Apple’s continuing struggle to make iOS work properly with Exchange was a prominent topic of discussion last night when some Exchange MVPs assembled for dinner. We’re in Redmond for the annual MVP Summit run by Microsoft and I was delighted to meet a number of people in person for the first time, including new MVPs Steve Goodman, Paul Cunningham, and Michael van Horenbeeck. I imagine that Steve’s book “iPhone with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 – Business Integration and Deployment” should become popular reading with those who want to manage iOS devices more effectively in an Exchange (on-premises or Office 365) environment. If it, it should be because it’s a very good book.

Paul is working on an Exchange 2013 book about PowerShell that he will self-publish. Apparently it will focus on helping people who are still grappling with the concept of using PowerShell to manage Exchange rather than diving into the depths of scripting complexity. The book will appear later on this year and I’ll keep a keen eye on its progress.

Although not all of the old-time Exchange MVPs are in town, it was good to meet up with people like Jeff Guillet and Paul Robichaux again. Jeff and I bumped into each other in the Bellevue Square mall, where I had gone to buy a Surface Pro (not yet available in Ireland – I will report back soon on my experiences of using the Surface) at the Microsoft Store. He waxed lyrical about recent experiences of running Windows Server 2012 with deduplication enabled so that he could recover disk space and run more virtual machines on a server. Some steps are necessary to make sure that the deduplication process does not interfere with the smooth working of Hyper-V, but it seems like a very nice way to fit more VMs on the server that he assembled himself. The technique should work with VMware too. Interesting reading!

Paul Robichaux and I took the chance to catch up with our Microsoft Press editor and discuss the progress of Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out, the two-volume set that we’re working on with a target publication date in October 2013. Things are going pretty well on the writing front and we wanted to discover the plans Microsoft Press had to push the book along through the copy editing and other processes that take books from raw text in a Word document to final printing. We want to do is to release chapters early through the Microsoft Press “PrePress” program so that text is available much earlier. If things go well, we should have something online in April – I hope!

Microsoft Press is also going to bring out an Exchange 2013 Best Practices book, scheduled in roughly the same timeframe as the Inside Out books. MVP Siegfried Jagott is working hard on this project, or so he tells me. I’ll see when the text starts arriving for technical review.

To come back to Apple’s iOS problems, perhaps they’ll accept the offer made by Paul Robichaux in an open letter to Tim Cook to come down and help them sort out their code. Paul is a long-time user of Apple products, but I think that his faith is wavering as he’s started to use a Surface Pro inside of his MacBook Pro and a Nokia Lumia 920 instead of an iPhone. Technology buying patterns change quickly when problems occur, and I sure hope that Apple starts to get a hold on the problems that they are having soon. The continuing flood of stories on this topic indicates that they are floundering. Maybe it really is time for Paul to visit Cupertino… Or for companies to take a stronger approach on the BYOD question, which is why you might want to buy Steve Goodman’s book.

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