Ok, you need this. Thats all I can say. The new PocketPC web browser based on Mozilla/Firefox code has just been updated to 0.13 and it has some huge improvements. First of all, tabbed browsing. Yes, tabbed browsing on your phone. No more navigating back and forth, open as many maps, pages and directions as you need. Second, and finally, a decent RSS aggregator for your Pocket PC. Need I say more? Go download it! Ok, now the eyecandy:

Inside SBS podcast folks decided excellent sound quality just was not working out for their show so they've gone back to Live Meeting. Join Mark, Peter, Damian or Justin (whoever gets punished into podcasting this week) to find out what happens when you outgrow your SBS. It's this Wednesday, Feb 22, live at 11:00 AM CST. Phone number for the live call-in portion of the podcast: (866) 500-6738 and use participant code: 7508158. Now a slight self-serving message: I'll be in Dallas next Friday, if time permits I'll go and see if they would be interested in recording another podcast at the Buffalo Wing House accross the street. Why am I asking you? Well, we're trying to figure out how to cash in on the average of 18,000-20,000 of you that listen to the SBS Show during its first week of release. So I'll be up front about this: How much would you pay to hear Microsoft PSS after 5 beers? 10?

Terry Myerson of the Exchange team finally comes out and talks about the "de-emphasizing" of the Public Folders in the Exchange releases after E12. What is particularly insighftul is the comment by Paul Robichaux, fellow Exchange MVP:

Given that PFs will be officially supported until at least 2016, I think it's a safe bet that the SharePoint folks will provide a distributed multi-master replication facility sometime before PFs fade off into the sunset. My experience has generally been that many of the organizations now using PFs have lots of PF content that they don't need and aren't using, so PF cleanup is always one of the first things included in any supportability review I perform for customers.- Paul Robichaux, MVP

Remember that this will not be a shotgun implementation with your Public folders disappearing overnight. Microsoft has a 10 year support on its server products, which means should E12 ship this year you will have 100% functionality in your Exchange Public Folder infrastructure through 2016. Do you REALLY plan your mail strategy that far in advance? Really? Do you? In 2016 I expect my Exchange server to read my mind, write my emails, strip out any profanities and make me more coherent than my thoughts. I also want it to have an ass-detector of the person that I am thinking my message to - so if they are cool it automatically inserts a snide remark, like the following quote from an unnamed MVP:

No. "De-emphasized". Used in a sentence: "I de-emphasized him with a brick".

Unify THAT Exchange.

Earlier tonight I was trolling the PSS newsgroups to find some new issues/resolutions to feed into my Exchange wiki. That beast is getting quite a bit of traffic and Google really seems to like sending people there so I figured I ought to write something on the keywords that the people searched for to end up in my wiki. So there I am trolling for ideas and one of my favourite topics is being discussed: IMF. Familar issue (user didn't RTFM, steamrolled Exchange SP2 without removing IMFv1 first) and I was curious to see if the Chinese PSS reps had lost it with these support requests. They lost it alright. Number one on the list of responses to the partners question is a link to……. tada: Vladville.com. My articles have gained enough prominence to be quoted by Microsoft support personnel in a positive light. I immediately proceeded to ask Chris to kiss my MVP ring: "Who yo MVP daddy?"; Poor Chris, now Microsoft can't kill me because I'm in the support food chain. Chris on the other hand is fair game. Watch out for that chair boy!

According to this post by Daniel Melanchthon Mobile Push mail that is coming with Windows Mobile 5 may not work out of the box on Microsoft Exchange 2003 SP2 if ISA 2000 is installed (which particularly also affects SBS 2003). Here is the thing, ActiveSync negotiates Push with the server by checking if its even available. According to Amy Babinchak, if ISA 2000 is installed by default it does not pass OPTIONS it does not know to the published server. Since Outlook Mobile Admin resides on the Front End server of Exchange 2003 SP2 deployment (or just the SBS server) request for options would pass this back: =-=-=-= Server Response =-=-=- HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Length: 136 Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 19:30:13 GMT Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-sync.wbxml Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Pragma: no-cache MS-Server-ActiveSync: 6.5.7638.1 Effectively, push mail will not work with Exchange 2003 SP2/SBS & ISA 2000 installed without adding the following registry key: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\W3Proxy\Parameters Value Name: PassOPTIONSToPublishedServer After it is added the OPTIONS keyword goes to the Exchange server which hopefully produces the following response: =-=-=-= Server Response =-=-=- HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 14:13:41 GMT Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Pragma: no-cache Content-Length: 0 Public: OPTIONS, POST Allow: OPTIONS, POST MS-Server-ActiveSync: 6.5.7638.1 MS-ASProtocolVersions: 1.0,2.0,2.1,2.5 MS-ASProtocolCommands: Sync, SendMail, SmartForward, SmartReply, GetAttachment, GetHierarchy, CreateCollection, DeleteCollection, MoveCollection, FolderSync, FolderCreate, FolderDelete, FolderUpdate, MoveItems, GetItemEstimate, MeetingResponse, ResolveRecipients, ValidateCert, Provision, Search, Notify, Ping Now please remember that this applies to ISA 2000, not 2004. I am obligated to say this again to limit the comment outrage: There is still NO device on the US market that has Microsoft Mobility & Security Feature Pack (Push Mail) available.

SBS Show 17 is almost at age of consent so we discussed a mature topic on a mature product: Migrating SBS. Small business networks are very mature and going from the old server to the new server is no longer a shotgun-reinstall method. Jeff Middleton is the father of SBS Migration and we talk to him about the swing process, news at sbsmigration.com, approaching documentation through subscription. We talk to Jeff about other topics as well: about being a consultant, IT Professional, SBS user groups, piracy, and religious experiences. You will want to listen to the 70+ minutes covering these topics: 0:01:40 What is Swing Migration? 0:22:00 How is Swing Migration Changing? 0:27:00 Microsoft's take on Swing Migration? 0:37:00 What is on the sbsmigration.com Portal? 0:48:20 ITPro Mash Project for New Orleans Update 0:51:30 Support for ITPro/SBS User Groups & Discounts 1:01:01 ..Jeff on Tour 1:03:00 ..Jeff on Piracy 1:07:00 ..Jeff on Consulting & Managed Services 1:09:00 ..Jeff on Swinging Download the SBS Show #17 http://www.vladville.com/sbsshow/sbsshow-episode17.mp3

Mark your calendars for Indy and Mobility webcasts. Indy is a very good friend of the Florida IT community (he was our TS2 guy before Shawn Henry left and JJ took the post) and as is the case with all the TS2 folks, he is putting together a series of webcasts on a very hot topic: Windows Mobile 5. Part 1: Selling the Value of Windows Mobile Solutions Part 2: Migrating to Windows Mobile 5.0 - Messaging Solutions and MSFP Part 3: Windows Mobile for Line of Business Solutions and Vertical Markets Part 4: Windows Mobile 5.0 versus the Competition Part 5: Deploying Windows Mobile Solutions – Technical Overview Part 6: Windows Mobile Devices (SmartPhone and Pocket PC) Part 7: Microsoft’s Partner Program and Demand Generation Tools for Mobility Solutions Competency These webcasts are from 3/21/2006 through 4/11/2006 and will certainly be recorded. In the meantime you can always listen to the excellent Inside SBS podcast on Mobility that the SBS PSS guys put together last week.

Ouch, looks like a fresh batch of security advisories are being re-released to update you against some public and privately reported vulnerabilities in the patches released earlier this week. That little yellow shield on the bottom left corner? Yeah, the yellow one. Might be a good day to click on it and fix the holes. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/current.aspx

Mary Jo Foley has an article over at eweek covering the apparent move by Microsoft to bundle ($5 if you get a Microsoft guy to say "bundle") a lot of server products they intended to roll out on their own into a single Office SharePoint Portal Server.

New to the Office 2007 server line up will be the Office Forms Server 2007, an electronic-forms offering designed to complement InfoPath; Office Groove Server 2007, a collaboration server based on the technology Microsoft acquired when it bought Groove Technology last year; and Office Project Portfolio Server 2007, a complement to Microsoft Project Server that is based on the UMT technology Microsoft acquired last year. But the big kahuna on the Office Server 2007 side is Office SharePoint Portal Server 2007. That offering will combine Microsoft's current Content Management Server, SharePoint Portal Server and what was expected to debut as a standalone Excel Server into a single product.

So here is what happened in Redmond earlier this week. This is inside info so please hush hush. Ballmer apparently got a hold of the Microsoft Licensing SKU book and flug it at one of the VP's. He threw out his shoulder, killed three Microsoft VP's and the building had to be evacuated as the SKU shattered the support beam in half. Joke aside, I think someone at Microsoft thought out loud and said: "Hey. We're dumping all this money in servers that nobody has ever bought. What if we got those PM's together and put together a solution instead of just telling our partners to figure it out at 10x the cost?" This is good for the partner because it offers a united solution to present to the client and it is good for the client because they now pay just twice as much for eight times the crap they do not need. Umm, Koolade tastes good today!

Just like Jesus, the free MCP exam retake is back from the dead and many are happy to see it. Basically, you sign up for an exam and if you flunk it you get to take it over again except you don't have to pay $125 again.

Microsoft's free exam retake offer is back by popular demand! Simply complete your exam(s) at any Pearson VUE Authorized Center by June 30, 2006 and retake the exam(s) for free if you do not pass on the first attempt. Initial (paid) exam(s) must be completed by June 30, 2006; second shot (free) exam(s) must be completed by July 31, 2006. This offer is valid for all Microsoft exams worldwide. Any means of payment, including promotion codes and vouchers, may be used on the paid exam(s). You must pre-register for this offer with Microsoft. For complete details, visit www.PearsonVUE.com/ms/2ndShot.

Simple enough, get to studying. Unlike other worthless occupations, computer science and engineering requires constant re-education and re-certification , so if you've made a choice to be in IT you should get to working.