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