Holiday Reading...

I hope you’ve had, or are still enjoying, a jolly nice Christmas holiday. I managed to go a full three days without touching a keyboard, which was a bit of a record!

There have been quite a few Exchange articles and news stories published over the past week or so, which you may, or may not have already seen… Here’s what I’ve been catching up with today…

ServerWatch have come up with an interesting list of what they “believe will be the 10 underlying trends for the server hardware landscape in 2004” There’s a worrying (but not unexpected) quote in there from Chris Belthoff, senior analyst at Sophos, who predicts that..

"The convergence of spam and viruses will likely continue in 2004, with more and more attempts to use viruses to set up networks of machines capable of sending out the spammers' messages."

RIM, the company behind the Blackberry wireless devices has been doing rather well... their revenues for the past twelve months were up by an impressive 107% which resulted in an handsome 50% increase in the share price just before Christmas. (another missed opportunity!) The future's looking pretty good too (expect perhaps for an injunction which could apparently “prevent it from selling its Blackberry handheld”) with recent announcements having been made that a Palm-based BlackBerry solution is on the cards, and also that a licensing agreement has been reached with Sony Ericsson which should result in Blackberry functionality being integrated into their handsets.... exciting stuff...

Markus Klein has written a new article about “Implementing Outlook Web Access with Exchange Server 2003”

Usability developer Dylan Greene thought it was great when Office crashed on him recently…"Office 2003 crashed and it was cool!"

“Normally it's not cool when Office crashes, but this time was different. When the "Do you want to send to Microsoft what happened so we can make our products better?" dialog came up, I clicked Yes. And then magic happened.
A new IE window opened...
"Hmm..." I thought, "That's never happened before."
And then I saw this:
"This is why you had the problem..." "...There is now a fix for it..." "...Click here to install the fix..."
This is near-nirvana for a usability freak like me. “

There some new reading material over at Exchange & Outlook…
Scripting Exchange
OWA Attachment Security
Using Rules to Handle Spam
Not Ready for an Antispam Solution?

Here's an interesting looking application... it's an Outlook Help Desk program Outlook Help Desk 3.0..."End Help Desk Chaos with the power of Outlook, Exchange and the Web!"

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I’ve been trying to find a hosted Exchange 2003 service provider for a small 5 user company… during my search I came across this pretty comprehensive list, and then stumbled upon Hosted Services who are UK based (as is the potential customer – this is better for tech support, billing etc), and common with other ASPs they provide a ‘try before you buy’ which I’m now making use of. So far, my trial has been going well, with their offering proving to be responsive and reliable. I did have a minor issue getting it up and running (I had to allocate licenses to the users which I had created in their admin GUI, which for whatever reason wasn’t detailed in the otherwise excellent initial instructions) but a quick call to Tech Support put that right. There are no pricing details on the company’s site, so I don’t know how their costs compare with the probably cheaper US service providers. I’ve also been waiting for ‘Sales’ to call since before Christmas, I guess they’re all on leave! Do any of you use similar hosted solutions?…What has your experience been like? Would you recommend them?

There’s some more hosted Exchange information over on the Boston Pocket PC site.

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From the forums…There is often a need to be able to use multiple SMTP addresses on a single mailbox, which can of course be easily implemented with secondary addresses for receiving mail, but it’s not so easy when it comes to sending mail from the additional addresses however. ChooseFrom for Exchange 2000/2003 is an application for Exchange 2000, 2003 and 5.5 running on Windows 2000, which allows a user to send a message with any sender address (From: field) , including his/her additional SMTP addresses. This event sink removes “the need to create an additional "fake" mailbox or contact specifically for storing an additional From address.”

Here’s a useful bit of shareware, Attachment Options is a COM add-in for Outlook 2000 SP3 or higher, Outlook 2002, and Outlook 2003 that provides a user interface for changing which file types are restricted as Level 1 attachments.

Have you wondered why, when you first use OWA 2000 and 2003, and click the New Message icon to create a new message, the Office Installer is fired-up and you’re prompted for the Office CD? Technet articles 257886 and 298110 explain that “If you install the multimedia extensions for OWA, and you did not install HTML Source Edit as an option when you installed Office 2000, the first time you use OWA, the Office 2000 installer program starts and asks you to insert the Office 2000 CD-ROM.”… The problem also occurs because Office 2000 creates a registry entry when it is installed on Windows 2000, which points to the Office Installer… this string value can be changed to resolve the problem.

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… and a couple of amusing sidelines…

Job Hunting…

A colleague left a job advert on my desk yesterday… apparently it was in one of the broadsheets, most probably The Sunday Times (the other adverts on the same page are for big bucks jobs)… I don’t have a scanner handy, so here’s what the advert said…

“World’s Best Programmer Location – Superyacht
Salary – outrageous

If you have a first class honours degree in Mathematics or Electronic Engineering and are considered by your peers to be the ‘Mutt’s Nuts’ when it comes to ‘C’ programming and pc based hardware, then this could be just the opportunity you should avoid.

You’ll work directly for an eccentric tax exile that made his money in telecommunications and will be responsible for his latest and very exciting new project in which you will also have share options. You will live on a Superyacht in the Mediterranean in summer and in the Caribbean in winter.

The hours are very reasonable at 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You also get free membership of a dating agency which you will need because your partner will leave you! Smokers are welcome and will be introduced to the ancient art of keel-hauling.

Another perk is that you will be working for an inconsiderate, insensitive, demanding, swine that expects everything to be done yesterday and is intolerant of feeble excuses like ‘it’s impossible.’

Send your CV to xxx with the key words ‘Lost Soul’ in the subject line.”

If anyone would like the e-mail address to which their CV should be sent, please get in touch and I’ll let you have it!

Need some fun?…

In case you’re still off work, and are fed-up with the Xbox or watching TV… I find that half an hour playing this excellent snowball-fight game that I came across a couple of years back, does the trick!