Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Aloha from the French Riviera!

Aloha from Nice! The Exchange Connections Europe is off to a great start. I have talked to some interesting people and have had great questions in my sessions so far. I'll try to get the questions and answer's blogged and also some interesting things that attendees have talked about.

I friend forwarded me this great quote that I have to add to the blog. I have read this a dozen times and still laugh out loud.

"Oh, bother," said the Borg. "We've assimilated Pooh."

In other news, I was reading a review of the new movie "Lucky Number Slevin". John DeVore from The New York Sun said of Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley that either of them could "read a Taco Bell menu and instill a sense of national purpose." John, I could not agree more. Morgan Freeman is one of my favorite actors.

Well, the sun is setting over Cannes, the tourist are out enjoying the beauty of the French Riviera and the Mediterranean Sea and *I* am sitting in my room writing about Exchange and Messaging Security. Sigh.....

Friday, April 14, 2006

Exchange Connections 2006 reflections

Exchange Connections 2006 in Orlando has come and went. It was a great week. I enjoy the "Connections" conferences much more than events like the RSA Conference or TechEd. The Connections conferences are much more personal; it is not unusual to see some of the best known names in our field like Mark Minasi, Tony Redmond, Sue Mosher, or Paul Robichaux casually sitting around with the attendees and talking shop. Especially Mark Minasi, Mark has to be the most up-beat and enthusiastic person in technology. I also participated in a lot of discussions with attendees from different organizations, all sharing their ideas and experiences with each other. This is one of the best part of the conferences for me.

I say "participated" because I spent much of my time this week on "radio silence". I got sick with a chest cold on Sunday and pretty much lost most of my speaking voice. Not a good thing when I had presentations to give, including an all-day session yesterday. So I wandered around much of the week in a medicine induced haze and sounding like Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry". Fortunately, I did make it through my all-day presentation on Thursday, though my voice hurts like heck today.

I managed to attend some great presentations this week including Jill Frank's session on Monad (if you don't know Monad, Exchange folks, [ominous voice on] you will [ominous voice off] and Sue Mosher's sneak peak at Outlook 12. The best presentation was Mike Ireland's presentation on the Microsoft Log Parser. Very cool, Mike.

I mentioned to a lot of people that the 2nd chapter of an eBook I'm writing (The Tips and Tricks Guide to Secure Messaging) has just been published. I promised I would post the link here.

I'm headed home later this weekend and then I turn around and head to Nice. After the Nice conference, I will post links to all of my slides. Thanks to everyone that attended and all the nice folks I got to talk with. If I have promised you any information, please email me and remind me about it.

Sunday, April 09, 2006

Mobile Web Admin tool and Small Business Server

Greetings, salutations, howdy, and a big ALOHA from the Exchange Connections Conference in Orlando. I'm running behind on some blogging, plus a lot of other things, but I had an entry i wanted to get posted.

I came across a problem someone was having with the Mobile Web Admin tool. He was trying to find users that had mobile devices; each time he searched for a user, he got the following error:

Could not locate the specified mailbox, verify that you entered the correct mailbox name.

He knew the users existed and had used their mobile devices. On further investigation, I found he was using this with Small Business Server. Exchange MVP Vlad Mazek had the following article on his blog: Peter Galagher on SBS MobileAdmin

While I was researching this, I found a couple of other tools and links that might be useful when troubleshooting or fixing mobile device problems. (Thanks to Rich M. and Vanitha P. for pointing these out to me.)

AUTD Binding Cleanup
AUTD Troubleshooter
Mobile Web Admin Tool
Document: Deploying Windows Mobile 5.0 with Windows Small Business Server 2003