The trials and tribulations of writing and reviews

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Tony Redmond

I guess an author wouldn’t be human if they didn’t check out the reviews of their books that are posted on major book-buying sites like Amazon.com. I do this on an irregular basis, mostly because other tasks get in the way. Often, I learn from the reviews and appreciate the time that people take to write them and I am very thankful for the feedback.

And then a one-star review appears. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and I thought that the review posted some interesting questions that deserve debate. Here’s the review as posted for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out.

A one-star review -- aaaaghhhhh!

So, let’s look at the comments and figure out what’s valid. First, a straightforward opinion:

“I don’t really see what people think is so great about this book.”

OK. That’s fine. No problem there. Some people like my writing and some don’t. Such is life. The next point describes why the book was bought – to find out more about Exchange 2010. The writer is clearly unhappy with Microsoft’s documentation and believes that the product is complex:

“I bought this book so I wouldn’t have to do a google-search on every darn Exchange 2010 issue that pops up. And a lot do pop up. Microsoft seems to have gone out of its way to be cryptic and counter-intuitive with this product.”

I actually think that Microsoft has done a lot of work over the past decade to improve and expand the documentation for Exchange. If you compare what was available for Exchange 2003 and what’s available now for Exchange 2010 SP2, I think that any reasonable human being would say that the current body of knowledge is much better organized, complex, and extensive. However, Microsoft doesn’t provide a manual for Exchange 2010 and it’s true that many administrators have to resort to their favorite search engine to locate information about the finer points of Exchange, even after they attend training and even if they are experienced with previous versions of Exchange and indeed, previous versions of Windows Server. Blogs and articles published recently can be extraordinarily valuable in terms of uncovering the current best practice in an area and certainly add to the static (or perhaps, fixed in time) picture presented in books.

“So I bought the book, based largely on the reviews, and you know what? I still have to do a google-search on every darn Exchange 2010 issue that pops up.”

I’m not honestly surprised by this statement. The book spans some 400,000 words and 1,170 pages. Some 45,000 words were cut out of the book to make it fit the requirements of Microsoft Press (otherwise it might have been a 3 pound monster instead of the 2.2 pound svelte and slim volume that it is).  Even so, I doubt that any author would attempt to cover every single technical detail of a product that’s so deep and complex as Exchange in a single book. That’s just impossible unless you want it to be done in as a simple fly-by coverage that will force even more consultation of search engines. In addition, our knowledge of technology evolves continually. What we know today is not what we knew yesterday, or in my case, what I knew in the period to September 2010 when I wrote the book. Every day I learn some other nugget that might or might not deserve inclusion in a book like Microsoft Exchange 2010 Inside Out. And then there’s the small matter of software evolution to deal with. Since the book appeared, Microsoft has shipped Exchange 2010 SP2 and Office 365, both of which introduced new features and issues to discuss and debate. Is there any wonder why you might have to look up the net to find out the latest information?

The review continues:

“90% of the material in this book is of this variety:

“To open a file, click on the FILE menu pulldown and choose OPEN” I’m not quoting from the book, here, I’m just saying that’s the level of information that the book is chock full of: Explanations of the obvious with nothing deeper sewn in.”

I take exception here. The writer is just plain wrong. You couldn’t complete a book at the required level and get past the mandatory technical edit if the material was as described. There are going to be times when you have to describe the steps that a reader should take to accomplish a task and that occurs in the book, but I don’t think my writing style fits the common model for educational/training material for technology topics.

“Example: Try setting up a DAG based on this book only, without once going to the internet. I dare you. I double-dare you.”

Obviously I did create multiple DAGs during the writing of the book – but I also went to the Internet to consult information such as the parameters for the various cmdlets that are used, such as Add-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupServer. After all, I wanted the material to be technically accurate. But seriously, I think that any administrator worth their salt will perform due diligence before they undertake fundamental tasks such as DAG planning and deployment by seeking out whatever information and advice that they can find so that they do not repeat mistakes that have already been made by others.  I think that going to the Internet is a positive rather than a negative and would like my book to be used as a guide rather than a definitive tome.

“Also, one of the reasons I bought this book was somewhere I got the idea that it would provide a lot of information on the use of powershell cmdlets. It doesn’t. Oh, some are in there, yes. But not all in one place, not all in one list… not “all” at all.”

Sounds like a boring book to me. Microsoft has done the work to document every one of the 600+ PowerShell cmdlets used by Exchange 2010 (many of which are also available for Exchange Online in Office 365). Why would you waste time, money, and energy and kill more trees than are necessary to duplicate their work?

“Want to learn more about cmdlets? Once again, go to the internet. (Although even there, good luck.)  There might be a book that’s got them all in one place. But this is not that book.”

Absolutely. Microsoft Exchange 2010 Inside Out is not a book crammed with PowerShell cmdlets. It incorporates many examples of PowerShell cmdlets to show how the shell can be used in an intelligent manner with Exchange 2010, but if you want a deeper discussion on PowerShell, you’d be better off buying a book such as Windows PowerShell Cookbook: The Complete Guide to Scripting Microsoft’s New Command Shell or Windows PowerShell in Action, Second Edition to learn the fundamentals of how to code with PowerShell or Mike Pfeiffer’s excellent Microsoft Exchange 2010 PowerShell Cookbook to learn how to use PowerShell very effectively with Exchange 2010. Because it is focused on building solutions for real-world problems, the latter is better (in my opinion) than Ilse Van Criekinge’s Exchange Management Shell: TFM, which is more of a listing of the available PowerShell cmdlets (for Exchange 2007).

David’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s, including mine. I just think that his opinion isd probably based on an incomplete realization of the complexity involved in the process of writing technical books and the struggle to complete with the ever-updating nature of the Internet. I do think that his review illuminates some of the problems that are faced in documenting and supporting complex software products. A natural thirst for up-to-date, technically accurate, and complete information exists that is increasingly satisfied by always-on access to the Internet. Our natural inclination is to go to the Internet for the latest and greatest news, something that cannot be delivered by books, especially when dealing with a product such as Office 365 that follows a regular update cycle to introduce new features.

Books provide a wonderful way to educate and to spread knowledge, but I wonder if we’re using the last set of software products that will spawn traditional books. The future might well be in the form of electronic publications composed of small and easily updated chapters that are bought on a subscription basis. Microsoft is now working on the next major version of Exchange in development. We shall just have to see what volumes appear to describe how that software works and whether the authors who take on the challenge of describing how to use Exchange “next” can do any better a job than today’s books.

– Tony

Posted in Exchange 2010, Writing | Tagged , | 9 Comments

Microsoft’s PST capture tool appears… eventually!

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Tony Redmond

A collective sigh settled upon the worldwide Exchange community after Microsoft’s much-anticipated but late release of their free-to-use PST Capture tool occurred today. The tool was originally announced in July 2011 for delivery by the end of the year. Essential testing, especially through a restricted external test by some members of Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Program (TAP), slowed the release. However, the tool is now available for download from Microsoft’s web site (updated for PST Capture 2.0 Released 20 February 2013) and you can make your own mind up whether the software fits the bill in your circumstances. Some documentation is available. However, it’s pretty sparse at present and needs to be filled out with experience and tips and techniques from actual deployments. Prepare for a flood of blog posts! In the meantime, I offer some thoughts on the challenges that exist in any PST ingestion project – including the indigestion that might result.

The EHLO posting provides some background on the tool, including an interview with Microsoft product manager Ankur Kothari, who also spoke on the topic at Fall Exchange Connections in Las Vegas last November.  The most interesting thing I learned was that the PST Capture tool is based on software that Microsoft bought in from Red Gate Software.  I’m not against the intelligent acquisition of technology as no one has sole ownership of innovation and it makes absolute sense to buy in software to address a problem if this accelerates the solution. Of course, Microsoft has done a lot of engineering to make the acquired software meet their own requirements and to work well with on-premises Exchange 2010 as well as with Office 365.

The tool doesn’t work with earlier versions of Exchange and you’ll need to deploy Exchange 2010 mailbox and Client Access Server (CAS) to be able to use this solution. To be precise, Microsoft says that they haven’t tested the tool against Exchange 2007 and it might or might not work with that version. I doubt that anything is possible with Exchange 2003 and believe that the PST Capture tool will have the good taste to ignore this now-antiquated version. Of course, once PST data is captured in an Exchange 2010 mailbox, you can move that mailbox back to an Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007 server, but that seems like a pretty silly approach to take.

There are three major components of the PST Capture tool:

  • The Central Service manages the set of PSTs discovered within an Exchange organization as well as the import of their contents into an Exchange mailbox (on-premises or cloud).
  • The Capture Console provides the management interface to set up import operations and associate discovered PSTs with user mailboxes so that Exchange can direct data to the right location. The console allows administrators to schedule and track the progress of import operations and retry operations if any fail, perhaps due to transient network conditions.
  • A set of Capture Agents deployed to user PCs are used to find PSTs, including those stored on removable devices such as USB drives.

In overview, you create a PST search from the Capture Console that causes PST Capture Agents to scan for PSTs on the PCs where they are installed. Details of the discovered PSTs are returned and registered with the Central Service.  After PSTs are discovered, an administrator can then decide what should be imported to Exchange and link the PSTs with target mailboxes. They then create an import job to do the work. When PSTs are imported, they are first copied from the client computer to a staging area on the computer where the Capture Console runs. The staging area is sized at 20GB by default. This figure can be increased to accommodate larger import operations. Once PSTs are copied to the staging area, the data is imported to Exchange under the control of the Central Service.

There’s no magic here and PSTs will not disappear overnight. In fact, Microsoft’s tool won’t work unless you do a fair amount of up-front preparation to deploy agents to client PCs. Not all companies exert the necessary control over client PCs so this is an obstacle that must be overcome before any PST can be captured. You are able to add the file names of PSTs directly to an import list. This is a workaround that avoids the need to install Capture Agents on client PCs. However, the workaround is only viable if you can map the drive where the PSTs are located. For example, you could import a set of PSTs stored on a network drive. Obviously, this approach won’t work for PSTs stored on laptop PCs that are invisible to the network.

The next issue is bandwidth.  To be captured, PSTs have to be copied from client PCs to the central staging area. This is easy enough for client PCs that run on corporate networks. It might not be so easy for PCs that enjoy intermittent access to the corporate network, such as those used by road warriors. Indeed, over the years, Microsoft has removed much of the need for roaming PCs to connect back to the mother ship via VPNs to access email, but in this case you’ll need to be able to access the PCs that hold the target PSTs on the network. A reasonable connection is also necessary to allow the capture agents to transfer the PSTs back to the computer where the Central Service runs. In this context, “reasonable” really means close to LAN-quality.

PSTs can range in size up to 32GB. In reality, the vast bulk of PSTs will be in the 200MB to 2GB range, but that’s still a fair amount of data to transfer, especially if multiple PSTs are being imported. If possible, PST capture operations should be scheduled outside normal working hours to take advantage of lower network demand. Of course, this implies that the clients PCs are connected at these times, so it follows that a reasonable amount of planning and coordination is required.

Moving PST data to Office 365 mailboxes introduces another network consideration and it’s hard to give a realistic guideline as to how much PST data you’ll be able to transfer to Office 365 per hour. The best idea is to run some tests in your own environment as this will give you some hard data that is pertinent to your circumstances rather than a finger-in-the-air guess based on theoretical conditions.

The reason why people use PSTs is to liberate themselves from the tyranny of harsh mailbox quotas. Of course, we live in an era when mailbox quotas are counted in gigabytes rather than megabytes but even so, you need to prepare for imports by adjusting mailbox quotas to allow Exchange to import the PST data. Note that part of the preparation process is to associate discovered PSTs with target mailboxes. A single import job can take data from multiple PSTs and move the data into a single destination mailbox. If you’ve deployed archive mailboxes, you can opt to import PST data into these rather than use the primary mailbox.

More esoterically, but potentially important, if you use extended Database Availability Groups (DAGs), you need to keep an eye on replication activity during PST import operations. Remember that importing data into a mailbox is like as if users suddenly created and sent email as if they were Duracell bunnies on steroids. Exchange will dutifully create transaction logs to capture details of all the new transactions and replicate the logs to other servers within the DAG. Depending on the network connectivity between servers and the other workload that’s going on during import operations, the extra transaction logs can build up in copy or replay queues and mean that database copies aren’t as quite up-to-date as you’d like them to be. The queues will clear eventually after the imports finish and server load levels reduce to normal.

The final challenge is to gain user buy-in. Beautiful as they are, users can break an administrator’s heart with their lack of cooperation with carefully-hatched plans. PSTs are “personal storage files” and the “personal” is the important word here. Users store all manner of information in these files, some of which is probably interesting corporate information that absolutely should be in a mailbox and subject to compliance regulations. But other information is going to be personal and users might like to keep it under their control and invisible from the prying eyes of the corporation.

PST capture is an all or nothing operation and everything ends up in the target mailbox. Education and awareness will be import to inform users why PST capture is a good idea, how it will happen, what it means to the user, and when capture will occur. I think it’s reasonable to advise users to create a special PST with an appropriate name (maybe “Personal – Not for Import”) where they can move any items that they don’t want to be imported into a mailbox. You can then exclude these PSTs from capture operations and proceed on the basis that any other PST that is discovered is fair game.

Technology is wonderful but it can only solve problems when the necessary groundwork is done to prepare for its deployment. It’s good that Microsoft has provided a free PST capture tool and I sincerely hope that it will provide the impetus to convince organizations that it’s now possible to move away from PST storage to more robust solutions. Other vendors such as Sherpa Software and Transvault will be happy to provide alternatives if you don’t like the Microsoft solution. Each product has its own set of strengths and weaknesses and you should consider how each fits into your operational environment before making a choice. Considerations such as the scanning mechanism used by each tool, how well the tools deal with large amounts of client computers and PSTs, recording and logging of import operations, and support should be taken into account when you make a choice.

No tool will gain you user buy-in. That’s going to be your personal challenge. Good luck making the case to your ever-receptive users… you’ll need it!

Follow Tony @12Knocksinna

Update: EHLO post on PST Capture 2.0 released on February 22, 2013

Posted in Cloud, Email, Exchange, Exchange 2010, Office 365 | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

Monday miscellany

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Tony Redmond

Some random thoughts to fill in the vacuum of a boring Monday afternoon in January…

First, why doesn’t the Nokia Lumia 800 running Windows Phone 7.5 display a status bar to show the current state of the battery, wireless connectivity, and so on? You can reveal the status bar, but it’s annoying that this has to be done with a swipe rather than just being there. I guess there is an argument that a status bar occupies valuable screen real estate but…

Also on the Nokia, the device is very pleasant to use and is nicer in many respects to my iPhone. However, I have a nagging sneaking feeling that the software is still a tad immature. Little things like phone reboots (two to date when making calls) and the relative slowness of email to show up on the device (same message sent to my wife’s iPhone and my phone ends up on the iPhone first by quite a distance – we both use the same carrier).

And although it’s an excellent feature to have Nokia Drive (GPS maps and driving assistance) available free of charge, three aspects bug me when compared to TomTom or other GPS devices. The Nokia is slow to track its position (moving along a motorway sometimes barely budges the pointer), the pointer can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s going north, south, east, or west, and you have to be online with the phone to be able to look up a destination address. It seems that “online” means a 3G or wi-fi connection as anything else declines to find your destination. The GPS works just fine and seems fast to find satellites, but it would be nice if the application worked better. Those wanting more information on the Nokia Lumia 800 can check out its review on themobilefanatics.com. I don’t agree with all of the conclusions reached by the review’s author, but it is very detailed and provides a good basis for anyone to make their own assessment.

Second, is it just me or has Gmail slowed down a tad? Operations such as deleting messages (yes, I know, you shouldn’t need to delete anything with such a large free mailbox but old habits die hard) don’t proceed at the same fast clip as I seem to remember. It’s not as if I use Gmail for anything complex or have lots of Labs add-ins enabled. I have conversation view and mail notifications turned off but do show snippets of messages. All in all, mine is rather a boring configuration.

Perhaps the slowness is because I am communicating with the Googleplex at bad times or maybe it’s because so much email is now being stored by so many people in Gmail that it’s an inevitable side-effect of success. But perhaps it’s another indication that Google needs to give Gmail a slam-dunk client that’s capable of working offline in a much more intelligent fashion than is available now. After all, a client can do so much to insulate users from the vagaries of networks and servers, a fact that Microsoft keeps on thanking Outlook for because that client has contributed so much to the success of Exchange and now Office 365.

On the subject of Exchange, I see that Neil Hobson has done a good job of explaining how a product deficiency can be overcome by intelligent use of PowerShell. MailTips is a new feature of Exchange 2010 and is designed to inform users that they might be about to do something stupid, like sending a “have a nice day” message to all 12,451 recipients across the organization. The data that MailTips depends on is sourced from the Active Directory (is a recipient on vacation, for instance) or calculated by Exchange (the number of recipients in a distribution group) and the Client Access Server is in charge of the magic that provides the data to clients. Of course, you need the latest clients to be able to use the magic, so those of you still using Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 need not apply.

In any case, MailTips don’t work for recipients outside your organization unless they are known contacts, in which case you can adda custom MailTip to their Active Directory object. Custom MailTips are also supported for the other Exchange objects and therefore can also be added to mailboxes, distribution groups, and so on. Neil suggests that you can scan Active Directory to find mail-enabled contacts for various domains and add appropriate MailTips. His example of scanning for contacts who use Hotmail is a good one as Hotmail is more of a consumer email service than anything else and anyone who sends business email there might like a reminder just in case they send out the latest (secret) corporate results by accident.

Last, I see the redoubtable Glen Scales, master of Exchange Web Services (EWS) has published yet more valuable posts about how to use EWS to solve real-life problems. If you’re interested in programming against Exchange in such a way that you think you need to access mailbox contents, you should bookmark Glen’s web site and check it regularly. His latest epistle on enumerating and manipulating folders is very interesting and should be useful for those who are looking for a good way to start playing with EWS.

Now back to the really boring stuff. I think I have a wall to paint somewhere…

– Tony

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

Shared mailbox or public folder

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Tony Redmond

A recent question asked to this blog as to whether I thought it a good idea to use a public folder as a repository for a shared calendar. My answer was “no” as I consider using a shared mailbox to be a much better response. That answer deserves some explanation, so here goes.

First, I don’t think it a good plan to make more use of public folders than absolutely possible. Some companies haven’t deployed public folders because they don’t need them to support older clients such as Outlook 2003. These companies can stop reading now as you’ve only one choice in the matter and that’s to use a shared mailbox.

Over the last decade, Microsoft has disappointed companies who do public folders because they haven’t exactly devoted lashings of care and attention to the development and maintenance of public folders. Every release comes complete with the compulsory “don’t worry, public folders aren’t going away anytime soon” announcement, but the future remains uncertain because Microsoft hasn’t added new feature to public folders for years. In addition, Microsoft hasn’t provided a migration path to other platforms (for example, SharePoint) that can move public folder data and applications in a seamless fashion. You therefore conclude that adding more data to public folders at this point might just end up with more of a migration challenge in the future.

On the other hand, mailboxes remain the natural core focus for much of the engineering within Exchange, as evident by the introduction of continuous replication over the past two versions. It therefore seems to be more sensible to use a mailbox-based feature rather than public folders whenever possible.

Second, the management and maintenance of shared mailboxes is easier than public folders. I know that Microsoft released an updated public folder administration console in Exchange 2010 SP1 that addressed some issues that had irked administrators for ages, but it’s still difficult to do something as simple as view the contents of a public folder. By comparison, the auto-mapping feature introduced in Exchange 2010 SP1 means that Outlook will open shared mailboxes automatically if a user is granted full access. I think it’s also easier for users to understand how to use a shared mailbox rather through Outlook.

Third, public folders weren’t strictly designed to host shared calendars. Sure, they’ve been hosting calendars for years and the implementation works, but the latest background features provided in Exchange 2010 don’t function with calendars stored in public folders. By this I mean the Resource Booking Assistant, Calendar Attendant, and Calendar Repair Assistant. Some of these might mean little to you or not deliver much value to the way that you want to use a shared calendar, but I’ll hazard a guess that automating the booking requests that flow into a shared calendar will be valuable to many.

Fourth, there are many more mailbox manipulation cmdlets than public folder management cmdlets.  Again, this might not be interesting to you but I thought that I’d make the point anyway.

Fifth, a shared mailbox can store so much more than a calendar. For example, you could associate some shared contacts with a calendar. Sure, you can use another public folder to store contacts that you want to use with a calendar that’s in a separate public folder, but there’s something satisfyingly united about keeping all of the data in one place – the shared mailbox – if only because this makes it easier to move the data should the need arise.

Sixth, using a shared mailbox doesn’t cost you anything extra because Microsoft doesn’t require a CAL (or an Office 365 subscription) for the use of a shared mailbox. Public folders don’t cost you anything either so this isn’t really an advantage. However, I thought it worth making the point because some believe that they have to pay for shared mailboxes.

Last, a shared mailbox is not a public folder so you’ll get better and more complete support from Microsoft should anything go wrong. And you have a go-forward plan for future versions in which you can have confidence, and that’s always a good thing.

Anyway, these are just my views. Feel free to disagree.

– Tony

Posted in Email, Exchange 2010, Office 365, Outlook | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Twitter can make twits of us all

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Tony Redmond

It might be that the nature of Twitter will either delight or infuriate those who consume its feeds. I’m not quite sure which side of the line I come down on, but I do continue to use Twitter.

My problem with Twitter is two-fold. First, there’s the low to very low signal to noise ratio of the information contained in the feeds. Second, there’s the public nature of conversations that occur that might better be kept private.

The Wikipedia article on Twitter contains an interesting analysis of 2,000 tweets from 2009, broken down as follows:

  • Pointless babble: 40%
  • Conversational: 38%
  • Pass-along value: 9%
  • Self-promotion: 6%
  • Spam: 4%
  • News: 4%

Your own mileage will vary based on the exact set of tweets used for analysis but I think that the point being made here is accurate: the vast proportion of tweets contain nothing but vapid emptiness.

It seems like the only way to avoid the problem is to be highly selective in the people that you follow. I’ve tried to do this and admit to getting value from @Techmeme, @GuardianTech, @ForbesTech and @Engadget, all of which I use as general-purpose feeds for technology news. The others in the 43 Twitter accounts that I follow are a mixture of technology and rugby commentators plus some personal choices. I’ve found that not falling into the “I’ll follow you if you follow me” trap and dropping those that I follow quickly if their output isn’t valuable are good ways to keep my feed relatively information-rich.

I do use Twitter for output, but the vast majority of my 254 tweets to date have been simply to advise those who care about new articles or blog posts. In short, I try and keep my output information-rich too as I don’t see the point in commentating on all and sundry in 140-character bursts. If people want to know what I think, they can read this blog!

I really don’t see the point of using Twitter to send messages from one user to another. Isn’t that what email was invented for? Or even SMS? OK, you might not have the email address of your correspondent but even so, why would you carry out a conversation in full view of the gaping public and have it lovingly indexed by search engines so that it can be recalled at a moment’s notice in the future? Although I cheerfully admit total bias on this point, a private email seems so much better.

On the plus side, tools are getting better in terms of making it easier to deal with the flood of tweets. I very much like the People application in Windows Phone 7.5 and have not bothered (at all) with the standalone Twitter application. I also use the Twinbox plug-in for Outlook to have tweets available there. I use Twinbox with Outlook 2010 but it also works with Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003.

With access through People and Twinbox, I haven’t used TweetDeck much recently, but it’s also a powerful way to keep an eye on what’s going on, especially if you want to track some trending development. For example, I used TweetDeck a lot during the Office 365 outages last August and September just to keep an eye on what was happening around the world. It was also a good tool during the recent Irish presidential election when one candidate made some real gaffs on live television that provoked a tweet storm.

It’s entirely possible that I am simply an old fogey who doesn’t “get” either the import of or the right way to use Twitter as a communications technology. I’d prefer to say that Twitter has its place in the spectrum of available media but has to be used intelligently to extract value and hold to the point that there’s far too much useless noise in tweets sent today. If not, Twitter can absolutely make twits of us all by either exposing our inane thoughts to the public or by forcing us to read far too much rubbish in order to find any value.

– Tony

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Exchange 2010 Inside Out receives “Distinguished” award

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Tony Redmond

I received a note from Microsoft Press yesterday to let me know that Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out had received a technical publications award. The note said:

“Every year, Microsoft Press enters our highest quality titles from the past year into the Technical Publications competition hosted by our local chapter of the Society for Technical Communications (STC). Entries are evaluated on rigorous standards for information design, use and appearance of visual elements, usability, writing and editing, and how well the publication meets the needs of the intended audience.

We’ve received the results from the 2011 competition, and I am pleased to inform you that Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out received a Distinguished award in the Informational Materials category. Distinguished is the highest level of award granted in the competition and signifies very high competence in technical communication. It also means that your book is eligible to be entered into the International competition.”

Now, I have no idea about the importance of this award within the technical publication community (in other words, does anyone care) or the process used to assess entries. However, I do know that “Distinguished” is the top-level award, so that’s good. I also assume that the decision is made on the basis of a review of the publication aspects of the book by at least two independent judges because I received two reports from “judge A” and “judge B”. These reports were very interesting because they help shape ideas for future books.

The criteria used include:

  • Organization and content scope (see screen shot below)
  • Information design – visual appeal; typography; artwork; consistency of design implementation
  • Navigation – table of contents; signposts and cues (headings, etc.); index
  • Writing – audience and purpose; technical vocabulary; capitalization, spelling, and punctuation; grammar and syntax; consistency
  • Essentials of style – word choice (diction); clarity and conciseness; tone (attitude of writer to audience)

The judges didn’t understand much of the technical material being presented so they can only judge from the perspective of an uninformed person who picks up the book rather than an Exchange professional who wants to find details how something particular works.

Some of the comments from Judge A

I found it interesting that so much attention is paid to writing skills because that’s certainly not something that seems to be highly valued in many third-level courses today, possibly because people believe that it’s more important to get information out than worry about how words and sentences are structured, whether spelling is correct, and if the topic being explained is covered in a clear manner rather than obscured in obtuse text.

It’s also interesting that huge value is seen in well-done indexes. Some publishers have tried to convince me that short-cuts are possible when building indexes for technical books. I don’t agree at all. I also like that focus and attention is put on how books are laid out, the typography, and how things like tips and screen shots are integrated with the general body of text.

I learned a lot from the assessments and wish that a similar job had been done on previous books. It reinforced the need for many quality inputs that are required to produce good books – writing, technical editing, copy editing, indexing, production and layout, and printing. A book suffers if you fail in any of these inputs and I’m just glad that Microsoft Press did such a splendid job in helping to publish Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out.

Now on to the next book, whenever that might be…

– Tony

Posted in Exchange 2010, Writing | Tagged , , | 18 Comments

More observations on Windows Phone (and the Nokia Lumia 800)

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Tony Redmond

I received quite a reaction to my post about moving from iPhone to Windows Phone 7.5 and the Nokia Lumia 800 (I note that Paul Robichaux, a died-in-the-wool Apple fan if one ever existed has now declared his lurking desire for a Lumia). That post contained some initial observations about how Windows Phone works in comparison to the iPhone. This follows up with some more notes on the topic.

Although the Outlook application on Windows Phone is good looking, it’s surprisingly slow to synchronize new items and deletions. Being a geek, I have Outlook 2010 running on my laptop at all times (you can never check email in too many places) and can observe when messages arrive there. My experience was that the Mail application on the iPhone was almost as fast and sometimes faster to display news messages than Outlook, which runs in cached Exchange mode so there’s always some lag between a message arriving on the server and being delivered to the client.

Apart from being slower to show new messages in the Inbox, it seems that Outlook on Windows Phone is also slower to synchronize deletions back to Exchange. At least, my observation is that I delete messages on the phone and then wait for the same deletions to be reflected in Outlook running on the PC whereas deletions made on an iPhone seem to happen almost immediately. My speculation is that Microsoft has tuned ActiveSync on Windows Phone to conserve power by optimizing phone to server communications – but I might be wrong. I freely admit that worrying about a matter of a few seconds in client to server communications borders on the maniac. On the other hand, it’s strange how little things attract attention.

I do like the way that Outlook uses a similar search folder capability (or views) to the one implemented on its PC counterpart as it makes it easier to focus in on unread messages.  I’d prefer if the default view shown when you open Outlook was “Unread” rather than “All” as I think that the most common reason people open the application is to see new mail. It would be nice if the Outlook settings allowed you to select a default view. I’d also appreciate if unread messages were highlighted more clearly than at present as the current method (turn the subject blue on my phone) is far too subtle for my old eyes.

I don’t like the way that Windows Phone reports the number of new messages in Outlook’s application tile as it doesn’t seem to update the count immediately new mail arrives. Instead, Windows Phone waits for the phone to be used before it bothers to update the new mail count in the application tile. There is a count of new messages shown on the locked screen that seems accurate, but then you unlock the phone to reveal the applications and watch Outlook’s tile update to reflect the same number. By contract, iPhone shows one number for new mail on the mail icon and that’s the number of unread messages you see when you open the application. It just seems to be a little more integrated, at least in my mind. If Windows Phone can keep count of new mail on the locked screen, why isn’t the same number immediately visible when you unlock the phone?

Waiting until data is needed seems to be the default approach used by Windows Phone as this also happens with the People application, which updates your current news feed when you open the application. I can understand this as it’s probably a very efficient use of resources.

I also don’t care for some of the processing of conversations in Outlook for Windows Phone. On the iPhone, once you delete an item in a conversation the next item is opened for reading. On Windows Phone, if you delete an item in a conversation you’re returned to the list of items in the conversation (if more items exist). The settings available to tweak Outlook’s behavior don’t allow me to opt to have the next time opened. Again, this is a small complaint but like the pea under the princess, the small issues tend to irritate. It would be good if Microsoft allowed users to select what happened after an item was deleted, just like they do with Outlook on the PC.

On the plus side, Outlook does a better job of formatting some of the messages that I receive than was the case with iPhone. Maybe this is just the interaction between Outlook and Exchange, but I suspect that it’s also because there’s more background knowledge about how an application works when both the client and server side come from the same vendor. Not surprisingly, Word does an excellent job of rendering documents on Windows Phone, although I haven’t quite gotten to the stage where I’d like to edit anything using the virtual keyboard on such a small screen.

I’ve gotten over the initial problem that I had with the Facebook application in that it won’t allow me to click on a URL in an item. I figure that this is simply an indication of the immaturity of some of the applications (the version 1 syndrome) in the Windows Phone marketplace when compared to the development time that iPhone applications have had. In any case, the People application is a much more powerful way to see all the various social networking data feeds in one place and URL links work just fine there, so I use it for my Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter feeds. And one of the best features of the application is that it optimizes all the feeds so that you only see one mention of a post that someone makes, even if they decide to publish on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Applying a filter like this is a very intelligent and worthwhile advance.

The desktop Zune application took me a little while to become familiarized, but I’ll put this down to user error and lack of expertise for the most part. It does the same job as iTunes in terms of synchronizing music, photos, and applications to the device but doesn’t have to go through all the trials and trauma that iTunes users have experienced in the past to synchronize Outlook contacts and calendar to the device as this is done with ActiveSync. Most of the problems between iTunes and Outlook seem to have been eliminated in recent releases but it’s a relief not to have to worry about this aspect as synchronization of this data is flawless. One big advantage that Zune boasts over iTunes is its ability to play FM radio. I realize that this might not seem like a big thing to the iTunes generation, but I really do like to listen to FM radio and its integration into Zune seems to add a nice feature to the phone.

The biggest and most perplexing problem that I’ve had so far is a totally random and explainable phone reboot that occurred in the middle of a phone call. For whatever reason the phone suddenly decided that it was a good idea to reboot immediately after the call connected and while the reboot sequence is fast, the experience still left an extremely bad taste in the mouth because making and receiving calls is the sine qua non for a phone. Anything device is entitled to a once-off glitch providing it stays that – a strict once-off occurrence – but a more frequent happening will make this relationship short-lived.

On the plus side, the Nokia Lumia 800 is a very nice piece of hardware and I really like the graphical interface that Windows Phone delivers. The combination is very different to the iPhone but there’s goodness and badness in that, just like most other things that come to mind.

– Tony

Update 19 Jan 2012: So far I have had two unexplained freezes when making telephone calls. The first was to another cell phone and the phone rebooted automatically. The second  (today) was to pick up voicemail and the phone locked out and required me to reboot it manually. I don’t like this at all because phones are meant to make phone calls reliably.

Update 4 Feb 2012: Another reboot today. I was listening to the radio using the phone when I noticed that I had missed a call (why didn’t the radio stop to allow the phone to ring?). I called the missed number back and the phone immediately rebooted. Not good.

Update 11 Feb 2012: Another reboot, this time when I was in Rome and called home. The phone rebooted immediately after I had completed dialling the number.

Update 13 Feb 2012: I contacted Nokia support to ask why the phone continually reboots when making or receiving calls. The advice that I received was a) reboot the phone, and b) reset the phone (in other words, wipe everything and restart). These suggestions didn’t seem like a good starting point as a) is already done automatically by the phone when it reboots itself when making calls and b) the need to wipe a phone seems excessive just because it can’t perform a basic function. We shall see what Nokia support has to say about my response.

Also, a good article about the Lumia 800 appeared in the Guardian today. Written by Jean-Louis Gassée of Apple fame, the article asks the question whether the Lumia 800 (and by extension, its big brother, the Lumia 900) is the phone to save Nokia. The underlying subtext is that Windows Phone 7.5 doesn’t cut the mustard as a phone ecosystem when compared to Android or iPhone.

Update February 14: St. Valentine’s Day brought a message from Nokia support telling me to send the phone back to them so that its innards could be examined and repaired as necessary. UPS is the nominated shipper but their online form doesn’t accommodate a pick-up from an Irish address (unless you believe that Ireland is part of the United Kingdom).  Eventually we sorted things out and Nokia pointed me to their service centers in Dublin.

Update February 21: I paid a visit to Fonemenders in Sandyford and they found that the mini-SIM used by the Lumia was slightly misaligned in its slot. They believe that this was sufficient to cause calls to drop. The SIM was reinserted and checked and I haven’t had a problem since. It’s always good when support works!

Posted in Email, Exchange, Outlook | Tagged , , , | 19 Comments

Moving back to Windows Phone

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Tony Redmond

I’ve been using an iPhone 3GS for the last two years and have enjoyed the experience. I even wanted to get an iPhone 4S before Christmas but couldn’t get one for love or money anywhere in Dublin. I might not have tried as hard as was necessary to procure a 4S in the madness that exists in the run-up to Christmas. On the other hand, I had heard some good things about Windows Phone 7.5, or the famous “Mango” release and how the Nokia Lumia 800 provided hardware that showed it off to maximum benefit. It’s good to see Nokia get back into the game again and become competitive. Many of us remember phones such as the Nokia 6310 (still on sale today) with a lot of fondness due to its indestructible and easy-to-use nature.

I’ve used many Windows phones in the past, most of them HP iPAQ models. Some were OK, such as the iPAQ 510 and some were bloody awful, like the iPAQ 6915. All seemed to be handicapped by a mixture of design shortcomings, battery life, and the awfulness of the Windows mobile operating system at the time. All broke my heart in one way or another and moving to an iPhone was a liberating experience.

But the iPhone has become boring and it was time for a change. I therefore took the plunge and bought a Nokia Lumia 800 (Incidentally, the price in the US at $528.95 is much cheaper than the STG399.99 or US$624 charged by Amazon.co.uk, but I guess it costs that much more for a three-prong plug than for the two-prong used in the U.S.). Amazon did their normal efficient job in delivering the phone, complete with a note on the box to attest to the presence of the Lithium-Ion battery inside.

First impressions were good. Nokia has clearly taken a leaf out of the Apple packaging manual as the phone came in a nice blue box. Not quite as nice as the iPhone box but sufficient to say “there’s something good inside”. Nokia include a slim rubberized cover for the phone too as well as a leaflet that contains advice about how to hold the phone to avoid disrupting antenna performance. Perhaps Apple should have done likewise when they released the iPhone 4 or maybe this is just a case of Nokia learning from those who have gone before.

The next step was to transfer my SIM. This task proved to be initially frustrating because Nokia requires you to press down on a button that hides the mini-USB connector and then slide across another piece of plastic to reveal the SIM card. Naturally, my fat fingers made a right mess of this and it took a little while before brain and fingers coordinated action to attain the necessary outcome. I’m sure that Nokia could come up with a better-engineered approach to this problem. By contrast, Apple does a nice job with its pin device that convinces the SIM to slide out of an iPhone. This approach becomes less valuable if you lose the special pin but anything with a slender point will usually do the trick.

The Nokia takes a mini-SIM card instead of the standard SIM as used by the iPhone so a trip to the phone provider’s store was necessary to get a new SIM. Once the new SIM was installed, the work to set up the phone was pretty easy. As you’d expect, it was a snap to connect Outlook to Office 365 and this made sure that my calendar and contacts also came across to the phone.

The longest amount of time expended to setup the phone was installing the Zune software on my PC and then copying all my music and phones over. I also had to take out new podcast subscriptions to the shows that I follow. All of this is pretty well what you have to do with iTunes to customize an iPhone to a user’s taste and the only difficulty arose in understanding the slightly different methods used by Zune and iTunes to find and install applications such as Facebook and Twitter from the respective marketplace (app store) and synchronize data with the phone. Thankfully there are quite a number of helpful articles available on Microsoft’s web site and elsewhere so the process was relatively painless once I understood what needed to be done. I think Apple’s new iCloud approach is probably a little slicker and certainly would have paid big benefits had I moved to a new iPhone.

The Nokia gives an impression of being a quality device with a top-notch 3.7 inch AMOLED 480×800 resolution screen (the Nokia Lumia 900 apparently has an even bigger 4.3 inch screen but I think this device might be a tad too large for my liking). So far I haven’t encountered the same kind of issues that caused a blogger named Matthew Baxter to dump his device after a month, which might go to prove that one person’s dud is another person’s delight. I do think that there value in many of the comments (plus the associated review of Mango for the HTC Titan) that will help you understand some of the differences between iOS and Mango. For example, how notifications (a big part of iOS 5) work compared to the way that the various Windows Phone applications tell you when new information has arrived.

At this point in time, my personal gripes revolve around the way that some of the Windows Phone applications seem less complete than their iPhone equivalents. Facebook is a good example.  Many posts contain URLs that lead to interesting information and on an iPhone it’s a simple matter of clicking on the URL to go to the link. The Facebook app on Mango is attractive but URL links are dead, which is pretty frustrating. Of course, you could point to the fact that links work properly when Facebook provides a feed to the People application (basically a consolidator of various feeds from different sources) but that’s not the point.

To me it’s just a matter of getting used to one device over another but I can see how some of these differences would make people climb the wall in frustration, especially if you are a heavy-duty user of one of an application that’s not quite as “finished” for Windows Phone as it is on iPhone.

In any case, I am now fully across and the Nokia is customized and fully loaded with music, photos, and podcasts. It’s a really nice piece of equipment and I value some of the stuff that Nokia has included such as the Nokia Drive application (GPS guidance), which I am sure will come in useful in the future. In the meantime, I’m happy with a new piece of hardware to play with and accept that not all will be sweetness and light as I get to know the new O/S and its applications. In the meantime, my son’s happy that he has my iPhone to replace his now sadly outdated but very reliable Sony phone.

Some would call this progress, others might say regression. I say that a change is as good as a rest and am looking forward to using my Nokia.

– Tony

Posted in Email, Technology | Tagged , | 3 Comments

December 2011 articles posted on WindowsITPro.com

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Happy New Year to all!

This post lists the articles that I posted to my WindowsITPro.com blog during December 2011. Enjoy!

Reporting Exchange Server 2010 Client Access Licenses (December 29) discusses the two types of Client Access Licenses (CALs) supported by Exchange 2010 and offers some advice as to how you can figure out the number of CALs and types of CALs that are needed by an Exchange organization.

Learning how to master PowerShell with Exchange as your tutor (December 23) is based on a survey that found that many Exchange administrators still don’t have a good knowledge of PowerShell. Given that PowerShell provides the base for Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 management and is the foundation for management in Windows 8 Server, this seems like a bad state of affairs. Fortunately Exchange 2010 provides three methods to inform administrators about the correct use of PowerShell, all described in the article.

Finding confidential user information with Exchange Search (December 19) arose from a discussion at an Exchange Maestro training event when one of the participants asked if it was possible to search mailboxes for items that contained information such as account and password data. This is a great example of why you need to restrict the ability to perform multi-mailbox discovery searches and, even more important, access to the items retrieved by searches.

Office 365 Advisor: what plan’s for me? (December 15) reviews a new web-based tool released by Microsoft to help companies decide what Office 365 plan is most suitable for their needs. Like any first release there are some small issues but it’s a reasonable start.

Exchange 2010 SP2: don’t forget the rest of the ecosystem (December 13) offers some advice about how to approach the upgrade of a complete Exchange 2010 ecosystem after the release of Service Pack 2. Very few Exchange servers run in perfect isolation and there are many third-party and Microsoft products that connect to Exchange in some way that might need to be upgraded.

Litigation hold updates in Exchange 2010 SP2 (December 9) describes some small but important changes that Microsoft made in Exchange 2010 SP2 to enhance the effectiveness of the litigation hold feature first introduced in Exchange 2010. Essentially you’re no longer able by default to remove or disable a mailbox that is under litigation hold.

DAGs and clusters (December 7) provides a useful reminder that Exchange’s Database Availability Group (DAG) feature is based on Windows Failover Clustering (WFC), which means that you need to keep an eye on updates and fixes that Microsoft release for WFC.

Exchange 2010 SP2 makes its debut (December 5) marks the formal release of Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2010 and provides some commentary on what I think are the most important points in the update. Unlike SP1, which really delivered some fundamental changes such as a complete revision of Outlook Web App, SP2 is much more of a tidy-up release. However, there are important new components such as the hybrid configuration wizard (HCW) and the introduction of Address Book Policies.

The futility of attempting to recall a message (December 1) was prompted by a tweet from a Windows IT Pro editor that mentioned the usefulness of Outlook’s recall message feature. Or rather, the futility (in my mind) of the said feature. See why I have this view by reading the article.

All in all, a productive month, even if we all seemed to shut down for a large number of days to celebrate the holidays.

Have a happy and productive 2012!

– Tony

Posted in Exchange, Exchange 2010 | Tagged , | 3 Comments