Life of an IT Pro Advisor @ Microsoft Canada : Exchange 2003

I posted on CanITPro blog about E12 64 bit Hardware Recomendations

rclaus — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 23:11:13 GMT

If you are considering purchasing new server hardware in the near future (if you plan on using E12 or not) and you have the ability to future proof yourself a bit – why not get a hold of some 64 bit hardware. You know that you are able to put a 32 bit OS on it for now (if you have app compatibility issues) and can reformat and reinstall with a 64 bit OS later on.

Go on over to the Canadian IT Pro blog to check it out.

Exchange Performance Tuning and the IBM Storage tour

rclaus — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 22:39:00 GMT

I just wrapped up the eastern half of a partner event with IBM Canada storage group. I was asked to speak about Optimizing Exchange Performance at their 1/2 day information session on SAN storage solutions based on their DS4000 series SAN architecture. It was really nice to see the business partners and the customers come out to such an event and listen to how to tune an Exchange server on IBM hardware attached to an IBM SAN.

I was asked a lot about disk tweaking, partition block allocation size and IOs per second and what that all meant to the performance on the Exchange server. Ironically enough as you can see from my previous post - we just released a tool that does a lot of what I was talking about for you automatically and reports on how to tweak it.

I wanted to thank the IBM Canada storage team members Ken Halbert (National Channel Manager) and Chris Mak (IT Specialist with the storage group) for asking me and my team to participate.

For those who attended the session or for those who are interested in seeing the short deck I used, here's the link for the content now posted online.

By the way - if you are interested in joining my colleague Bruce Cowper on his west coast stops of the tour I believe there is still time to register. The IBM guys say their events registration should be up by Monday (http://www.ibm.com/news/ca/events/).
November 15th - Vancouver
November 16th - Calgary
November 22nd - Toronto

Keeping track of technology - Exchange and GroupWise

rclaus — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 20:39:00 GMT

In case you haven't noticed, I don't normally blog about other vendors technology, but this email came into my inbox last night and I had a great chuckle about it. It’s important to me that I stay on top of various technologies and interoperability across all platforms IT Professionals might use in their day to day jobs. This includes signing up for and attending marketing and technical events from various software companies. I mean hey – We’re (software vendors) all trying to add what we believe is value in the industry - they are more then welcome to come out to my events if they want…

What was the title of the email? "Friends don't let friends use Exchange". The email opens up with an eye catching statement "You know them. Your poor unfortunate friends. The ones who have to use Exchange day after day after excruciating, virus-plagued day…" … It's an invitation for attending a Novell marketing event talking about GroupWise 7. The email goes on to say, "...if you care about your friends who are Exchange administrators and you want to introduce them to GroupWise, you should have them sign up” and you get a chance to win a $4000 vacation for two to Hawaii.

To give them credit - it's an interesting twist to try to get people out to an event.

I’m not going to comment on the obvious marketing message as that is just what it is.

What I did find funny, besides the title/introduction (which I have to say did catch my eye) was the bottom section of the rules and regulations. If you read the rules and regulations (an yes, I DO read EULAs before clicking YES I AGREE on software installs) at the bottom of the page under General Conditions it states:

“Sponsor reserves the right, in its sole discretion to cancel or suspend this promotion should a virus, bug or other cause beyond the control of the sponsor corrupt the administration, security or proper operation of the promotion.”

If they are worried about this - given their opening statement in the email (they state: GroupWise is the most secure and reliable mail system on the planet…) does that mean Novell is not running GroupWise as their internal mail product?

;-)

Community Technology Preview of Messaging & Security Feature Pack (Exchange SP2)

rclaus — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 04:25:00 GMT

Hummm… This was timely. : )

I can finally give you the link to the CTP release of Exchange SP2! The overview page of Exchange 2003 SP2 is right here - it details all the new features and functions of the Service Pack...

Main points of interest are:

Seamless Direct Push to Mobile 5 devices
Better compression for lower data transfer to mobile devices
Synchronized Tasks (instead of just calendar, inbox and contacts)
Control of remote devices (policy settings, Local and Remote Wipe)
Improved Intelligent Message Filter SPAM control
Support for Sender ID
Exchange Standard Mailbox Store INCREASED from 16 GB to 75 GB!!! (AWESOME)
Refined offline addressbook format
Full support for GroupWise 6 connectors and migration tools

I've seen all these options in action at the various conferences I've been at over the last month. I can't wait to get my hands on it to demo to you all on the next tour or during a Canadian Webcast in the near future. I do have some GOOD news for those of you who what to see this for yourself - one piece of what you need to enable Push email delivery to a Windows Mobile 5 device using your Exchange 2003 infrastructure has been released to a Community Technology Preview today!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DB3813C5-B0FA-4230-813B-902ACA775ADA&displaylang=en

This is Pre-Release code and should not be used in a production environment (i.e. Keep it in your testing environment for now!). It is provided to you in order to start your testing and configuration / implementation planning. Some of its features will require access to Windows Mobile 5 devices or Outlook 2003 SP2 (not released yet) which may not be readily available to you at this time. For some more information before you register for the download can be read in the online Release Notes.

Now where did I put that Windows Mobile 5 device .... : )

Exchange 2003 Push email to Windows Mobile (MSFP and Exchange SP2)

rclaus — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 14:46:00 GMT

I admit it – prior to joining Microsoft, I was a Blackberry RIM user back at the old employer. In fact, I had personally purchased my own device way back when after they introduced the larger 957 version here in Canada. Why was I using RIM? I needed access to my email remotely while on the road when I was unable to get on the internet in order to use Outlook Web Access or establish a VPN for email. Yup – I was addicted – like most early BlackBerry users were. I even worked on a couple of Exchange projects where I implemented BlackBerry Enterprise Servers for some customer deployments.

Please Note – this was all PRIOR to the release of Outlook 2003 with Exchange 2003 and RPC over HTTPs access to email and PRIOR to the general availability of SmartPhone based devices that used Windows Mobile 2003 here in Canada.

I’ve been traveling a lot to the states for various Microsoft conferences and events over the last month or so and met with a number of individuals on the Windows Mobile team. The events have a large international audience who carry a variety of the latest and greatest mobile smart phones. I’ve looked enviously at them when I had to place a call with my Nokia “dumb” phone. Why do I carry a Nokia phone? I joined MS Canada when there were no viable options for smart phones available to the general population. This has finally changed - I participated in the Canadian national Mobility tour a while back after the launch of smart phones in Canada from virtually all the mobile carriers. I can’t wait to get my hands on some of the new devices.

So where are we now? What’s our remote email push technology solution? How can you and I get my remote email fix? What do you have to do to prepare your environment for these technologies? How much additional $$$ do I have to spend to do this?

To keep it simple:

Implement / Upgrade to Exchange 2003
Purchase a Windows Mobile 2003 device that is upgradeable to Windows Mobile 5
Implement Exchange Service Pack 2 with Messaging & Security Feature Pack

Want some additional details? Humm… I sense a BlogPost series developing here – stay tuned! Want to suggest some content or have questions? Post a comment!

It is now 5:55:55 on 5/5/5

rclaus — Thu, 05 May 2005 23:55:00 GMT

I had to post this one. I love numbers and this was too good to pass up.

5:55:55 PM on the 5th day of the 5th month of the 5th year of 2000. Not bad.

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What was I doing today? Nope - I wasn't helping a customer migrate from Exchange 5.5.

Strangely enough I have been working a LOT with the Canadian Exchange PM (Hilary Wittmann) on some initiatives called "CookingSchools". It's a great concept - Have three presentations to a group of customers who are facing Exchange migrations.

A MS person (me) who talks about all the benefits, functionality, mobility, security and overall "WOW" of the Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003 platform.
A Systems Integration partner (In no specific order: Legendcorp, Metaphore, Dell, HP and Compugen) who have significant experience working on Exchange Migrations to talk about their approach and best practices to make a migration Successful.
A migration software company (Quest Software) who makes tools to both report, diagnose and migrate the customer from old to new.

Put us all together in the room and include a personalized whiteboarding session to talk about specific customer pains. You get one real cool day of migration information for the customers. I love seeing the lightbulb go on throughout the day for the customers. I love to see the excitement for the new tools and features in Exchange 2003. I've had a lot of fun helping this process out.

Oh yeah - Great value as well - did I mention it was free?

The IMF filter as per out last TechNet Tour - Have you implemented it?

rclaus — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 13:08:00 GMT

On our last national TechNet tour, we introduced you to the Intelligent Message Filter and how it worked to combat SPAM in your Exchange messaging environment. By using an algorithm/process developed my Microsoft Research and millions of reference SPAM from hotmail and other sources, the IMF team came up the Spam Confidence Level and applied it to messages as they were received by your organisation. This SCL was then compared to your gateway threshold in order to be deleted, archived or rejected – only to be evaluated again by your mailbox threshold in order to be destined to your JunkMail or Inbox.

Sounds like a simple enough process, it’s even easier to implement on your production boxes.

My question to you – HAVE YOU DONE IT YET? I would love to hear from you if you have decided to implement the IMF in your environment. Tell me about your experiences with it so far? What levels have you set at your gateway and at your mailbox? How do your users like it? Did you implement it as a result of seeing how it worked on the last tour (Did I have an impact)?

Here’s a link to the Deployment Guide:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/2003/library/imfdeploy.mspx

Here’s the link to the main IMF download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C1B08F7B-8CAF-4147-B074-8C9C8F277071&displaylang=en

Here’s a link to the update for the IMF:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C1EA8CF1-48C9-4E43-A4EB-82D9A83FD4A7&displaylang=en

Tell us how you made out. The good, the bad and the Ugly. Hit the comments link at the bottom of this post.

IMF archive folder management - Gérer le dossier d'archive de l'IMF (Exchange 2003)

rclaus — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 19:33:00 GMT

I’ve had a request for information from Christian P asking about managing the IMF (intelligent Message Filter) archive folder and what utilities you can use to help you with the task. Yup – IMF can be very useful, but it can also create a large volume of mail that you need to look at for false positives…

I was about to write a nice reply to him with this post – but I will steal some already used brain cells from my colleague Bruce Cowper. He’s written up a reply to someone who asked him the same question while he was out west.

Here is a link to his post on the subject of “Tools for handling archived Email/SPAM generated by the IMF”
http://blogs.msdn.com/brucecowper/archive/2005/03/18/398679.aspx

J’ai reçu un question par courriel de ChristianP qui me demande comment gérer les courriels qui son identifier comme pourriels. Il trouve que c’est difficile de rechercher tous les pourriels pour des courriels qui on été incorrectement classifier. En utilisant l’IMF, ça va crée beaucoup de fichier dans le dossier des archives.

J’étais en trains d’écrire un post pour lui aider, mais j’ai décider d’utiliser un post que mon collègue a écrit sur son site de web. Il a écrit un post quand il étais en l’ouest pour le tournée de TechNet d’hiver.

Voici le lien a son post au sujet « Tools for handling archived email/spam generated by the IMF ». C’est en anglais, mais c’est vraiment bien écrit.
http://blogs.msdn.com/brucecowper/archive/2005/03/18/398679.aspx