Here are a few more questions-and-answers from last week's DPM 2007 chat session, starting with a very popular question that comes up in the newsgroup frequently:

• Q: [I'd like to use USB disk instead of tape for offsite and long term archival... will this be in DPM 2007, or is Tape still my only option for moving data outside the DPM pool?
  A: We have a partner solution (Cristalink's Firestreamer) that works with DPM and will allow DPM to backup to a USB disk. This works with Beta2 itself. The partner page has more details on this.
  Data Protection Manager Partners page
• Q: I see DPM already comes with ese.dll. Yet its dialogs ask that I copy over both ese.dll and eseutil.exe for Exchange to DPM. Why is ese.dll already in place in DPM? Should I delete it?
  A: The RTM version of DPM will not come with ese.dll. Please do delete the existing versions and then copy the latest version from the Exchange server.
• Q: If the DPM server seems to be reasonably idle most of the time can it host other Server applications for small businesses with limited equipment resources or does it have to be dedicated to just backup?
  A: We typically recommend a dedicated DPM server as it is known to have some interop issues with other roles like Domain Controller or Sharepoint. It has been tested as a standalone server but we know some customers to run some file/print workloads on the same server.

This has been annoying me since I upgraded to Outlook 2007. Sometimes I need to cancel a meeting without sending a cancellation to those invited. For example, when my boss stops me in the hall and says, "I deleted our 1:1 from my calendar for next week because I'm on vacation" -- when that happens, I just want to delete the occurrence from my calendar as well without sending her unnecessary email.

Will Outlook let me do that? Not. The choices are (1) Send cancellation, or (2) don't cancel. I've looked and can't find a way to do what I want, so today I tried a work-around: I cancelled the meeting occurrence, and then in the resulting email form, I deleted the To recipients and entered my own email alias, then sent it.

Result? Meeting removed from my calendar (which is what I wanted). I never received the cancellation email that I sent to myself, so I didn't even have to delete it (which I'd rather do than send it to others who didn't need the notification).

My opinion is that it wasn't a good idea to remove the old option of "cancel without sending cancellation", but at least there's a way to get around it. So I thought I'd share in case someone else was struggling with the same issue.