Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

  • Ferry to St-Tropez; the easiest way to get there during the summer months

    If you holiday on the French Riviera during the summer, you’ll know that the road from Ste-Maxime to St-Tropez can be one of life’s miseries as traffic moves at the pace of a diffident snail en route home from a wine-pleasured lunch. In short, no one with more than two…

  • Exchange Unwashed blog digest June-July 2012

    I was remiss in not posting a digest of June articles so here’s a bumper edition listing all of the articles posted to WindowsITPro.com during June and July. In passing, I should also point to my 4,000-word plus in-depth review of Exchange 2013 posted on WindowsITPro.com on July 23. This…

  • How much is your email worth?

    The nice people at Backupify have created a Gmail value calculator to help solve the question that I know has been keeping everyone awake at night: “Just how much is the email in my Gmail account worth?” Apparently the answer is in the order of $3,588, based on the average…

  • Farewell EMC, welcome EAC – the end of Windows-based Exchange administration

    In a conference room in Redmond, WA last February, Microsoft revealed to a group of Exchange MVPs that Exchange 2013 would only include a browser-based administration client. The era of traditional Microsoft Management Console (MMC)-based UIs such as the Exchange System Manager (ESM), used in Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003,…

  • Countdown accelerates to Microsoft Exchange Conference – worth attending?

    As I write, there are 67 days to go before the new, improved, and so much better Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) returns after its ten-year hiatus. Even though I have attending far too many IT conferences in Orlando, I’ll be there when MEC swings into high gear on September 24,…

  • The ALL-IN-1 Mail Filter: Forerunner of modern email rules processing

    Email systems had a different ebb and flow twenty-five years ago. An average mailbox received perhaps 10-15 messages daily and the messages were simpler with fewer attachments and properties. Most messages were in the order of one printed page or less, or roughly 2KB of ASCII text. Some email systems,…

  • Sanity slowing coming into focus in patent wars

    Patents have been a lucrative source of highly profitable income for the technology companies that have accumulated sizable portfolios over the years. Companies earn income by licensing their patents to other companies or by prosecuting others who are felt to infringe a patent. At the same time, a patent portfolio…

  • Computing survey reports on UK market – 2% still using Exchange 2000?

    The U.K. is Microsoft’s largest subsidiary and has always been an important and mature market for Exchange Server. The results of a survey about the pace of transition to Exchange 2010 reported by the well-respected Computing magazine are therefore interesting and deserve some commentary. According to Computing, Exchange has 80%…

  • Adieu Minitel

    France turned off its Minitel service on June 30, thirty years after the little beige boxes first appeared in French homes. Apparently almost 800,000 devices were still in use when the time came to flip the switch from the maximum of 9 million devices that were in use in the…

  • Office 365: A pretty good first year

    On June 28 it will be a year since the formal launch of Office 365 in New York. I guess that we’ve learned a lot since. When they brief the press, Microsoft likes to discuss the 50-odd enhancements that they’ve apparently made since launch and the fact that Office 365…