Exchange Unwashed September 2012 Digest

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Tony Redmond

September 2012 was the month of MEC and many articles appeared to cover the happenings at the conference. I tried, but failed, to stay away from too many mentions of MEC in the “Exchange Unwashed” blog because there were many other topics to discuss, at least early on in the month. Here’s what featured in September.

The upside and downside of Microsoft’s focus on the cloud (September 27). This post discusses how the changing development priorities within Microsoft’s engineering groups influence on-premises products. Microsoft announced the termination of some of its well-known security products during September, including Threat Management Gateway (TMG), a product deployed as a reverse proxy server in many Exchange installations. Offsetting that downside, the upside is the knowledge and experience gained from operating “the service”, Microsoft’s name for Office 365. Exchange 2013 includes a very nice Managed Availability feature that’s built by engineers to avoid the need to get out of bed at night to respond to outages. Sounds good. We shall soon see how it works in practice.

MEC shows that Outlook, OWA, and EAC user interfaces maturing nicely (September 25). If you’ve installed Exchange 2013 Preview and Outlook 2013 Preview, you might be under-impressed at the user interface redesign flowing from the style-whose-name-can-no-longer-be-mentioned. Fortunately, the preview editions are just that and the soon-to-be-released versions boast tweaked user interfaces that are better than their predecessors. OWA and EAC still miss features that won’t be included when Exchange 2013 makes its debut, but we can always wait until SP1 appears – just like every other version of Exchange since Exchange 2000.

Questions for Exchange engineers at MEC (September 20). I find that going to a conference without having some questions that need to be answered is a bad thing. The list of questions help me to focus and provide a good mental checklist of issues that I’m concerned about. So I published my list for all to see the week before MEC. The question now is whether I (or anyone else) is at all clearer on these points after sitting through sessions. Or rather, not being able to get into rooms as was the case for many sessions at MEC.

Choosing the right operating system for Exchange 2013 (September 18). Ever since Microsoft decided that in-place server upgrades were just too hard to engineer, this is a choice that we get to make every time Microsoft releases a brand new version of Exchange. For Exchange 2013 the choice is Windows 2008 R2 SP1 or Windows 2012. It might surprise you that I have a strong view and distinct preference on this topic. Read on to find out…

Will Exchange Customers Trust the Cloud to Provide Anti-Malware Protection? (September 13). The announcement that Microsoft was dropping development of some of its on-premises security products came like a bolt from the blue for many customers, who now have a choice to a) continue to use the existing products like TMG until they turn to dust, b) moving to a cloud-based service, or c) looking elsewhere for replacement products. I think that many will stay with choice a) at least until Microsoft ceases to support the products (2015) and that choice c) will become more attractive over time as competitors move back into a space where Microsoft was a pretty big player. As to b), it’s viable and should improve over time, but it’s not the favourite option for many security professionals who like the comfort of controlling their own anti-malware destiny.

Exchange 2013 Site Mailboxes – a new beginning for collaboration? (September 11). Site mailboxes (which used to be called “team mailboxes” – I think the name was changed to align them better with “SharePoint sites”) are one of the major new features in Exchange 2013 and part of the “let’s work better together” theme that you can see across Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync. The question is whether customers will be happy to deploy a SharePoint 2013 infrastructure just to be able to do better collaborative document handling. After reading what Microsoft has published about site mailboxes, I came up with ten “must know” things for Exchange administrators. See if I missed anything important!

The Implications of Outlook 2013 Changing OST Cache Behavior (September 6). One of the little secrets in Outlook 2013 Preview is the way that it updates the OST (offline storage) file. In addition to introducing some very welcome compression of data fields to result in smaller file sizes, Outlook 2013 controls the amount of information that’s cached by setting a cache period. The idea is good as most people don’t care too much about older information – that is, until they need to get to it – but the implementation is a little bothersome as it introduces another deployment hassle for administrators.

Exchange 2013 dumps CAS arrays (September 4). Exchange 2013 concentrates on RPC-over-HTTPS as the connection method for Outlook clients, meaning that the traditional RPC-over-TCP method is consigned to the byte wastebasket. The Exchange 2013 version of the Client Access Server (CAS) is a much simpler stateless entity, so the notion of CAS arrays isn’t really necessary in a world where load balancing is easier. It’s all good stuff, as long as you take account of the changes when you plan your Exchange 2013 deployment.

September was quite a light month as only eight articles appeared. This is accounted for by the tempo of Tuesday and Thursday publication that I follow for “Exchange Unwashed”. Keep on reading to learn about new developments or simply to attempt to understand my somewhat unstructured thought patterns.

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Posted in Cloud, Email, Exchange, Exchange 2010, Office 365, Outlook, SharePoint 2010 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Searching, iFilters, and attachments

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Tony Redmond

Ireland in October is definitely different to Florida in September. Although I didn’t see much of the outside weather during last week’s MEC in Orlando, heat and humidity has been replaced with Dublin’s ongoing mixture of rain and wind. Some say that the weather doesn’t really matter as long as you wear the right clothing, but I don’t know whether I buy that theory.

I had the chance to visit a friend at Google’s “Europlex” in Barrow Street in Dublin on Monday. Despite being in a very different location to the Googleplex in Mountain View (city center surrounded by railways and canals versus a very suburban setting by the San Francisco Bay), I think Google has done a nice job of recreating the sense of excitement and passion found in Silicon Valley. I enjoyed the views from the top floors of the Google offices out over Dublin Bay and the surrounding hinterlands, which definitely added to my knowledge of Dublin.

One thing’s for sure – I felt very old in the midst of the hordes of twenty-somethings that inhabit the Europlex. The number of different languages being spoken was also very noticeable, which isn’t altogether surprising as the Dublin center provides many shared services to other Google offices throughout EMEA.

Taking the Google theme further, it was good to read that the fine people who monitor Internet traffic in Iran have unblocked Gmail. People all over the Islamic Republic breathed a sigh of relief as they regained access to their mailboxes, even if the Gmail user interface must look as good in Iranian as it does (in my oft-expressed opinion) in English. Apparently the desire was to block YouTube traffic so that Iranians couldn’t see videos online that might be critical of the regime but the interdiction was too severe and the “unintended consequence” interrupted service from other Google services.

Also in the world of Google, an October 1 post on the “Google Operating System” blog said that Gmail is now able to search inside attachments, including PDF files, Word documents, and PowerPoint presentations. I must say that I always thought that Gmail could search inside attachments, largely because I made a large jump from “Google is great at search technology” to that understanding. How wrong assumptions can make our understanding be sometimes.

In any case, Exchange has offered similar search capabilities for some time now. Server-side searching to support always-connected clients such as Outlook Web App (OWA) was enabled in Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 improved performance and stability of its content indexing. When you use Outlook in cached Exchange mode, it indexes the contents of the OST and PSTs using Windows Desktop Search to perform searches locally rather than going to the server. Both Exchange content indexing and Windows Desktop Search depend on iFilters to open and index specific file formats. Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013 use the Office Filter Pack 2.1 for this purpose, which contains iFilters for the most common file formats, including all of those generated by Microsoft Office.

However, PDF is not one of the file formats that is included in the Office Filter Pack. If you want to index PDF files, you need to download and install the PDF iFilter from Adobe. The same software can be used for both Exchange and Windows 64-bit PCs running Outlook. The installation is pretty quick and once in place, the new iFilter is available to the Windows Indexing Service and eventually any PDFs will be inserted into the indexes and so exposed to search queries. Interestingly, Exchange Online (Office 365) might not index PDFs as some tests that I ran discovered that PDFs sent as attachments were always discovered by Outlook but never by OWA. Based on the list of supported file types for multi-mailbox searches, it seems that the Exchange Online people haven’t gotten around to installing the Adobe PDF iFilter. Maybe Microsoft thinks that Adobe will charge them a stack of money if they use their iFilter. For whatever reason, I think that it’s a great pity that Exchange Online (aka “the service”) can’t index PDFs as so many business documents are transported in this format today.

Of course, Exchange 2013 makes some change the underpinnings of its search facilities. Users won’t care as long as their searches are fast and accurate, but those who care about technical detail will delight in the fact that Exchange 2013 drops the MSSEARCH engine and instead shares the Windows Search Foundation (aka FAST) with SharePoint 2013 and Lync 2013 to provide the basis of cross-product searching. Given that Exchange 2013 still requires the Office Filter Pack to be installed before it can be deployed, the iFilters are still used in the same way. Another difference is that the Exchange 2013 version of OWA is able to work offline (provided you have a modern browser), but offline mode has no search capability because OWA still depends on a server connection for its content indexes.

Finally, here’s a page that lists various sources of information about Exchange that you might like to bookmark. Blogs, twitter links, and books to read. Something useful could be found here!

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Posted in Cloud, Email, Exchange, Exchange 2010, Office 365 | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Exchange community, UC architects, and engineers with a fashion sense

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Tony Redmond

Back in Ireland after a week away in Orlando to take in MEC, the “forgotten conference”, I’ve had time to digest some of what happened in Florida and reflect on some topics that I didn’t get to cover in previous posts from MEC.

It was great to be at an event where “community” was as important as the formal conference sessions. Evidence of engagement was easily seen any time you went by the whiteboard areas in the exhibit hall, especially the area close to where the MVPs hung out (well done to Stacey Yen, Melissa Travers, and their colleagues). I think that Brian Winstead’s report over-estimated the number of Exchange MVPs who attended MEC at “more than 50”. After all, depending on the point in the award cycle, there are only 91 Exchange MVPs worldwide (the MVP site lists 89 current Exchange MVPs who have agreed to publicize their status) and many did not make it to Orlando due to other commitments.

MVP “Hall of Fame” at MEC

Amongst those who did that I had never met before was Glen Scales, master of EWS. I had no chance of recognizing Glen without his floppy Aussie hat! Overall, my estimate is that there were perhaps 25-30 MVPs at the event, some of whom have earned their recognition by working with other products such as Lync. About 20 MVPs featured on the “Hall of Fame” shown here. The higher number reported by Brian might be accounted for if you include the Microsoft Certified Masters (MCMs). In any case, the MVPs were obvious, engaged with attendees, and many of the attendees had good fun tracking down the MVPs to get autographs on the shirts distributed by eNow Consulting. Congratulations to James Matteson for winning the Microsoft Surface.

It was nice to run into people who make very worthwhile contributions to the Exchange community on an ongoing basis. Among these are the “UC Architects”, a group including Pat Richard, Steve Goodman, John Cook, Dave Stork, Michel de Rooij, Johan Weldhuis, Michael Van Horenbeeck, and Serkan Varoglu, who collectively do a nice job of putting together a regular podcast covering items of interest to the Exchange and Unified Communications community. The photo shows some of the UC Architects at MEC with Perry Clarke, fresh from his “geek out” keynote session. The latest UC Architects episode (number 8) covers the demise of TMG and other Microsoft on-premises security products. Recommended!

UC Architects at MEC with Perry Clarke

I received quite a lot of messages that felt that my MEC wrap-up was a tad critical of what was by any measure a very successful event. My feeling on this point is that there’s no value to be gained by proclaiming that everything was wonderful. Many parts of MEC were very good indeed but there were areas that deserve attention and should work better at future events. I’m sure that Microsoft will do better as they always do in Version 2.0 of anything they work on…

In previous posts I made the point that the Exchange developers were very available at MEC. In fact, the engineers who were there organized and delivered a “tell it all – the unvarnished truth” session in the last speaking slot. I missed this session because I was speaking at the same time. I wish I had been able to attend as a session that promises to explain why marketing and product management don’t always tell the truth would have been compelling listening. I hope that Microsoft includes a similar session at the next MEC.Perhaps this time it will receive more publicity.

Brett Shirley was one of the engineers at the “tell-all” session. Brett has a most unusual dress style and is renowned for the sartorial dash that he cuts at events. My eyes are still smarting from looking at the flowery overalls that Brett wore when giving an ESE Internals session at TEC in San Diego last May and I heard (but sadly did not see) that other fashion highlights were revealed by Brett at MEC.  But Brett did leave his mark in other ways, not least because he was the engineer who offered to check the Exchange source code on his laptop to resolve a question raised at a session. Super response to any technical question!

Scott Schnoll is one of the popular speakers on the conference circuit. Before MEC, Scott was at TechEd Australia and TechEd New Zealand. You can read his thoughts on changes in Exchange 2013 in an interview given when Scott was down under. It doesn’t quite measure up to listening to Scott in person, but the interview does cover some of the material he presented at MEC.

On another note altogether, I liked the New York Times article about Meg Whitman’s challenge at HP. It seemed to hit all the problem areas that afflict the Palo Alto company. It’s hard to turn a company the size of HP to cope with the demands of a time when PCs aren’t so important and cloud services are changing the server market. Time will tell whether she succeeds. I hope that she does.

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MEC 2012 Wrap-up

Posted on September 26, 2012 by Tony Redmond

Day 3 of MEC delivered another set of sessions containing lots of interesting information about different Exchange topics, the most interesting of which was named “Ask an Exchange Dev (because program managers and marketing lie)”. This session was announced late on, possibly because of its totally politically incorrect title and never featured on an official agenda. I didn’t get to attend because it was scheduled at the same time as the repeat of my “Making the call: Cloud or On-premises” talk, but those who had the good sense to go there rather than listen to me said that it was highly amusing. We need honesty about the way that software engineering really works in more sessions like this!

The closing session was excellent, if only because it proved that not even the fire alarm going off would make attendees leave the conference. Talk about commitment! Greg Taylor did a nice job keeping the competitors in the final of the Exchange Arena challenge moving through the steps necessary to debug the problem before Phil Fiore ran out as champion with 1:31 left on the 15 minute clock. Well done to all who participated in the Arena challenge.

Interestingly, Michael Atalla did not say when MEC would return or if it would be an annual event. Instead, he said that MEC would return when the Exchange development group “has something interesting to say”. I guess it is hard to repeat the kind of content-rich event enabled by the recent announcement of Exchange 2013 and the rest of the Office 2013 suite. Perhaps a 2013 MEC might focus on the real-life deployment experience of Exchange 2013 and the changes in Exchange 2013 SP1. There’s probably enough good content there to warrant coming together again.

After a slightly anti-climatic finish that left people wondering what to do once the excitement faded, it’s appropriate to look back and discuss the highs and lows, what went well and what can be improved for future MECs. Here’s my take on the topic.

First, I think MEC overall was successful. Michael Atalla, Navin Chand (who lived and breathed MEC for the last year), Rajesh Jha, and the entire Microsoft Exchange development group desire our thanks and appreciation for bringing back MEC in such a wonderful way. This could have been a ho-hum let’s roll out another conference using an old formula kind of event, but it wasn’t.

That being said, here’s the report card:

Good points:

  • Overall, an excellent level of content delivered with good humour and openness by the Exchange development group and other speakers. I didn’t meet many people who said that their desire for information remained unsatisfied. The all-round attention to detail was very good.
  • A powerful opening keynote that set the right tone for the conference with slightly zany, off-the-wall, and edgy videos wrapped around some interesting contributions from speakers. See my MEC Day 1 review for more on how the conference launched with style and panache.
  • White-boarding sessions led by engineers. Apart from avoiding the awkward moments that often occur when engineers (who don’t normally speak to large public audiences) grapple with the opening slides of often-overloaded decks, breaking the ice by asking attendees to state their concerns and then diving in to answer questions seemed like a very nice way to communicate information about technical topics.
  • The gather-to-discuss impromptu sessions around whiteboards in the exhibit halls. Engineers, MVPs, and MCMs gathered to debate technical issues posed by attendees and all seemed to have a good time driving towards an eventual solution. It was also nice to see the MVP Program do their level best to inform, educate, and encourage people to contribute to the community to the level necessary to be recognized as an MVP.
  • Access to engineers. Where else can you have a 1-on-1 conversation with people who know what really happens?  Along this line, “Just let me check the code on my laptop”. There’s really no better response to a technical question about a software product.
  • An enjoyable night out at Universal. Riding rollercoasters with zero wait is so much more enjoyable than the normal battleground-like fight through crowds that Orlando’s theme parks resemble in the summer. We discovered that running a theme park at 5% capacity delivers a delightful experience all round.
  • Providing a wall-sized poster for people to chart their own involvement with Exchange since 1993 was a nice touch.

What can be improved:

  • The Exchange Arena: the four heats were too far away from the rest of the action. These would have been better had they been located on the exhibit floor, preferably in some kind of “in the round” setting that allowed spectators to follow what the competitors were doing instead of getting eye strain from looking at distant monitors. In addition, the challenges should not have clashed with sessions – this would have been a great activity during breaks.
  • Many of the breakout rooms were far too small for the number of people who wanted to attend sessions. There was a lot of energy and interest around Exchange 2013, coupled with an almost equal amount of disappointment and frustration when people found they couldn’t get into sessions, even when repeats were scheduled. And sitting against a wall is not a very pleasant way to endure a 75-minute session.
  • The idea behind “Geek Out with Perry” was good, but the format and execution can be much improved. I love the idea of providing the technical leaders of Exchange with a platform to share their knowledge and experience, but doing this in front of large audiences in a keynote slot needs better preparation and delivery. I hope Microsoft keep the idea and refine it in future events. More on this topic in my MEC Day 2 review.
  • Not providing shuttles from the conference to the airport. If you provide shuttles for people arriving at the event, why not complete the circle and bring them back to the airport again?
  • Spotty Wi-Fi coverage at times in different parts of the conference center. The bane of conference organizers who have to cope with a profusion of wireless devices. In an era where connectivity is expected, couldn’t Microsoft do better?
  • No more can be said about the lurid t-shirts inflicted on different groups. The vile green and horrible yellow shirts made their wearers visible from a mile away but were really difficult to look at, even with sunglasses. A photo of the shirts in all their glory is posted here, if you really need to see them.

The most successful marketing giveaway in the MEC exhibit was eNow Consulting’s t-shirt that required attendees to track down MVPs and MCMs and have them sign the shirt on the back. Those who managed to track down at least three were entered into a draw for a Microsoft Surface. The eNow folks distributed a thousand shirts. How many of these will reappear at future MECs? The challenge for other exhibitors is to come up with an even better giveaway in the future, something that is so more memorable than the classic branded t-shirt, mug, or sparkly bouncing ball.

Best whiteboard comment? Maybe “About as good as JBOD” to the question “What did you think of the Office 365 datacenter model made of LEGO?”  Well, I liked it anyway!

I don’t pretend to be the only one to have a valid opinion on what was good and not so good at MEC. Debate is always good and I am sure that Microsoft will appreciate hearing your views on how to expand, enhance, and improve future MECs. Although no comment box yet exists on the iammec.com site, I bet one will be there soon

In a sentence, the best thing about MEC was that it definitely was not the tired, flabby, and not-so-good conference that TechEd has become. It’s a new start for an old conference. Roll on 2013 (or whenever the Exchange team concludes that they have something interesting to say)!

Explaining why you need to wear a raincoat when you go near the cloud (photo by https://twitter.com/Eastsideg1rl)

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MEC day 2: Geek Out could have been better, but much to applaud

Posted on September 26, 2012 by Tony Redmond

The second day at the revamped, relaunched, recherished Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) commenced with quick wrap-up of day 1 from Michael Atalla (a man who books a theme park and then fills it to 5% capacity must be respected) followed by a Geek Talk with Perry Clarke, hosted by Ann Vu, of Microsoft product management. Perry, the Director of Software Development for Exchange, and Ann are a well-known double act featuring in the “Geek Out With Perry” blog/video series.

I liked the concept of the idea of Perry answering questions sent in beforehand very much as I think that a well-managed cut-and-thrust debate between experienced interviewers and interviewees can be compelling. However, despite the depth and quality of some of the discussion, I was disappointed by the overall impact here. Ann is a great lady who does a fine job with the video blog, but the format used for short online debates isn’t so good when scaled up to a massive stage in front of over a thousand people. I would have preferred to see fewer soft questions thrown to Perry and more insightful and inquisitive debate as (like all of us), Perry had a tendency to wax lyrical about some topics (like SSDs for Exchange) that really could have been dealt with in a few words (they’re not important right now, period). A better conversation over 75 minutes could have been created had Perry been asked some harder questions, but I guess it wasn’t really intended to be at the standard of a presidential debate.

Nevertheless, Microsoft should be applauded for doing something different and for allowing Perry to share his undoubted knowledge and expertise in a way that he’s obviously very comfortable. Having a massive electronic whiteboard certainly helped too – a device that weighs some 700 pounds, so it isn’t appropriate for every office. The whiteboard almost made me want to use OneNote, and that has never happened before as Word has always satisfied my requirements.

Paul Robichaux suggested that the audience should get to vote on the questions so that Perry could answer them in order of importance. I like this idea very too, but I think that its success is linked to a good quality of questions sent in by MEC attendees. The best of this year’s batch came from MVP Jeff Guillet who asked Perry what area of technology Exchange administrators had to become proficient in to master Exchange 2013. Jeff laid out the various areas from previous versions and Perry responded. I’ve tried to capture their contributions with an observation of my own (the “influence” column) below:

Version Area of technology Influence Design for mailbox size
Exchange 2000/2003 SAN and clusters Growth in users 100MB
Exchange 2007 PKI and namespaces Growth in devices and methods of access 500MB
Exchange 2010 Load balancing (CAS/ISA) Bring your own device 5GB
Exchange 2013 Compliance, discovery, data mining Tighter integration with SharePoint and Lync 100GB

Many interesting and worthwhile points were raised that deserve more attention in dedicated articles and I’ll return to these over time. For now, it’s sufficient to say that I hope that Perry comes back to future MEC events to debate again. It’s always interesting to listen to someone who observed that the most fundamental thing that he’s learned in his career at Microsoft is that “everything breaks” and that when you scale up “you see everything breaking at once”, which seems to be a pretty accurate encapsulation of Microsoft’s experience of making Exchange a successful cloud-capable platform over the last few years. This is an example of an interesting opportunity to probe further and ask “just what broke so badly and why” rather than simply accepting that stuff broke with no further explanation.

So much else happened at MEC that it would take several articles to do justice to what’s been going on in Orlando. For now, here are the highlights and some lowlights from day 2:

Many of the interactive sessions were packed out and people had to sit on the floor to attend (up to the capacity limit of the rooms). I think some better scheduling and use of larger rooms for sessions that you could almost predict would be popular is essential in future events, else attendees will end up with numb buttocks, a condition that I suffered after sitting through one session. For example, Greg Taylor’s sessions will always be packed because he comes out with some amazing stuff, not all of which is linked with technology (his views on the cancellation of TMG were appreciated). Sessions on DAGs and high availability are likewise always popular.

It’s a matter of coping with success from this point and it is important to provide an adequate size of room so that people feel comfortable and not squashed during sessions. Perhaps the conference center here is limited in terms of available rooms and the problem wouldn’t occur in other places. As a counter, it’s possible that the tactic of scheduling repeat sessions will enable everyone to get to the sessions that they want to attend. But whatever the reason, I think scheduling and room sizes could have been handled better here. Feel free to disagree if you had a different experience, such as pointing out that if I had arrived earlier for the sessions, I’d have had no difficulty getting in!

Whiteboard session in deep thought near the MVP booth at MEC

The whiteboard sessions in the exhibit hall seemed to be well populated today any time I wandered by. Lots of furrowed brows and deep thinking. Far too technical for me!

Some sessions seem to have been cancelled without great warning. Anecdotal evidence is that the majority of these were linked to Office 365, so it’s possible that a presenter had to cry off due to illness or other good reason. Nevertheless, I was surprised that Microsoft didn’t have a substitute to take up the slack of the cancelled sessions.

No conference in living memory has delivered great food at lunch time. And so it came to pass that the quality achieved yesterday (very acceptable in this reviewer’s eyes, or rather belly) was let down today. The conference center has done well so far. Let’s hope better food is available tomorrow.

I didn’t give Microsoft sufficient credit about the t-shirts they distributed to attendees. A range of different shirts were given out, some that even had witty slogans and will appear at MECs over the next ten years or whenever the shirts finally give out. On another fashion note, some declined to wear the luminous t-shirts assigned to various groups on the basis that they made the wearer look like a radioactive highlighter. Another fashion fiasco avoided!

The Exchange Arena with Nicholas Blank

The Exchange Arena was located in a bar featuring a wall of TVs. This proved to be highly entertaining for the audience (note to organizers: let’s have larger text on the screens to help vision-challenged people like me) as well as providing an opportunity for people to win an Emperor Scorpion chair (the chair that the competitors are sitting in the photo above), which I understand to be highly desirable to those who shop for a chair in which to game themselves into oblivion. The challenges (in the case of the first challenge, to figure out why Exchange wasn’t sending a manager’s email) set to the competitors apparently come from the Exchange MCM exam so they’re pretty tough  and definitely not the kind of thing you’d solve in a heartbeat. Congratulations to Bryan Cornette and Martina Miskovic, who won today’s heats and progress into the final. Also kudos to MC Nicolas Blank, who cut a rather compelling figure in the middle. Of course, the contestants were handicapped by having to follow his directions in a broad South African accent, but that’s all part of the competition!

I ran a session titled “Making the Call: On-Premises or Cloud” in the graveyard shift late on in the day. Despite being the last session of the day, I was impressed by the attention that the attendees paid to what I was saying. They are clearly more proficient  at maintaining focus than I’d be in their position. If you’re interested in this topic, I repeat it on Wednesday at 2:45pm in the Tallahassee 2 room. See you there. Or maybe not if another session seizes your attention.

Overall, the level of passion, engagement, and energy that I’ve experienced at MEC is different to any other technical conference I’ve attended in the last ten years. That can’t be bad and it’s certainly a good reason to anticipate future events. Let’s hope that day 3 lives up to the success of days 1 and 2.

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MEC launches with insults, edgy humour, but lots of good technical content too

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Tony Redmond

Michael Atalla launches the new MEC

MEC swung into action on Monday with two keynotes followed by a set of technical sessions covering different aspects of Exchange 2013. Overall, it was a highly productive day where a lot of interesting content was shared. It all started with a video…

Nice and all as it is to see your beaming face featured on a very large screen, I wondered whether to be happy to have featured in the keynote video or to contact a friendly lawyer to file suit against Microsoft for alleging that my jokes only work given to audiences of well-lubricated attendees? Or for the other scandalous lie that I have been hiding MEC in my house for the last ten years because I wanted to create the perfect conference?

The first allegation is, of course, ridiculous as my attempts at humour matches, if not surpasses, the acceptable joke level of most technologists. The second is easily disproved on the basis that my house couldn’t possibly cope with the demands of conference like MEC as well as the salient point that it doesn’t look at all like the house featured in the video.

But these gentle insults (which I don’t take seriously) are easy to overlook when put against a very energetic and I think successful attempt to revitalize the Exchange community after ten years of neglect, most probably because of Microsoft internal politics and some large degree of envy that existed in other development groups due to the success of the older version MEC. As Michael Atalla summarized, dumping MEC “was just a bad call”.

Right from the get-go, the new MEC laid down some markers that it wants to be difference and not a pale rebranding of other Microsoft events. The videos played during the opening keynote were well-produced, witty, and poked fun at just about all available targets. Based on audience reaction, the favourite piece was the video merge of Vivek Sharma and Karim Battish into the child from hell to represent the close working relationship between the on-premises and services teams. It’s an analogy that works for some while causing nightmares for others. However, the point about the close working relationship that exists between the two parts of the Exchange brain is well made.

I thought Michael Atalla did a good job of keeping everything going at a reasonable pace. Even though the opening keynote overran by about 10 minutes, I didn’t see many people leave early. He delivered the apology for community neglect with aplomb and announced the launch of iammec.com, a new portal for the Exchange community to learn from information gathered from within Microsoft and other sources, including interaction with local user groups. It will be interesting to see how this effort goes.

The rest of the opening keynote varied from executive endorsement to some interesting discussions about the investment in developing Exchange Online and its benefits for the on-premises server, updates to clients (including a demo of OWA given by Kristian Andaker on an undisclosed device believed to be a Microsoft Surface), and the updates to compliance and data leak protection, including integrations with SharePoint and Lync.

I was interested to hear Julia White announce her joy at finally becoming a cult member by being able to attend MEC. Welcome to the cult, whatever that is. She also claimed that “ten years ago Exchange was an underdog – now it leads”. This came as a surprise to many of us who had been at events such as the MEC in Boston in 1998 when Brian Valentine led the Exchange team on a charge to demonstrate their superiority over Lotus Notes and  proclaimed that Exchange 5.5 was a superior product to Notes. Of course, Lotus ran some pretty interesting ads on buses that passed by MEC at the World Trade Center then and maybe we were mistaken and Exchange really was the underdog, but I don’t think so… even if Gartner only recently concluded that the race for email supremacy is done.

Of course the content had been carefully scripted and practiced, but it was delivered in the manner of a well-rounded TV chat show and kept the attention of the audience throughout. At times it seemed like we were at an Apple event as the typography used in the slides was clear and clutter-free.

Microsoft learns how to do keynote presentations from Apple?

Ross Smith’s technical keynote provided a good fly-past of the major areas of technical change in Exchange 2013. Ross brought the “squeaky lobster” (or rather, a squeakless cousin of the famous crustacean) to provide moral support, not that he seemed to need it. Like most technical keynotes, the content had to be seasoned with a reasonable pinch of salt as there’s a world of difference between a headline description of some functionality and putting it into production.

Take the “red-headed stepchild of Exchange”, aka public folders. The smooth words emitting from Ross would convince even a sceptic like myself that modern public folders will indeed transform themselves into the “blondes” of Exchange (whatever that means). But this assumes that the methodology, tools, and inter-operability are fully sorted to be able to move some very large public folder deployments to Exchange 2013 and then execute a flawless switchover. We remain to experience such a transition.

Ross laid out a compelling case for large mailboxes, pointing out that someone who receives 150 messages averaging 75kb each will accumulate an 11.2GB mailbox in four years. I guess that this is true, assuming that the user never gives in to the temptation to delete anything and the administrator stands idly by and doesn’t implement a retention policy. Ross made some reference to “tribbles” that my poor European mind didn’t grasp. I am thankful to Paul Robichaux for explaining the Star Trek reference, but still don’t quite see how quickly-reproducing furry animals apply to email. Perhaps tribbles is code for a new kind of virus.

But despite his choice of words, Ross is usually good value when he speaks, especially when trashing some of the parts of Exchange that he cares little for, such as RPC/TCP and the death of Greg Taylor’s “backside of the elephant” analogy (the famous picture used by Greg in his CAS sessions is capture in the top right-hand corner of the slide shown below).

Ross Smith IV gets excited because Greg Taylor can no longer talk about elephant’s backsides

The afternoon sessions that I attended were also very good. I thought that Scott Schnoll did his normally excellent job in explaining how high availability has changed in Exchange 2013 (all for the better). Other sessions covered OWA, compliance, Exchange 2013 management tools, archiving, and how Microsoft runs Office 365 as a service plus the ever-popular topic of deployment and co-existence.

A conference isn’t just the sessions and much value is extracted from chance meetings. I especially liked the over-lunch discussion about why the Exchange 2013 Administration Centre (EAC) can’t support the PowerShell learning tools that the Exchange Management Console (EMC) offers in Exchange 2010. EAC is built from the foundation established by Exchange 2010’s Exchange Control Panel (ECP) and was never designed to capture and output PowerShell commands, so it’s a case that some retrofitting is necessary. In addition, EAC runs local PowerShell sessions direct on the Exchange server that it’s managing and the syntax and parameters are slightly different to the code that an administrator might run afterwards using EMS. Other complications exist, but this is a summary of an area that I hope will see some improvement in Exchange 2013 SP1.

And of course the conference party (sponsored by HP) at Universal Studios was greatly appreciated by attendees. There’s something faintly strange about 1,500 or so self-proclaimed geeks being let loose in an amusement park. But it was good fun, the beer and wine flowed, the rides in the Harry Potter section of the park were definitely better for the lack of numbers, and a great time seemed to be had by all, which is all that matters.

With reference to yesterday’s post covering the standard of sartorial elegance forced upon speakers by the MEC organizers, some black collared polo shirts of a reasonably elegant standard featured during Monday’s sessions, but only for some of the Microsoft speakers. This seems to be a shame as the only relieving factor for the garish (almost radioactively so) t-shirts is the opportunity for an entrepreneur to gather a complete collection that they then sell to some unwary individual on eBay. I imagine that there’s someone in the world who can cope with the bright spectrum used here.

On an upward note, the white t-shirt given out to MEC attendees (in a cardboard container reminiscent of a lunch box) is rather nice. Clean design, a color that anyone can live with, and not too much text. All-in-all, something that might make an appearance outside the boundaries of a technical conference, and that can’t be bad.

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Posted in Email, Exchange, Exchange 2010, Office 365 | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Some color problems as MEC swings into action

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Tony Redmond

The first full day of the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) swings into play this morning with the normal menu of an opening non-technical keynote followed by a technical keynote. The difference of course is that the first is for marketing personnel, who will be forced to leave the room for the second. Only kidding people! The real meat of the day will then commence as engineers from the Exchange development group reveal details about Exchange 2013. At least, that’s the plan.

Last night’s welcome reception was quite nice. Like most other technical conferences it consisted of food and beverage stations scattered amongst islands of technology companies, each eager to sell their wares and engage with the conference attendees. Apparently around 1,500 have signed up for the event so there was a nice amount of room to circulate between the different stands, a welcome change from the norm of grappling with crowds to be even able to see what’s happening.

At first look, 1,500 seems a low number to attend MEC. However, I know that the organizers are well aware of some of the handicaps that they had to contend with to get the event up and running, not least the inability to announce a full agenda due to the constraint on talking about Exchange 2013 before its formal announcement in August. That, plus the lack of information about speakers and the sessions on Exchange 2010 and Office 365, probably stopped some who might have come to the event from signing up. I think that more will come to MEC next year, especially if Microsoft announces the location well in advance and do a better job overall of communicating the value that people can gain from coming to MEC.

I liked the approach taken by eNow on their stand. Giveaways are ten a penny at technical conferences and most giveaways rapidly decline in attractiveness and value immediately after you get then. Enow took a different tack by offering a t-shirt to people with the challenge to have the back of the shirt signed by at least three MVPs or MCMs (Microsoft Certified Masters) attending MEC. Those who get their shirts signed will qualify to enter a draw for a Microsoft Surface.

Speaking of MVPs, the nice people from the MVP program are at MEC to answer questions about how to become an MVP and to encourage awareness of the program. Be nice to them by dropping by. Apparently they’ll be the only ones serving beer at specific times, which should be enough to drive some traffic. The MVP stand has a “Hall of Fame” featuring Exchange MVPs. My photo is dreadfully old, taken in 2001 when Compaq (remember them?) made a series of VHS-videos (what’s VHS?) about Exchange 2000 at Compaq’s European Technical Center in the South of France. I have fond memories of the filming, but the photo is truly horrible. I should have signed my autograph over my face as that would have at least obscured the awfulness.

Oh dear, someone lost control of the color palette here…

On the fashion front, MEC has decided that speakers will wear different colors of t-shirts. This decision gave me some problems. First, I don’t like t-shirts and wish that they had chosen the normal polo-type shirt instead. Some of us look better in collared shirts. Second, some of the chosen colors are garish. I know that I am color-blind (browns and greens give me problems) but the shade of luminous green selected to identify MVPs will cause a form of snow-blindness to those unhappy individuals who bump into the MVPs.  I regard the purplish color assigned to me as someone who’s leading an interactive session as the least offending of the set. MEC will have to do better in its fashion choices in future. MEC will also have to pay attention to personal hygiene by giving a shirt for each day that someone is presenting. I don’t care to wear the same shirt for two consecutive days and I anticipate that those close to me won’t either.

One of the joys of events like MEC is the chance to catch up with people. Yesterday, I discovered that Nicolas Blank (an MVP from South Africa) and Nathan Winters (from Microsoft UK) have signed up (with Sybex) to write an Exchange 2013 book. Apparently they’ll be taking a business process approach to the book, which should make it a little difference from the normal. This is the first book for Nicolas (Nathan’s latest covers Lync 2010) so there was an amount of gentle bantering (aka advice) on the topics of word counts, the horrors of editors, the difference between “it’s” and “its” and why you should always use “it is” anyway, and so on. I await the result of their work with interest.

One book that I’ll be avoiding is the recently announced “Exchange 2013 Unleashed”, brought to you with equal care to detail by the same folks who have ruined similar books on Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2007. My problem is that they are rushing into publication based on software that isn’t fully-baked yet. Sure, they will be the first on the market with an Exchange 2013 book and there’s some value in that, but if you buy this book, I can almost guarantee that you will be forced to buy another to learn about Exchange 2013. Save your money and wait for books based on real-life experience of Exchange 2013 deployment. You’ll learn a lot more.

The real action begins in about an hour. Stay tuned for reports.

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Squeaky lobster’s at MEC: Is this the start of the excitement?

Posted on September 23, 2012 by Tony Redmond

This coming week is all about the relaunched, revamped, and hopefully not-a-warmed-over-copy-of-Teched Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC). I flew from Dublin to Orlando yesterday, enjoying a reasonable service from Aer Lingus on a flight that must have set a new record for the number of kiddie buggies that it carried. Speaking of which, it’s a tad ridiculous to see some of the fully-grown children that parents push forward for early boarding. Some of them were even sprouting whiskers! And all to get onto a metal tube so that they could spend even more time than the 9 hour scheduled flight.

But on to Orlando, which isn’t my favourite conference location (San Diego holds that title). Bespite the somewhat dubious service of the ice-cream-chomping dispatchers, the transfer on the Mears bus shuttle was reasonably efficient and delivered a full load to the splendidly-named Gaylord Palms Resort and Conference Center. My first impressions weren’t great as the corridors are faceless expanses of carpet and doorways and the overall architecture of the resort can be summarized as “large”, but it’s growing on me. Perhaps I hadn’t drunk enough coffee to appreciate the nature of what I’m sure is a nice place for families (in particular) to stay while they plan their assault on the theme parks and other attractions.

In any case, MEC is in situ and the hype has begun to accumulate. I ran into some of the Exchange team late last night, including Michael Atalla, the Director of Product Management for Exchange, who promised that the event would be stunning and very different to what’s gone on in the past. One of the problems that all technical conferences face today is the changed nature of the information flow. Ten years ago, when MEC was last held, product documentation wasn’t as good as it is today and social media hadn’t taken off to the same extent. We enjoy a tremendous amount of information about technology that is easily accessed on the Internet (possibly so much that it’s confusing at times) and it can be argued that it’s no longer necessary to travel to conferences to learn about new technology or to get the “inside track”.

Indeed, Microsoft has posted online recordings from the recent TechEd Australia that include some of the Exchange 2013 content that you can anticipate from MEC and it’s likely that they’ll post the MEC sessions afterwards too. So you could save the $1,500 conference fee, $1,000 for accommodation, and all the sundry expenses by saying home to wait for the sessions to be posted.

However economic such an approach undoubtly is, missing a conference means that you miss the chance to interact with the talent that’s gathered at the event. I consider this to be where the real value lies. I can always catch up with a session that I missed by listening to the recording, but I can never recreate some of the background conversations and debates that I’ll have with engineers, third party software vendors, MVPs, and other interesting people who have come to Orlando.

I can’t believe that I’m including this in a blog post

Speaking of which, one point that Michael Atalla really wanted to make was that the infamous Exchange squeaky lobster has taken up residence in Orlando and is available to meet people at MEC. I won’t tell you where as part of the fun is to discover the lobster’s location. Or you can just follow the rambling of the lobster on Twitter.

MEC starts with the standard Kool-Aid keynote tomorrow followed by some of the real meat in the form of many Exchange 2013 sessions delivered by the development team. My session on “Cloud or on-Premises” (outlining the choice between on-premises Exchange and moving to Office 365 or another cloud platform) are on Tuesday and Wednesday (a repeat). See you there.

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HP: Once more into the smartphone breach?

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Tony Redmond

Meg Whitman’s interview with Fox Business News where the CEO of HP revealed “My view is we have to ultimately offer a smartphone because in many countries of the world, that is your first computing device” is a little surprising (at least, to me). Not so much that HP would want to create a smartphone because they’ve had several runs at this before, but because HP might want to plunge into the maelstrom of mobile devices now.

HP’s history with smartphones is an unhappy one. For example, in 2005 we had the joys of the HP iPAQ Mobile Messenger 6500 devices, which ran Windows Mobile 5. At first blush these devices seemed a good choice for any company who had deployed Exchange 2003 SP2 (released in March 2005) as this version included the first release of server-based ActiveSync. Alas, the 6500 wasn’t a very good device at all. Its radio was weak, battery life limited, and the design wasn’t so great. Some of my sources in HP’s Personal Systems Group (PSG) told me that the design work was outsourced to HTC. If so, HTC has clearly improved (a lot) since in its industrial design capability.

HP’s next generation of smartphones included the iPAQ 500 and 900 series. These ran Windows Mobile 6 and were designed in-house. I thought that these devices were much better and liked my iPAQ 510, even though its candy-bar design and phone keyboard made it a pain to read and process a busy inbox. In that respect, the iPAQ 910 was a better option for me and I moved over to use it.

HP iPAQ 6500, iPAQ 910, and iPAQ 510

Even with the improvements, customers didn’t respond well to HP’s smartphones. Sales were weak and the result was that the people inside PSG who wanted to push the boundaries of industrial design to create some much better looking and functioning smartphones didn’t get the backing or investment to develop new models in the 2007-2008 period. Such was the effect of the boa-constrictor effect of Mark Hurd on new research initiatives, even as he was asking the HP R&D community “where’s my iPhone”?

But then Hurd allowed HP to buy Palm for $1.2 billion in April 2010. I had moved on from HP by then but this news still came as a shock. It appeared to be a good deal initially, even if the price was high, because it brought a lot of smartphone talent into HP and a good mobile O/S in webOS to complement or possibly replace HP’s previous dependency on Windows Mobile, a platform that was struggling at the time. The Palm acquisition offered HP the opportunity to build a complete mobile ecosystem that could link up with their other enterprise offerings as well as offer devices that were suitable for consumers. Alas, we know how the Palm story turned out. A new CEO shot down in flames, a massive write-off, webOS open-sourced, many lay-offs of expensively-acquired talent, and an embarrassing reversal out of the tablet market. About the only benefit anyone gained was through the cut-price sale of TouchPad devices after they were canned.

And so to today. It’s reasonable that HP would have a continued interest in tablet devices as they can leverage Microsoft’s investment in Windows 8. Whitman said in December 2011 that HP might have webOS tablets in 2013 but that ambition seems to have disappeared. But phones are a different matter. Apple makes enormous profits from its iPhone, but they have market share, presence, and a terrific ecosystem in iTunes. HP has none of this and yet they now seem to want to plunge back into a market where Nokia is losing its shirt, everyone is suing one another because of patent infringements, the pace of development is very fast, and profits are largely cornered by a dominant player. And then you’ve got the effect of BYOD in large enterprises that no longer seek to impose a restricted set of devices on their employees. All-in-all, it sure sounds like a recipe for sure-fire success.

Perhaps HP has some magic tricks up its sleeve. Maybe there are sufficient patents in its huge IP portfolio to insulate it from lawsuits by Apple, Samsung, Sony, Motorola Mobility, or anyone else. It’s possible that the decision-making process within HP has been accelerated from barely trickling along to something approaching reasonable. HP has deep pockets and could afford to throw millions into R&D to come up with a unique device that swoons consumers and also delivers a winning formula for enterprises.

Whitman did say that “we’ve got to get it right this time. … So we’re working to make sure that, when we do this, it will be the right thing for HP and we will be successful.”  I do hope that whatever they do is the right thing for HP but there’s a nagging feeling that plunging back into smartphones isn’t the right way to go, unless it’s simply a case of making a deal with a smartphone vendor to produce HP-branded devices. I could see something like this happening with Nokia as Windows Phone is closer to HP’s other offerings than are Android or iOS devices. Maybe an HP-badged Lumia smartphone is in the future – or taking a completely different direction, perhaps an HP smartphone will come about as a result of some webOS development that resurrects a Palm-like device. We shall see.

On another note, following last week’s announcements from Microsoft, I was interested to read the views of Hal Berenson on the demise of the Forefront products. Hal was deeply involved in the development of Microsoft’s Identity and Security Division and is therefore able to provide some real insight into the flaws of the division that might have led Microsoft to decide to move away from on-premises products to concentrate on cloud-based offerings.

We live in interesting times.

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Update (4 October): Following HP’s annual meeting with market analysts, Whitman made it clear that there won’t be an HP smartphone in 2013. ZDnet reported:

We don’t have any plans to introduce a smartphone in 2013, but we’ve got to start thinking about what is our unique play, how do we capture this element of the personal computing market?” she said, according to reports. Noting the possibility of a future smartphone, she said that failing to enter the smartphone market in the next “five years from now,” HP could be “locked out of a huge segment of the population in many countries of the world.”

No doubt we shall hear more in time.

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The consequences of Microsoft’s new cloud-centric security product strategy

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Tony Redmond

If you haven’t read the news about Microsoft’s new direction for its on-premises security products, you might not be aware that offerings such as Forefront Protection for Exchange (FPE) and Threat Management Gateway (TMG) will not be carried forward into the future. FPE is being replaced by its cloud-based anti-malware companion, Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE – now renamed as Exchange Online Protection), supplemented with a single-engine anti-malware feature incorporated into Exchange 2013. At least you can buy third-party anti-malware products for Exchange if you don’t like the direction that Microsoft is taking. Or run another product alongside Exchange’s anti-malware feature to achieve a level of redundancy or multi-layered protection.

Details of changes in Microsoft’s security product strategy

But what of TMG? I didn’t care very much for ISA Server, TMG’s predecessor. ISA was handicapped by its 32-bit nature and subsequent poor performance under load, a factor that was bitterly exposed in some of the higher-end engagements that I worked on. Great hopes were invested in TMG without ever being totally fulfilled, but it is a product that is very useful within an Exchange infrastructure because of its relatively easy-to-deploy reverse-proxy functionality, something that’s essential when you have a DMZ to sanitize incoming connections from the Internet before passing connections onto servers hidden by an internal network. Outlook Web App (OWA), Outlook Anywhere and ActiveSync, all generate heavy loads for TMG en route to a Client Access Server endpoint, so it’s a popular choice for Exchange administrators.

TMG has its limitations, with poor NAT support being one of the most obvious. But it did its job and is a Microsoft product, which means that documentation is acceptable and support available. Combining TMG with Exchange provides a single throat to choke when things go wrong, which is always a nice thing to have.

It might be natural to suppose that Microsoft’s Unified Access Gateway (UAG) might replace TMG, but that’s not really the case. First, UAG is more expensive than TMG. Depending on Microsoft pricing in the country where you reside, UAG might be twice as expensive as TMG, so the sheer cost of a transition will be painful. Second, TMG works with some Microsoft products to cover common scenarios very well. Exchange is one of these applications, and there are some functionality gaps that UAG will have to cover before it can be considered to be an adequate replacement. For example, two-factor authentication for ActiveSync devices or certificate-based authentication for OWA.

So Microsoft’s move to delete TMG from their product catalog from December 1, 2012 is curious. Mainstream support for TMG lasts until April 14, 2015 and the lights won’t fully go out until April 14, 2020, so time is available to find a long-term replacement, probably from a third-party software vendor, who might just follow the line taken by some companies of building specialized appliances in the form of virtual machines. We’ll see.

The move to go “all-in-the-cloud” with FOPE is more understandable from an engineering and economic perspective. It’s much easier and cheaper for Microsoft to concentrate on a single platform. They have to protect Office 365 anyway and more companies are moving to embrace utility cloud services that are commonly protected by FPE (Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync) so it’s good for Microsoft to focus their anti-malware efforts on Office 365. Removing the need to ship FPE releases additional engineering resources (people) and budget that can be invested in other areas, most likely those deemed to be emerging technologies rather than the somewhat ho-hum (but vitally important) domain that anti-virus and anti-spam has become. It also makes support easier as fewer variants have to be considered – and because all the problems are now going to occur within Microsoft’s own very tightly controlled Office 365 infrastructure. Overall, I imagine that dropping FPE will save Microsoft a ton of money.

Savings will come at the expense of customer discomfort. Microsoft will point to the cloud alternative, their commitment to include an anti-malware engine in Exchange 2013 (no news yet about SharePoint and Lync), and the preservation of customer choice insofar as you can disable Exchange’s anti-malware feature and replace it with whatever layers of anti-malware defences you choose to erect. Companies who use or plan to use Office 365 won’t be bothered by the shift in strategy, but those who plan to stay on-premises have a few decisions to make over the few months.

We don’t have all of the necessary information to make informed decisions yet. Like all switches in strategy, it takes time to digest the initial announcement before asking questions that are pertinent and relevant to your own infrastructure and circumstances. I think quite a few Microsoft account managers will have the opportunity to debate Microsoft’s new security product strategy before 2012 comes to a close. It should be an interesting few months.

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Posted in Cloud, Email, Exchange, Office 365 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 22 Comments