...or Seattle, or Bellevue, or Kirkland, or just about anywhere I can get to in a couple hours from Redmond. I have not been a registered member of a user group in a LOOOONG time. Now that I am well settled into my new home and area, I think it is time to get more involved. If you are a member of a UG in the area or would be interested in starting one, please let me know!

I am going to be attending a couple of Linux User Group meetings soon. It is also time to start playing with SUSE Linux and get a better feel for it. I have to admit I am a Linux n00b. My experiences with installing a few different distros a few years back were not very pleasant. I just have not had a reason to use Linux for anything personally but I believe now is the time to start getting my hands dirty. I would like to get SUSE up and running on my Laptop since that is what I use the most often.

I would be interested in hearing from you what your experiences are with SUSE and what I should watch out for when I go to install.

Cheers!

Welcome Everyone!  I am back!  And I am writing my inaugural post on my new blog from Boise, ID. Tomorrow I am delivering a group of sessions for the Vista/Office/Exchange launch here in Boise, and it looks to be a great crowd. I brought my camera with me so I will post some pictures in a day or so from the session.

Hey Chris....why haven't you been blogging?

Wow.....where do I start. There are a bunch of things I could blather on about, but in reality it comes down to two things:

1) Technological - As some of you know, I was blogging fairly regularly on my personal blog over at Stewed Prunes. That blog and all of the infrastructure to support it runs on servers in my basement. Some of that equipment is very old (which is a relative thing when speaking about computer hardware). I have had several hardware failures which with my travel schedule and other commitments were difficult to resolve quickly. I also switched ISP's which caused me grief to no end. Not to mention the power failures we suffered here in the Pac West. But that only accounts for November through present time. My last post was in August. Which leads me to the real reason.....

2) Motivation - I just didn't have it.

So what changed?

I decided to move my blog over to a MS hosted property. Now I don't have to worry about the hardware anymore! I also have outlined for myself some topics I want to blog about to get more focused. I will still probably be all over the map from time to time, you will see some themes developing as I progress. We all have pet projects or things we like to talk about so that is what I am going to pursue. For now I am leaving my tags/categories blank and will fill them in I blog about something that deserves a new area. rest assured I will will be blogging about cool MS technologies. I also will be doing some break/fix postings on how to resolve common issues people run into.

What about Stewed Prunes?

I am keeping it. In fact I may even start up at least one other blog. But don't expect a lot of activity there. For now I plan to focus on this blog. I still have hardware to replace and until I feel comfortably redundant at home and like I have a more easily recoverable configuration, I am not going to get real active. Suffice it to say that Stewed Prunes will be a more personal blog and here i will be more technical.

With that, it is getting late and I have a big show tomorrow. Time to get some rest!

Cheers!

Here are the resources I promised from the UAC session I delivered today --

User Account Control Resources on the Technet Site

Understanding and Configuring User Account Control

Application Compatibility Tool and the ACT 5.0

Windows Vista Security Guide

Vista UAC Requirements for Application Developers

Cheers!

...how much like a singles ad does that sound? (I am sure it doesn't at all if you are native to Alaska).

I was chatting with my friend Glen Gordon yesterday and it came up that I was heading to Anchorage to deliver a Technet Seminar on Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 - btw, Glen will be in Charleston, SC on Thursday. ANYWAY.....he said I should pick up an Ulu knife while in Anchorage. I had never heard of one so I fired up the Laptop, typed "ulu knife" into the Vista Search bar, and clicked Search the Internet. Simple.

I was a little bummed to see that the ulu.com online store is actually.....offline. But I did find theulufactory.com and they have a storefront right here in Anchorage. Now I don't know a thing about ulu knives so when I walk into the store tomorrow the salespeople could have a good time with me, but I do find the knives interesting enough, and I do need a unique souvenir to bring home to Jeanne. So it looks as if that is what I will be bring home this trip.

Cheers!

Wow. This one snuck up on me.

First...the download link for Windows 2003 SP2.

Second...did it sneak up on you too?

I have been so heads down with...well....everything that I have not bothered to keep up on the release schedule. That being said, it is time to remote into the home servers and start updating!

Cheers!

I am delivering a session at the Windows Connections Conference in Orlando tomorrow called, "Top 10 things you might not have seen in the Office 2007 clients". In preparation for the session, I have found some really cool things you can do with the applications in the Office suite. This is the first of several posts that I am going to make of the next few days and weeks to provide more detail on this session. (I have to give credit to Mark Alexieff, Sr. Product Manager on the Office team for supplying me with the bulk of the information for this and other posts.)

Background...

I have been using Office since Office 4.0. I have mostly remained safely within the realm of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and of course... Outlook. Like most basic users, I use maybe 10% of the features in the Office apps. I just don't have a functional need to use most of the advanced features. With Office 2007 though there are plenty of new features that will appeal to the everyday user. There are also plenty of cool and interesting things in the newer members of the Office family of products that will appeal to everyday users. For this post I am going to start with Outlook since that is the application I use the most (isn't that true for everyone?!?)

For those of you that use Outlook in a business environment where Outlook is connected to an Exchange server, sharing your calendar and your availability information is as simple as sharing your calendar  (you may not be aware of what kind of server your Outlook client is connected to. If it's an Exchange server, Outlook will tell you. Just look in status bar at the bottom of the Outlook Window). This is Great! *If* the person you want to share your calendar with is on an Exchange server within your business environment.

But what about people you do business with outside of your organization? What about your better half? Your grandparents? Other friends and family that are not connected to your Exchange server? For that matter, what about people that don't use Outlook at all?

And one more.....what if you use Outlook 2007 and you are NOT connected to an exchange server?

Well....now there is a solution for everyone!

Outlook 2007 can insert your calendar information into an email that you can send to whomever you wish to share your information with. Here's how....

Start by composing a New Mail Message. Position your cursor in the body of the message where you would like to insert the calendar information.  Then, in the Office Ribbon, choose the "Insert" tab, and then choose "Calendar" it is between "Business Card" (also cool!) and "Signature". You will then be prompted for a date range (default is the current day) and the level detail (just your free/busy info and/or the subject and details of appointments). You can also remove private details and choose the layout in advanced options. After clicking OK, Outlook grabs the calendar information, formats it as HTML and inserts it into the body of the email. Now, just click send! When the recipient opens the email, they get a very nicely formatted email with a standard calendar at the top where each day is a hyperlink and will scroll the email to the appropriate day to show availability. Simple. Easy. Functional. That meets my criteria of a useful feature!

I have tested this with sends to my Hotmail account, GMail, my home server and with several email clients. It worked flawlessly for everyone.

There is one downside though.....now I don't have much excuse for not letting my friends and family what my schedule is!

Cheers!

I am now catching up on email and blogs topics. Look for a flurry of activity over the next few days as I am off the road now for a few days.

My wife and i were in Chicago for the weekend (had never been there) and went on the Frank Lloyd Wright tour of homes. It is a once annual tour of homes in the Chicago area that Frank Lloyd Wright either designed or otherwise influenced. We were were a little disappointed that only 50% of the homes on the tour were Wright homes. The other 50% he had no hand in at all. They were designed by other architects and not necessarily even influenced by Wright. But they are fantastic homes none-the-less. We haven't pulled the pictures off the camera yet but I will post a few once we do.

Cheers!

**Updated - Tom Shinder over at ISASERVER.ORG pointed out some legacy thinking I had in my post regarding ISA being in a Workgroup vs a Domain. He has an excellent article on this at this link. Microsoft also has an article regarding the pros and cons of ISA being in a domain. (This article is a good one too...) My own ISA server is joined to my domain in fact and for some of the reasons Tom points out. Thanks for the catch! **

I received the following email yesterday and through it would make a good blog post.....

On my internal network I have 200 Internet users that pass thru my gateway (Windows 2003 Server Std Edition SP2) to access the Internet.

Of these 200 users, I want only 20 users to have unrestricted access to the Internet, while the remaining 180 users to be restricted to only 6 web sites. Please kindly help me out on how to achieve this, I will prefer to prevent users thru their machine names rather that the IP Addresses.

In a follow-up email it was noted that the Windows 2003 "gateway" is an ISA 2006 server...

There is no built in method for applying an access policy to computers using built in Windows Groups or OU's. We rely on Computer Sets to get close to the same thing in ISA. In larger environments this can be a little cumbersome to manually enter a large number of machine names and IP addresses. There is an import feature in the GUI, but the import asks for the information to be in XML format and it is a little clunky.

So I pinged our internal ISA DL and got a response from resident ISA expert, Jim Harrison (Jim also helps run the isatools.org site)  He pointed me out to a site called isascripts.org where I found a script called ISA_Fill_Computer_set_Computers.vbs that does exactly what the question above asks for.

While we can't rely solely on the machine name in ISA access policies (ISA uses the IP address of the machine in question while the name is simply to help us humans identify the machine), we can use the script to import the machinename,IPAddress information into a computer set which can then be used in the access policy. Save a lot of time over manually entering a couple hundred machine to IP address mappings into a computer set.

To use the tool, we first need to generate a delimited .txt file with the computers and IP addresses in the form of -

According to the information in the script, the delimiter can be a space, comma, tab, semicolon, colon, forwardslash or backslash. I tested this using a comma and it worked perfectly.

So.... for the question posed to me we would need to generate a file called unrestricted.txt that contains the 20 machines that need unrestricted access to the Internet. Another named restricted.txt that contains the 180 machines that are restricted to the 6 URL's suggested by the admin.

So how do we get the machine names and IP addresses into the text file? If we type them in we might as well just do that in the ISA computer sets since it will take just about the same amount of time.

After a little searching I found another script called Network Inventory over at the AdminScriptEditor site that can scan your network and generate an Excel file listing a bunch of details about the machines on your network including the machine name and IPaddress. The script will have to be run from a machine that has Excel loaded on it. I ran it from a Vista workstation running Excel 2007 and generated the results below on my own network (machine name changed). Of course this is only going to work if the machines are powered on and accessible. I have a simple network at home on a single IP subnet. I am going to guess this script will not pass through routers to other IP segments so you may have to run it on a machine in each segment and combine the results to get a full map.

The script collects a lot of information that we don't need for our ISA solution. To get this into a usable format, we can delete the columns that aren't needed as well as the 1st row. Once this is done, save the file out as a master file. Then trim out the machines not used for the Unrestricted Computer Set and save as a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file (unrestricted.txt). Then open the master again, trim out the machines not included in the Restricted Computer Set and again save as a CSV file (restricted.txt).

We can now use the ISA_Fill_Computer_set_Computers.vbs script to import each file into our computer sets. I just created a folder off the root and dropped the script and the CSV text files into the folder. Drop to a command prompt and go to the folder you create and run the import script. The format of the command is --

ISA_Fill_Computer_set_Computers.vbs setname file.txt

setname = the name of the computer set you wish to create in ISA

file.txt = the CSV file you wish to import.

For the questioned posed to me, there will also need to be a URL set created with the 6 web sites that the restricted user have access to and the appropriate Access Rule created. Then the Access Rule created for the Unrestricted computers.

Things to watch for --

As noted, the Network Inventory script will not find machines that are powered off or otherwise inaccessible. Firewalls, Routers and other network issues may result in an incomplete list. There may be some manual updating of the Excel or CSV files to get an accurate list for import.

The Network Inventory script appears to only pull back the IPv6 address on Vista machines. The workaround would be to disable IPv6 on the Vista machines (a pain if you have a bunch) or modify the script to grab only the IPv4 address.

The import script will overwrite an existing named computer set. It does not merge or append.

Computer sets can be manually edited as machines are added/removed from the network.

Request --

If you have a more efficient way t0o do this, I would love to know! Especially if it allows us to use the native XML import mechanism.

Cheers!

I just read yet another article on how the RIAA sent out letters to university students threatening to sue those who have downloaded and shared music without paying for it unless they pay a settlement. I have seen dozens of similar articles over the past couple of years. According to this most recent article, a student was asked to settle for $3000 - about $7.87 a song - or get sued.

When will this kind of bullying will stop? My guess, not any time soon.

The music industry is hemorrhaging money like blood in an overly gruesome episode of Grey's Anatomy due to piracy. It's their own fault too. I can understand why they want to re-coup some of those losses but I don't believe bullying college students who have little to no money is the way to do it. They need to keep in mind that the students they are targeting today are the lawyers and policy makers of tomorrow. Pissing them off is going to lead to a backlash down the road.

$7.87 a song is insanity. I personally think $1.00 a song is robbery but that is just me. But almost $8 bucks? I don't want to upset the recording artists who burn the midnight oil recording music they think people want to hear, but what single song is worth that much to anyone? I suppose an artist who spends a year (or even 3 years) creating music might feel like the music is worth that much. To those artists I say go talk to Jack White of the The White Stripes and learn how to make record a kick ass album in two weeks.  The artists aren't the ones who are profiting from the RIAA's legal onslaught anyway. Recording artists receive only a small percentage of the overall money received from album sales.

Yeah....I said "album". Twice. I am old.

Most of the money goes into the coffers of the record labels themselves. They can argue that they use the money to promote artists and sponsor tours and blah, blah, blah but since when should the money given to the artists who create the content be only a fraction of what it costs for the consumer to purchase it? Since forever actually and it really needs to change.

The world has moved on. The digital age is now. The record industry has been as slow as a snail climbing Mount Everest in adopting digital distribution methods. It should have been the record companies that created the Napster's, BitTorrent's and Kazaa's of the world. But since they didn't have the foresight to see how quickly the world was changing and other people did, those other people did the hard work for them. Brick and mortar music stores are closing in droves. Getting music online is THE way to disseminate music (and increasingly just about all visual and audio based content).

The industry has also demanded that companies like Microsoft, Apple and others implement digital rights management (DRM) systems which, on the surface sound like an effective way of combating piracy but only muddy the waters for consumers. Different companies implement different DRM methods and the music gets locked to specific devices or platforms and reduces portability and consumer choice. You can argue that companies should work better together to come up with a global standard but that is a whole other problem to tackle. Why are the latter forced to fix a problem created by the former?

The music industry (and ALL industries where intellectual property can be easily disseminated online) needs to understand WHY students (and others) pirate media.

1) Cost - The cost to purchase a CD is crazy. $15-20 bucks for 45-60 minutes of music? Come on! Figure out the online model and get the cost down to a point where poor college students can afford it. They are your target market most of the time anyway.

2) It's Easy - Why get in a car, drive to a mall, fight to find a parking spot, fight the throngs of people, just to MAYBE find what you want when you can DEFINITELY find everything you want in seconds online? I can download a song I want faster than it takes to pump the $10 in gas it will cost me to get to an from the store.

3) DRM sucks - IPods are cool. Zunes rock. But they don't share music with each other because of formats and DRM. For that matter, it should be easy to move that music from my portable player to my PC to my Media Center to my car just like I can with a CD. Stop making me purchase the same song 4 times in 4 different formats so I can listen to it in my car, my home stereo, my portable music player, and my PC's.

4) The social aspect - When I hear music I like, I ask about it. I am a consumer. Consumers are the best advertising there is for music. We blast it in our cars, we play it at parties. We ask then they go try to find it or we send links to each other. We want to listen to what we hear other people playing and we want to share it with others with similar tastes.

But.....I don't want to just bitch and moan about this. I want to offer up a solution. And here it is.....in two short paragraphs.

The recording industry needs to spend some of their own money on R&D to develop a standardized electronic distribution methodology instead of relying on third parties to manage their mess. Either develop their own system or work with the major players in the peer-to-peer world to refine and license existing technologies. Get with the digital age! This will address the cost factor and since it is already easy, that is in the bag as well.

While I think DRM is the worst thing ever for music and movies, I might support it if it was standardized and let me move my music between different devices easily without having to purchase multiple licenses/copies. It should also be tied into the social aspect of this. Cut me in on the action. Develop a DRM scheme that allows me to send a digital copy to someone else, and automatically deducts a (small) payment from the receiver and deposits a small chunk of that in my account, a big chunk in the account of the content creator, and some percentage into the account of the recording industry. That alone would probably solve the problem.

Cheers!

It has been brought to my attention that comments are not working on my blog....I will get some emails sent to see if this can get resolved. I will update this post when it is good to go.

***UPDATED***

Comments are now working. It seems my Technorati search box interferes with the ASP.Net coding used in the blogging software. I have temporarily removed the search box till I locate a workaround. Comment away!

Cheers!

This is the second in a series of Screencasts I have recently completed. This one deals with the Windows Vista Power Plans and the ease with which you can change and customize them. I can say for a fact they work too. I usually run on the High Performance plan and I can just make it through a 2.5 hour movie on the plane in that config using my Lenovo T60p on a full charge. Switching to Power Saver gives me a full 45-60 minutes more time after the movie. Sweetness.

I will be posting a few more screencasts immediately after this one. For those interested, I used TechSmith's Camtasia to capture the screen demos. Slick product. 

Vista Power Management - Power Plans

Cheers!

I am delivering a webcast today on Why to Deploy IPv6 at 9am Pacific time today...

Here are some resources that I will be referring to....

Server and Domain Isolation Site

Network Access Protection (NAP) Site

Introduction to IPv6 Whitepaper (updated January 2007)

IPv6 technical Reference Site (this is a little older but still relevant)

Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) Internet Host Survey - Record of number of hosts on the Internet every year since 1981

How Windows Vista Delivers IPv6 - An Ask the Experts session by Dale Geesey

How IPv6 Works - Architecture, Routing, Transition technologies

IPv6 Transition Technologies

DNS Client Behavior in Vista

Name of Large Numbers - Cool Wikipedia entry discussing how large numbers are named....we reference "undecillion" in the webcast....

Cheers!

I have three daughters from two previous marriages. I remarried for the final time just over a year ago. Jeanne (my wife) and I were together for 5 years before we got married. During that time we discussed a lot of things future-related that dealt with our relationship. One of those things was regarding children. She has no children of her own and didn't want any. She enjoys my children and that fulfills her motherly instinct. This was discussed many times and she convinced me that she did not want to try to have kids once we were married. I believed her. I trusted her. I married her.

I was betrayed....

My youngest daughter is 8 years old. Well out of diapers. I thought the days of getting up in the middle of the night to comfort a crying child, clean up "messes", and satisfy their hunger were long over.

Or so I thought....

About a week ago my wife comes home with the twins - Hayden and Darwyn.

And here I am at 3:30am, comforting the crying kids, cleaning up "messes", and making sure they don't go hungry....they just got back to sleep so I decided to snap a couple pictures of the new arrivals and vent my parental frustrations....

The sleeping twins...

Just not comfortable enough...

Betrayed.

Cheers!

For the longest time I have heard this question....

"I heard Harold Wong was doing a series of webcasts and I really like the others by him I have seen. How kind I find other webcasts he is delivering?" (Substitute your favorite Technet Presenter if you like)

Well now you can!  Check out the new Technet Webcasts site that allows you to sort by presenter, date, or title. This works for upcoming as well as on-demand webcasts. Version 2 is already in the works so if you have any suggestions, feel free to comment on this post and I will pass it on to our awesome operations team!

Cheers!

The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer is a fantastic tool for scanning machines for missing hotfixes, security updates, and security configurations. I have used the MBSA since it's original release to scan my home LAN that has 7-12 machines at any given time. It is an invaluable tool, especially for smaller networks that reduces the amount of time it takes to figure out what machines need to be updated. When used in conjunction with Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) it is a perfect solution for patch management for smaller networks.

It only recently occurred to me that the 3-4 Vista machines I run at home have never been scanned with MBSA because there hasn't been a Vista version of the MBSA available. I have also been very pleased with the Automatic Updates on Vista and have not had to perform many manual updates to my machines. Of course there haven't been a lot of updates released for Vista either to date. The latest beta release of MBSA enables the scanning of Vista machines.

I just installed the new MBSA 2.1 to my corporate laptop. I knew I was missing an update to SQL Express (MBSA 2.1 identified it), and due to the nature of testing I do, I suspected I might have a few other anomalies. Sure enough MBSA identified a weak password for a local account I used for some testing a few weeks ago (account is now gone) and also reminded that I had IIS installed on my Vista machine from back when I was testing Virtual Server (IIS removed now along with the IUSR account).

If you are looking for some extra information and support on MBSA and other patch management technologies, check out the MBSA Newsgroups. Also check out Captain's Blog from Mark Shavlik. His company originally developed MBSA.

Cheers!

I am increasingly getting more question about IPv6. Especially now that IPv6 is installed and turned on by default in Vista. So I want to post a few resources for those of you starting to ramp up on IPv6.

For a little bit more information.....IPv4 is what most people are using today when they connect to the Internet, their home LAN/WAN, and even at work. IPv4 is what most people would refer to as the current TCP/IP implementation and comprises the combination of the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol) for networking applications and routing of packets. IPv4 has been around for a long time and over time, it has become constrained by some inherent scalability issues as well as security exploits and vulnerabilities.

IPv6 is the next generation TCP/IP stack that promises to alleviate the IP addressing issues we have as well as plug some of the holes that exist today. I have gathered just a few resources on IPv6 to help get you up to speed....and you need to get up to speed. Unlike Window XP where IPv6 could be implemented but only from a command prompt and usually only if you knew exactly what you were doing, in Windows Vista, IPv6 is installed and enabled by default. It is also managed through the GUI instead on only through the command prompt.

So here are a few resources for you....

Intro to IPv6 Webcast

IPv6 information on Technet

Intro to IPv6 Whitepaper

IPv6 Transition Technologies Whitepaper

Why Deploy IPv6? Webcast

 

Cheers!

Not exactly in my backyard, but having met a few of the evangelists from around the world, and them being nice enough to link back to my blog now and then, it seems to be a good idea to help promote their events.

You can register for the event here - Developer Roadshow 2007 in Cape Town, Africa. The name "roadshow" tipped me off there may be other events in the area as well. So with a little searching I found the following posting over at sadevelopers.net. Looks like there are a few dates coming up in South Africa for this.

On a side note.....I am posting this while sitting in a hotel room in Anchorage, Alaska - Current Temp - 16 Degrees Fahrenheit. I left Seattle, Washington, US today around 12 noon and it looked like it was going to be a gorgeous day. Not exactly warm at 50 degrees but it isn't Anchorage. That is my luck.

Cheers!

I will be grabbing this as soon as I get home and have something better than dial-up....<j/k>

Longhorn Beta 3 Download

Cheers!

subtitle - an overuse of parentheticals....

An email came across an internal alias today that really got me thinking....I am going to quote a portion of it here.....

The weirdest thing happened tonight – my Outlook said it was connected. To Exchange Server. From my home network. Which had no RAS/PPTP set up. No smart card plugged in. Weird.

 I had never known this was possible before, and thought it  had somehow detected that I had OWA opened in an IE window.

The reference is to Outlook and RPC over HTTP (incorrectly named IMO since it is actually RPC through HTTP(s)) or what is now called Outlook Anywhere in Outlook 2007/Exchange 2007.

The simplest definition of this is that Outlook (since Outlook 2003) has had the ability (with a properly configured Exchange environment) to connect to it's home Exchange server, over the Internet, without the use of a VPN. It is an unbelievable time saver for those of us at MS that would otherwise have to whip out a SmartCard, enter a PIN, establish a VPN, clear quarantine and only then be able to delete our spam (and of course read and respond to email). I am sure a few of our customers out there appreciate this feature as well.

This is not new. We have been able to do this for a couple of years now. When I say "we" I mean anyone with Exchange 2003 or later and Outlook 2003 or later. Which makes me wonder how much of a gap there is between our marketing/training and our customers. I am in front of IT Pros almost every day. I have always been amazed at the response I get to some of the technologies or features (and sometimes entire products!) I speak about that our customers don't know exist. But when our own employees don't know......wow. (for the record, no one at MS knows everything about every product.....but Outlook? EVERY employee uses Outlook!)

This is why I love what I do. Those light bulb moments I get to see. But it is also a little unnerving to know that there is so much education to do with our customers (and our employees). I define what I do as - Traveling the world spreading the word about our products and technologies. Problem is I only really get to do this in a handful of states in the US. But that is what this blog is for - to help bridge the gap....

Cheers!

Outlook. It is one of the best applications Microsoft has ever produced. Some might argue that Windows is the best thing ever (and some might argue the opposite), but I think Outlook takes the cake.

Outlook handles my email. I get a lot of email. It handles my public folders and distribution lists. It handles my calendar and tells me where to be and when and for how long. It lets me figure out where other people are, when and for how long. It lets me organize the people I know and how to get a hold of them. I can take notes with Outlook. I can schedule tasks (honey-do lists) to be completed by a certain time. I can categorize my activities and all of the aforementioned items - color coding them so I can easily identify what it is.

I can even create business cards using Outlook (look for that post later in the series).

More recently I have taken to using the the updated Out of Office Assistant in Outlook 2007. It is a simple utility and feature but very useful. It has been updated to provide a LOT more flexibility for scheduling your OOF time.

Now, I can set a unique OOF message to be sent to people who email me from the outside world. In other words, the people who do not have accounts on the internal Microsoft Exchange server. This way I can set one message for the outside world and a completely different message for people within Microsoft that need to reach me.

But my favorite part is being able to schedule it in advance. Previous implementations of OOF messages were either and ON or OFF thing. If you take a look at the graphic below, you will see I can now effectively schedule my OOF time in advance by selecting a start time.

I can also turn it off at a scheduled time as well. This is great for me because I usually know when I will be out of town well in advance of the trip. And by allowing me to set an End Time, I don't have to worry about manually going into the tool after I return and disabling OOF manually - something I was previously terrible at remembering to do and so people would be getting OOF messages weeks after I was back from a trip (the upside was it reduced my email dramatically because everyone thought I was gone!). You will also notice I can differentiate between those on my contact list (if they deserve some special treatment) and everyone outside of my organization.

Furthermore, if we click the Rules button, we can start getting REALLY specific about what message individual people get and even take some action on the incoming emails from those unique people. For instance, just delete everything my manager sends me while I am OOF (just kidding Melanie!). Or maybe place all email while I am OOF in a specific folder or (if I was important enough to have one) forward email to an administrative assistant while I am on vacation to take action on.

I could even set up some alerts that play sound files and display text in a pop-up. As you can see from the options here, there is a LOT of checking and conditioning that can be performed on the incoming email. We can get even more granular by clicking the Advanced button on this page and start checking for the Importance and Sensitivity flags associated with an email or even the size of the email. Pretty much any condition you can think of. Even better is you can set multiple rules to cover multiple people and/or conditions. There is more I could just tell you about....but what fun is that!?!?  I encourage you to poke around and see what kind of rules you can come up with using this feature.

Just make sure you specify an end date!!!  Otherwise you may go on vacation and come back only to find your email dwindle down to nothing (we can only dream....!) because everyone thinks you are never coming back....

Cheers!

....of course, I am his older brother and based upon how much weight I have gained since the holidays, I am prone to agree with him. He sent me an email consisting of the Subject: Dude! and Body: Dude! You're Huge! and then a weblink. I expected it to be a link to a YouTube video of me pigging out on the 10 lbs of Hershey's Kisses my daughter sent me for my birthday. Fortunately, is was a link to an article on Yahoo! Finance about an interview I recently did with "Let's Talk Computers". In the interview we talk about Windows Vista and some of the new features available for consumers and businesses. Much better than watching me eat chocolate...

My friend and co-worker Chris Henley also did an interview with Let's talk Computers on the new Office 2007 release. There is also an interview with Stuart Scott, the CIO of Microsoft, regarding Vista and Office 2007. Seems I am in good company!

Cheers!

***Updated 12:28*** MSN Money/MoneyCentral link to Interview - Also, my previous post got eaten so sorry for the time shift...

I have received a dozen or so emails/calls about my interview from friends/family/co-workers. All but one pointed me to the Yahoo! Finance article as the reference point (see my earlier posting). Makes me wonder why so many of my acquaintances are going to Yahoo! Finance instead of MSN MoneyCentral! This is the first interview I have given while at MS, but I have recently been the interviewer for a series of Technet Radio Interviews. I figure now is as good as any to post about those.

Deploying Office w2007 w/ Josh Edwards - Technical Product Manager on the Microsoft Office Client  team

Windows Vista Deployment w/ Manu Namboodiri - Sr. Product manager in the Windows Client marketing group

Interview with Exchange Author and MVP Paul Robichaux

My co-workers Chris Henley and Michael J. Murphy also do interviews for Technet Radio.

Who would you like me to interview?

Cheers!

subtitle - "I need more brain RAM..."

One of the pitfalls of being a technology evangelist, is the sheer magnitude of information that exists about technology. Just take a look at the Microsoft Product Catalog. Hundreds and hundreds of products and technologies. It is overwhelming. Add in just the competing technologies from the *nix world and my brain starts to overheat. Then start looking at Apple, Google, Yahoo, and the countless smaller vendors and my brain simply stops working. But let's take out the competitors and focus on just Microsoft for now. I need to know about the products we make so I can speak about them to my audiences. AND I need to know the basic information about our operating systems because I speak to ITPros almost daily. What they want to know, I need to know.

So imagine my surprise this morning when I was in Salem, Or delivering a session on Vista, Office, and Exchange when up comes the question - 

 "What are the big differences between the XP Tablet PC edition and Vista Tablet PC?"

- and....I could not give a good answer. What makes this particularly embarrassing is that I have a Vista Tablet PC in my home! Now, in my own defense, I don't ever get to use it because it belongs to Jeanne, my wife. I learned a couple years ago, when the Media Center attached to our living room PC was her primary machine, that experimenting with her machine was not very conducive to a conflict free relationship. So I have left the Tablet alone for the most part. Outside of fiddling with Tablets at various stores and the research I did on Tablets before buying her particular machine (which was originally an XP Tablet PC), I have not had much personal exposure to the Tablet PC products. I also have never been asked about Tablet PC's ever in a live session. So up till this morning, I have never had a real need to allocate any brain RAM to knowing the Tablet PC specs and info and differences.<tangent>

I know enough about my own brain that I unless I do something or use something on a regular basis, I just don't remember it. I know that my customers ask me about Windows Servers, Exchange, ISA, Media Center, SBS and most of the stuff that makes those products tick. So....I run a small domain at home with a couple of Windows 2003 DC's, and Exchange Server, a couple of ISA servers, a Media Center machine, and I keep and SBS Virtual Machine around just because my first 5 years with the company were supporting the SBS products. I think I do pretty good job of handling those products day in and day out. But the Tablet PC question stumped me.

Customer - 1, Chris - 0.

At this point I have to give kudos to Ken Shafer with Agape Computing. Ken's business is focused on small businesses with a strong focus on Small Business Server customers. I have delivered a session or two for his company and he was one of the partners at the event this morning. While I was moving on to my next set of questions, Ken went to the web, found what I should have already known and then emailed me a link that has a very good summary of the new features in the Vista Tablet PC. I knew about the improvements in handwriting recognition, and the pen usage (which I did mention in my session). I also knew about the Tablet PC Input Panel, Snipping Tool, and Explorer Check Boxes. I have used all of those on Jeanne's Tablet. Problem is, I never really used a Tablet under XP so I didn't know those things weren't in the XP version. But there were the other things I didn't know about, Touch Screen support, Pen Flicks, and the other improvements. Now I do! (Don't tell Jeanne, but the next time she is out and about, the Tablet is mine!.......mwahahahaha!)

Thanks Ken!

I decided to gather up some additional Tablet PC information sources just for my own future perusal (so I don't get caught with my pants down again) and to help you locate the information as well --

Windows XP Tablet PC Edition home page - just for comparison and support of those not making the jump to Vista immediately.

Tablet PC Community on Microsoft.com

Tablet PC Team Blog - Wish it were more active, but the most recent post on Pen Flicks is really interesting

Robert Scoble's Tablet PC posts - Scoble is a big tablet fan

Enjoy!

Cheers!

Tomorrow I am delivering a webcast entitled - Deploying IPSec with Windows Vista. I don't like the title very much because I won't be making a deep dive into deploying IPSec on a wide scale. It is more of an intro to IPSec on Vista and how we can control some IPSec functions using Vista's new Windows Firewall with Advanced Security (if you have Vista, type "Advanced" into the Start Button Search bar and you will see the tool......don't make changes 'til you have backed up though!). One interesting feature is the native support for IPv6 in the Vista Firewall. We will show some of that in the session.

I would really like your feedback on how this webcast goes. It is my first IPSec webcast and I would like to know if the session is useful and how much more information you want to know about IPSec. I have been toying with the idea of making some regular posts about it so this will help with direction.

Cheers!

I was trying to come up with a witty title for this post and all I could come up with was a shout out to the TV show "Fantasy Island" from the 1970's. Viva Herve.

My apologies.

I am delivering a webcast tomorrow on Windows Vista Deployment if you are interested. If you are interested in some pre-reading, check out the Desktop Deployment site which is where the bulk of what is in the webcast can be found. The webcast specifics can be found on the Technet Site. One thing to note is the reference to the "ximage" utility. It is actually "imagex" and that is what you will see in my session. I will be doing slightly different demos than the videos so it would still be beneficial to grab them.

You might also want to grab the Vista Deployment Step-by-Step Guide. It goes into much greater detail about the deployment process than we will be able to go during the webcast.

Cheers!