Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

  • Updated virtualization guidelines for Exchange 2010

    On May 16, Microsoft took advantage of the start of TechEd North America (the marketing folks always like to have news to reveal at major conferences) to make a significant announcement about virtualization support for Exchange 2010. The two biggest and most welcome changes are outlined as follows: “As of…

  • Managing Office 365 with the one true shell

    Exchange administrators have known since the release of Exchange 2007 that only wimps seek the soft comfort of the GUI-rich Exchange Management Console (EMC) when they attempt to manage servers, mailboxes, or other objects. Exchange Online, part of Office 365, doesn’t provide EMC as a management option. It’s possible to…

  • Excluding disclaimers for encrypted or signed messages

    In a recent post, I described the basic approach to building an Exchange 2010 transport rule to build corporate disclaimers containing Active Directory data and formatted nicely with HTML that are then appended to all outgoing messages. The approach works well in most instances, but there are situations when you…

  • On email disclaimers

    The April 7 article “Spare us the email yada-yada” published in The Economist provoked some consideration of how email disclaimers have evolved to a point where they have become one of the “minor nuisances of modern office life”, mostly because the information inserted in the disclaimer is designed to make the…

  • San Diego Maestro

    We’ve just wrapped up the Exchange 2010 Maestro seminar in San Diego and everyone is making their way home after a pretty exhausting three days. Wednesday was particularly tough with an early start at 8am finishing up with a presentation from Binary Tree, one of our sponsors, at 6:10pm before…

  • Rugby, weapons, and conferences

    Lots has been happening over the past two weeks with trips to Las Vegas to speak at “The Experts Conference” (TEC), Flayosc (south of France) for some vacation, and England for rugby. It’s time to consider some of the incidents encountered along the way. I landed in Las Vegas late…

  • Free Exchange 2010 Seminar in Dublin

    If you’re interested in Exchange 2010 and are in Dublin on May 11, you can register for a free seminar that I will be speaking at on the topic of practical and economic issues that influence the decision to deploy on-premises or hosted Exchange 2010/Office 365. Click here for the…

  • An ActiveSync logo compliance program: How nice!

    On April 13, Microsoft announced details of their ActiveSync logo compliance program. While it’s taken me a little while to comment (other things go in the way), I think this is a good idea because it should rein in the tendency for ActiveSync to rapidly degrade to become the wild…

  • Two conferences call for sessions for Fall 2011

    The two conferences that cover topics of interest to Exchange, including Exchange itself, SharePoint, and Windows, have issued calls for sessions for their Fall conferences. TEC’s Fall event is in Frankfurt, Germany from 17-19 October while Fall Connections is in Las Vegas from October 31 to November 2. The TEC…

  • A peek into the future from Exchange’s General Manager

    One of the joys of attending a conference as a speaker is the chance to listen to others once your session is over. My keynote at TEC was at 8AM on Monday morning so I had most of Monday and Tuesday to pick other sessions to attend before I had…