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 call notification" feature of Exchange Unified Messaging - as well as the server telling you that you have a new voicemail, it will also tell you when someone has connected to UM but hung up before leaving a message.

In both cases (ie when someone leaves a message, or if they hang up beforehand), if the server can identify their caller ID as belonging to someone in your contacts, you'll see the voicemail or the missed call notification as if it came from the person themselves (it's actually Microsoft Exchange on behalf of <the caller>, but it primarily shows as if it came from the person directly).

So in this case, if I hit "reply" to the notification, it will send an email to the person that was identified as the source of the message. Cool, yes.

What's nice, though, is that if I have my Out of Office message set, and someone calls me then either leaves a message or hangs up, when the notification lands in my Inbox and appears "From" them, their email address will be sent the Out of Office message I've set.

As it happens, I have a contact entry for my own mobile number, in my Outlook contacts folder, but set with my Hotmail email address. When I call my office extension from the mobile, it identifies the contact as the source of the call, and the return address is the Hotmail one, so the Out of Office message I set on my mailbox will be sent to the Hotmail account, since I had associated the mobile number that called me, with that address.

Neil (who spends a lot of time on the road) said this was one of the most unexpectedly cool parts of Exchange UM - customers who call him up and don't leave a message (but who he's already added to his Outlook contacts), will get the Out of Office message as if they'd sent him email. So the next question they ask him is, "How can I get that for myself??"

Seeing this in reality brings the technology alive in a lot of users' eyes.

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 important once you get into using click-to-dial technologies such as Office Communication Server.

The tool itself is basic since it's only really expected that people will run it once, to sort out the numbers of old contacts you might have. It will check all the contacts in a given folder and automatically fix the numbers up, but there are a few caveats...

• It's hard coded for UK numbers beginning +44 ... though the code is pretty easy to get to if you know anything about Outlook forms, and you can modify it at will.
  
• It doesn't back up the contacts before modifying, so you might just want to copy your Contacts folder somewhere else before running, if you're of a nervous disposition. I can verify that it hasn't mangled any of my contacts and nobody in Microsoft who's tried it has reported a problem.
  
• It's not exactly straightforward to install - but if you follow the instructions carefully, you'll be OK.
  
• The document in the ZIP file explaining how to install & run it, is in Word 2007 format (docx). If you still haven't either upgraded or installed the compatibility pack to add OpenXML support to your older version of Office, there's a link in the ZIP file to go straight to the download page.

A final word: this is completely unsupported, supplied "as is" etc. If it does mangle all your contacts up, just revert to your backup copy - and if you didn't take a backup then you've only got yourself to blame.

Harsh but fair I think :)

Enjoy.

The logic converts "from" the format on the left to the format on the right... (_ denotes a space)

Examples

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 of the comments says that they have used a custom kernel based on RedHat (since the standard kernel won't scale to that number of CPUs).

Since Windows is (still) available for the Itanium architecture, I bet it would be possible to run Win2003 or maybe 2008 on this box. It makes more economic sense, though, to have more servers running fewer CPUs and scaling "out" rather than "up"... but if you you could run Windows on this box, Solitaire really would fly :-)

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 way of unifying voice and inbound fax messages with email).

What's particularly nice about this is that as far as Exchange is concerned, email and voicemails are just messages. I can respond to a voicemail (such as the one pictured here) by hitting reply, and Outlook (or OWA, or Windows Mobile etc) will create a email response to the "sender" of the voice message, assuming it can work out who they are based on the caller ID that was identified when the message was left.

Lots of people get nervous when thinking about holding voice mail in Exchange, worrying that the message sizes will burden their already overloaded mailboxes. In reality, the size is rarely a big deal - we tend not to get too many voicemails (I probably get less than 10 a week), at least in comparison to the volume of emails received. Add to this the fact that most voicemails are relatively short (and you set a limit on how long the system will let a caller ramble before cutting them off anyway: generally if it's more than 2 minutes long, then it's more of a soliloquy).

There are a few ways of encoding the voice content that Exchange will record as voice mails, and which option you choose might depend on how the users are going to be collecting the voice mails. Outlook, OWA and Windows Mobile can all play Windows Media (WMA) format files, so that's the default - and offers the highest quality for minimum size of message - typically a couple of Kb per second or so (a combination of some overhead for the message, and then the encoding rate of the sample).

The options are to stick with WMA, or if you're looking to interoperate playback of voice content with other telecoms equipment, you may want to encode using GSM 06.10 (an 8-bit compressed format derived from the GSM mobile specifications), or G.711 (a 16-bit PCM non-compressed format, defined as an ITU standard). Both GSM 06.10 and G.711 use the WAV format for representing the sound, and will deliver larger sound files than WMA.

There's a nice explanation of the options over on http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998670.aspx, including this comparative graph of the file sizes:

Basically, don't use G.711 unless you want *really* big voicemails... 

Finally, SP1 will add the option of using Microsoft's RTAudio codec for playback to Office Communicator Phone Edition devices - part of the integration between OCS and Exchange 2007.

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 met a lot of IT people who have a similar bias - some pay Gartner for their advice, and basically don't do anything that Gartner doesn't advocate (a favourite was always the "Wait for SP1" behaviour when looking at deploying anything new from Microsoft). Other IT directors look dimly on any analyst report, figuring that that they're all recycling the same old opinions, dusted with acronyms and supposedly cutting edge insight.

Gartner's had some cracking ideas in the past, however - my two favourite models of theirs behind the Hype Cycle (particularly the "Trough of Disillusionment") and the Magic Quadrant.

The latest Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications looked pretty favourable to Microsoft and Nortel (compared with last year, both have moved up and right) and a bit less so to a couple of other vendors who've dropped out of the "Magic Quadrant" altogether (the aforesaid being the top right quarter of the plot area, signifying the leaders who have the most complete vision and the best ability to execute on it).

I know they're rather particular about licensing of reprints etc, and although Microsoft has licensed the Magic Quadrant report to be able to distribute, I'm not sure about taking an image from the report and posting it here. As a result, I'd encourage you to go directly to Gartner to view the latest Magic Quadrant diagram...

Infrastructure Maturity Model

A couple of years ago now, Microsoft was working with Gartner to simplify its existing Infrastructure Maturity Model, a means of describing an IT infrastructure's level of advancement towards a well-managed, low-cost infrastructure. Gartner's model has 7 stages, ranging from the chaotic "Basic" to the nirvana of "Policy-based", but have estimated that 90% of customers never make it past the 3rd stage, "Standardised".

IO, IO, it's off to work we go

If you head over to http://www.microsoft.com/io you'll see the output of some of this work - Microsoft boiled the 7 stages down to just 4, describing the Infrastructure Optimization (IO) model.

Since then, they've worked with analysts to show that as an organisation moves its operations from left to right, there are many cost benefits - eg the average cost of managing a PC for a customer in the "Rationalized" segment could be as little as 1/6th the cost of one in the "Basic" stage.

The key part in this model is that it's self-measured, so you can use tools and techniques to figure out where you are in the model for any given metric - eg you could be Standardized when it comes to identity management, but Basic in what you do with it or even Rationalized in some more.

The same 4-stage model has since been applied to other areas besides core Infrastructure, such as "Business Productivity" (essentially, user-oriented communication & collaboration software & services) and "Application Platform" (ie the back-end applications which sit behind line of business systems, such as SQL Server).

There are some fantastic additional resources about these additional models, on BPIO and APIO. I tend to present this whole model to IT people, as a vocabulary with which to have the discussion around IT investment, with the finance department. It seems to work well (even though I thought it was a load of hot air when I first saw it... gaining an understanding of when it can be useful has since helped me appreciate it!)