Exchange 2007 SP1 has shipped today, there is a TON of stuff you need to be aware of before you roll out. This is a significant upgrade that should not just be clicked through without reading the manual. So while congratulations are in order and feature set gold enough to make you go for it right now, hold on, wait a minute..

The set of release notes linked in with the download link points to the RTM (ie, the original release of Exchange 2007, not SP1). The actual Exchange 2007 SP1 Release Notes are here.

I’ll break down the SP1 over the next couple of days so stay tuned. If you need to rush and install it today, please read the documentation first.

The bad news for Microsoft Vista keep on piling on, this week from a group outraged that the Vista SP1 is apparently only focusing on the stability and reliability, not performance. Through what is arguably flawed test, a group has “proven” that Vista SP1 performs 30% worse than its 6-years-senior brother, XP SP3. Either way, the group gave in to the criticism and added another 1 GB of RAM to the system, and ran both XP SP3 and Vista SP1 with 2GB RAM. The results looked even worse for Vista running Office 2003.

Now I am not going to argue whether these conclusions are valid or not, I will even go as far to say that if I were @Microsoft I too would focus on improving the product reliability and stability over the performance.

What I will argue is that this test, with all its flaws, represents the marketplace a lot more realistically than Microsoft wants to believe. Yes, 1 GB ram. Yes, Office 2003 (or older). Yes, IDE drive. Yes, onboard SATA controller. Yes, 32bit systems because driver support for 64bit sucks. Those are the realities of your basic workstations, at best to be honest.

So what?

This reality disconnect is really only a Microsoft problem. Microsoft has been lying to itself, to its partners and to its customers about the satisfaction customers get from Vista. In much the same fashion Dave dismisses the statistics of comparing old with the new, Microsoft has been delusional in the Vista failure constantly quoting the growth units in spite of the fact that the global PC shipments have increased many times over since the release of Windows XP.

So the big question here is whether this Microsoft problem is really your problem? Is their supposed disconnect with the market reality something that should be allowed to impact your business or is this time time reject the notion of Microsoft-centric all-Microsoft business built on Vista, Office, Exchange, SQL, Server, Business Solutions?

There is a big rift, one that I have never seen before, between what Microsoft is offering and what customers are asking for or what is even available on the market. You see, the market is demanding a low cost PC with low TCO (read: managed services) and the operational basics: email, scheduling, shared files and some integration with the things they already own - smartphones, VoIP, (kill me now) Macs and iPhones.

They no longer want to buy into the Microsoft-only world and are rapidly rejecting any investment in the hardware beyond that of storage and VoIP. Since the release of Windows 95, users have done everything they could to upgrade to the latest. You can say, businesses were fanboys, swayed by the improvements in reliability, communication, speed. Not so much anymore.

The big question, one that even I am hard pressed to answer, is whether it is over for Microsoft? You see, my business exists at its core as a Microsoft business. We generally go into situations that involve the Microsoft platform at one version or another, and we work on getting it to the baseline. However, with the rapid de-Microsoftization of our core markets, is it still viable to solve problems by providing more of the same, or are Microsoft self-delusions of desktop/server strategy missing customer expectations and thereby inadequate for the long term?

See what my customers are saying in the upcoming Vladville Newsletter, sign up by filling out the box on the right.

In a further proof that people respond to what they read on the Internet in  the context of their current emotional state comes the overwhelmingly positive response to yesterday’s post. It was perhaps one of the darkest things I have ever written on this blog, yet the response so far has been overwhelmingly positive and almost to the edge of craving. Nearly everyone that wrote in wanted more of it, I even got a compliment from someone in Hollywood who liked my writing and suggested I explore screenwriting.

Is it a mere coincidence that the post came right after the long weekend that people got to spend with family, relaxing and away from the stress of their jobs and clients? I doubt it.

You see, when people are in a good mood, the intriguing/critical/thought provoking posts make them feel good, fulfilled. When people are in a bad mood, critical posts become judgemental, personal and hurtful. When you have a bad day, an opinion different from your own invokes an antagonistic response. On a good day, a message urging you to consider change turns into a motivational speech, on a bad day it is a crude putdown of everything you stand for. Identical stories get comments of praise and hate, seconds apart.

What I suppose I want you to consider is that you should not judge people based on their blog posts and opinions because those can be taken out of context (in your own context). If you must judge people you have never met, judge them on their actions not on their words. Sticks and stones folks..

Lot’s of people want to keep track of what I am up to but do not have the time to read every word, every day. I also get plenty of items that people would like to bring attention to, but not the full scale Vladville storm of traffic. Things like beta products and free conference passes, swag, Microsoft surveys and other benefits that are in the small supply and can’t be blasted over the front page.

So for all of you looking for a more exclusive, focused Vlad, here is a newsletter.

Click here to sign up. It’s free! I will even spell check it.

Little bit of business, little bit of tech, lot’s of SMB insight and hair..

Disclosure: I have been a Microsoft MVP in Microsoft Exchange category for two years, each year the reward consists of some swag and a $150 credit in the Microsoft store. How I got the award (first or second time) is beyond me, it carries no professional status value (i.e., it’s not a certification of knowledge or experience like an MCSE) and I generally do not use it. However, it is a great honor bestowed by Microsoft to the enthusiasts of their technology and I am quite grateful for it and the product involvement that has come as a result of it.

Started by the opening few minutes of Simpson’s last night, here is some food for thought..

Some of you feel that you don’t have to support MVPs or really offer any gratification in return for someone helping you. You don’t. Some of you don’t even feel thanks are in order. Fair enough. Some of you feel that the content produced on the Internet is done at the will of its creators, distributed for free to get attention and you can take it or leave it. Very true. Some of you will go to community events like SBS groups, .NET meetings, Linux user groups, bootcamps and mashups without thinking you owe the organizers a damn thing. You’re right!

Point is, you cannot owe someone something if you didn’t agree to purchase it. If it had material value, it would come with a price tag and you would judge if it was worth the monetary tradeoff or not. And since it comes without a price tag it is equivalent to a giveaway. Do you owe it thanks? Sure, if you appreciated it. Do you owe it gratitude? I suppose so, if it gives you a lasting benefit.

In a nutshell, we are a free society with an incentive based monetary system, and if someone is going to offer something for nothing you do not owe them any compensation, personal or commercial.

So you don’t have to. But should you?

Wayne brought up a great point this morning, in a nutshell saying “people can only keep on fighting the good fight whilst they don’t need to think about how to pay the bills. Once they need to think more about money than the job they like doing, they stop to do it.”

Some people thrive on accomplishment. Some thrive on money. Some thrive on personal gratitude. Some thrive on attention. Some thrive on argument and passion. Most people have something that makes them tick, something that self-motivates them to do what they do.

The Answer Underpants Gnomes Are Seeking

South Park is a world famous adult cartoon that places children in rather vulgar adult situations and exposes how in a naive fashion children expose the huge adult flaws in logic.

One of the most quoted episodes is the one of the Underpants Gnomes (wikipedia), in which children are asked to write a paper on economics. They meet the underpants gnomes who sneak into kids rooms at nights and steal underpants.  Gnomes have this colossal operation and setup, designed to make profit with just a few missing pieces. They know where they are (collect pants) and where they want to be (profit) they just need to fill in the middle. This is also known as the “every web 2.0 and dot com business plan, EVER” which is why you see it quoted on nearly every social networking site out there when reviewing questionable business plans:

So, let’s circle this back. When you hear or see someone giving something away for free, you ought to try and answer: How are they going to survive doing that? Are they giving it away to gain exposure? Customer base? Attention? What is step 2?

Same question ought to get asked of the Microsoft MVPs, group leaders, event organizers, user groups, etc. How are the leaders, in the end, being compensated for their work?

The easy answer is the question “Who gives a shit” - after all, if they have the time to write, blog, podcast, video blog, answer questions and participate in the IT events and discussions they likely need to get another job. So what if they get tired, someone else will just fall into their place and it’s not your economic duty to subsidize people with flawed business plans - you’re saving $$$ for the iPod Touch.

And for the record - I don’t blame you. I am perhaps the same. I’ve watched the Evolution of Dance video on YouTube at least 20 times and to my recollection I haven’t paid the guy, or Youtube once. I am sure the guy makes money somehow, somewhere, frankly I don’t care.

But the things I do care about, the things that I enjoy, I support. I love 2 Live Crew music and have purchased every single CD they put out. I love The Darkness, and have purchased the CD’s and even went to a concert. (yes, there is a pattern here, I like it when people do phenomenal things with so few resources / talent). I hate Michael Savage and his beliefs with a passion, but I love his delivery - so I bought his books. I could not fall asleep without Coast 2 Coast AM, and I subscribe to its Streamlink even though the program is available on the AM band and I don’t believe in bigfoot, chupacabras or the JFK conspiracies.

Point is, I support what I enjoy because I care that it survives.

End Game

If you don’t support what you care about, it disappears. If you take what you get for free for granted, it comes back as the nastiest commercial substitute you can imagine. If you can only take, without ever giving, you might get accustomed to that and when you need it there may be none left for the taking.

The loose change bin, do you ever put loose change back or do you only take?

In restaurants, do you ever compensate someone for their hard work - even though it’s their f’n job - or do you just stiff them?

Well, dear friends, it works the same way in Cyberspace. If you don’t support the things you like, they will go away.

If you are a content creator that doesn’t want to run a business but is open to a monetary contribution from the people that enjoy what you do, setup and publish a PayPal address. You can even make a subscription, by making Paypal do a reoccurring withdrawal of a few bucks a month. Whatever the case, you are sharing what you want, the public that appreciates you will send you it feels like is appropriate and it’s not a business, it’s just a way of saying thanks.

For the consuming public: Without gratitude, the courtesy goes away. For the content creators: Be honest about what you want.

If you choose to do nothing, you end up with the insults to your intelligence such as this guys site, and SPF Nation. But if you don’t care, perhaps thats the best you deserve.

P.S. Woops. Had to edit the link to coasttocoastam.com - apparently, coast2coastam.com is an amateur porn site. Thanks to Danny from Nofx for pointing that out.

Today I took the first steps towards publishing my newsletter and that of course means putting up a signup form. This is a dreadful, backwards process of creating a new template page, building a form, a processing script and then sending the user where they started out from. It involves unnecessary clicks, diminishes from design and flow of the site. But it doesn’t have to – enter jQuery and Wordpress.

Using jQuery framework and a simple backend server script you can collect data from the user and post the response inline on the same page with the minimal interruption to the browsing process and minimal changes to the layout. For example, my form prompts users for their email address in the sidebar to the right. It communicates errors or success by fading in a container with the error or congratulations text. No page reloads, no dedicated pages to design or maintain – just embed another widget in the sidebar and enable the site to be more functional. Gotta love AJAX.

I wrote a quick and simple HowTo article on creating AJAX driven forms in Wordpress: Check it out.

Enjoy!

Earlier today I went to the Apple store to try and make myself like the iPhone enough so I could ask my wife to get it for me for Xmas. I failed… the keyboard sucks, the phone sucks, the mail app sucks (15 minute mail check intervals were ok.. five years ago) the configuration sucks and it really boils down to a midgetized, albeit beautiful, tablet without actual applications. So I need a new Christmas present idea for the wife…

This post, however, is  about something else – customer disservice. I spent close to 30 minutes playing with the iPhone, really doing everything I could to see myself dropping the Samsung Blackjack for. In that time I was harrassed by no less than 10 separate “Geniuses” – I suppose they don’t often see people using their devices as the name of the game is “let’s make idiots gawk at pretty pictures and run to the register” – so I paid them no attention. Read the swag bitch, you may be an Apple Genius but you’re not qualified to delete SPAM from my Junk Items.

So as I was trying to will myself into thinking iPhone would be for me, I got to listen to the “Geniuses” blast their arrogance on their customer base. All of whom left without purchasing anything. All of whom, as a result of this experience, will likely never return to an apple store.

The key argument: Unlocking. Can you unlock the device? Can I use it in another country? Can it be unlocked. The answers were not “no” but were far more threatening and egoistical. It was as if you were committing an act against the humanity by trying to be on a carrier other than the one Apple chose to abuse its monopoly with.

“It’s possible but its difficult and I would not recommend it. You are likely going to destroy the phone and we will not take it back.”

“We cannot unlock the phone, it can’t be done.”

“If you try to unlock it you void the warranty and we will just lock it back the next time you connect it to your computer”

What cracked me up was the shere ignorance of these walking Apple infomercials – they are a smug little bunch, for being a bunch of retail retards making I venture to guess $12 an hour tops? I wonder if there is a huge gap in the Apple staff training that needs to go a long way to explaining to these geniuses that they are not actually “geniuses” in the IT space that can showcase ego but rather just retail sales people, you know, like the kind you find at Macy’s. Without this check, Apple seems to be antagonizing a fair amount of sales through their customer disservice.

As usual, time to grab the mirror and make sure we aren’t doing the same.

BBS Forums…
FIDOnet, CCi…
Usenet…..
IRC……
SlashDot…….
AIM……..
MSN………
Yahoo Groups……….
Digg…………
LinkedIn………….
Facebook…………..

……. Just a few of the ways I have wasted my time over the past 15 years, none of which I touch in a significant way anymore. When things are fresh and new you find people with which you can have an open exchange of ideas, early adopters, energetic.. but over time the medium gets exhausted by everyone and the meaningful conversations and connections no longer happen.

There are always folks out there treat every new community technology as the second coming of Christ – it’s not. Things are now as they have always been, there is a huge new popular thing out there and people jump on it. The only new variable is the difficulty of participation – as it becomes less difficult to participate, more people do so. That’s it.

My message is simple: Take all the new fads for what they are worth: A new way to reach new people and exchange new ideas. Hopefully you are decent enough of a human being that in the process you both learn something and form long lasting relationships that can look back at some good times together.

So jump in, the water is warm because we are all peeing in it.

(This bit of motivational insight is brought to you by a spectacular Carrabba’s steak and reading Scott Adams new book: Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!: Cartoonist Ignores Helpful Advice)

Just a courtesy mention for an event that my dear friend Susanne Dansey is planning in the UK this week. Over 170 have signed up, and you can register here. I believe in Susanne enough that I can blindly endorse this, she can throw things like nobody’s business, and I can tell you that the sub-200 crowd is far better than the larger events, especially if you’re trying to build relationships and network with everyone there. So if you can, go.

Andy mentions that the event may have sold out already, but he can get you in. If that fails, remember that tech events in SMB are highly dependant on the things that “come up” so the odds that you’ll be able to get in might be better than you imagine. And if you still can’t get in, contact me for some incriminating pictures and video of Susanne that will get you right in and into the VIP seats*.

(* Limited to the first 10,000 people that request it.) 

Take a look at the following article discussing the current state of SPAM, discussed by the ones with perhaps most to gain: antispam vendors. As a highly biased vendor, I can tell you that the threat description by the marketers below is pretty much dead on. The logic at the end is horribly flawed because it questions the end of spam because the consumers now have freebie filters and commercial mail is getting more difficult to send.

Quite the contrary, dear Watson. The SPAM has gotten far less expensive to send because it is being distributed through huge botnets that do not send enough SPAM to get blacklisted quickly outside of the honeypot system. At the same time, it has gotten prohibitively expensive to filter mail at the server and/or the gateway – We sign up dozens of customers daily, almost all of whom are pulling out GFI and Barracuda appliances. Those systems are now worthless, despite their cost advantage over hosted networks, because they cannot handle the volume of mail being sent – even the largest appliances are getting overflown in SMB not to mention the tight T1 or broadband pipes.

Hosted SPAM filtering is taking a hit as well. Those “free” offers are going away and effective hosted filters are starting to raise prices. Hosting companies are also adding larger premiums for this service, cornering customers to use the client-based SPAM protection, having to rely on Outlook Junk Mail filters.

As my favourite demotivator says: “It’s always the darkest right before it goes pitch black.”

Now, here is the article:

— Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bill Gates, 2004, World Economic Forum in Switzerland

SAN FRANCISCO — Why, in 2007, is spam worse than ever? Let exasperated consumers count the ways: PDF spam. MP3 spam. Pump-and-dump spam. E-card spam.

It may sound like a broken record, but spam continues to do just that — break records. This year marks the first time the total number of spam e-mail messages sent worldwide, 10.8 trillion, will surpass the number of person-to-person e-mails sent, 10.5 trillion, according to market researcher IDC.

“Every year for the past four years has been the worst year yet,” says Rebecca Steinberg Herson, vice president of marketing at e-mail security firm Commtouch.

Unwanted commercial e-mail touting Viagra, get-rich-quick schemes and more is growing by electronic leaps and bounds: an Internet-buckling 60 billion to 150 billion messages a day. “It was one of the rare times (Gates) was wrong,” says David Mayer, a product manager at e-mail security firm IronPort Systems, a Cisco Systems (CSCO) division.

The sheer volume of unwanted commercial e-mail is like a tidal wave, washing over the best-built digital dams and, despite a federal anti-spam law, resulting in spam leaking through to consumers.

Feeding the spam-alanche are advances in spamming techniques, the rise of bots — millions of compromised PCs that spew spam — and the fact that more people have multiple e-mail addresses. Market researcher The Radicati Group estimates there will be 2.4 billion e-mail accounts worldwide by year’s end.

Eliminating spam is “a war you cannot win,” says Greg Toto, vice president of products and operations at computer security firm BigFix. “It is much cheaper to send spam than stop it. Spam is becoming more specialized, and spammers are taking advantage of bad practices by consumers and businesses.

“The stuff continues to spill through,” Toto says.

A surfeit of spam

And how. Despite Gates’ bold prophecy, a revolving door of anti-spam products and the Can-Spam Act of 2003 — whose advocates breathlessly predicted would deter spammers — the total volume of meddlesome stuff has continued an inexorable climb.

So much so that Gates recently clarified his 3-year-old prediction.

“I never said it would be solved,” Gates said in an interview with USA TODAY last month. “I said it would be substantially reduced, and in fact it has been reduced a lot.”

When reminded that numbers are spiking, Gates begged to differ. “Sure, there’s a lot (of spam) out there, but software is deleting 99.9% of that anyway,” he said. (Microsoft now pegs the figure at 85% to 95%.)

Spam is popping up in different guises — whether as attachments that appear to be PDFs, MP3 files and Excel spreadsheets — to evade anti-spam services, says Scott Petry, founder of e-mail security firm Postini, a subsidiary of Google (GOOG).

Faux electronic-greeting cards, containing links to viruses, have also picked up. Since July, Postini alone has blocked more than 1.5 billion copies of Storm, an e-mail virus masquerading as a greeting card.

Meanwhile, spam containing PDFs, non-existent in May, now accounts for 8% of unsolicited commercial e-mail. “The bad guys have taken a highly mutated approach because they’re only paid for what gets through,” says Jose Nazario, senior security researcher at Arbor Networks.

This summer, a PDF promoting a pump-and-dump scam urged consumers to buy shares in an obscure company called Prime Time Group. Anti-virus firm Sophos reported a 30% spike in spam moving across the Internet at the time, fueled by the missive. The fraudulent spam messages were sent from compromised home PCs by Storm, the e-mail worm that entices victims to click on tainted e-card links and thereby turns their PCs into spam-spewing bots.

Although Sophos blocked more than 500 million copies of the Prime Time PDF, it is likely the Internet was swamped by several billion copies of this particular piece of fraud spam. Many copies were getting blocked by anti-spam filters, but some made it to unprotected in-boxes.

“As long as even a small percentage of people continue responding to pump-and-dump scams like this, the problem will continue to exist,” says Ron O’Brien, Sophos’ senior security analyst.

And then there is phishing, those fraudulent e-mail and websites designed to rip off personal information. An insidious version of spam, its levels are at all-time highs. In July 2007 — the most recent month for which data are available — the Anti-Phishing Working Group said new phishing sites pole-vaulted to 30,999, from 14,191 in July 2006.

One in 87 e-mails is tagged as phishing scams now, compared with one in 500 a year ago, according to e-mail security firm MessageLabs.

Fighting back

All is not lost, however. Consumers and corporations are getting creative to cope with the problem, operating on the premise that spam is inescapable.

“You can’t eradicate (spam), but you can manage the problem,” says Arbor Networks’ Nazario, who compares spam to the flu.

Industrious e-mail users are using an exotic mix of software and services to tamp down spam across several fronts. Think of it as their idea of spam inoculation.

For a start, tens of millions use Google’s Gmail because it was designed with built-in spam defenses. Others are joining social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, where they control who has access to their personal profile, to exchange e-mail with friends, family and business associates.

Many also use phishing filters provided by Microsoft on its Internet Explorer browser. Last month, Yahoo, eBay and PayPal took a major step to shield customers from phishing attacks. They announced eBay and PayPal customers who use Yahoo Mail should start receiving fewer bogus e-mails because it now uses DomainKeys, an e-mail-authentication technology.

A new breed of e-mail services, such as CertifiedEmail from Goodmail Systems, put the financial onus on the senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail.

CertifiedEmail treats e-mail as a FedEx-like service. For less than one-fourth of a penny per message, commercial marketers, government agencies and non-profits are guaranteed delivery of e-mail to individuals who have indicated they will accept the messages from that specific sender. Recipients see a blue seal verifying that the message is legitimate, says David Atlas, senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Goodmail.

Another free option, Boxbe, lets users of Gmail, Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo Mail create a guest list, giving them final say on who is allowed to send e-mail. Anyone not on the list receives an invitation to join when they send an e-mail to the Boxbe user.

The multilayered-defense approach has worked to stop such scourges as image spam, which varied the content of individual messages — through colors, backgrounds, picture sizes or font types — to slip through spam filters. Image spam made up half of all spam in January. Since software makers came up with a solution, image spam has dropped to 8% of all spam, Symantec says.

Given all of these free available solutions, and their success in some cases, could the future be brighter for spam-slammed consumers?

Richi Jennings, lead analyst for e-mail security at Ferris Research, thinks so. He expects evolving anti-spam technology to slowly choke off unwanted commercial e-mail.

Could Gates’ oft-disparaged prophecy be right, after all?

“As more people have in-boxes protected by better and better spam filters, their experience of spam gets closer to Gates’ vision,” Jennings says. “He was a bit overaggressive with the prediction, of course. But spam isn’t an easy problem to solve.”

Contributing: Byron Acohido