I was telling someone recently that before I joined Microsoft I spent the late 1990s running a small training company. The number of employees varied, averaging out at a dozen or so. I delivered training, did the business management, helped the win over customers and I looked after the IT. It was like...

Inside Microsoft we have this custom of “dog-fooding” new software, and Exchange 2010 is now at the point where Microsoft IT feel they can run it outside of North America. So a few days ago I got a mail saying my mail box was going to be moved to a new server “using the new Exchange 2010 Online Mailbox...

One of those Saturday morning serendipitous link chains. Sometime in 1988  I was talking to Mike, one of my colleagues at Research Machines. It's impossible to keep using increasing computer for ever I said. He had 16Mhz 386 computer on his desk with a 387 maths co-processor and a special cache...

I started typing this blog post at 07:21. Outlook has already received the first 50 items of the day. Most of which were from night-owls in the US, a few from Asia/Pacific, and only a couple from European insomniacs. Yesterday it pulled down at least 426. I know this because yesterday I set up 3 new...

It's been an interesting few days, Monday was the Glasgow road-show event and Thursday was our day in Newcastle. The team didn't look upon flying with any great enthusiasm. So rather than returning home, drawing breath and heading North again we decided to stop en-route for an extra day and night: since...

It's not when you see articles like this from Mary Jo   (Self styled Linux guy and VMware proponent Jason Perlow thinks Hyper-V is pretty darn good... I want to quote so much of this that really is easier for you to go and read it). It's when it's the subject of a sequence of Dilbert Cartoons. Our...

The news went live on the Exchange Web Page yesterday. Technet Magazine has " 16 new features in Exchange SP1 " the one which is of most interest to me is " Improvements to Unified Messaging "... that's all about integration with OCS and communicator. Update : Jason thinks the mobility improvements are...

I said when I posted about fixing the phone numbers in your Outlook Contacts that I'd come back and do the same thing for Active Directory. Richard told people to look out for that, so no pressure to get it done then... Using the Active Directory Services interface (ADSI) from Powershell seems to...

Eileen asks " So how do I get my team to read my emails ? " Actually, she overlooks something very simple and important. Rule one: the nearer the author is to the reader in the company hierarchy the more likely the message will be read. If someone at the very top of Microsoft wants something done I could...

I've had an outlook rule in place for a while to tell people about broken phone numbers, I thought I'd report back. The first thing I found was that colleagues who forward lots of mail threads soon tired of seeing the message, so I've filtered out anything which is a reply or forward. The rule now goes...

I was going to write about my Experience of using Outlook Voice Access. And Voice command on my phone. I have phone set up so that when it sees my Bluetooth headset, it announces my calls. On a typical day I'll clear mail that came in overnight before I leave home, drop one or other of my kids at school...

Maybe I'm getting mellow in my old age, or maybe things in Microsoft IT are changing. There was a time when I really didn't think much them - directly after they off-shored the help-desk was the low point. But since then they've been doing this and that to improve the service they deliver to us. One...

With all the new products which we're seeing this year, the question does bubble up "How does this impact certification ?" . The people who run the MC* programmes have put together a set of web casts. These have already happened (click to see more and watch the web cast) 2007 Office System Certifications...

Digital rights management get a bad press. To most of us, as consumers of music or video it's something which limits what we do. We can tell right from wrong, we don't need stuff to limit us ... right ? Of course People who create "intellectual property" have a different view. And that's not just record...

Teething troubles with the new phone have proved to be pretty minor. I'm finding more things to love about this phone. I've got one major annoyance : on the C500 with Mobile 2003 I could go to Settings/Phone/Call options and program the Microsoft voice mail number with my account code and Pin as ...

Bias declaration: I've been a fan of Windows Mobile since before we started using the name. But having picked up my new Orange E650 aka HTC S710 codename “ Vox ” I'm left thinking " Boy oh boy Mobile 6 devices are a jump forward ". You could dismiss some of the changes as cosmetic , but I find they really...

One of the things that annoys any technical person is when you get asked a question and have to shrug and say "No, never seen that one", even if you suspect there is a genuine problem. I've had a couple of people ask me about problems with Outlook web access under Vista. The symptoms are usually in the...

No sense denying it, I like Mary Jo Foley linking to something I wrote . Although being cast as a member of the thought Blog Police seems odd. I doubt if many people think of me as someone who filters what he says inside Microsoft :-) I searched for an FBI saying I'd heard and found it with the same...

Sorry to rant about phones twice on the same day, but hopefully this will get something out of my system which has been has been bugging me for ages. Really this is only aimed at British readers. First some history. When "Subscriber Trunk Dialing" was introduced into Britain the Post Office came up with...

Eileen blogged a few days back about her frustration that we can't roll out Unified Messaging any quicker, and I want it for one reason and one reason only. A while back I wrote about Stupid phones . I listened to Gurdeep at TechReady saying that his phone hasn't learnt any new tricks in 20 years. Voice...

Technorati tags: Microsoft , Exchange , 2007 , Outlook Web Access , OWA No this isn't a reference to my home life and the fact the refuse is collected today. I've been running an experiment. Since my move to Exchange 2007 I've had a bigger mailbox, so I tried not emptying my deleted items folder to see...

I'm waiting to see the feedback from the audience, but the general feeling is Tuesdays event was a success. We had two servers "live" on stage and a third in reserve. These had 4 processing cores each, with 8 GB of memory and twin hard drives. The global launch organizers sent us a total of 53 Virtual...

Since Eileen is on her way back from holiday, I'm going to steal her thunder and share what Jeff Raikes just told the whole of Microsoft. I’m very pleased to announce that the Exchange team has completed its development work on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 . Congratulations to the team on this terrific...

I realise that those of you who are prone to bouts of political correctness might describe me as "pro-detail" - and whose who aren't might call me a Pedantic wassname. You might register for the Exchange/Vista/Office (a.k.a EVO) Launch event perfectly happily but since I first saw the UK version of a...

When I posted about Vista RTM ( Trolls: Slain, Lake: crossed, Mountain: climbed, Vista: Released. ) I said it wasn't connected with the NatWest Adverts In the current one a woman walks round town (stopping for a beauty treatment with free Coffee: I know what you pay for a haircut when the coffee is thrown...