The Electric Wand

Weekly tips from the "Tip o' the Week" email distribution inside of Microsoft.
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The Electric Wand

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  • Imperialism, Metric-centricity and Live Search

    Posted over 6 years ago
    by EwanD}
    I'm a child of a mixed up time when it comes to measures and the likes. I am feet and inches tall, stones and pounds heavy, when it's cold outside, it's below zero degrees, but when it's hot, it's in the 80s. I learned small measurement in mms and cms...

  • The day I met Tony Blair, talked about online healthcare

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    I am feeling under the weather at the moment. Been off work for a couple of days with what seems to be some kind of chest infection. I finally decided to stop waiting for it to go away on its own, and went to see the doctor - starting by looking at the...

  • Windows Home Server - would you have it in your home?

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    I just read an interesting article from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes on ZDNet about Windows Home Server , speculating whether there really was a market for such a device, and who would buy it. Adrian's point - and it is a valid one, if you know anything...

  • Custom presence states in Communicator, reprise

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    A quick follow on to my post the other day about having custom presence states in Office Communicator 2007 - the Communicator Deployment Guide has a couple of minor errors which could frustrate you, as one commenter pointed out, and I've had comments...

  • Drowning in a deluge of spam

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    I'm sure everyone knows that email spam is a growing problem and that there's not a great deal we can do to stop it entirely - initiatives like SenderID can help reduce the volume an organisation receives, and by using smart sender and recipient filtering...

  • Outlook 2007 signatures location

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    Following my post about .sig files , I had cause to dig around looking for where Outlook actually puts the Signature files. I came across a post which Allister wrote a little while ago, but it's such a useful little tip that it's worth repeating... Basically...

  • Exchange mailbox quotas and a 'paradox of thrift'

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    The study of economics throws up some fantastic names for concepts or economic models, some of which have become part of the standard lexicon, such as the Law of Diminishing Returns , or the concept of opportunity cost , which I've written about before...

  • Keep the Item count in your mailbox low!

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    I've been doing a little digging today, following a query from a partner company who're helping out one of their customers with some performance problems on Exchange. Said customer is running Exchange 2000, and has some frankly amazing statistics... ...

  • The Return of Exchange Unplugged

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    In late 2005, to prepare for Exchange 5.5 going out of support (and to help customers understand what was involved in moving up to Exchange 2003), we did a really well received tour of the country arranged around the theme of " Exchange Unplugged ". We...

  • OCS2007 trial edition now available

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    If you want to get your hands on trial software for the recently-released Office Communications Server 2007 and its client, Office Communicator 2007 , then you're in luck... OCS trial download (both Standard & Enterprise editions) Communicator trial...

  • Tip for finding when an appointment was created

    Posted over 6 years ago
    by EwanD}
    Here's a tip for when you suspect someone has magicked up an appointment to coincidentally collide with an Outlook meeting request you sent them... In your own calendar (and other people's), you can see when a meeting was scheduled (ie request was sent...

  • Tips for optimizing Vista on new hardware

    Posted over 6 years ago
    by EwanD}
    Ed Bott over at ZDNet posted a really interesting article yesterday, detailing the journey he had of making his friend's brand new Sony Viao laptop work properly with Windows Vista Business. In short, his friend upgraded a trusty old XP Vaio to a new...

  • The biggest file I've ever seen - 3Tb PUB.EDB

    Posted over 6 years ago
    by EwanD}
    Well I haven't seen this for myself, but I was sent a screenshot of it. Actually, it was 3 different Exchange public folder servers, each of which had ~3Tb of public folder data... That's scary and impressive in equal measure. Reminds me of some of the...

  • What next for Windows Mobile?

    Posted over 6 years ago
    by EwanD}
    I've been a big fan of Windows Mobile for years - ever since the original Orange SPV Smartphone , the ability to easily sync contacts & calendar onto the phone and the way Windows Mobile handles that data, is far more useful than email, IMHO. I even...

  • Voicemail sizes on Exchange 2007

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    A question we get asked a lot is regarding the sizing of voice mail messages in Exchange 2007. If you're not familiar with the built-in voicemail capabilities, Exchange can function as a voice mail system (or Unified Messaging system, really - it's a...

  • Lessons of over-promise, under-deliver

    Posted over 5 years ago
    by EwanD}
    UPDATE: 28/2/09 Just got an email from the general manager of the restaurant (after my message back to them), graciously admitting to “ what can only be described as a complete failure of our internal system ”, which has led to the entire team getting...

  • Apple put the ‘Networks’ in their place

    Posted over 5 years ago
    by EwanD}
    Having just read Andrew Orlowski’s article over on The Register , it chimes exactly with a belief I’ve had since the original iPhone came out and showed a clean pair of heels to pretty much every other single device: someone had to put the mobile operator...

  • Is Blu-ray really "all that"?

    Posted over 6 years ago
    by EwanD}
    I made the decision to wait until the HD-DVD/Blu-ray format war had been resolved before deciding to give the winner a try. In the interim, about 18 months ago I picked up a new DVD player for about £120, which had HDMI support, did a decent job of upscaling...

  • Custom presence states in OCS – revisited again

    Posted over 5 years ago
    by EwanD}
    I posted a while back about custom presence states ( here and here ). Well it turns out that a change made to an updated version of Communicator, requires (by default) that the custom state XML file is downloaded from a “secure” URL (so ruling out the...

  • Mac vs Vista ads

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    I think Apple scored a home run with their "I'm a Mac"/"I'm a PC" ads, and in the UK have done a great job (and no doubt spent a good chunk of cash) in getting Mitchell & Webb to feature in them. You can see the UK ads on Apple.com/uk if you have...

  • Blackberry outage - worrying for mobile mail junkies

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    I just read news of an 11-hour outage in RIM's Blackberry infrastructure on ZDNet - ouch. Not only did email stop flowing to the devices during the outage, but the backlog of mail which built up is taking time to clear. Without wishing to gloat (really...

  • TripAdvisor - an example of the web <done right>

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    I've been on holiday for the last 2 weeks. Whilst away (and trying not to think about work), we took a boat trip where 12 people went off on a catamaran for the day, 6 of us from the same hotel. During the chit-chat that goes on in such a scenario, we...

  • iCon - Steve Jobs biography

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    I don't make a great secret of the fact that I'm not much of an Apple fan - I can appreciate the great design in the products but I've just never had a desire or need to actually buy any (apart from the iPod sock , and that was actually a freebie from...

  • Picture association - a new variant of word association

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    I've seen this crop up a couple of times on web discussion forums - basically a game kicks off where people post photos and the responses need to be tenuously linked to the previous picture, the more tenuous and clever the better. I'll add explanations...

  • Graeme Obree: The Flying Scotsman

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    I went to see a really interesting film tonight, a preview of The Flying Scotsman , a film about the life (or at least some of the achievements) of the remarkable Graeme Obree. Obree, if you've never heard of him, broke the holy-grail record of cycling...