Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

  • Bad week for Microsoft partners

    This week has been some week for Microsoft partners. First, all of the OEMs who have faithfully followed Microsoft’s weaving way through operating systems towards the Promised Land of Windows 8 had their collective noses rubbed into the dirt when Steve Ballmer introduced Microsoft Surface. Dreams of a happy 2012…

  • Microsoft scores own goal with their sad attitude to Windows Phone upgrades

    Microsoft passed a really positive message to the people, like me, who invested in Windows Phone 7.5 when they announced that Windows Phone 8 won’t run on older devices on June 20 at the Windows Phone Summit in San Francisco. In particular, those who recently bought a Nokia Lumia 900…

  • Roscoff: a good ferry port option even for those driving to the Riviera

    Traditionally I have used the Normandy ports when taking a ferry from Ireland to France. The original destination in the 1970s, first served from Rosslare by the rickety old St. Patrick, was Le Harve. Later Irish Ferries, the successor to Irish Continental Lines, shifted their focus to Cherbourg as the…

  • Decision time: into the cloud or stay on-premises

    HP and Penton Media recently asked me to write a paper outlining the critical issues that surround the decision that many companies are currently considering whether they should continue to run Exchange on-premises, move into the cloud with Office 365, or deploy a hybrid solution. I think the decision is…

  • The ethics of cut and paste blogging

    Blogging is good fun. After all, if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t do it – right? But there are some blogging habits that are unacceptable. Abusing someone for instance would seem to be in pretty poor taste. So, at least in my mind, is the way that some populate their blog…

  • May 2012 articles posted on WindowsITPro.com

    Another month goes by, another set of articles have been posted to my “Exchange Unwashed” blog on WindowsITPro.com. Here are the set for May 2012: The cloud is great, but what about Plan B? (May 31) discusses the need for companies who move applications to cloud services to have a…

  • Windows 8 upgrade smooth, but Skype’s a CPU hog

    Microsoft took the IT world a little by surprise when it made the Windows 8 Release Preview code available last Thursday (May 30). Ever prepared to take a run at the future, I promptly downloaded the code and upgraded my venerable HP EliteBook 8530w (8GB memory, 256GB SSD) from the…

  • Exploring Exchange 2010 SP2 RU3

    On May 29, 2012, the Exchange Customer Experience Team (CXP) released Roll-up Update 3 (RU3) for Exchange 2010 SP2. RU3 comes some six weeks after its RU2 predecessor (April 16) and as always among the 42 individual fixes, this update contains an eclectic mixture of ho-hum and important fixes. My…

  • Flying the B-17

    Taking any recommendation from Paul Robichaux is always a risky business. Accepting that you should strap yourself into a World War II bomber that was built in 1945 and has been flying continuously seemed like one of his more outlandish suggestions, but it was absolutely wonderful and a fantastic thing…

  • Forcing an Active Directory update with Exchange 2013 might not be such a good idea

    My post of May 4 exploring the question whether the upcoming Exchange 2013 release should force companies to upgrade their Active Directory infrastructures to a modern version generated a considerable number of messages. As you might recall, the question was originally debated at a spirited Q&A session at TEC in…