Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

  • Chatting about Exchange 2010 SP2 and Office 365 with Matt Gervais

    Last week, Matt Gervais, site editor of SearchExchange.com, tracked me down in France to chat about my views about Exchange 2010 SP2, Office 365, virtualizing Exchange, and whether Exchange administrators are threatened by the cloud. Matt captured our conversation in a podcast, which you can now download from SearchExchange.com. Now…

  • Wandering down through France

    It was time to head back from Ireland to France. This time we decided to take the ferry from Rosslare to Roscoff on the basis that the route was shorter and we’d spend less time cooped up on the boat being a captive audience for Irish Ferries. We’d also have…

  • Office 365: Launch on June 28

    The invitations have been printed and Steve Ballmer is making the final touches to the PowerPoint that he’s scheduled to present at Microsoft’s formal launch of Office 365. The grand event takes place in New York City on June 28 before a carefully-assembled audience of industry observers, journalists, and others.…

  • Has an email disclaimer any legal effect?

    On May 7, I posted about the Economist article “Spare us the email yada-yada” that asserted that email disclaimers have no legal effect. Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway subsequently waded into the debate on June 5 with her column that described a memo sent by the new Philips CEO Frans van…

  • Filers verus Pilers

    Many moons ago, good filing habits were deemed to be an important part of office life. Documents had to be correctly placed in the right folder and carefully deposited in a file cabinet to allow the office to operate properly. Everything was neatly arranged, easily found, and everyone was happy.…

  • Hotmail’s ActiveSync support

    For as long as I have been using an iPhone, I have been frustrated by the inability of Hotmail to support a modern email access protocol. Hotmail seemed to be fixed in the mists of time at a point where POP3 was deemed to be sufficient to meet the needs…

  • Musing on searching

    The publication of the post by the Exchange team to reveal the secret registry instruction to allow multi-mailbox searches to interrogate more than 25,000 mailboxes got me thinking. First,  I thought that the era of registry hacks was over for Exchange. But on reflection I don’t think that we are…

  • Thoughts on Microsoft Certified Master accreditation

    On May 16, Microsoft announced that the exams that lead to accreditation as a Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) for Exchange 2010 will be available in centers worldwide. This development, similar to the announcement about MCM for SQL made in late 2010, interests me from multiple perspectives – as a commentator…

  • HP releases videos about E5000 messaging system

    Last February, Paul Robichaux, Brian Desmond and I were invited by HP to come to Cupertino to look over the HP E5000 messaging system. Over two days we had the chance to quiz Dean Steadman, the HP product manager, and Jeff Mealiffe, from the Exchange development group (Jeff specializes in…

  • Exchange 2010 SP2: Not the headline release that SP1 was

    As part of their announcements at TechEd, Microsoft revealed the worst secret in the Exchange world and told us that they’re working on Exchange 2010 SP2. The software is still in a restricted beta and won’t be available for some time yet, but the outline of the new features is solid…