The Electric Wand

Exchange in the cloud or on the ground?

Ewan — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:02:42 GMT

Following the price cut on the desperately-in-need-of-renaming BPOS services recently, I’ve been talking with a few people about the where the tipping point might be for running Exchange in house vs using some form of hosted provision.

There are plenty of reasons why a hosted offering makes sense. More and more end-users are away from the office (using web access, mobile devices or VPN-less connectivity such as “Outlook Anywhere” that’s been part of Outlook for the last 6 years), and as the user end-point is increasingly mobile, it starts to matter a lot less where the server end is.

In the first 3 versions of Exchange (4.0, 5.0 and 5.5, released in 1997 and 1998), the accepted rule was that servers would be placed in the same location as clumps of users (say, if you have more than 30 users in a remote office and anything other than a great WAN connection, you’d drop an Exchange server on-site.

Since the client and server maintained a constant connection with each other (using MAPI over RPC, if you’re interested), and since wide area networks for most companies were in the few hundred kilobits between sites, the default was pretty much that servers tended to be in the same physical location as the users.

As network capacity improved (and costs fell), combined with server capability improvements (and price reductions, and technology like Outlook cached mode and the shift to using web access as an alternative, it became more feasible for organisations to centralise and consolidate Exchange into one or a few physical locations – such as Microsoft famously did, by moving from many locations in Exchange 2000 to just 3 in Exchange 2003.

So the position we’re now at is, it pretty much doesn’t matter to an end user whether they’re connecting over a company wide-area network to a remote Exchange server, or if they’re connecting over the internet to one that sits in someone else’s datacenter.

If you’re an organisation with few hundred users, then you probably don’t have a dedicated Exchange administrator who does nothing but feed and water the email system. Moving to an online hosted model such as Microsoft Online or one of the many “Hosted Exchange” partners who offer a more tailored service, could mean a significantly lower cost of operations when measured over the next few years.

Since Hosted Exchange providers and Microsoft Online will both move towards Exchange 2010 in the near future, it’s something that every current Exchange users should consider – is it time to consider moving some or all of your estate to a hosted environment, or you do have specific requirements around backup retention or data control, that you absolutely need to have your own servers on your own soil? If the latter, then maybe “cloud” based email isn’t for you, but Exchange 2010 “on-premise” would be the right choice.

Microsoft Online Services prices cut

Ewan — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:37:13 GMT

The snappily-titled Microsoft Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) offering, announced some price cuts the other day…

I heard from someone internally that the price cuts were driven by increased economy of scale – ie. as more customers signed up for BPOS, the cost per customer of providing the services has fallen, and the saving is being passed on.

There’s an online pricing calculator to get an estimate of what it would cost to adopt, but if we took an example of 250 seats of Exchange Online (ie not the full BPOS suite), it would be around £805 per month, or just under £10,000 per annum.

Now that might sound like a lot for only 250 seats, but if you compare with the license costs to buy a server or two, 250 Client Access Licenses and the Enterprise CAL for email protection, you’d be looking at around £15k for software licenses, plus hardware costs (let’s say another £5-10k) and the staff costs to maintain the Exchange environment. It might start to look pretty attractive to outsource the whole “keeping email running” task, and just pay for it to be online.

Some customers like the online services model since it is an operational expense (OPEX) rather than having capital expenses for servers & storage hardware, which is depreciated over a number of years.

Finally, an example of where Online Services might suit particularly well… one fairly well known company (who shall remain nameless for the moment), were still muddling along on an old Exchange 5.5 environment. On Wednesday, the server shuffled off this mortal coil to join the choir invisible, causing a good deal of consternation in the business, who were now completely without email.

I’ve said for a long time, that Exchange is the only mission critical system in most businesses, which affects everyone immediately. If the CRM or billing or the payroll systems fell over, sure, it would be important – but most people wouldn’t know right away that it had happened. Email goes down, and most businesses will feel pain right away.

Back to example company. As fire rained from the sky, they took the decision at 4:30pm to buy 110 BPOS accounts, which were provisioned in 15 minutes and the business was fully back up with email up and running, later that evening.

XP Mode in Windows 7 saved me money

Ewan — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 04:12:00 GMT

I've been running Windows 7 at home for a while now, and have been very pleased with it - on a decent spec machine (Quad core, 4Gb RAM, lots of SATA-II disk etc), it absolutely flies. As did Vista before it, if truth be told.

When I got this machine, I had it set up to dual boot between Windows Vista x64 and XP Media Center, partly because I had some software that didn't like Vista. One of the problem software/hardware combos was an oldish Canon 5000F scanner that gets used once every few months or so, but didn't have 64-bit drivers available. It wasn't enough hassle to make me want to go & buy a new scanner.

On moving to Windows 7, I've just used the Virtual Windows XP, or "XP Mode" (which has now RTMed - available soon), function, which lets me run an XP virtual machine that has access to local resources like hard disks etc.

After firing up the Virtual XP instance, the scanner is listed under USB devices - the software was easy to install since the hard disks of the host machine are visible to the VM, and it was a snap to configure the Canon scanner software to save its output back into the Documents library of the host.

So all in all, a bit more trouble than if it just worked natively - but the XP Mode offers a solution to the gnarly problem of old hardware that isn't being supported any more by its manufacturer. It certainly saved me the £50 or whatever it would take to buy a new scanner!

Outlook 2010 beta and E.164 number format updater

Ewan — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:26:14 GMT

Well hello again; it’s been a while.
Normal service should now infrequently resume.

I thought I’d update the instructions of a previous post, after I was showing someone how to use my old “Contacts updater” application to make all their Outlook contact phone numbers be E.164 compliant.

(see blogs passim. eg here, here, or here.)

Now the little app I reference is an Outlook custom form, meaning it gets installed into the Exchange mailbox folder, rather than some client-side Add-in to Outlook. Custom Forms have been available since the days of the Exchange 4.0 client and later Outlook, as the installed forms show up an item on the “Action” menu within the view of the folder.

Now that Outlook 2010 has adopted the Fluent UI (aka the “Ribbon”), things have moved somewhat…

Just like the early days of Office 2007, the initial response from some users might be to get annoyed that things are in a different place, but in most cases, it’s a great improvement.

Since custom forms in Outlook have largely faded into the sunset, this particular one gets a bit more obscure… it’s a question of going to “New Items” within the folder, then selecting the “Custom Forms” pop-out (only available when you actually have some custom forms installed in that folder), and any forms installed will be presented there.

Ferrari powered by Sharepoint

Ewan — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:07:00 GMT

I noticed that the Sharepoint case study for Ferrari today, posted at the end of July – link here. The case study includes a cool video hosted in a nice Silverlight player – looks really slick and well worth a look, especially if you’re one of the Tifosi or just like Ferrari road cars.

On a related note, if you’re a fan, check out one of the best car-related ads I think I’ve ever seen – Shell host a high-quality streaming version of it on their site:

The noise of the flat-12 F312B driving through Hong Kong makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up every time I’ve watched it…

Pinpoint a Microsoft Partner

Ewan — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:20:02 GMT

This site has had something of a quiet launch – I first saw it a couple of weeks ago and was really impressed – it’s called Pinpoint and is a new take on the question, “How do I find a good Microsoft partner?”

Simply enter a search (a name of a known partner, or any element of the technology or solution you’re interested in), and a location, and you’ll see results shown on a map, with a list of matches below.

What’s interesting is the ability to review partners or solutions – so if and when this site gets a bit more use, we should see not just a linear list of partners who have the skills, but the ability to see who gets the best reviews (a bit like on Tripadvisor or Amazon). If you’ve had a good (or bad!) experience with any Microsoft partner, please add a review – it might help someone else to choose the right solution partner for them.

If you work for a Microsoft partner, make sure you’re listed on here with some sensible detail – one of the guys in my team, Matt aka virtualboy, was showing this site to a partner only the other day. Top of the list of results came their main competitor… You have to be in it, to win it, as they say… Make sure you have your products & services listed!

Pinpoint is now linked from the Microsoft UK homepage, via the “Experts” page at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/experts/, which also has more detail about the different types of partner and why you may need their services and help.

Mapping with Bing

Ewan — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 10:37:00 GMT

As a follow on to the Bing post from the other day, I was talking with a guy who’d spent some years working in the Microsoft mapping team in Redmond – he’d talked about the progress the company had made in online mapping technology and the challenges associated with it.

One of the latter was the brand – maps.live.com didn’t drip off the tongue quite as well as, say, Google Maps or Multimap etc. Well, the Bing team has registered a whole bunch of domains which could make it easier to jump straight to the content you want – eg bingmaps.com, bingtravel, bingnews, bingimages, bingvideos etc etc.

TIP: If you use Internet Explorer, just type the name (eg bingmaps) into the address bar, and press CTRL & Enter. IE automatically inserts the http://www. and the .com/ bits for you, and takes you there. No more clicking on the “Go” button …

I Bing; do u Bing 2?

Ewan — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:11:00 GMT

It might take a while before you “bing” someone before going out on a date with them, or you “bing” a question out onto the internet… stranger things have happened though. I hear stories of people visiting bing.com every day, just to see what the picture of the day is. IMHO, that’s so much cooler than a plan white page and 10pt Arial.

When Microsoft first announced “Bing” a few weeks ago, it was the first step in delivering a relatively fresh take on how people want to use search online. Dr Qi Lu, brain-the-size-of-a-planet president of the MS Online Services group and a recent hire from Yahoo, talks about “user intent” as being the key to unlocking a great online experience – in other words, not simply answering the question but trying to understand what the user actually wanted to say.

I’ve seen some people use search online and since they don’t really understand how query languages work (or can’t easily express themselves in accurate yet concise terms), they don’t get the best out of the current crop of search engines. By trying out really simple searches, Bing seems to be a lot better than Google, which might appeal to the less sophisticated user. IT people probably know how to search the web properly, and therefore will get similar results sets. As an example, try these randomly picked terms:

GOOGLE	BING
BBC News	BBC News
U2 concert	U2 concert
Weather tomorrow	Weather tomorrow
Kate Bush	Kate Bush
Pizza recipe	Pizza recipe

Hands up – the results I used on Bing were from the US version… Bing in the UK hasn’t yet got all the functionality that’s in the US site, though further improvements are coming – check out Bing’s US English site, or look at the Tour for an idea. As for the table above – I honestly spent a while thinking up the kinds of things people might search for, and none of what I came up with looked like it was any better in Google than Bing. Sometimes it was notably better the other way round.

Try yourself: look at the top search terms from Google or from Bing, and try the same search in both. You might even try BlackDog to do the search side by side.

When I was in Atlanta the other week, I went into an Apple store for a sniff around and was amused to see a Macbook Air showing a Bing search results page… was that just because 12,000 Microsoft people were in town, or are the general public starting to question the default search provider in Safari?

Safari on the Mac has, like IE on a PC, a search box in the top right. Unlike IE, you can’t choose your search provider however – Google is hard-coded in there, unless you download the Glims plugin. See GrinGod’s blog article for more details.

Office Web Apps complement, not replace, Office

Ewan — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:54:00 GMT

The Office 2010 announcement a couple of weeks ago, (publicly) lifted the lid on the Office Web Applications, either as a set of web-based Office apps that a customer could host on their own metal (and expose to the outside world, perhaps), or as something that you’d be able to get online from others. Microsoft’s own “Office Live” workspaces will use Office WebApps, for example.

It’s easy to think that moving to an online-based set of productivity applications would be an either/or decision – like today, you could choose to do either Office (as a client side set of apps) OR Google docs (as an online variant).

Maybe Office WebApps will blur that distinction a good bit. As an illustration, I was in an interesting talk last week, where the speaker asked:

Who in here uses Outlook Web Access?

(everyone’s hand goes up – well it was a Microsoft audience, so no surprises there)

OK, who now uses Outlook *less* because they also use OWA?

Literally, not a single hand went up.

So, for business use, you could think of Office WebApps as a way of interacting with the same documents, the same data, that you would if you were inside your company and using Office applications on a PC, but instead you’re at home or you’re at someone else’s machine, or maybe you just want to share your document with someone from outside the company. WebApps are promised with every version of Office, too, as is OneNote – finally making OneNote available to everyone, not just Professional or Student users.

More info on the Office Web Applications blog.

Playing with Microsoft Tag

Ewan — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:45:00 GMT

I know it’s been around in some form for a little while now, but I’ve only started looking at Tag – a way of essentially representing URLs in a camera-phone friendly way, such that merely pointing the phone at the “tag” takes you there.

Head over to http://tag.microsoft.com and sign in with a Live ID, to create your own tags – you can generate them in colour or black & white, in several formats and sizes. I’m thinking of putting a tag on the back of my next set of business cards, pointing to a vCard – then anyone with Tag software on their phone could add my contact details in an instant.

(this tag takes you to the blog’s URL)

Point your mobile at http://gettag.mobi to install the software – available for a whole host of platforms, including iPhone, Symbian, Android and, of course, Windows Mobile ;-)

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Ewan — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:35:51 GMT

Firstly, apologies for the silence in recent weeks – it’s been a busy time and, well, y’know. Once you’re a week or two behind blog posting, you might as well be a month or two behind…

Anyway. Lots has happened IT-wise in the last few months. Windows 7 press seems to be going well (shock, even some Mac users think it’s not awful, though maybe it’s too Mac like…), and the RTM last week [from our annual sales conference held this year in Atlanta, in past years the source of the various Ballmer videos that can be found online] has the potential to kick-start a new wave of PC innovation in both hardware and software.

The iPhone 3GS has launched to near universal acclaim, even if it costs £1700 to upgrade for existing fans. Hats off to Apple on another great product release – Windows Mobile is now so far behind it’s almost an also-ran: despite some great devices like the HTC Snap, which I had a play with the other day … that, for me, is the ideal device: I've never got on that well with ‘touch’, and a slim, 3G device with a decent keyboard is hard to beat.

The buzz in the press a few weeks ago (and inspiration for the title of this post) concerned Google’s Chrome OS. Essentially, a Linux kernel fused to a Chrome browser, with enough drivers to make it work on various bits of hardware (principally Intel based netbooks), at least as far as I can tell. Maybe I’m missing the point, but I don’t see it as being all that revolutionary, or even all that functional… and others appear to be saying the same thing.

Things get more complicated, though, when trying to understand Google’s plan for where this OS/browser fusion is going – especially when thinking about the Native Client project, which aims to provide a way of executing rich client code natively on the host PC rather than going through JavaScript or similar.

It seems that Google is putting a lot of effort into reinventing the Operating System, even though there are plenty of good ones out there already… but to what end? Is the end result going to be more “open”? More secure (than Windows, or Mac, or any of the major Linux distros)? Or is it just that Google wants to control everything the end users do, and what data they do it with?

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) wrote about a previously hyped revolution in the way we’ll all work, the Network Computer. 10 years ago, the story was that all our apps would move to a new paradigm, be written in Java, and delivered to the Network Computer – NC – on demand. The PC model was dead.

Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) was a driving force behind that initiative, at Sun. Maybe he thinks it’s time to try again?

I had to laugh at the brilliant Fake Steve Jobs’ “Dear Eric” post, highlighting something of the impending conflict of interest between erstwhile partners, GOOG and AAPL, as the anti-trust investigators start circling and looking for transgressions. With Google and Apple competing on mobile device OSs, potentially on desktop OSs and on browsers (although Chrome currently does use the same heart as Safari), how long before they start putting clear air between themselves in other areas? Maybe we’ll see Apple putting their arms around other search engines, and not hard-coding Google as the provider in Safari?

Last year, Wired magazine mocked the “Don’t be Evil” motto, by featuring an “Evil Meter” – maybe it’s time for an update?

Windows 7 Release Candidate available now

Ewan — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:17:05 GMT

I’ve now upgraded 4 different PCs to Win7 Release Candidate (build 7100) and each one has gone swimmingly – you too can share in the fun by downloading the release candidate for yourself.

The Windows development team are looking to test the upgrade process from Vista to Windows 7, so are asking customers who upgraded from Vista to Windows 7 beta, to regress first to Vista then upgrade to RC from there. Out of the box, the RC won’t do an in-place upgrade from previous versions of Windows 7, before build 7077. [The beta was 7000].

Since I did a clean install of the beta on a few machines, I’ve used the cheeky workaround here to allow the setup to be tricked into allowing it to go ahead. The only problem I’ve had – and this happened on going between interim builds of W7 too – is that the Lenovo thinkpad keyboard & tablet buttons driver doesn’t work until I go into Device Manager and force a driver update… so initial login needs to be from a Remote Desktop connection or via a plugged-in USB keyboard.

Office 2007 SP2 now available

Ewan — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:47:45 GMT

I’ve been beta testing Office 2007 SP2 since the beginning of the year, and it’s been great – the single biggest reason to use it is the myriad improvements made to Outlook, in terms of stability & performance (particularly relating to search and to startup & closedown).

Download Office 2007 SP2 here

From the summary of what’s new, check out:

Microsoft Office Outlook

Performance improvements that apply to the following general responsiveness areas:
- Startup
  Removes lengthy operations from initial startup.
- Shutdown
  Makes Outlook exit predictably despite pending activities.
- Folder View and Switch
  Improves view rendering and folder switching.
Calendar improvements
Improves underlying data structures and the general reliability of calendar updates.
Data file checks
Greatly reduces the number of scenarios in which you receive the following error message when you start Outlook:

The data file 'file name' was not closed properly. This file is being checked for problems.
Search reliability
Improves search reliability when you use SP2 with Windows Desktop Search 4
Improvements to Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
There are now fewer duplicated items.
Object Model improvements
Now contains many customer-driven fixes.

For more information about these improvements and details about other Outlook fixes, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

968774 Outlook 2007 improvements in the 2007 Microsoft Office suite Service Pack 2

Exchange 2010 beta & high availability strategies

Ewan — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:45:00 GMT

Today, the Exchange team released details of Exchange 14, now to be known as Exchange Server 2010. [download here]. There’s plenty of new stuff in the box, but I’m just going to look at one: high availability & data replication.

[My previous missives on Exchange 2007 HA are here, here and here]

There are some interesting differences between 2007 and 2010, particularly in the way databases are handled and what that means for clustering.

THERE IS NO SINGLE COPY CLUSTER ANY MORE.

Single Copy Clusters, or the traditional way of deploying Exchange onto a Windows Cluster with several nodes sharing a copy of the data held in a central SAN, have quite a few downsides … like there being that Single Copy, or the fact that the storage hardware is typically complex and expensive.

There are other pretty major changes, like storage groups going away (it’s just a database now, a move that Exchange 2007 previewed by the advice that you should only have a single DB per SG), or the fact that databases are now the unit of failover (rather than the whole server…), or the ability now to install multiple roles on servers providing high availability – so you could deploy highly available, clustered/replicated environment to a small number of users, without having lots of boxes or VMs.

Oh, Local Continuous Replication goes away too…

Well, reading the documentation explains a bit more about how Exchange 2010 will change the way that high availability can be achieved – no more the need for a MSCS cluster to be set up first should make it simpler, for one. From that site:

Changes to High Availability from Previous Versions of Exchange

Exchange 2010 includes many changes to its core architecture. Two prominent features from Exchange 2007, namely CCR and SCR, have been combined and evolved into a single framework called a database availability group (DAG). The DAG handles both on-site data replication and off-site data replication, and forms a platform that makes operating a highly available Exchange environment easier than ever before. Other new high availability concepts are introduced in Exchange 2010, such as database mobility, and incremental deployment. The concepts of a backup-less and RAID-less organization are also being introduced in Exchange 2010.

In a nutshell, the key aspects to data and service availability for the Mailbox server role and mailbox databases are:

Exchange 2010 uses an enhanced version of the same continuous replication technology introduced in Exchange 2007. See the section below entitled "Changes to Continuous Replication from Exchange Server 2007" for more information.

Storage groups no longer exist in Exchange 2010. Instead, there are simply mailbox databases and mailbox database copies, and public folder databases. The primary management interfaces for Exchange databases has moved within the Exchange Management Console from the Mailbox node under Server Configuration to the Mailbox node under Organization Configuration.

Some Windows Failover Clustering technology is used by Exchange 2010, but it is now completely managed under-the-hood by Exchange. Administrators do not need to install, build or configure any aspects of failover clustering when deploying highly available Mailbox servers.

Each Mailbox server can host as many as 100 databases. In this Beta release of Exchange 2010, each Mailbox server can host a maximum of 50 databases. The total number of databases equals the combined number of active and passive databases on a server.

Each mailbox database can have as many as 16 copies.

In addition to the transport dumpster feature, a new Hub Transport server feature named shadow redundancy has been added. Shadow redundancy provides redundancy for messages for the entire time they are in transit. The solution involves a technique similar to the transport dumpster. With shadow redundancy, the deletion of a message from the transport database is delayed until the transport server verifies that all of the next hops for that message have completed delivery. If any of the next hops fail before reporting back successful delivery, the message is resubmitted for delivery to that next hop. For more information about shadow redundancy, see Understanding Shadow Redundancy.

Outlook Thread Compressor download now available

Ewan — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:34:00 GMT

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about Thread Compressor on here – it’s an add-in to Outlook which removes unnecessary emails, on the assumption that most people reply to mail and leave the original intact, so you could keep the last mail in each branch of a thread, and remove all the others.

Way back when I was still developing TC, I tried to get it included on the Office Downloads section of Microsoft.com, but our legal department was (with some justification) very nervous about us offering a download which would go through the end user’s mailbox like a dose of salts, deleting stuff. So it stayed (more or less) an internal tool: I even started developing a “version 5” with a much groovier UI and some extra features.

Included in the v5 beta (which is a real pain to install nowadays – the previous v4.2.030 version has nearly the same feature set and is a lot more self contained), was a piece of logic which captured stats on TC usage and emailed them back to me.

Since many people at MS are still running that beta (it’s a long story, but the source code went south so it’ll never get out of “beta” state), I still get maybe 20-30 statistics mails a day…

Since August 2003 when the first statistics email arrived – from me, kind-of naturally – until 24th April 2007 (when I last did an analysis of the stats), TC v5 beta had scanned over 400m email messsages and had compressed over 30m, worth nearly half a terabyte of email data.

To the reader, the spoils

Well, I finally decided – in an “ask forgiveness rather than permission” move – to make the last complete and stable version available for download.

It’s not particularly elegant looking by modern standards (given that most of it was written 7 years ago in VB6) but it does work, even on Windows 7 (x86 and x64) and Office 2007. Basically, anything post-Office 2000/Windows 2000 should be OK.

A reader called Mark Ruggles emailed me the other day and said:

“It is fantastic and it works like a champ in Outlook 2007. I turned it loose on my Inbox and my archive and I deleted 103Mb of redundant data. I sent it out to some of my colleagues and my manager used it cutting his archives down by 2Gb.
…
This is the coolest utility I’ve found in a long time.”

So, thanks to Mark's comment, I’ve now registered www.threadcompressor.co.uk and posted install instructions and a download file up there.