MSFP for Cingular 8125 Available

Posted: 8:37 am
June 19, 2006
Gadgets, Mobility
2 Comments

Now as much as I hate the fact that you give money to Bell South, I feel a lot of you out there could benefit from this one: Cingular has made MSFP available for 8125 device, HTC Wizard. Get your leech on. MSFP provides push mail as well as advanced security, remote wipe and administration for your PocketPC. You just need to install a tiny bit of software on your server to get all the features.

Here is a list of all the phones that have an official MSPF download.

MobileAdmin aka Microsoft Exchange Server ActiveSync Web Administration Tool

NTFS Partitioning Tool

Posted: 7:30 am
June 19, 2006
Linux
4 Comments

Need to repartition your NTFS volume – resize, delete, move, format or delete for free? Even on a server? Check out Gparted.

Not a day goes by without someone that just got their shiny new Dell server with a 160 GB hard drive… and a 12 GB C:\ partition. Resizing the NTFS partition then becomes an interesting task of finding a piece of software that is still up to date yet certified for resizing volumes on a server. The process becomes so ambiguous that most just blow up the whole machine for a repartition and reinstall. It’s a frustrating search with many wrong turns and steep fees but there is this great tool that you can use, for free, to do it yourself. Yes, it works on servers. Yes, it works on domain controllers. Yes, it works on NTFS. Using Linux to fix Windows, what a concept. Check out this review of Gparted and burn yourself an iso for free.

SBS Show #22 – Live from TechEd

Posted: 1:19 am
June 17, 2006
Podcast, SBS Show
6 Comments

SBS Show 22 live from TechEd. We grabbed everyone left over after TechEd ended earlier today and brought you the SBS Show live from TechEd’s Security MVP executive office. By the time we were done not even the posters were left on the walls. Hope you enjoy it, we talk about the new technologies demonstrated at TechEd, general Microsoft technical direction for the next year, what we took from the event, working on SBS as a big-business employee and more. Joining me are Susan Bradley, Alun Johnson and Dave Sobel.

Download the SBS Show #22

http://www.vladville.com/sbsshow/sbsshow-episode22.mp3

The SBS Prostitute

Posted: 11:04 pm
June 16, 2006
IT Business
4 Comments

Just wanted to offer something to ponder over the weekend. This entire week and its relevant absence of SBS has made me feel quite bad about the state of respect the small guys (rightfully) get. I’ve probably been asked about 10,000 times this weekend what it is I do with SBS, usually with a very puzzling look on their face. So here is my elevator pitch (to the techies):

“We’re a hosting company that provides SBS to customers that either could not afford, support or properly deploy a server in their environment. We enable IT consultants to provide fully configured SBS server in under 2 hours for $99 a month and we take care of the entire process – from setup and configuration all the way to continuous backup and practive monitoring and security investment. We basically bring in a server where it would otherwise not be able to exist or be unprofitable for an IT consultant to deploy one and we give people enterprise quality software with the comparable support“

And what do I get in return? Well, thats something I have thermed as “SBS Prostitute” view.

Oh, you poor soul, I guess you do have to make a living too.

Awe, well, do you enjoy it or do you just do it for the money?

Were you mistreated when you were young?

Now my elevator pitch is pretty close to the SBS goal, bring in a collection of Microsoft servers that make sense for the small business at a price they can afford where it profits both the business, the consultant and Microsoft. Server in small business == more money spent on additional servers, application and services.

However, by being virtually absent from TechEd the SBS team has all but confirmed the relative obscurity of the product and as something not to be taken very seriously. I’ve met plenty of people this weekend that were selling straight 2003 server and Exchange instead of SBS to small businesses, which on surface is good for Microsoft because they make money, but I doubt its good for the SBS team – they’ve got sales goals too you know. And it’s not great news for Microsoft – by selling an OS without a built in database, security management and more you are leaving out critical features that the IT solution shop may not offer because they bring up the cost of the deployment and effectively halt the opportunity to upsell the product – no CRM, no MOM, no LCS – unless they part with a lot more money… at which point Linux sounds like a good alternative. And you know, Linux may just get in for Jabber, or Nagios, or vTiger or SugarCRM…. but it may stay for more and for far longer.

I sure hope someone at Microsoft is considering these factors. Just out of curiosity, how much more would it have cost to remove one chair from the floor and add 4 sq ft and a side panel for SBS? I’ll help you – $0, you had two empty spots. For what its worth, I understand why it was not there (don’t want to promote crippleware, business bundles, not a target SBS audience) but I can tell you that you had potential customers in the audience that you’ve chosen to ignore.

TechEd Ends with Monkeys in Buckets

Posted: 1:45 pm
June 16, 2006
Events
Comments Off on TechEd Ends with Monkeys in Buckets

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Last day at TechEd. It feels like an hour before DisneyLand closes and you still want to go on four rides. The lines are shorter, you see the fireworks and are just running around to see everything you didn’t get. Unfortunately, there is a lot to be seen and a lot to be done – like a few dozen labs on all the technologies we can use. Booth babes are gone, here is that big vendor hall….

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But the good news is that its easy to find the people you know. Below is a pic of Tom Shinder, fellow MVP and an author of all those ISA books. Tom is the guy that helped us with some ISA issues a while back so it was a pleasure to meet him.

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Jim Harrison, the author of… well, many great oneliners on the sbs2k list is here is well. And as usual, he delivered a good one to a few hundred people:

“I don’t care what you’re using for routing.. Cisco, Linksys… monkeys in buckets”

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There you go! More amazing people, so little time. SBS Show tonight…

Windows Mobile 5 MSFP Emulator

Posted: 10:15 am
June 16, 2006
Mobility
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Microsoft Exchange team just released the WM5 emulator with MSFP so you can test Direct Push via GPRS for your apps. You can download it here.

Of little more interest, and to stick it to my SBS Show partner, I ended up waiting about 40 minutes for the bus yesterday to get back to the hotel. I was wearing my deep blue shirt and hanging out with a bunch of burned out Microsoft staffers. We’re all wearing the TechEd “blue badges” but they don’t have their Microsoft blue badges so we’re chatting about the bus and everything…. So we finally gave up and decided to split a cab. Only bad side of this is that the cabs are on the opposite corner of the convention center. So we’re walking our few acres and I turn to the guy next to me that has been particularly ticked about the bus problems..

Vlad: So, what do you do for Mobility?

Omar: I designed MSFP.

Vlad: What do you mean by “designed”

Omar: I own the whole ActiveSync stack.

Got to chat about all sorts of things, very nice guy. So talk about making connections, WWPC boy.

TechED MVP Fun

Posted: 7:43 am
June 15, 2006
Events
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SBS Booth at TechEd

The running joke at TechEd whenever SBS comes up is… “SPS? Oh, SBS! Sorry, I’m not familiar with that product, can you please point me to that products booth?” The SBS community owes big thanks to Missy Koslosky for facilitating this as I held our first mashup “SBS booth” at TechEd. I was volunteering in the Messaging area for the usual Exchange security Q&A and Missy dragged over someone with an SBS question, and I quote:

“Have Exchange on SBS in an edge role.. and I think its an open relay”

So went back to the couch, fired up a few terminal server connections, opened up the stock SBS virtual machine and simply went at it. Few minutes later there was a crowd and it continued for the better part of an hour with people walking up, checking out the proper Exchange setup on SBS, gotchas, differences from the big server land.

Then went back to answer a question for a person from a major weapons research company on where to move the OWA frontend on a 5 site ATM connected backbone. Infinite money, infinite bandwidth, moving stuff around out of boredom. “Have you heard of ExchangeDefender ma’am?”

SBS Birds, Feathers, Debugging

Went to Susan Bradley’s session yesterday and taped an hour and a half of video. You’ll get to see it when I get back to Orlando, it was amazing to see her break down the best practices on everything from R2 to Quickbooks and everything she usually talks about in that little time. Nobody was killed but it came close, very close.

Now the following picture begs for a good caption. Here is my try:

“Debugging process completed, the 2×4 has been removed”

Debugged

I’d love to hear your captions, comments are open.

Another Party?

Yes! I’m absolutely exausted from the presentations, q&a, busses and one or two parties every night followed by business stuff into the wee hours of the night. It’s absolutely insane but I have had a chance to meet to many people at such a high level that an hour of sleep I get each night is totally worth it. I think I need to get into the hard liquor game, maybe that helps as I’ve seen the same people consistently drunk every night and in top shape again in the morning so I’m doing something wrong here drinking the sodas.

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Either way, went to the MVP appreciation party last night and got to chat to a TON of my fellow MVP’s along with an entrepreneur that had the similar business experience I had (Windows Device Driver MVP!) and later the person that manages the doc team for E12 on the bus ride back to the hotel. I think the reason I’m loving all of this so much is because I’m really put in the element with the people that work on the same type of stuff I do. “Yeah, we have a SAN in two sites and we’re trying to solve this problem.. or I have 6 frontend servers and I  want to get routing info from LDAP instead of managing the event sink configuration by hand… ” as opposed to “I have an unreliable cable modem so I’m trying to hotwire a dialup connection with a static IP address and do load balancing for my domain but I’m not a fan of TZO… why won’t ExchangeDefender work with a dynamic IP address?… Vlad, you suck, why can’t you redirect my mail to port 26?”

Two more days to go. Today is the Vlad lab day, I think I’m blowing off the trip to Fenway since we’re getting the tail end of Alberto up here today. I can’t get away from f’n hurricanes.

TechEd Exchange Day

Posted: 11:18 am
June 14, 2006
Uncategorized
1 Comment

Here we go with the Day 2 update, promptly written on day 3 in the Messaging area. The big deal this year is Monad, MSH, PowerShell or whatever it will eventually be called. Peter O’Dewd is really pushing to call it Exchange Management Shell as its current big deal at TechEd is all about managing Exchange. It is quite a big deal for the dev guys who have time and time again demonstrated monad oneliners replacing entire pages of vbscript. This is a near keynote-sized page on Powershell.

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And this one is straight from the Exchange folks, something to get you started. If you’re going to 2007 you need to start learning monad, hope this helps:

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Fun with the SBS Family

Jeff Middleton arrived at about 5 PM and had the misfortune of asking me for directions. I was sitting right next to the door he could have gone through, but having never gone through it myself I sent him down the same path I’ve been taking all day long. Long story short, I sent him onto a mile long trip with multiple escalators for something that was LITERALLY around the corner. He appreciated the exercise.

We did moral support for Anne and her CRM birds of the feather thing. It was mostly the free food factor but I will not miss a moment making fun of CRM so I went along as well. So let me share my CRM story.

Vlad the CRM Evangelist

If there is anything to me it is most certainly my passion as the undying evangelist of Microsoft CRM. Wait, wait, stick with me here. I went along into the birds of the feather session with Anne, Susanne, Terry and Jeff and as we got to the meal hall the sessions were organized by a bird… so here is what got me beaten:

Anne: I wonder where I’m at.

Susan: Well, which bird  are you?

Now nobody asked me but picture what went through my mind thinking about what the official bird of CRM is. Then, the mifortunate quality of thinking out loud, turning to Susan:

Vlad: Umm, a CRM bird. Whats that bird that sticks its head in the sand at the first sight of problems? Ostrich!

I would like to state for the record that I got physically assaulted after making that statement. But as I explained to Anne, its not really that I dislike the technology as much as I dislike the people who promote it. But I’ll let pictures speak for my venom. Below are two pictures, one is a birds of a feather session of the people with a product that is actually used by human beings, the other is MicrosoftBS Dynamics.

Guess which one is CRM?  

Birdsofafeather

Mobile Party

Went to the mobile party and thanked them for producing the awesome devices that promote the sale of servers in the SMB – god knows we can take all the help we can get to make people go away from p2p. The party was at the Boston Harbor Hotel and it was spectacular (unlike the nightshot features on my camera).

But forget about the view – this is a geek occasion, right? Here is the REALLY cool stuff. The entire party (music, PA, giveaways and all the other stuff was handled from a single SmartPhone plugged into a mixer and a single speaker. You can’t top that.

Mobile

Vista Evangelism

With all the Microsoft goodwill I figured I’d give Vista a shot again. Below is a pic of Jeff Middleton after yet another great Jeff oneliner. You had to be there but allow me to set it up for you anyhow. As Vista completes setup it has a progress bar that updates the status of the installation and provides a wonderful waving background. Almost as if it was a transporter. Jeff’s observation on the progress bar:

“I got him in the stream Jim, but I need more power to Scotty!”

Hope you’re a trekkie. 

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The IT event of the day

I spent entire day 2 in meetings with the Exchange dev teams in a deep dive on the features, direction and Q&A on whats new, whats next and whats going on. Of course I’m under the NDA as far as it’s concerned but screw it, here are all the juicy details (picture is worth a thousand words). Enjoy the back of Missy, Martin and Mics head.

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TechEd: The Communications Day

Posted: 11:24 pm
June 13, 2006
Events
2 Comments

Long, long day here at TechEd. As I’ve said quite a few times this is not an SMB (neither S nor M) event by any means but we’ve still managed to represent. From left to right, Anne Stanton, me, Susan Bradley, Terry Constable, Jeff Middleton. Today, quite frankly, the most valuable day for me since becoming an MVP. I feel like I traveled into the future. Huge thanks to the PMs, Senior PMs, group PMs and all the other big cheese of Microsoft Exchange.

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Will blog about this tomorrow, its quite unreal how many of you I’ve been able to reach over the past year of doing this. Not a day has gone by that I meet yet another stranger that seems to know who I am – glad I was of some help to you. I’ll be at the MSG center all day tomorrow (Wednesday) so if you’ve got an Exchange question stop by. We’re also doing birds of the feather session on SBS tomorrow, Jeff is doing his speach tomorrow so there will be a lot there for those of you that want to hear about this TechEd Lochness Server that we’re such big fans of.

Will break it down for you tomorrow.

SBS Day 1: ’tis Good to be an MVP

Posted: 12:51 am
June 13, 2006
Exchange
1 Comment

Untitled document

What a day….

Well, TechEd day 1 has paid for the lost time & productivity that was sacrificed to attend. Many, many times over. Today was quite eventful and longer than I imagined but also very start-struck. First, I saw the keynote by David Thompson (whom I’ve met at last years TechEd) the head Exchange guy and the conversation was about where Unified Messaging worked. He obviously had many monkeys working on his presentation because it was the only one, whole day, that went on without a hitch. Then mo Exchange, I recruited Terry Constable (fellow part-time SBSer and full time SQL BI analyst) away from Scorecard Manager presentation and to an Exchange 2007 presentation by Terry Myerson under the premise of “why not see a presentation on a product that you’ll actually use” – awesome presentation. You have probably seen presentations by Terry before on the Microsoft Exchange blog but he pulled one PM after another to demo PowerShell, OWA, SharePoint integration, UM info and so on. Then off to Mike Fitzmaurice’s presentation on whats new in SharePoint, then also got to have dinner with him. Mike was described to me as the “spokesman” for SharePoint and a Technical PM but you can see the geekness – as a developer you can certainly appreciate people that debug live in front of others, great sense of humor too. Speaking of a good sense of humor, met Kevin Remde in person, finally – he’ll have a pic on his blog. Last presentation of the day I actually assisted Alex Nikolayev (owner of the huge SMTP part of Exchange and a whole lot more) on the antispam framework of all things. Thats a humbling experience I recommend to everyone – go stand next to the guy that developed every bit of code you use and then provide your implementation ideas.

After all the evets I got to volunteer in the unified messaging area and field questions. Of interest was my alma mater Exchange administrator talking about University of Florida’s final migration to Exchange (lets just say that UF migrating to Exchange is like it becoming a basketball school) – the hell in Gainesville is getting cold. Chatted with the sr. architect at Accenture about the concept of managing field consultant systems, chatted with a few hospital employees that need to customize IMF for a deployment on a system with 50,000 mailboxes, Martin Tuip from Quest about the how they deployed the archiving system in over 20 minutes for the entire company where their competitor spent 3 days on-site, and to top it off I went through the vendor showcase (searching for grub) and ended up meeting Vassil Terziev (CEO, Telerik) who in about 3 minutes saved me thousands of dollars on the AJAX development of Shockey Monkey… and gave me a free tshirt! Score!

Now I figured I could have said “That’s Hot” but I’m starstruck enough that I don’t need more Paris Hilton help   

SBS Spotlight

Not a newsflash but TechEd ain’t no SBSer event. I was answering a question for someone today on the WSUS junk filter updates and they were your usual SBSer questions – guy runs Exchange @ a major drink company with roughly 30,000 mailboxes under management. So different kind of crowd, different focus, just think different.

That said, I got to hang out with Susan Bradley today for a few minutes. Tomorrow Jeff is coming over so we’ll have our party here. You’ll definitely see the launch of the SBS Shirts 

Grove

Speaking of not for SBS, the grove solution is definitely not gonna be in the price or complexity range for your SBS shop. However, this is the kind of Technology that SBSers have a dire need. Think of SharePoint with integrated task and project management, with discussion groups, collaborative file sharing, integrated live messaging, secure replication and sharing – and an offline client. Dig that! Unfortunately the price and the complexity make it an unlikely part of the SBS network but we’ll work our ass off to make it affordable through Own Web Now.

Working with Microsoft Exchange

I volunteered to field questions in the Messaging booth for Microsoft. Shaming 2.0. Again, stick an outsider next to the person that was in charge of design, development, project management, promotion, marketing and delivery of a particular piece of code – and then answer another ITPRO’s question about that piece while they stand next to you. Forgive me for my geekness, but this is pretty high up there for my little world. Although I was there to answer questions the flow was a little slow so I was the one asking most of the questions – from the guys responsible for it.

And yes Chris, I thanked KC for the swag she sent you. Much prettier in person than on the blog.

Those of you that know me (and had the pleasure of seeing Vlad-built PowerPoint decks) will be happy to hear that I expressed my opinion and understanding of Microsoft PowerPoint to the guy responsible for it! Now, I didn’t know who he was before I shared my enthusiasm for Death by PowerPoint. Ooooooooooooooooof, never needed an undo in life that badly. Could have been worse, can you imagine my conversation with a Dynamics product PM?

MVP UM Party

Big big thanks to April Dalke (MVP Lead) for inviting me to the MVP party for Office/UM party. No shirts and software can top a free Lobster from Microsoft!

But MVP’s can. Got a new description of the MCSE acronym from Lee Mackey, hiring suggestions from Andy Webb, forum talk with Daniel Petri, see someone take the drink away from Missy Koslosky and get SharePoint migration ideas from Todd Bleeker. Finally met Andy David and Martin Blackstone, ironically enough, in a bar line. WOW. Talk about fair advertising!  

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Todd Bleeker and me, didn’t catch the lobsters name. ‘tis good to be an MVP!