Support issues with Communicator Mobile

Tom has posted a Product Support Guide for Communicator Mobile on his blog, containing issues that isn't part of the release notes or accompanying documentation (As of yet).

One of the things he notes is that installation of Communicator Mobile isn’t supported on Storage Cards (As I enjoy to do with the limited memory on my Qtek 8310), also it explains why CoMO sometimes can be unresponsive.

Find the guide here.

Exchange 12 / Monad name changes

Just a quick note - At the MMS in San Diego there were a few announcements on this. Exchange 12 is now named Exchange Server 2007, and Monad is now Windows PowerShell.

Where Vista Fails

Interesting article with some harsh comments from Paul Thurrot -

The company itself has turned into that thing it most hated (read:
IBM)

The bad news, then, is that UAP is a sad, sad joke. It's the most annoying feature that Microsoft has ever added to any software product, and yes, that
includes that ridiculous Clippy character from older Office versions.

On Media Center: It's a horrid update to a wonderful bit of software, an ugly stepchild of beautiful parents.

Feature complete, my butt

OK, let's not get silly here. I don't hate Windows Vista ... That's not
horrible. It's just not what was promised.

Read it all here (Btw. I'm downloading build 5365 for my x64 notebook now - lets hope it has improved since 5342, which IMHO was way to unstable to do any testing on). Originally seen on bink.nu

Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile released

I've been using Office Communicator Mobile since the first beta released last year and was happy to get an e-mail from the beta team, stating that it finally has been released to the web (And also last week I heard that the RC of Qtek 8310 AKU2 was released - so we will probably soon see the final version).

So what's in the product ?

• A new Home/Today screen showing you availability
• Presence on your contacts including federated and PIC users (Including their icons)
• Contact information like "Idle since .." and Outlook calender information like "Free for next 2 hours"
• Escalation from IM conversation to phone calls
• VoIP calls through Wireless LANs (No firewall traversall though - so just internal within the companys network)
• 3rd Party Call Control like changing your desk/work phone forwarding settings
• E-mailing the content of an IM conversation
• And much more ;-)

You can find information here -

• Overview (marketing)
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Getting Started Guide
• Release Notes
• Planning and Deployment Guide
• Troubleshooting Guide

And the download here.

runas without domain trusts

Being a consultant, I often work from my own laptop on my customers computers. This often results in a lot of commands like these -
net use \\server\ipc$ /user:custdomain\account

Recently, I discovered, that I could actually create a new process with runas and use my customer credentials from that process. The trick is the /netonly argument. If I do a -
runas /user:custdomain\account /netonly cmd
I end up with a command prompt running as my normal user. But when I access network resources from that command prompt - or any child processes - I do it with my customer credentials. Needless to say, this saves a lot of tedious work.

Remember that if you do somethings, that invokes Explorer, you are often back to your default credentials - read more here.

When you use /netonly, you can actually specify any domain\user you like. The security check will - as always - be made when you try to access a resource.

Finding and fixing those LUA problems

Back in 1997, I was working at LEGO doing a PC project based on Windows NT workstation. The goal was end-users without local administrative permissions. This made perfectly sense, as we came out of a OpenVMS environment where that was the norm.
Back then, we learned the hard way how difficult it was to do this and without regmon and filemon we never could have do it. Back then the problem was lack of documenation - today the problem is the waste amount of documentation - and when you finally hit the right spot you sometimes find that the detail you were looking for was left out of the documentation - or simply wrong.
Things have improved when it comes to using LUA but there are still a way to go before nirvana is reached.
Aaron Margosis created a series of articles on this - and the best is the prioritized approach he has taken - i.e. should I start tweaking the registry permissions first or should I copy parts of the class registry to HKCU? Read it all here and here.

Also read my LUA article about controlling permissions with Group Policy.

To be or not to be - really random

Having the flu - this is day #5 - I found energy to browse dibert.com to motion my cheeks. I saw Scott Adams blog and had to read it as I like his twisted mind. From there I came across a reference to real random numbers called HotBits. The most interesting part was the How HotBits Works. This explains parts of quantum physics in a really simple way - e.g. that a beta particle is simply an electron and that gamma ray is simply high energy photons.
So is this really 'in scope' of this blog? Hmmm - well random numbers are - else simply blame it on the flu.

Microsoft Exchange's 10 year anniversary

As one of my contacts at Microsoft just pointed out, Microsoft Exchange was released more than 10 years ago in March 1996. It also means that I now have been a MCP for 12 years (Since April 1994); time has certainly gone fast since Microsoft Advanced Server 3.1 was the new kid on the block and it was unique to be a MCSE (I still remember competing with Per to be the first MCSE+I). I personally started working with OS/2 LanServer and Lotus cc:Mail and variations of Microsoft Mail and later evolved to Exchange 4.0 and Exchange 5.0/5.5, where clustering were one of my specialities and also my first piece published to the web was on the subject of Tips for Clustering Exchange Successfully (In the days of NT 4.0 and Exchange 5.5).

Windows IT Pro has released a very good article series by well known Industry Experts like Tony Redmond, Kevin Laahs and Kieran McCorry (All former colleagues at Digital/Compaq), Eric Legault and Pierre Bijaoui. It’s called A Decade of Exchange and it is certainly worth a read.

More interesting, to me anyway, is the future of Exchange in the Unified Communications group. We are probably going to witness a unification of Exchange, Live Communications Server (SIP) and related Voice services (VoIP, PBX, Centrex etc.), the interesting part here will ultimately be which technologies will be delivered by Microsoft and which will be delivered by 3rd party products. Also the evolution of SIP and perhaps disruptive Peer-to-Peer SIP standards/products and its impact on e.g. Microsoft UC and telephony service providers (And vendors) will be interesting to follow on the side-/frontline.

In my world Live Communications Server and the upcoming Live Server and their integration in Exchange and to CSTA, VoIP and MCU’s will certainly continue to be a main focus.

Sending IM messages through scripts

Would you like to send an instant message through script like this -

cscript lcsSendmsg.vbs administrator@managenet.com.au
"Hello world how are you doing”

Then look no further than Glen's Exchange Dev Blog and his post on the subject, where he uses the newly announced AJAX SDK for the purpose (Btw. if your scripting against Exchange his blog is certainly worth a look; in this case I'm only sorry that I didn't get around to write the script ;-)

Office Communicator Web Access AJAX Service SDK 1.0

Microsoft has released the Office Communicator AJAX Service SDK 1.0 including the following sample applications:

A simple instant messaging (IM) client written in JavaScript.
A simple instant messaging (IM) client written in C#.
A C# application that receives events from Communicator Web Access and displays them, as well as the methods that are being sent to the server, in JSON format.

You can find it here

Corrupted logon Web page when you try to log on to Communicator Web Access

If you are running Windows 2000 on your clients, and they are accessing an internal CWA Server, you may have had problems with corrupted web logon pages. Microsoft has now released a public hotfix for this problem.

See the KB describing the problem, download the hotfix and the description here

Vista feature summation

If you want to know what kind of beast Windows Vista is, then there is a nice summary to be found here -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista

Also if you want to know more about the new features (Including those features from XP not making it to Vista), there's a nice wiki here -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista

(Thanks to Steffen Madsen from Inceptio A/S for the hint).

Windows deployment resource

Here’s some shameless advertising for a friend of mine ;-) Rico Raja, and some of his friends, has started a blog/forum/website, that centers mainly around Windows Deployment, Preinstallation and unattended installation. His expertise is, amongst others, Vista Deployment and he (and his friends) has produced some very exciting records in installation time for Windows Vista Deployments.

Check out www.windows-admin.com and since they haven't implemented a RSS or Atom feed (Hint, hint!) you need to bookmark it for future updates (I have seen some of the upcoming content and it looks promising).

Unified Communications presentations

As promised, here are the presentations from the Unified Communications event -

• Download artiklen MSN Messenger for voksne fra vores nyhedsbrev (PDF)
• Præsentation fra seminar - Dennis Lundtoft Thomsen
• Præsentation fra seminar - Dag Cummings (English)
• Video - Unified Communication (English)
• Download AREL Videokonference her (PDF) (English)

IM Culture

Along with new ways of communicating, there will be new do's and don’ts. I personally have more than 100 persons on my IM lists, but I prefer to have most of my private contacts on a separate IM client, namely Live Messenger, and first when Office Communicator implements Spheres as per the RFC's (a.k.a. selective per group availability) will I move them to OC. And why is that you may ask? Well mainly because my family (Including my 79 years old grandmother) has a habit of "disturbing" me during my work time, and my business contacts tends to be more into the IM way of doing things, with only occasional, important and short IM conversations.

Heather Leigh wrote an interesting blog about her opinion on this subject called IM Angst, quote

"What’s the deal with people you have never met before IMing you? This is analogous to interrupting a potentially important conversation (let’s not pretend all of my conversations are important but some of them are...some are even important AND interesting). In my opinion, IMing basically says, “I know you well enough to do this” (among friends) or “this is urgent” (among business associates). I cannot tell you how many times I receive IMs that fall into neither category. When a simple e-mail would suffice, IM is chosen for the immediacy (of the sender) without regard to the time of the receiver."

Suffice to say new habits and cultures will arise. Quickly, if appropriate, moving from e-mail to IM with Office Communicator has certainly lessened the amount of e-mails in my inbox and also moving from IM to phone or video/VoIP conferencing has shortened the amount of time in the IM space for my sake.

Migrating RSS feeds from RssReader to Outlook 2007

Adding more than 100 feeds manually into Outlook 2007 wasn't an option and RssReader does import OPML, but doesn't export to it. So I did a little Googling and found a nice script, with an accompanying XSLT transform file. It will take RssReaders XML based export file as an input and create an OPML compliant XML file. The only thing missing here is Groups, so I had to manually regroup all my feeds :-

You can find the script here

Btw. Outlook 2007 RSS implementation in Beta1 TR is way better that the last version I've tested - but there is still room for enhancement (Remember its still beta, so it will probably change). The concept of groups is badly implemented (Especially when adding new feeds), the formatting of the posts is nothing compared to RssReaders and there's missing a "View all Unread Posts" and a "Mark all Unread Posts as Read" (It can be accomplished under Unread Mail - but I personally don't like to mix these in the same folder).

Whitepaper/resources on Exchange 2003 Mobility and MSFP / AKU2

As several different Telcos are releasing WM5 AKU2 / MSFP updates to their devices, there's also a need to setup the environment to support these new devices. I have earlier described a "Quick Guide" to upgrading the device, and configuring the website and ISA for DirectPush. But, as reported by several sources, Mr. Mobile a.k.a. Jason Langridge has released a large whitepaper on configuring all the aspects of mobility including web sites, certificates, ISA, certificate login and configuring the device. His excellent whitepaper can be found here.

Furthermore Vlad has posted a very good set of resources in a post called Advanced Mobility and Stalking with WM5.

Office Communicator now available in new languages

Office Communicator MUI has been updated, so that it now also includes Danish and Finnish (And perhaps other languages - I don't recall the former list of supported languages). It is recommended that you apply the hotfix from KB903928 before installing the new MUI, which can be found here.

Microsoft Connect and SMS 4 Beta

Wanted to join the SMS 4 Beta program - and consequently got into a new (for me at least) site called Microsoft Connect. Connect is a kind of new betaplace. Browsing the available programs page, I found another interesting product called Certificate Lifecycle Manager Beta 1. You can check it out yourself - I will when I have a little time to spare.

Communicator Web Access guides released

Three new Communicator Web Access guides has been released -

Microsoft Office Communicator Web Access Getting Started Guide
This guide describes how to use the instant messaging (IM) and presence features of Microsoft® Office Communicator Web Access.

Microsoft Office Communicator Web Access Technical Reference Guide
This guide provides reference and troubleshooting information for administrators who are deploying or have deployed Microsoft® Office Communicator Web Access.

Factors Affecting User Capacity of Microsoft Office Communicator Web Access
This white paper discusses the factors that affect the number of users that can be supported on a Microsoft® Office Communicator Web Access server.

Also Don't forget the "old" guide on (With the pace Microsoft is announcing VoIP, SIP and UC news 3 months must be considered old ;-)

Microsoft Office Communicator Web Access Planning and Deployment Guide
This guide helps you plan and deploy Communicator Web Access for your organization.