A visit to Craven Cottage

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Tony Redmond

There’s something impressive about professional sport when it is played at speed and with precision at the highest level. Wednesday evening saw my sons and I pay a visit to Craven Cottage in London to see Fulham FC welcome Manchester United in an English Premier League game. Fulham had won the same fixture by 3-0 in 2009, the last time that we’d been at this famous old ground by the Thames, a result that had disappointed my sons, both of whom are die-hard United fans.

With a maximum capacity of 27,500, Craven Cottage is an anachronism in the world of modern sports stadia. It’s built alongside the River Thames in the middle of a residential district. The stands are small and the ground is tightly gathered around the pitch. However, it’s a friendly place as the Fulham fans are welcoming and the security staff always seem to smile, which is definitely not the experience that you’ll get in other soccer grounds.

United brought their best game to London and dominated the first half with an impressive performance full of power and speed. Watching soccer on TV has its advantages but it doesn’t deliver the same feeling of movement, pace and interaction between players that unfolds when you watch a game live. It’s the same for any high-level sport. Manchester United played superbly and gave Fulham no quarter to score three unanswered goals in the first half. At least Fulham showed some improvement in the second half before late goals from Rooney and Berbatov, the former a powerful drive from well aside the penalty box and the latter a delightful back-heel, took the winds out of their sails.

View from Putney stand

We sat in the Putney Stand in a position right behind the goal. (above) The Putney Stand is referred to as the neutral end but everyone around us seemed to support Manchester United. At least, they knew the words of all the weird and wonderful football chants that featured United greats such as George Best and Eric Cantona, current players such as Ryan Giggs (clearly a favourite based on the number of songs that lauded his many gifts), as well as the contempt in which United fans hold teams such as Liverpool and Leeds. Many of the songs were not for the faint-hearted. The singing started before kick-off and persisted right to the end with a small gap at half-time. Far worse than the aural assault, the hard-core fans insisted in standing up for the complete game and we were forced to forego the comfort of our seats and stand to watch the game.

Manchester United on the attack

Craven Cottage is a great place to watch soccer and we enjoyed ourselves. What wasn’t so good was the Travelodge Toleworth, which must be the worst hotel that I have ever had the chance to stay at since lodging in an Intourist hotel in Kiev in 1992. The fact that you can get rooms at this hotel for STG12/night is no reason to stay there. Avoid at all costs! Much better were the splendid lamb burgers and home-made chips that we ate at the Royal Oak Hotel in Betws-y-Coed en route to catch the ferry from Holyhead to Dublin. The road through Wales (M54 and then A5) is a far nicer and more scenic route between Holyhead towards London than the hassle of the alternate A55-M6 battleground.

Interesting results from an Audi Sat Nav

Finally, the Sat Nav in my Audi A6 showed some interesting information when we were waiting to get onto the ferry. Apparently we were positioned 10m deep in water off the Welsh coast (above). In any case, all went well and our feet stayed dry.

Happy Holidays to all…

Tony

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The pain of CDG transits

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Is there another airport in the world that rivals CDG-Paris in terms of its ability to infuriate passengers through senseless bus journeys from one part of the airport to another? This thought came to my mind as I endured yet another opportunity to get far too close to people I didn’t know in the back of a slow journey past static airliners positioned on the CDG tarmac last Saturday morning en route back from a Heineken Cup fixture between Biarritz and Treviso.

It was the second weekend in a row that I’d had the unique joy of transferring through CDG. As a rule I prefer direct flights, even if they sometimes cost a little more. Direct flights have the great benefit of getting you to your destination fast and with as little hassle as possible, once you’ve gotten through the “please take your belt off” security routine (has anyone ever assaulted a cockpit with a belt?). But unfortunately there aren’t many direct flights from Ireland to France in the winter and the French rugby teams who play in the European cups are not located close to the airports where the direct flights arrive. In short, if you’re not involved in a game with Racing Metro 92 or Stade Francais (both in Paris) or Toulon (easily reachable through Nice), a transit through CDG is probably required.

The problem is that Air France insists that its regional jets arrive at a distant stand well away from the set of linked terminals that make up Aerogare 2. And because CDG is a sprawling airport that spreads itself over 12.5 square miles, distant means “very far away”. So buses are deployed to shuttle passengers between the main terminal and the stand for the regional jets. CityJet (a fully owned subsidiary of Air France) operates the service between Ireland and France. It’s deemed to be a regional service, so its planes arrive and depart from the distant stand.

I can just about tolerate the seven-to-ten minute ride in from CityJet’s stand to Terminal 2E where border controls and luggage reclaim are located. I can even take the subsequent bus transfer to Terminal 2G to link up with regional flights to airports such as Clermont or Toulouse. I guess my tolerance level is higher on the outward leg, but things seem to be so much more disorganized on the return. Here’s what normally happens.

After landing and an interminable taxi around the airport, you enjoy the mercifully short bus journey from plane to Terminal 2G. This is followed by the passage through passport control in a cramped room often in a queue that is too large for the room’s capacity. Then you get to wait in a holding room, again small, for the shuttle to the main terminal that’s supposed to operate on a 10-minute schedule. The shuttle bus starts off by travelling away from the airport to make a loop and retraces its steps back past the pickup point. It then crawls from one part of the airport to another, weaving its way past chariots towing luggage carts, before arriving at its first stop alongside a stairs up into the terminal. Then off we go again back over part of the route to eventually arrive at the second and final stop. The complete transfer through bus ride, security, waiting, and final bus ride takes about 40 minutes and invariably it’s when you’re pressed for time and just want to get to your final destination.

Last Saturday, Air France surpassed themselves by then loading their Dublin-bound passengers for AF2478 on a bus before keeping everyone there – without explanation – for 25 minutes before starting the journey back out to the remote stand that’s located close to Terminal 2G. In short, back to the point where passengers like me had arrived. Has no one in Air France ever figured out the madness of busing people in and out to the main terminal when some can simply stay put to wait for their next flight?

My mood wasn’t improved by being allocated seat 8E. A middle seat is never something to anticipate with joy unless you’re seated because someone you know. A middle seat in the Avro-85 airplanes operated by CityJet is especially onerous because the cabin cannot be described as “airy”, “comfortable”, or anything like a modern regional jet such as the Embraer-190, which is used by other Air France regional subsidiaries. The overhead wing arrangement imposes its own restrictions on the cabin and the tight seats with minimal legroom complete the misery.

Some light seemed to appear when we arrived at the aircraft because no one else turned up to occupy seat 8F. Alas, the light disappeared when the captain told us that a second bus was on the way (what! after a 25-minute wait on our bus?) and that everything was the fault of the security staff who were on strike. Forty minutes later the promised bus appeared and seat 8F was occupied. My black mood descended again and was compounded by a further 20 minutes waiting before take-off on a 105-minute flight to Dublin. My recollection of flights between Paris and Dublin is that this was a long flight. I don’t know if airlines are throttling back to save fuel or if the Avro-85 is just plain slow. In any case, the flight seemed to go on for ever with the only saving grace being that Air France is one of the few remaining companies that serves passengers with some refreshment on short flights.

Apart from the promise of doubtful coffee and fizzy water, why should anyone fly Air France to CDG? The short answer is that transfers from Aerogare 1, where Aer Lingus fly into, are even worse. Ryanair doesn’t fly to CDG and a transfer from Beauvais, which is where the Ryanair atlas believes is somewhat close to Paris, is not practicable, unless you plan to spend a day or so between flights in Paris.

Of course, sometimes there isn’t a good transfer available. For example, this week’s game was in Biarritz and Air France doesn’t fly from CDG to Biarritz (it does from Paris-Orly). We were booked to fly DUB-CDG and then on to Bilbao, which turned out to be the closest airport available from CDG. Sod’s law being in force, Air France cancelled the flight to Bilbao on Thursday nights due to a storm that hit the Atlantic coast so we were forced to take the coach to Orly and stay at the Ibis hotel in the airport. Thankfully Friday morning’s flight to Biarritz was good and the Radisson Blu hotel in the town was excellent and looked after us very well before we had to go to the ground for a 9pm kick-off.

I suspect that Air France and CDG will inflict further bus transfers on me in the future. C’est la vie. It’s just part and parcel of getting around Europe to places where professional rugby teams play in the winter months. But I can at least behave like the grumpy old man that I have become and complain bitterly about what happens, even if no one listens.

– Tony

PS. If (like me) you’re interested in commercial aviation, take a look at the Plane Finder web site. As the site explains:

Plane Finder works by picking up ADS-B plane feeds used by commercial and private planes to transmit their name, position, callsign, status and lots more. Our servers add additional information such as departure airport, destination and photos for presentation on planefinder.net and in our Plane Finder apps. The ADS-B data comes to us either from our own receivers or from people with receivers who share their data with us over the internet. 

It’s just great fun…

Posted in Rugby, Travel | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Oops – “Reply All” strikes again

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Anyone who’s worked with email for a while is probably well aware of the havoc that the uncontrolled (or unintended) use of the Reply/All option can wreak on the unwary. It was interesting to see The Register report on the case of a UK-based recruitment executive who lost his STG200K ($312K) job because he used reply/all to respond to an inquiry.

Sending back an unwanted response to 4,000 people is unfortunate. Sending a response that was obscene and rude was quite another and this is what caused the company that he worked for to dispense with his services. Oh well, strike another for the reply/all syndrome.

Some might ask if the designers of email clients such as Outlook might not be able to come up with a way to make reply/all less dangerous. I guess the problem is to strike a balance between usability and effectiveness. Reply/all has its place and it is a useful function when you need to correspond to a group of recipients. However, it is overused and contributes to the endless ping-pong routine into which many email conversations degenerate long past the point where additional useful information is being shared. The need to accommodate all the messages generated in reply/all storms coupled with the default of copying the complete text of previous responses in new replies is one of the reasons why we need massive mailboxes today.

On another topic, in my secondary (but more important) role as the IT manager for my family, I have been struggling with my son’s HP DV6-3111SA PC and its habit of not being able to restore the screen correctly after sleeping or hibernation. This PC has an AMD CPU and includes some smarts that detects whether the PC is plugged in or on battery. Depending on the situation, it seems to switch graphic processor to reduce battery consumption. Sounds good, if it worked. The problem seemed to be that the PC got confused whether it was using the battery or not and didn’t use the right processor so the screen was dim or just plain blank after it came back from hibernation. All in all, a very annoying feature.

After doing the right thing to make sure that the BIOS was up to date and that all available fixes from both HP and Microsoft had been applied, the blessed problem stubbornly refused to budge. The time for sledgehammer tactics had come so I installed a brand new copy of Windows 7  SP1 Home Premium, allowed Windows Update to do its thing to apply whatever updates were necessary, and the problem has disappeared. This doesn’t say that it won’t come back, but for now the PC seems happier to run its fresh version of Windows.

TR

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Collective early December ramblings

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Last week my wife and I traveled to The Netherlands to visit Utrecht and Amsterdam for some business and a little pleasure. In Utrecht, we stayed at the Hotel Karel V, which was very nice if a tad cold at times. While there, I visited Conclusion Future IT to talk about a seminar on cloud computing that I think will happen next February. Conclusion FIT is headed up by Murat Kiran, an old acquaintance from Digital and Compaq. It’s an interesting company that includes several radio stations amongst its portfolio, so I ended up making an ad that might be used to publicize the cloud seminar.

Making a radio ad

We then moved on to Amsterdam (using the excellent Dutch Railways system) and stayed at the Mint Hotel. This hotel is new and features an iMac in each bedroom, which is used for broadband access, a DVD player, and the in-room TV. It’s the first time that I have seen an iMac used in this fashion and it worked well. Interestingly, the rest of the PCs that I saw in the hotel ran Windows.

While in Amsterdam, we visited the Anne Frank House and the Van Gogh Museum. I preferred the former to the latter as I thought that the Anne Frank House was thoughtfully and well done despite the loss of many of the artifacts immediately after the German police lifted the eight hidden people in 1944. The Van Gogh Museum seemed to have an expensive admission fee  (EUR14 each) for what it offered. However, in its defence, it was nice to be able to see so many of the paintings in person that you might have seen reproduced en masse elsewhere.

In passing, let me note the sale of the Lunar Module Systems Activation Checklist from the Apollo 13 mission for some $388,375. This is a truly fascinating document that I can’t help wondering how it emerged for sale by auction when it should really be gracing a museum somewhere. Anyone who has seen the Apollo 13 movie will remember the dramatics that followed the explosion on the command module and the heroics of the crew and ground staff as they figured out how to return to earth. Apollo 11 landed on the moon on my 10th birthday and I have very clear memories of watching the broadcast at home in Ireland, so I am firmly linked to that era and have read a lot of books on the Apollo program. If you want to learn more about Apollo 13, the book by Jeffrey Kruger and Jim Lovell (Apollo 13) is a good read., while the computer nerds amongst us will delight in The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation.

I also liked the Forbes article An Email Fanatic’s Guide to Organizing Your Inbox. In a nutshell, the advice given is:

  1. Process email and delete or file items as soon as possible after they arrive in the Inbox (I doubt this will happen if only because modern email clients and servers positively encourage people to pile up thousands of messages in their inboxes).
  2. Unsubscribe from as many web sites and other places that blast out “helpful” messages as you can. Alternatively, set up rules to move these messages into somewhere that you can check whenever you have the time.
  3. Consolidate your email so that messages sent to multiple addresses flow into a single inbox. I think this is a good idea and it’s what I do – all my email sent to addresses accumulated over the years (Hotmail, Gmail, etc.) is now forwarded to my Office 365 address, which makes handling the resulting flow of email very much easier.
  4. Make intelligent use of rules. Once again this is good advice. Many people don’t know how to use rules and therefore spend time that they don’t need to handling messages that could be redirected by a rule to an appropriate folder where they can be processed when time allows.
  5. Plan for later. The advice is to use a plug-in that’s available for Gmail and Outlook to “boomerang” messages that you can’t deal with right now so that they are redelivered into the inbox after a set period. I don’t like loading plug-ins because my experience with them (especially with Outlook) hasn’t been great over the years. There are other ways of doing the same job such as adding a reminder to a message. However, I think that determining the “right way” to handle messages that you need to be reminded about is highly personal and individual to a user. The advice is good (figure out some way to keep yourself organized), but you’ll have to figure it out for yourself.

Tomorrow I am off to Clermont-Ferrand to TMO in what should be a fierce encounter between the home team and Leicester in the Heineken Cup. Always nice to spend a quiet Sunday in France looking at two teams beating hell out of each other!

TR

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RunAs radio interview on Office 365

Posted on December 7, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Recently I had the chance to sit down and chat with Richard Campbell of RunAs radio, who posted a recording of the interview on December 7. The topic of the interview was the current state of play with Office 365, who’s moving to it, what the impact of the August and September outages has been on customers and Microsoft, and what might happen in the future.

Of course, as I don’t work for Microsoft everything that I say is simply the result of analyzing what I see and hear in order to make some sense of what’s going on. Feel free to listen to the interview and tell me what you think!

– Tony

Posted in Office 365 | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Installing Exchange 2010 SP2

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Tony Redmond

By now you’ll have read the news that Microsoft has released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Exchange 2010. If not, you can read my article on WindowsITPro.com and then go and fetch the necessary bits from the Microsoft Download Center.

Installing SP2 is a relatively straightforward affair and Exchange 2010 SP1 and SP2 servers can co-exist peacefully alongside each other for as long as it takes to roll out SP2. However, it is best practice to run a consistent software level across an entire Exchange organization so it’s best to schedule the updates to occur as quickly as possible. Of course, don’t do this until after you’re happy that SP2 meets your needs and requirements and has been tested in your own environment.

The biggest hindrance in the update process for most people is likely to be the requirement to schedule the prerequisite Active Directory schema update, which is required to support new features such as Address Book Policies (ABPs). Once the schema has been updated and replicated throughout the Active Directory forest, you should be able to upgrade Exchange 2010 SP1 servers following the normal order of CAS-Hub Transport-Mailbox servers (Edge servers can be updated first or last, UM servers should be updated before mailbox servers). CAS servers in Internet-facing sites are usually the first candidates for upgrade and this is especially so in Exchange 2010 SP2 if you plan to run a hybrid on-premises/Office 365 configuration. Those who run  multi-role Exchange 2010 servers can simply start to upgrade servers…

Updates are performed from the command line with the SETUP program or by running the normal Exchange 2010 installation program. If you run SETUP, you’ll probably run the command SETUP /m:upgrade /InstallWindowsComponents to apply the upgrade and to install any Windows components that might be missing on a server.

SP2 update fails because IIS6 WMI Compatibility component is required

If you use the GUI version of the installation program to install SP2, you might encounter the error shown above when you attempt to upgrade Exchange 2010 SP1 CAS servers. This is because SP2 introduces a new requirement for CAS servers to have the IIS6 WMI Compatibility role. The Exchange installation program is able to detect the lack of prerequisite software on a server and offer to install the missing pieces for you but it can only do this for new installations as the code doesn’t cover the situation where a service pack or other upgrade introduces the need for a new component. As you’ll already have noted from the command-line example described above, the same limitation doesn’t exist for SETUP.

For those who like to script server updates, you can use PowerShell to run these commands to ensure that the correct prerequisite software is installed for Exchange 2010 SP2 (the change from previous versions is the addition of the Web-WMI component):

Import-Module ServerManager

Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework, RSAT-ADDS, Web-Server, Web-Basic-Auth, Web-Windows-Auth, Web-Metabase, Web-Net-Ext, Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console, WAS-Process-Model, RSAT-Web-Server, Web-ISAPI-Ext, Web-Digest-Auth, Web-Dyn-Compression, NET-HTTP-Activation, RPC-Over-HTTP-Proxy, Web-WMI –Restart

For mailbox servers that are members of a Database Availability Group, remember that Exchange includes a script called StartDagServerMaintenance.ps1 that is designed to prepare a DAG server member for maintenance, such as installing a service pack. This script:

  1. Runs the Suspend-MailboxDatabaseCopy cmdlet for each database copy hosted on the DAG member to block replication and replay activity.
  2. Pauses the node in the cluster. This prevents the server taking on the role of the Primary Active Manager (PAM) for the DAG
  3. Sets the value of the DatabaseCopyAutoActivationPolicy parameter on the DAG member to “Blocked“. This step prevents the PAM attempting to automatically activate any of the database copies that are present on the server.
  4. Moves all the active databases that are currently hosted on the DAG member to other DAG members. Assuming that there are DAG members available to accept the workload, clients should be automatically transferred to the new locations by the RPC Client Access Layer.

Like all the other scripts included in the Exchange kit, you can find this one in the location \Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Scripts. You’ll also find its companion script that’s designed to bring a DAG member back online after maintenance is complete, StopDagServerMaintenance.ps1, in the same location. This script does the following:

  1. Runs the Resume-MailboxDatabaseCopy cmdlet for each database copy hosted on the DAG member to allow the server to fully participate in database replication and replay.
  2. Resumes the node in the cluster to enable full cluster functionality for the DAG member
  3. Sets the value of the DatabaseCopyAutoActivationPolicy parameter on the DAG member to be “Unrestricted“. The PAM is then able to automatically activate database copies on the DAG member.

Note that workload is not automatically transferred back to the newly reenabled DAG member. You will have to either perform a manual switchover of databases to make them active on the DAG member or rely on the update of another DAG member to transfer databases and balance workload across the DAG. Inevitably, you will end up switching some databases around once all the servers have been upgraded to SP2.

As an example, here’s how we would run the scripts to work with a server called ExServer1 during maintenance.

1. Navigate to the scripts directory (or do one of the tricks to get the scripts directory in your search order for PowerShell).

2. Run the script to prepare a DAG server member for maintenance.

.\StartDagServerMaintenance -ServerName "EXSERVER1"

3. When maintenance is done, run the other script to bring the server back online within the DAG.

.\StopDagServerMaintenance -ServerName "EXSERVER1"

All in all, your upgrade to SP2 should proceed reasonably smoothly and with a minimum of fuss. Microsoft has invested lots of time into making it all flow nicely and you’ll appreciate their work after the upgrade is complete.

– Tony

Posted in Active Directory, Email, Exchange, Exchange 2010, Office 365 | Tagged , , , , | 62 Comments

November posts on WindowsITPro.com

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Tony Redmond

I know that many of the readers of this fine blog don’t have the chance or the time to keep up to date with the “Exchange Unwashed” blog that I contribute to on WindowsITPro.com (of course, you could subscribe to Twitter and follow me there), so here’s a brief recap on some of my November posts on WindowsITPro.com that might be of interest to some.

Expiring Office 365 Passwords (Nov 28) considers the impact of the Office 365 password expiration policy for Plan E (enterprise) users, which forces users to change passwords every 90 days whether they want to or not (or realize that they have to). Plan P users like me are unaffected because Microsoft has thoughtfully allowed us to play with fire and passwords that don’t expire. Why is this an issue? Well, it could be a support problem for small to medium companies who have just moved to Office 365 and are now meeting that 90 day limit…

The economics of becoming a Microsoft Certified Master (MCM–Exchange) (Nov 22) discussed the relatively high cost ($18,500) charged by Microsoft for the three-week training course that they run for people who want to become a Microsoft Certified Master (Exchange). Alas, the course fee is only the start of the costs associated with this accreditation, which is what I explore in the article.

Exchange 2010 Transaction Logs: To Be Cerished, Not Ignored (Nov 17) arose from a recent post by the Exchange development group stating that “the number one reason why our Premier customers open Exchange 2010 critical situations is because Mailbox databases dismount due to running out of disk space on the transaction log LUN…”  This caused me to consider whether Microsoft is a victim of its own marketing success in selling the effect of the storage changes incorporated in Exchange 2010 that support deployments on low-end disks and so on.

Google improves support for Google Apps users and claims 80% customer satisfaction rating: What about Office 365? (Nov 15) A commentary after Google announced telephone support for all business users of its Google Apps application suite. Office 365 Plan P users are restricted to logging support calls on the Office 365 portal or searching blogs and other support forums, so is support now a competitive advantage for Google Apps?

Office 365 Troubleshooter: a start, but not as accurate as you need (Nov 11) is a review of the first release of a Microsoft troubleshooting tool that’s designed to guide Office 365 users to the answer for problems that they might meet. I found that the tool is a start but it can be misleading for inexperienced administrators.

So much fuss, but all part of the Google vs. Microsoft sales game (Nov 9). I was amused by all of the reports saying that Google had signed a deal with General Motors (GM) to supply Google Apps to GM’s 100,000 users. I’ve been through many sales campaigns to sell product to large corporations and this seemed to be the opening salvo in a battle that has many stages to go through yet.

The wonders of the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator (Nov 7) is a commentary on the latest version of the storage calculator, which apart from anything else is a wonderful example of just what you can do with Excel. There’s some interesting features in this release that are extremely useful to anyone who’s trying to design a Database Availability Group (DAG).

Gartner analyzes Google Apps revenue and the email race (Nov 1) reviews an interesting analysis that Gartner did of just how important Google Apps is to Google’s overall revenue and how Google might be using Google Apps to keep Microsoft focused on defending its application strongholds (with Office 365, for example) while leaving Google relatively unscathed in search.

I hope that you enjoy the articles!

– Tony

Posted in Cloud, Exchange, Exchange 2010, Office 365, Writing | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Email Museum

Posted on November 26, 2011 by Tony Redmond

Email has been part of our life for so long that it’s hard to remember a time when email was not pervasive and available on so many devices in so many forms. But there was a time when email access was confined to senior people or those who “had the need”. I was reminded about this when David Sengupta, a fellow MVP and the organizer of the Exchange track for “The Experts Conference” told me that he is also a Curator of the Museum of eMail & Digital Communications.

Apparently the Museum is dedicated to capturing the reasons why email has become so important for human communications. It is backed by Ferris Research, a well-respected research company that has worked in the email field for many years.

In any case, I was asked to write a brief note about my experiences for the museum and chose to write about some of my memories of ALL-IN-1 (see below). You can go to the Email Museum web page to sign up for newsletters that contain other articles about how email has contributed to the world in which we live today.

– Tony

Memories of ALL-IN-1

My first exposure to enterprise email was in the form of CP/OSS in 1982. CP/OSS stood for the “Charlotte Package of Office System Services”. It was a form-driven Office Automation (OA) solution developed by the engineers who worked in the Charlotte, NC office of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and offered subsystems for EM (Electronic Mail), WP (Word Processing), and CM (Calendar Management). CP/OSS was the first human-friendly interface to email that I had ever seen and was a world apart from the command-line interfaces of tools such as VAXmail and UNIX mail.

DEC saw the value in CP/OSS and made it a corporate offering under the name ALL-IN-1 with its first release (Version 1.1) appearing in late 1982. Because of its user-friendliness and the ease in which you could use ALL-IN-1 as an integration platform for other products, ALL-IN-1 became one of DEC’s most successful products and had well over 5 million users by early 1990. This doesn’t sound very many users in terms of the hundreds of millions of people that connect to services such as Gmail and Hotmail today, but it was pretty impressive at a time when computer hardware and software was much more expensive and people simply didn’t have access to a service like email unless they had a very obvious business need.

ALL-IN-1 went through many ups and downs during its time. The major advances that I remember include:

  • First email system to boast a voice mail integration with ALL-IN-1 V2.0/DECtalk Mail Access (1984-85). When provoked, DECtalk could sing a mean “Moonlight in Vermont”!
  • First email system to appear in multiple languages with ALL-IN-1 Basic European Version – BEV (1986). I have some not-so-fond memories of trying to debug an ALL-IN-1 problem across a 300 baud telephone connection for a bank in Helsinki. Things would have been easier had the bank not run ALL-IN-1 in Finnish
  • Integrations with industry leaders Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect along with DEC’s own VAX Notes and VAX/VTX (videotext) products in the 1988-1990 period
  • Failed attempts to integrate ALL-IN-1 with early Macintosh computers and slightly more successful integrations with DOS. DEC bought a product called OATmail from a small company based in St. Louis that became PC/ALL-IN-1 in 1989. It wasn’t the smoothest integration that ever existed but at the time, working with DOS just wasn’t easy for VMS applications
  • Distributed sharing with the ALL-IN-1 File Cabinet Server (FCS), first delivered in ALL-IN-1 V3.0 in 1992. The FCS made integration possible with DEC’s TeamLinks Windows (3.1) client to provide ALL-IN-1 with its first real GUI client

All products have their natural lifetime as technology evolves. I know of ALL-IN-1 customers who still ran the final variant (OfficeServer for OpenVMS) in 2010. Perhaps some still run the product today. What’s for sure is that ALL-IN-1 outlasted its competitors such as IBM PROFS and DISOSS. It was even seen by Microsoft as a prime competitor for Microsoft Exchange 4.0 during its development period in 1993-95, but I think that ALL-IN-1 was creaking at the seams at that time, largely due to some unfortunate management decisions and engineering investments taken by DEC when the product was at the height of its success. Those who can recall back that far might remember the fiasco called “ALL-IN-1 Phase II”.

Nothing ever quite replaced ALL-IN-1. DEC signed the “Alliance for Enterprise Computing” with Microsoft in 1995 and began the push to support Windows NT and its applications. That, allied to the huge losses that eventually forced DEC into the hands of Compaq in the 1998 acquisition, meant that ALL-IN-1 moved into the side-street of corporate hubris. It was unloved and forgotten by management, but fondly remembered by anyone who had the pleasure of figuring out what the separation of form and function really meant in the minds of the ALL-IN-1 developers.

Posted in Email, Exchange, Technology | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Getting used to Outlook 2011 for Mac

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Tony Redmond

On November 8, I described how a brand-new MacBook Air had made its appearance in the IT lineup for the Redmond household and some initial teething problems that this Windows-centric (to date) individual had experienced in setting up this beautiful piece of equipment. It seems that the latest HP Envy range bears a resemblance to the MacBook but I see no equivalent there for the MacBook Air.

Two weeks later on things have settled down and the major obstacles to a happy user have been removed. Printing to our faithful HP C6180 works now (albeit with more intervention than I’d like and certainly more than I expected) and I have managed to make the iPhone synchronize its calendar with Outlook. In my naivety, I assumed that anything that ran on an Apple platform would play nicely together. I was further lulled into a false sense of security about how well Outlook 2010 for Windows works (now) with iTunes to synchronize its data to an iPhone. Therefore, when I set out to configure synchronization between Outlook 2011 for Mac and an iPhone (3GS running IOS 5), I thought that this would take just a few moments. Of course, I was dead wrong.

Part of the problem is that I ignored the simple solution, which is to use over-the-air (OTA) updates whenever possible. My feeble excuse is that the previous configuration of Outlook connected to Hotmail didn’t support OTA updates whereas the new configuration for my wife’s email is Outlook connected to Exchange Online/Office 365, which absolutely does support OTA updates. There’s simply no need to get iTunes or Mac Sync Services or iCal or anything else involved. All I had to do was to configure the entry for the Office 365 mail account on the iPhone to synchronize the calendar and that was that. All done. Works without a problem. Take one more item off the list.

Although I feel a tad silly that I didn’t figure the solution out quicker than I did, I plead a certain amount of ignorance for the Mac platform and offer evidence that I consulted with two other MVPs who have some expertise in this area. After some to’ing and fro’ing via email, William Smith decided that it was time to post something definitive on the topic and he wrote the splendid blog post all about how to synchronize Outlook for Mac calendars and contacts to an iPhone. From my perspective, the most important piece of advice was:

“Exchange users have the luxury of being able to synchronize their information across multiple computers and devices wirelessly and I’d advise they stick with that. No matter what I advise they never sync Exchange data directly from computer to iPhone or else they risk duplicate data appearing as a result of the two methods of syncing.”

What else have we learned in the last couple of weeks. Well, one thing is for sure, as Paul Robichaux says “Outlook isn’t Outlook” when it comes to comparing Outlook 2010 for Windows and Outlook 2011 for Mac. Sure, email works just fine and most of the standard operations that you’d expect from a modern email client work as they should. However, there are some small things that just bug me.

First, the fonts. Now, I know that Macintosh computers have a long and noble history in the elegant use of fonts and typefaces but really, couldn’t Microsoft have worked out how to make Outlook 2011 for Mac display messages that originate from Outlook 2010 for Windows slightly more impressively than they do now? William tried to explain the reasons why to me, which basically come down to the lowest common denominator argument. Outlook for Windows sends a nicely formatted message to an Outlook for Mac user and the Mac client can’t handle the formatting sent from its Windows cousin, so it uses some other font. Jeez…

William’s advice to me was:

“If you stick with the Windows Office Compatible fonts (Format menu –> Fonts –> Choose –> Collection column –> Windows Office Compatible) you should have pretty good luck with fonts in HTML formatted messages. These are cross-platform. Likewise, your Windows counterparts must use these as well.”

The basic Calibri font seems to work acceptably but you’ll probably have less success with others, unless both platforms agree. Oh well.

My second gripe is about calendar sharing. When you view multiple calendars with Outlook 2010, the calendars are viewed alongside each other. This makes it very easy to see what appointments and meetings belong to what user. But Outlook 2011 for Mac merges everything into one calendar. Cue immediate confusion as duplicates pop up all over the place because an item is in multiple calendars. Not good at all.

I also don’t like the way reminders appear in Outlook for Mac. In Outlook for Windows you get the opportunity to postpone a reminder for another 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 2 days or whatever. The Mac version of a reminder sits there until it’s dismissed or you click on “Snooze”… in which case the reminder seems to sleep for 5 minutes. There’s a little down arrow by the Snooze button that looks like you should be able to change that sleep time but  Outlook doesn’t seem to want to play. It’s all rather weird and begs the question whether the two Outlook teams even communicate? After all, given that Outlook first appeared in 1997, you’d think that some cross-pollination of ideas might happen. And while I’m on that point, why can’t Outlook for Mac handle conversations in the same reasonably intelligent manner as Outlook for Windows, including the ability to ignore a conversation and clean up a conversation?

Another issue is that no access is possible to an archive mailbox because Outlook 2011 for Mac doesn’t support this feature. I’ve already discussed this issue before as Outlook 2011 is not the only Microsoft client to ignore archive mailboxes.

Switching platforms and clients is never seamless and two very different philosophies exist across Windows and Mac. I’m sure that other gripes will occur over time but in the meantime it’s fair to say that the MacBook Air is a delight, especially its speed and ability to resume in an instant in a way that I have never seen from a Windows PC. Oh well, I’m sure that Microsoft will improve system startup and resume operations in Windows 8 but until then it seems like Mac has a real and measurable advantage here.

– Tony

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

Blast from the past (1994)

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Tony Redmond

On November 5th, 1994 Ireland played the USA Eagles at Lansdowne Road, Dublin. The game ended in a 26-15 win for Ireland and it was the first time that I participated in an international rugby match.

In those days the fourth (reserve) official sat in the stand kitted out in a tracksuit. Rugby hadn’t gone fully professional and the kind of bedlam that sometimes occurs on the sides of pitches when teams make wholesale substitutions didn’t happen then. All the reserve official did was sit waiting for one of his colleagues to fall down (tired, exhausted, crocked, whatever). Today’s team of officials include two sideline officials who manage substitutions and make sure that teams complete the appropriate paperwork to note whether a player is being replaced tactically or due to injury or blood. They also manage the timings for sin-binned players (10 minute suspensions) and make sure that teams have the right number of water carriers and medical people  present. It’s a world of difference.

Ireland team photo vs. USA 5 November 1994

My mind was set to rambling when I discovered the photo above. It contains a number of interesting individuals such as Santiago Rolandi, the referee from Argentina, and Clayton Thomas and Cliff Jones from Wales, the two touch judges. Seeing that this photo is from the last millennium, those who know me today might have difficulty recognizing the handsome individual on the far left.

This game marked Rolandi’s debut as an international referee. He was different in many ways to the refereeing norm in Ireland – some might have said that he was so laid back that he was horizontal. His display on the pitch caused some heartburn for the performance reviewer (or assessor as they were known then), who completed six pages of notes during the game. I was sitting beside the assessor in the committee box in Lansdowne Road so I had a good idea of his view of how the referee had performed.

But it didn’t matter a jot in the end. After the game finished, Rolandi came into the referee’s dressing room, announced his joy at becoming an international referee, and then told us that this was his last game. He told the same news to the assessor who seemed disappointed at wasting his time taking copious notes for post-match discussion.

Another interesting personage in the photo is Alain Rolland, who recently became famous because he correctly awarded a red card in the RWC semi-final between Wales and France. Alain is one of the substitutes lined up to the right of the team. He’s wearing a rather complicated knee brace, which seems to have been somewhat of a fashion based on the number of others who are similarly equipped.

When he was playing, Alain was a scrum-half who made the life of any poor unfortunate referee who attempted to control his games very difficult indeed. He freely admits that he attempted to push the limits at all times and if he came up against a referee who let him, he took whatever latitude was on offer. In particular, he dominated the base of scrum, ruck, and maul just like any good scrum-half with the added benefit that Alain would instruct the referee whom to penalize and when. Funnily enough, those who incurred the wrath of the referee were always part of Alain’s opposition. If you disbelieve me, listen to the radio interview (also available as a TodayFM podcast on iTunes) of the great man himself when he was on the Ray D’Arcy show last week. I had a little chuckle when I heard Alain admit to being a royal pain for referees. How times have changed!

The Ireland v USA game was also interesting because it marked the first time that the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) admitted women to the post-match dinner, all because USA Rugby had a lady vice-president at the time. Before then, ladies had their own separate post-match dinner away from the men. When speeches had been made and all was ready for dancing, the ladies (who had travelled by bus from the location of their dinner) were admitted. Looking back at the situation today, it’s difficult to understand how such a position would be accepted by anyone, but it was then. Chalk this down to “tradition” or something else. For whatever reason, the barrier was well and truly broken and women are now welcome at all international rugby post-match dinners (that I am aware of), which is how it should be.

Ah memories, sweet memories…

– Tony

Posted in Rugby | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment