November 2007 - Posts

Bulk update Outlook Contacts' phone numbers to be E.164 compliant
30 November 07 09:10 AM | Ewan | 1 Comments   

Here's a quick & dirty tool I put together for Outlook to be able to update all the phone numbers of contacts to make them E.164 compliant. It relates back to a post a while back around the challenges of formatting numbers 'correctly', particularly Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Outlook, Office, Unified Comms, OCS

Exchange 2007 SP1 signed off
29 November 07 09:04 AM | Ewan | 1 Comments   

The Exchange team gave the green light to build 240.06 of SP1 yesterday! The download will be available here as soon as they can get the packages deployed to the web. More information on what's in SP1 is on Technet already . Read More...

Filed under: Exchange

Drowning in a deluge of spam
27 November 07 07:49 PM | Ewan | 3 Comments   

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 Read More...

Filed under: Exchange

Fun and games with identity (and keeping it safe)
26 November 07 03:54 PM | Ewan | 1 Comments   

I was going to title this post, " the Wizard of Id " but decided against it. It hasn't been a great week for the UK government's HMRC (Revenue & Customs) department, who admitted losing a couple of CDs which had an unencrypted export of the name, Read More...

Filed under: Random Stuff

NASA's new server - with 4Tb of RAM and 2048 CPU cores
16 November 07 04:07 PM | Ewan | 0 Comments   

Wow. George Ou from ZDNet wrote yesterday about NASA's new supercomputer, the most powerful single node computer in the world. It comprises 1024 dual-core Itanium2 CPUs with 4Tb of memory. The article doesn't say what OS the beast is running, but one Read More...

Filed under: Random Stuff

When bean counters start counting things they don't understand the value of.
15 November 07 09:58 AM | Ewan | 1 Comments   

I've been having a discussion with an old friend, who's telling me of a large financial institution that have suddenly started getting very picky about spending on IT. Maybe it's the financial environment right now - the tabloids are desperate to paint Read More...

Filed under: Humour, Business

Zune software and firmware upgrade now live
13 November 07 05:39 PM | Ewan | 2 Comments   

Just noticed that www.zune.net has the latest Zune software for the PC and corresponding device firmware, available for download. Today marks the on-sale date of the new Zune devices too. I'll be in NYC early next month... and I'm confident (at the moment Read More...

Filed under: Consumer Tech

Gartner's wisdom and the IO models
12 November 07 11:12 AM | Ewan | 0 Comments   

Over the years, Microsoft and Gartner Inc (neé Gartner Group) have had an interesting relationship: sometimes very close partners and colleagues in research projects, sometimes taking opposite stances to a position and being criticised by the other. I've Read More...

Careful what names you give to Outlook Contacts when using UM!
05 November 07 09:45 AM | Ewan | 0 Comments   

This is a follow up to Friday's post about what happens if you have Exchange Unified Messaging set up to send you notifications on missed call alerts (and on voicemail), using caller-ID to reverse lookup against the personal contacts folder. Stephen Spence Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Humour, Outlook, Unified Comms

I learned a cool thing about Exchange UM today
02 November 07 03:22 PM | Ewan | 2 Comments   

I've seen this behaviour in practice before, but I don't think it really clicked with me until Neil May from PostCTI (who was hosting our penultimate Exchange Unplugged event today) told me how pleased he was with it. This functionality concerns the "missed Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Outlook, Unified Comms

Voicemail sizes on Exchange 2007
01 November 07 06:45 PM | Ewan | 1 Comments   

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 Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Unified Comms