announced its new F5 Management Pack Solution for OpsMgr 2007, allowing customers using F5 and Microsoft to dynamically manage application delivery in virtual environments, particularly when using Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
F5 has added Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) capabilities to its F5 management pack, previously introduced in April 2009. Read more
I haven't disappeared, I've had several family medical related "incidents" to deal with. These are not over, but I will resume blogging as time permits. I appreciate your patience!
New to Exchange 2010 is the Exchange Control Panel, or ECP. This is a component of Outlook Web App 2010 where an administrator can sit in their OWA screen and not only check their emails, calendar appointments, and contacts, but can perform administrative tasks. So instead of the administrator having to find a computer and terminal server remote into a system to add a user, delete a user, make configuration changes in public f Read more
At least Cisco is warning Unified Communications customers about it NOT successfully offering support for Microsoft Windows 7:
"Cisco will have no liability for any delay in delivery, or failure to deliver, any or all of the planned Windows 7 support features set forth herein. Therefore, any such delay or failure will not in any way grant to Cisco customers the right to return, refund, adjust, or exchange any previously purchased Cisco products or products that customers may purchase under their Cisco purchase contracts."
Are you "rolling the dice" by deploying Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit) while purchasing the following Cisco UC products? Read more
Text message this morning from CNN: Unemployment hit 10.2% in October. Microsoft announced earlier this week another 800 employee layoffs to the 5,000 previously announced employee layoffs. If you look at Microsoft's financials you see why, a 14% revenue and 18% net income drop for the last reported quarter, on top of disappointing prior quarters. Read more
The last day at PASS is always with mixed feelings but as they say "Don't cry because it's over, just smile because it happened". Easier said than done as President Wayne Snyder got all choked up when he acknowledged Kevin Kline's awesome 10 years contribution to the leadership of PASS. Standing ovation in Seattle. Read more
One of the nicest integration features in Exchange 2010 Outlook Web App is the ability to integrate Office Communications Server 2007 R2 presence and instant message right in the OWA 2010 screen. Read more
We are tickled to announce the winners of our October giveaways. The grand prize winner of the October Microsoft Subnet giveaway is Wendy Newton (pictured), IT manager for Bowman and Brooke LLP. She won a free Microsoft training course from Global Knowledge. Read more
Microsoft plans to release six patches that address 15 vulnerabilities next week for its regularly scheduled Patch Tuesday, three of which are labeled critical and three, important. These patches fix holes in XP, Vista, Windows Server 2008 (all editions except R2), most recent versions of Office for both Macs and Windows. Read more
A major IPv4 to IPv6 transition technique is the use of tunnels; this is encapsulating IPv6 packets into IPv4 packets that can then be transported over the IPv4-only parts of the Internet. Those tunnels can also be used within the enterprise network either on purpose (for example to traverse some legacy network devices not supporting IPv6) or not on purpose... Read more
It came as a surprise to many of us on the early adopter program with Microsoft when on one of the very last builds of Exchange 2010 all of a sudden Outlook Web Access was renamed Outlook Web App. Same OWA for web mail as we’ve used for years, but just a different name. Why the different name? Be Read more
Another great day in Seattle at the PASS Summit 2009. The highlight for me was getting 23 SQL Server MVPs to sign a copy of the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives book just released. All royalties are to be donated to the http://www.WarChild.org charity. The book store at the conference sold all of its 150 copies. It's a great book and a great cause. Read more
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) said on Wednesday that it will cut 800 more jobs, bringing total cuts to 5,800 including the layoffs it announced in January. The company was not specific as to what kinds of jobs would be eliminated nor in what locations. Read more
Way back in August I blogged about installing Windows 7 on my Dell X1. Well the long overdue task is now complete. I have to say that the inital results are pretty impresive. Read more
The Blackberry Bold is getting good attention but the mobile SmartPhone world has become a two horse race between the Apple iPhone and the Motorola/Google Droid. Even with the new Blackberry Storm 2 model, the Storm missed its window to be a serious contender against the iPhone (despite all my ill advised pro-Storm predictions). Read more
The day started out with "Bruce" Wayne Snyder providing opening remarks at the PASS Summit 2009 and finished with "Batman Returns" on the AMC channel. In between was a festival of SQL Server know-how and networking. A great day. Read more
UPDATED 11/04/09: Microsoft has revised two of the critical updates it released during its epic October Patch Tuesday to fix bugs in the patches. A reader writes to inform me that one buggy patch, which breaks Office Communication Server, has not yet been fixed has been fixed via another patch that OCS users can obtain and install manually. Read more
It's great to be back in Seattle for the SQL PASS Summit 2009. This year it has a different structure with one pre-conference day for extra seminars and one post-conference day instead of 2 pre-conference days. This is a good idea and should prevent people disapearing early on the last day of the conference. We'll see... Read more
For this blog post, I'm going to jump right into a topic of most interest to organizations deploying Exchange Server 2010, which is Disaster Recovery of databases. New to Exchange 2010 is the concept of the Database Availability Group, or DAG, which effectively allows an organization to have up to 16 replicated copies of an Exchange Database (EDB). Read more
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