Prometric is currently offering 15%-25% off for Microsoft exams. Both of the Exchange Technical Specialist exams (2007 and 2010) are 15% off. The Exchange 2007 IT Pro exams are 25% off. Get the vouchers for them and other Microsoft certification exams here, http://www.prometric.com/microsoft/careeroffer.htm.
The Outlook team has posted an update that should improve reliability and performance. Here's an excerpt:
"This update contains a significant number of new performance-focused improvements for Outlook users. We especially focused on the areas of starting up and shutting down Outlook, switching between folders with large numbers of messages, calendar reliability and consistency, and general responsiveness of the application when performing common tasks around managing your e-mail, calendar, and other information..."
I'll say this, Outlook does close faster. You can read the blog and download it from here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/archive/2009/02/25/announcing-the-february-cumulative-update-for-outlook-2007.aspx
This is about a discussion last summer but I thought it was interesting as I didn't see much of it until I ran into some posts by Ed Brill from IBM. There's always been a back and forth between IBM and Microsoft with Lotus Notes and Exchange server on who has a bigger market share, who is more relevant, has better commercials, etc.
A
Ferris study released last January 08 sparked some more debate between some IBM and Microsoft spokesmen\bloggers. Jim Bernardo from Microsoft and Ed went at it for a bit until someone, Volker Weber, decided to see if he could find some truth to the debate. He put up a wiki to gather as much factual information as he could get to see who was right. And like most truths, it was somewhere in between. You can see Volker's post
here and the wiki
here.
I'm not surprised that there isn't any open source, Sun, Oracle, or other POP\IMAP system, but I was surprised there was only one Groupwise left. And that was #113 on the global list. And that's right folks, no Gmail, Hotmail or AOL.
I've seen some posts around that others are having issues with OWA after applying rollup 3 for SP1. We got it this past weekend. Essentially after applying and trying to access OWA, a blank page is all you get.
After digging around, uninstalling and reinstalling, none of which worked for us, one of the guys where I work (our man "Stuff") found that there seemed to be a change of code in logon.aspx from rollup 3. We changed
var a_sLgn = "<% RenderLogonHref(); %>";
To
var a_sLgnQS = "<% RenderLogonQueryString(); %>";
In our case we've heavily customized our logon page so when we copied the customized logon.aspx from previous builds it didn't quite work. One of these days we'll have to redo our custom theme from RTM code to SP1 code. Most everything still works but rules, and deleted item recovery screens are pretty broke.
I caught this from Trika's certification blog. Did you know there are 7,399 certified dudes Technical Specialists on Exchange 2007? How about 2,236 certified Enterprise Messaging Administrators? Have you gotten your certifications yet?
Trika's post is here, http://blogs.msdn.com/trika/archive/2008/07/24/new-numbers.aspx.
This is probably the 289th blog that will note that Hyper-V has made release to manufacturing (RTM) and is available for download. It will be available to Windows Update in about 12 days. Check out the news at the Virtualization team blog here: Virtualization Team Blog. Anyone testing Exchange 2007 with Hyper-V?
One question I have which I haven’t been able to find is when System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) will be released.
Looks like the Exchange 2007 Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 has been updated. Released 6/22/2008 version 6.0.6278.12. I was hoping to get a few more canned reports but it doesn’t look like they added much. Get it here: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007
Also, at Teched Professionals a few weeks ago, I attended an interactive theater session which used to be called cabana sessions. I liked that name better. Leave it to Microsoft’s marketing people to screw things up. Anyways the session was from Ake Pettersson over monitoring Exchange 2007 with SCOM. He had a bullet list covering a few hotfixes that should be applied in your SCOM environment. I haven’t read over all of the details of the hotfixes but thought that they might be of interest for some folks. They are KB’s 951979, 950853, 951380. We applied them this week and nothing’s blown up so far.
I'm sure many Exchange admins have been asked about users that have renamed one of their Outlook default folders, such as the Inbox or Sent Items, to something undesirable and they want to rename it back. In Outlook and OWA it's not really possible. I knew it was available via CDO but sending a user the CDO code wasn't really viable (I guess you could if you really felt like being the Exchange Nazi). The best ways to get it fixed is run Outlook with the /ResetFolders switch or use an IMAP client and rename the folder there. The /ResetFolders switch should also bring back any folders that somehow were removed or are not being listed.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197180/EN-US/
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/233040
With Microsoft Mail on Vista the option to rename is grayed out and not renamable except for the Calendar folder. I haven't gotten my hands on Outlook Express or another client to test further. Also for an Exchange 2007 mailbox, renaming the calendar folder gives an error "Your folder could not be renamed. Your IMAP server refused to rename it. Command Argument Error. 11. Code: 800cccd3". I'm guessing the Exchange team has blocked renaming folders via MAPI in Exchange 2007.
Ever since I've been running Vista on my primary laptop I could never find out how to get a runas command working for my domain admin account (my normal logon is non privileged). Ran into a post on windowsconnected.com which explained about changing the GPO setting for elevation prompts from prompt for "consent" to "credentials". As Josh notes, this will now prompt you for credentials for anything local as well. It's a small pain and hopefully someone (ahem Microsoft) will allow for some better flexibility at some point.
Check out the post here, http://windowsconnected.com/blogs/joshs_blog/archive/2006/12/01/windows-vista-tip-run-as-administrator.aspx.
Hello world. After Joel held me and my family hostage, he gave me an ultimatum. Blog or I'll make you watch Rosie O'donnell on The View for 24 hrs straight. So here I am.
All kidding aside, my name is Joseph Nguyen and I'm gonna try and blog about Exchange, Windows, Vista, Powershell and related stuff. And no, I'm probably not related to that Nguyen person you have as a neighbor, or friend you had in college or the one that owns the nail salon in the mall. Anyways I work at a University trying to evangenlize the benefits of Microsoft technologies to the masses. Hopefully I can contribute here and bring you some interesting posts.