Marcus Hass' [MS] Blog : Rants

Microsoft Online and SBS 2003

mhass — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:16:00 GMT

I have been working with the Microsoft BPOS aka Microsoft Online guys in Enterprise accounts for a while to help big companies migrate to BPOS dedicated. Don’t know what that is? Check out www.microsoftonline.com. To sum it up, it is hosted Exchange, SharePoint, OCS, LiveMeeting, and a few other offerings. For bigger businesses, Microsoft sets up dedicated hosting servers, for small it is multitenant.

I help out a small company from time to time because they have 15 employees and a Small Business Server 2003 environment. They are constantly running out of space on their 5 year old server because mail boxes keep growing because of attachment sizes. These guys are the perfect scenario to migrate to Microsoft Online!

So, I setup a free trial and started loading some of the coexistence tools like email sync and dirsync onto the Small Business server. Well, that was the plan. Turns out, dirsync can’t be run on a domain controller and will only run on Windows Server 2003. I think the BPOS guys missed the Small Businesses aren’t going to have an extra server lying around. How can you miss this scenario when building your tools, especially a segment of the market so perfect for BPOS?

So, they will have to forgo the coexistence and migrate mailboxes in one fell swoop over a weekend, which won’t be pretty over the small network connection they have.

I am sure there are technical reasons, and that's what will be used as an excuse. It just disappoints me when we have really smart guys that miss such a big opportunity to help small businesses.

Worldly (Cup) Views

mhass — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 21:55:00 GMT

I was just catching up on some of my reading and saw several people mentioning that they read Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” book. Scoble even went so far as to describe editorials he wrote in college about raising gas taxes by several dollars to encourage Americans to buy smaller cars and get car companies to make more efficient cars. I kinda like this idea.

4 years ago, I spend most of a year in Germany with my family while I was leading a project there for Microsoft. I think that spending a lot of time there made me realize how arrogant and wasteful Americans are when it comes to cars. I really can’t see why Americans need big SUV’s, with 5.0+ Litre engines. Off roading? Please. I am more apt to buy a mid size SUV or wagon that can seat 5+ people than an American made goliath. Even midsize SUV’s from American makers come with pocket draining V8’s, although there are exceptions. BTW Joern, what happened to us upgrading your environment during this year’s world cup?

When my brother in law asked me several years ago what truck they should buy, I recommended a couple mid size SUV’s. Their requirement was room for 7, of which there are several mid size SUV’s that can hold 7 that don’t have a 6.1 L gas guzzling engine like the Denali they ended up buying. Now it takes him close to $75 to fill the tank and gets at best 13 miles to the gallon. Yikes.

I am reminded about all of this because I was in Germany when the World Cup was going on in 2002, and how passionate they were about soccer. I am no stranger to this as I have been to a couple bloody ~~brawls~~ soccer games when I have been in Brasil with my parents (both immigrated to the US from Brasil). But, Germans are just as passionate about things like recycling, more efficient cars (diesels), and family life as they are about soccer. It has always seemed to me that as a society, Germans (and most Europeans) have their priorities much more in line with “saving the planet” than Americans.

What am I trying to say? I don't know. I just feel like we (Americans) don't take our role in the global environment seriously, and the only way to make a point is to do it monetarily. I hope Al Gore keeps up the pressure and makes something out of his new cause and can genuinely change attitudes about America’s obsession with big, bloaty SUV’s.

Oh, and go Brasil!

Outgoing Caller ID not supported on Vonage!!

mhass — Tue, 02 May 2006 06:29:00 GMT

So, I finally got rid of Qwest at my house, not even the line is hooked up to anything. I switched to Vonage for my primary home phone because it will save me about $10 a month, and my wife can use it to call long distance for free instead of having to grab my office phone (ATT Callvantage phone).

The thing I didn’t know is that Vonage doesn’t completely support Caller ID. Yeah, yeah, incoming CID works great but outgoing will not display your name, only your number. HUH?

Caller ID has been around for 22 years. 22 years!! I can’t believe that Vonage can’t get this together. My two lines on ATT Callvantage do it, and they are VOIP. Every Comcastic customer I know works fine. Even some mobile phones do it. But, the might powerful and much ballyhooed Vongage can’t seem to deliver a two decade old technology. This doesn't seem like a big deal, but some people won’t pick up their phone unless they see a name in that caller ID field.

Oh, and BTW, don't bother calling their support. You will be routed to a call center in India, and they will ask you to go to the configuration page and be surprised when there isn't a Caller ID applet. I called them a total of 3 times, and each time it took an incredible amount of explination to tell them that outgoing Caller ID doesn't display my name.

Now where did I put that customer service number for ATT Callvantage?

Bedlam DL3 (revisited)

mhass — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 01:30:00 GMT

So, I am on a few distribution lists that pertain directly to my every day job. I have a few others that are nice to look at because there is interesting stuff. One of the hobby DL’s that I like to read is our “Pocket PC Users and Enthusiasts”, which we share all kinds of gripes and praise about our Windows Mobile devices.

Justin Emch, our resident Program Manager for mobile devices decided that we had fractured into many different DL’s and people where asking the same questions on several different DL’s and a consolidation was in order. This is a great idea as the rules in my inbox were gathering email from like three different DL’s into one folder to make sure I got it all. Justin also sent out like 5 emails warning people that this was going to happen and to make sure you adjust your rules appropriately because your inbox could grow pretty quick if the rules don’t pick it up.

Wouldn’t you know it, that a day after it went into effect, you have all kinds of people asking to be unsubscribed from it. Of course this means that you are flooding 1000’s of mailboxes with your email to unsubscribe, this is Bedlam DL3 all over again!

First of all, there is no owner of a DL that will unsubscribe you from the DL at Microsoft because it would take too much time to manage DL’s like this. Second, we have a tool called AutoGroup (formerly known as AutoDL) that lets you manage all your subscriptions and create your own groups. So, to unsubscribe, you have to go do it yourself. Lastly, I can’t believe the number of smart people we have at Microsoft that sent Unsubscribe requests to the DL. I found out about AutoGroup within minutes of joining Microsoft almost 6 years ago since that is how we communicate internally. I am astounded at the number of people that don’t know about AutoGroup, especially some of the more senior people.

I think the problem is that we have so many interesting DL’s that people subscribe to, that they don’t get a chance to read the email that their Inbox rules filter. So, those people never saw the ample warning emails that Justin sent and were surprised by the barrage of email yesterday and today to the new DL. My advice: Prune the DL’s you are on to a manageable level and only subscribe to the ones that you can read each week.

Monday Night Figure Skating on ABC

mhass — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 04:30:00 GMT

What the hell were they thinking? I sit here in a pub at the airport, eating a burger in front of a big TV that is tuned to ABC. We had been watching Brett Favre warmup and his stats, etc. Next thing we know, we are watching the extended remix version of a teaser about figure skating. There was a collective, "What the?" . This was then followed by a really long ending to the teaser which made us all think that we would get to watch some triple lutz'. Note to ABC: Monday night football and figure skating is not good.

RANT: Traveling gripes this week and a business idea for someone

mhass — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 22:03:00 GMT

I have been on the road again this week, this time to Richmond, VA where I can’t get a direct flight from Denver. My favorite carrier, Frontier, didn’t look to be close enough in Washington DC, but if I go again I am going to just drive down from DC. The problem isn’t the transfer of planes, the problem is flying USAir where there is absolutely no entertainment (I’m spoiled on Frontier), although they do provide power to the seat for your laptop if you have the magical plug (I don’t). USAir has TV’s in the ceilings which they use for safety demonstrations but not for news, movies, etc. SeatGuru also helped me find the most comfortable seats in their tight spacing.

So, here is a quick get-rich-quick idea for someone. I love InMotion Pictures DVD and player rentals at the airport, but why don’t any of the gift shops at the airport sell DVD’s? I could have easily made an impulse purchase in an airport that doesn’t have an InMotion Pictures stand. Better yet, McDonalds has those DVD rental machines based on number of days rented. Since there is a McDonalds in most airports why don’t they have them sitting there? There is some money to made in there somewhere buy establishing a relationship with gift shops or the company that is working with McDonalds.

Zotob, a hard and unfortunate lesson (again) for Enterprises

mhass — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 01:00:00 GMT

Unless you have been on vacation on the moon for the last few days, you know that there is new exploit in the wild that mainly affect Windows 2000 and pre SP2 Windows XP OS’s called Zotob (and variants). This worm is hitting some of the same big name companies that were crippled by CodeRed, Sasser and Blaster.

In the years since those nightmares, there have been a lot of great tools that have come out to help avoid these nightmares. I can’t believe that some of the big enterprises (some of them are my customers) don’t have a better strategy or mandatory policy to update desktops and servers with security updates quickly. Microsoft and others have been preaching for at least the last 3 years that it is only a matter of time for a 0 day exploit. While Zotob is not a zero day exploit, it is close.

Everyone knows about “patch Tuesday”, including malware authors. You absolutely have to have a patch strategy these days to push security updates immediately or within 24 hours. This means 1000’s of boxes in some cases.

If you are an enterprise, don’t just stand there, get something! Windows/Microsoft Update, SMS, SUS, WSUS, ONiPatch, Hercules, etc it doesn’t matter!! Some you pay for, some are free, but just do it. I guarantee this isn’t the last time, and the next one might be even bigger.

I don’t want to get into a debate about how many security flaws Microsoft has over distributions of Linux or IIS vs Apache. You need a strategy for all of these systems.

If you have a single PC, home network with a couple computers or if you have an enterprise with 10,000 of pc/servers get a plan on how you get and apply updates.

BTW, don't get me started on the Media. Every single time I watch the "tech" portion of our local news channels I want to call them up and make at least 3 corrections (most of the time non-Microsoft stuff). They can't even get mobile phones right.

A great blog to subscribe to is the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog!.

Stick to computers, the stock market is wacky

mhass — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 06:09:00 GMT

I admit it, I think I was playing solitaire on my laptop (resembled a desktop) back in college when we covered the stock market. It continues to baffle me.

Microsoft announces (record) earnings, above forecasts, and the after hours stock goes down. In fact, bit Google and Microsoft tanked after hours. I was just reading about the after hours action on CNBC and although it was more than the street expected, they were disappointed with both Google and Microsoft. I guess they are looking at the guidance expressed by both companies, which didn't seem too gloomy. I'll just go back to my small little life, and let those people manage those multi-billion dollar mutual funds.

Confused (again)…

Language Barriers

mhass — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 20:48:00 GMT

I am a little more sensitive about language barriers than most, because both my parents are not native English speakers. My parents are both from Brazil, but spoke Portuguese and German as their primary languages up until they moved the United States in the 60’s and 70’s. In fact, my first language was German, although I was born here in the states. I think many people mistake lack of command of a language for stupidity, and I know that isn’t the case.

I started another project this week, with a company that is part of NTT. NTT is the largest Telco in the world, and is headquartered in Japan. They sent several people from Japan to make sure that we understood the requirements from their side. I found myself completely frustrated at times, because I really wanted to understand what they wanted. I know for a fact that the people I met from Japan are smart, passionate people abut what they do and I was frustrated that I couldn’t have a peer to peer conversation with them that wasn’t a lot of work on everyone’s part. We got through it, but I know it was hard on them and hard on us.

I am a customer service oriented person, and when I can’t actively participate in a conversation, I get flustered. I am either going to have to learn Japanese or start work on the Universal Translator again.

RANT: Unhappy with EA, BF2

mhass — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 20:41:00 GMT

I have really been looking forward to Battlefield 2 (BF2) since I played the Desert Combat mod on the original Battlefield 1942. I installed it, and played about a week of single player games, trying to get used to flying and driving various vehicles before I went and got my butt kicked online by a 12 year old girl. After adjusting my ISA firewall to allow the BF2/EA traffic, I finally got up the courage to go online and went to our own public, non ranked server and had a good time.

A couple days later, I wanted to play some single player and it wouldn't work. I tried to start the map, it would dim the screen, music would get lower and it would try to start the map but go right back to the map select screen. The only thing that changed on my system was the update to the latest version of iTunes. Yes, I have a couple iPods, I am training for a marathon and they are absolutely necessary.

I called EA and after spending an hour between hold times and their tier 1 support (have you rebooted?) I was escalated to tier 2. They spent more time looking at Direct X diagnostics, had me delete profiles, update drivers, uninstall/reinstall and basically said they had never seen the problem, contact our warranty group for a refund (transcript below).

Huh? Because you haven’t seen it you say give them their money back? I would think that any software company would want to get to the bottom of any issue if it is easily reproducible on a clean, stable system. I wrote them back (god forbid they ever pick up a phone and call me) and asked why they wouldn’t want to continue trouble shooting. No response yet.

Transcript:

Subject

ESCALATION.same issue

Discussion Thread

Response (Landon F.) 07/04/2005 10:29 AM

Hello,

I am very sorry, however unfortunately at this point there may not be a fix for this issue. It may be a conflict with a file, utility, program, or hardware setting that we are not able to find and/or check.

We do not issue refunds directly, however we can exchange your game for a sealed copy that you can return to the store from which it was purchased. You can contact our warranty department at (xxx) xxx-xxxx to exchange your disk for a new one.

Rant: Airline travel

mhass — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 05:58:00 GMT

After having flown a couple different ailrlines in the past couple months, I have reaffirmed my commitment to fly Frontier wherever I can. Even if I have a bad experience waitng for a slight delay, the friendliness and Satelite TV usually make up for it. Not to mention the best general prices (except to Seattle this week for some reason).

There are a couple issues that I have with Frontier since they switched to Sabre a couple months ago.

They don't send you a PDF of your bill anymore. Which makes going back to get a receipt for expenses a big pain. I have provided them this feedback and they are already working on it and promise a fix soon
Their Virtually There stuff sucks! It tries to let you send info to email , pagers, SMS messages, and it really is a bad implementation. in fact, their calendar appointments don't take into account your time zones.

I think they will work through them, so www.flyfrontier.com. BTW, 15,000 miles is a free flight.

BTW, flight from Seattle to Denver was delayed for 25 minutes, but somehow we landed an hour late on Alaska. I thought Alaska was going to be a good alternative, but it turned out to be a much bigger hassle. Not to mention that Alaska is on concourse C at DIA which requires a train ride, rather than walking across the bridge with Frontier. The train was broken when I arrived at DIA, so I almost missed my plane on the way to Seattle.