Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

  • Improve Exchange – voice your ideas now

    Following up the request for input for an interview with Perry Clarke, Microsoft VP for Exchange development (the interview is this coming Friday, and I will publish the result on my Exchange Unwashed blog), a number of the Exchange MVPs have discussed how best to collect real-world user input for…

  • Security updates for Exchange December 2013

    Updated: 10 December. As anticipated, Microsoft released a set of security bulletins on Tuesday, December 10. Among the set, MS13-105 addresses a number of vulnerabilities in Exchange 2007, 2010, and 2013. The following updates have been released: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3 (RU12 – KB2903911) Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Service…

  • Exchange Unwashed Digest – November 2013

    November 2013 was quite a month for me. I was all set to go to the annual Microsoft MVP Summit in Redmond when I had a sudden and so far unexplained collapse (kind of like a personal reboot) on November 15 that resulted in a fifteen-day stay in hospital. Although…

  • Using an intelligent Twitter stream to keep up to date

    I am often asked how I track new developments and information about Exchange, Office 365, Windows or the other technologies in which I am interested. My response is “by using Twitter intelligently”. There’s no doubt that an extraordinary amount of dross is generated and shared daily on Twitter. People who…

  • Contemplating Yammer

    Microsoft’s $1.2 billion purchase of Yammer in June 2012 is now starting to get traction as the technology becomes more integrated with the rest of the Office suite. Officially described as an internal social network, Yammer is sometimes compared to a company-specific version of Twitter or Facebook (perhaps because all…

  • Review of the bug fixes included in Exchange 2013 CU3

    Now that Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 3 (CU3) has made its appearance (a little delayed to make sure that quality is high), it seems appropriate to review the set of bug fixes included in the update as reported by Microsoft in KB2892464. These are the fixes related to the on-premises…

  • Evolving Office 365 monitoring tools

    I’ve been playing around with the Office 365 Admin app, now available for Windows Phone 8 and due to be available “soon” for Android and Apple iPhone. Think of the Windows Phone users like myself as the advanced beta testers before the more popular devices get their teeth into the…

  • Best-ever Exchange Unified Messaging book now available

    I see that Paul Robichaux’s “Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Connectivity, Clients, and UM (Unified Messaging)” has finally made an appearance on Amazon.com. This is the companion volume to my “Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability” book and it’s nice to see the pair finally…

  • The dubious value of LinkedIn endorsements

    Allow me to pose a simple question: what value does anyone get from the endorsements lovingly gathered and displayed (with no little amount of pride) by LinkedIn? I ask myself this in light of some of the endorsements given to me. But I’m sure that the same question has occurred…

  • Exchange 2013 training in Malaysia

    This past week I was in Kuala Lumpur, helping to teach an Exchange 2013 course for HP. It’s been quite a while since I was last in KL when I spoke at Microsoft’s APJ launch of Exchange 5.0 in 1997. Fifteen years, two massive corporate mergers (Digital-Compaq and Compaq-HP), and…