Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

  • Office 365 reaches public beta

    On April 18, Microsoft announced that Office 365 is now in public beta. This is a big thing because it marks the last major hurdle before Office 365 becomes publicly available, an event that is expected later on this summer, just in time to become a huge factor in the…

  • Scaling connections with Exchange 2010

    It’s an undeniable fact of being an author of a book on a technical topic that you cannot cover everything in the number of pages that a publisher allocates. Sometimes this causes you to cut material that you think is perfectly good but is less interesting in the grand scheme…

  • Coupons for Exchange 2010 Maestro training now available

    I guess there are coupons for just about everything these days so why wouldn’t I be surprised to see our marketing partners in Penton Media releasing coupons for the Exchange 2010 Maestro training events that Paul Robichaux and I are running in San Diego, London (England), and Greenwich CT.  Click…

  • Doing the right thing on Twitter and Facebook

    I realize that many of my friends outside the U.K. won’t be habitual readers of “The Telegraph” so might have missed the opportunity to update their social skills through the release of Netiquette: Debrett’s Guide to Twitter and Facebook. Of course, they also probably don’t know that Debrett’s has a…

  • Microsoft reveals the truth about single-role servers

    In the April 8 post on the Exchange team’s blog, a clear direction is given that single-role Exchange servers are not the preferred starting point for designs. In fact, a rather bold statement is made: “… always start design discussions with multi-role, and that is the recommended solution from the…

  • Catalan triumph in Barcelona

    It’s been a big rugby weekend in Europe as the Heineken Cup quarter-finals were played in Ireland, England, and Spain. Despite Spain’s relatively low status in world rugby, it hosted two games, both moved from France. The Olympic stadium in Barcelona, where I was the TMO, was the location for…

  • The changing need for backups

    New technology and different business requirements are seminal events that cause technologists to ponder on well-held tenets of their trade. The need for Exchange backups is one such instance. The technical developments are the elimination of streamed backups in Exchange 2010 (only VSS-based backups are now supported) allied to the…

  • Review: Spring 2011 Connections

    The Spring 2011 Connections event took place at the JW Marriott Grande Lakes complex in Orlando from March 27-30. I like this event because it’s a one-stop opportunity to get a broad overview of what’s happening in different aspects of the Microsoft-centric industry – ASP, SilverLight, SharePoint, and of course,…

  • ALL-IN-1 trivia quiz from 1985

    ALL-IN-1 was a forms-driven Office Automation (OA) product released by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Its origin were in software called the Charlotte Package of Office Systems Solutions (CP/OSS) written in 1981-82 by DEC Software Services in Charlotte, NC. The software was subsequently released by DEC as ALL-IN-1 1.1 in late…

  • Thoughts about having a dedicated archive server in a DAG

    An article covering some aspects of the deployment of archive mailboxes posted on SearchExchange by Brian Posey, a well-known and respected writer about Exchange, attracted my attention. While Brian makes some good points, I think the general thrust of his argument is flawed. Here’s why. His central point is that…