Apache 2.2 Is Out, as is MS-CRM 3.0 but in a completely different way

Posted: 11:40 pm
December 1, 2005
IT Business, Open Source
1 Comment

Now this is turning out to be a huge week for open source: Apache 2.2 has been released today and it brings a lot of new (great) features: Smart Filtering, Improved Caching, AJP Proxy, Proxy Load Balancing, Graceful Shutdown support, Large File Support, the Event MPM, and refactored Authentication/Authorization. Apache is worlds most popular and widely used web server and if you have not played with it, you really should. You can run it on Windows 2003 (and 2000, and XP) concurrently with IIS 5/6, just make sure you don't bind to all on either server and you'll be set. Great way to test your new web sites or get familiar with different platforms and software. A little birdie from Omaha sent me some business slides on Microsoft CRM 3.0 which was launched and… well, lets say that more than a few little birdies have told me the pricing behind it will make very few people bite. Come on Microsoft, you are NOT the dominant CRM player. When you're coming from behind, you have to offer a better product, better pricing, better incentives.. Eric better walk over there with a size 16 boot and bang out some incentives because at these prices small business will keep on going to salesforce.com.

New Addiction: Social Bookmarking

Posted: 2:27 pm
December 1, 2005
Web 2.0
4 Comments

The guy on the right is Stefan Weitz from the Microsoft Windows Server group and he is cool for two reasons: He bought me lunch the last time I was in Redmond (so there, I got at least something from Microsoft) and he is responsible for a lot of the cool stuff we get in the user group world, namely, the 150 seat livemeeting accounts for remote presentations. However, Stefan is also responsible for the social bookmarking, tagging, noting and sharing project at Microsoft: theworkingnetwork.com. The goal of The Working Network and its distributed opml gadget (or widget or whatever they call it) is to give IT Professionals access to reputation-ranked blogs and community sites so they can find out if a person is a reputable provider of information based on the ratings of others in the community. Check out the OPML-meter video that Scoble did with them to find out what its all about. But outside the beta developing world, I've really hooked myself up with del.icio.us and spent more time browsing in the past two days than I have nearly year-to-date. The first thing I did after opening my account was to hit up my Tampa barbie girl and see what she's up to. After her, I started looking at popular stuff and got around to tagging a bunch of newbie sites on AJAX. Check it out: http://del.icio.us/vladmazek and get your own. For a more distributed one check out theworkingnetwork.com and look for the Community Bar. Video itself is fascinating but almost 40 minutes long.

SBS Show #7: This Week In SBS

Posted: 10:37 pm
November 30, 2005
SBS Show
4 Comments

SBS Show 7 is out and we cover this weeks events in SBS. For your easy consumption it is only 22 minutes in length as promised and we just go over some of the things you may have missed in the SBS community this week. On the table were: – Exchange 2003 SP2 reboots faster than usual (kb 555526) – Exchange 2003 SP2 IMF does not scan messages bigger than 3MB (thanks Philipp Kohn) – Can I install Exchange SP2 and SharePoint Team Services SP2 before I install SBS SP1 or do I have to install Exchange/SharePoint SP1, then SBS SP1 then SP2 of each? – (5:11) Firefox 1.5 – and reasons to upgrade – (12:14) Microsoft OneCare Live goes global – (15:19) What a (British) girl wants: Suede Laptop! – (18:00) SBS group meetings and sbsgroups.com Susanne Dansey of Readycrest Ltd. joined us today after some convincing and will be with us regularly during Wednesday's editions of the SBS Show (This Week in SBS). I explained the reasoning for this previously but we intended to keep a very high standard and make weekend shows useful. We understand nobody has an hour (or more) to sit down and consider all the braindumps offered on the weekend show and we still want to inform you. So during the week well have a little 20 minute show that brings you up to date and tells you what you need to know. Susanne will give us the global perspective, so while Chris and I represent the SEC, Susanne is tasked with representing the rest of the world. Hopefully a balanced and informative show for everyone, as a great man once said: "The SBS world is flat." SBS Show #7 – Download it here. Up next: THE Susan Bradley talking about patch management. Wanna talk to her? (407) 965-2945.

Firefox transition and IE preaching abstinence

Posted: 12:49 pm
November 30, 2005
Security
4 Comments

Since Securnia cracked the camels back I've been playing with different things Firefox has to offer. First of all, the major problem is rolling this out in the Enterprise through group policy and Sarah was kind enough to point me to a Firefox MSI repository. So far so good, until I hit the Microsoft Partner site – not very Firefox friendly I'm afraid, but there are two good things that came out of it. Number one, its the only IE-needy side (outside of our corporate internal SharePoint/CRM/GP sites) and it sent me off searching in the Firefox plugin land where I found IE View extension. Thats what the picture below is all about, you just right click on the page that doesn't render properly and select "View This Page In IE". There is even an IE Tab which makes it easier for people that don't like to right click – it adds an icon next to the address bar that opens the page up in a new tab using Internet Explorer as a rendering engine. Reduces desktop clutter! And it can be pre-configured so you can add the sites that should always render in IE. This is simply amazing. Now back on the Internet Explorer side, Microsoft has published an advisory regarding the severity of the exploit published months ago. The statement? "Microsoft encourages users to exercise caution when they open links in e-mail. For more information about Safe Browsing".. so they are basically preaching abstinence. That worked out great for the religious freaks (hi Jen) I'm sure it will have similar consequences for Microsoft unless they straighten this out fairly quickly or they'll end up getting (what happens when abstinence fails) by Firefox. Come on guys, IE 7 "beta" ain't the answer we're looking for here.

Technet Magazine

Posted: 12:01 pm
November 30, 2005
IT Culture, System Admin
1 Comment

Perhaps I've been under a rock lately but there appears to be an online Technet Magazine and its available in both HTML and help (.chm) format for portability. And oh, it is worth the read, for example check out SharePoint disaster recovery article by Jeff Centimano. I'm sure some of our seasoned veterans would also like to take a look at IIS performance tuning article after everything we're going through with Yoda.

SBS Show #6: SBS PSS Crew shows you how to troubleshoot SBS

Posted: 5:47 pm
November 29, 2005
Uncategorized
13 Comments

Mark Stanfill and Peter Gallagher from Microsoft SBS Product Support Services joined us this weekend to share some of their SBS support skills. We talked about basic troubleshooting, performance as well as leveraging PSS for your business whether you’re a partner, consultant or an SBS owner. Topics include troubleshooting performance issues, performance monitor, PSS call experience.

As a special treat you’ll find out how to get your calls answered directly by the US PSS support crew without a Premier support contract and some SBS troubleshooting best practices. It’s so good even Arnold Schwarzenegger called in!

Get SBS Show #6!
Subscribe to the podcast xml (for iTunes, podcatcher, etc)
Subscribe to the SBS Show blog

P.S. To do justice to this podcast please don’t blog about it until you’ve had a chance to listen to it. I promise it is far from what you’re expecting. This is the biggest and most entertaining podcast in the long and prolific 6-week history of the SBS Show.

Correction: We hinted to this during the show but just to state it clearly again: What Mark Stanfill refered to was “Microsoft Small Business Specialist” and “Microsoft Certified Partner” programs. (not Small Business Partner or Microsoft Silver Partner); to find more about it please go to http://www.microsoft.com/partneradvantage. They also talked about Performance Monitor Wizard and how it can help you find bottlenecks and establish performance logs with some very telling counters.

Firefox 1.5 is now available, on the heels of IE exploit

Posted: 4:57 pm
November 29, 2005
Uncategorized
1 Comment

Talk about impecable timing, Firefox 1.5 has been released in the wild and its available from Firefox FTP site and many mirror sites. If you’re lazy in USA and on Windows XP here is the direct link and the release notes. Considering that the release falls on the day of an extremely critical IE exploit with exploit DoS code and the ability to launch executables on your system. Talk about Scoble’s fireable offense term, using IE is really getting close to that SouthWest commercial where a lady launches the pinkslip virus 🙂

Exchange 2003 SP2 Faster Reboots

Posted: 2:46 pm
November 29, 2005
Exchange
1 Comment

Leave it to Microsoft to brag about how fast a server can reboot. 🙂 Joke aside, this doesn't seem to be news at all but it has come in my inbox about 50 times over the past few days so here is the summary. Famous Microsoft MVP, Daniel Petri, has produced a knowledge base article 555526 which basically explains that Exchange 2003 SP2 will reboot faster on a domain controller (read: SBS, if you're running Exchange on a DC in any other setup you need help) because Windows will notify Exchange that the box is about to shut down and Exchange services are shut down prior to Windows services (Active Directory) are shut down. This will automatically make your reboots faster. The news here is that Microsoft finally implemented a process that has been used in production servers for years. I have yet to see a production server where Exchange was allowed to shut down on its own – there is always a script that stops Exchange services and then calls for the box shutdown. So if you were freaked out by the reboot performance enhancement and the subsequent KB article, welcome to Exchange system administration 🙂

Exchange IMF bi-weekly updates start in December

Posted: 9:04 am
November 29, 2005
Exchange
4 Comments

I talked about the IMF going to bi-weekly upgrades with Exchange 2003 SP2 and here is the update from the man that was brave enough to kick them around at Barcelona's IT Forum this year:

"Microsoft has informed me that those updates will start appearing on Microsoft Update in mid-December. I’m also told that the Exchange team will be writing about this shortly on their blog and that a Webcast on this subject is scheduled on January 17th."

So keep your eyes on the blog. These are just IMF definition updates but the faster you get the definitions the more spam you can kill. If you want it realtime, you know what will defend your Exchange the best. 😉

SBS Show #6 Taped

Posted: 1:01 am
November 28, 2005
SBS Show
7 Comments

.. and wow did we have a lot of fun. Peter Galagher and Mark Stanfill from Inside SBS joined us and braindumped their support know-how. Thats the best way I can describe it. It is by far the most fun we've ever had recording this show and we got to act out things only done to the closest confidants… "The crazy SBS guru", "Sucidal SBS admin", "Helpless smallbiz owner" and Chris joined in with his impersonation of Arnold Schwarzenegger. If there was ever a show we were going to get sued for, this is the one. I did say "damn" and we recorded for 1:45 so there is at least 30 minutes of editing involved that I hope Chris can help with a little bit. I'll try to get this out by EOD Monday but I sincerely doubt it will be ready until Tuesday. This is on par with SBS Show #3 in the amount of great advice for SBS newbies and seasoned gurus wanting to learn more about how things work. I know that one famous guru will want to listen to this webcast as they talk about the perfmon preset counters that can be downloaded from Microsoft's web site that look at SBS specific issues. P.S. Dig the new logo?