Growth in smartphone and mobile device use and the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend in corporate IT is now having a backward effect on PCs....Read the rest of entry >>

A recent article on CIO.com asked the question “Can Google Apps Unseat Microsoft Office and Exchange?” Many similar articles are published to help advise CIOs and budding CIOs about the deep and serious choices they will have to make about technology. Take the wrong decision and your career is a bust, make the right choice and your reputation is secure and you become a CIO par excellence. Or so the theory goes. Given the topic, I had a certain interest in the article. There’s always a possibility that you can learn something from the experiences of others, even if this article focused on a small 500-user company (New England Biolabs) in a highly specialized area (molecular biology) that might not be a good prototype for other companies that are considering making a switch.The trial to figure out whether Google Apps could replace Office and Exchange was carried out  by 24 users over 60 days. Not many companies could dedicate nearly 5% of their total user population to testing new software, so this was somewhat out of the ordinary. All of the testers were Gmail users for personal email and the company operates heterogeneous platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux)....Read the rest of entry >>

A recent tweet took me to a script repository for Office 365 maintained by Microsoft’s Thomas Ashworth. Now, despite the best efforts of Twinbox to integrate my Twitter feed into Outlook (a job it does quite nicely), I don’t always respond to tweets or even read their content. After all, there’s so much rubbish you can deal with during any one day. But discovering an exception to the normal dross is always wonderful and so it is when you discover something useful. When I visited it, the script repository offered just six scripts. Perhaps more will come over time. However, the point is that there’s some interesting stuff here that can be taken advantage of immediately, which I think is the hallmark of a truly useful repository. In this case, the PowerShell scripts deal with aspects of Office 365 tenant domain management. I think that most administrators who have to manage email in an Office 365 tenant domain limit their horizon to the Exchange Control Panel (ECP) and don’t attempt to navigate the depths of PowerShell for Exchange Online. ...Read the rest of entry >>

Early-bird discounted registration for the much-anticipated relaunch of the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) finishes on May 18, which is tomorrow for most people. This public service message is brought to you in an attempt to help resolve the nagging question “which conference is likely to deliver the best Exchange content for me in the next year”. The operational and technical environment that people deal with differs enormously from deployment to deployment and a single answer won’t apply in all cases. For instance, it’s pretty clear that Microsoft will use MEC as the launch vehicle for Exchange 2013 with Kevin Allison, GM of Exchange, promising that “MEC will be full of Exchange 15 content” when he keynoted at TEC in San Diego earlier this month. Therefore, if you really must learn all you possibly can about the latest and greatest version of Exchange, you’ll be one of those who packs their Mickey Mouse ears and heads to Orlando in September to join the MECfest. On the other hand, if you’re more interested in the details of practical deployment, tips and techniques, and the nitty-gritty of current versions of Exchange, you’d probably be better off investing in a conference fee for either TEC or Exchange Connections. That is, if these conferences continue to function in a world where a lot of the available attention and attendee dollars is being vacuumed up by MEC....Read the rest of entry >>

Windows 7 is arguably one of the most hardened and regularly updated OSes available, and now Apple and the Macintosh are in the headlines for fighting off malware and patching vulnerable software....Read the rest of entry >>

Even in an era of massive quotas, it’s annoying to find that mailboxes are cluttered with extraneous logging messages that accumulate steadily and are never removed without manual intervention. So it is with Outlook synchronization logs, which you’ll find tucked away in the Sync Issues folder (to expose this folder, click on the Folders icon and expand the folder hierarchy). Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 generate synchronization logs when errors occur when clients synchronize local replica copies (held in the OST file) of cached server folders. Logically, synchronization errors and log generation only happens when Outlook is configured in cached Exchange mode. There are many reasons why a synchronization operation might experience some difficulties. Network glitches are the obvious example – something that is extremely likely to happen when connecting Outlook to Exchange Online in Office 365 when transient network errors are common between the network that the PC client runs on and Microsoft’s datacenters. After all, no one controls the Internet and no one guarantees the speed, latency, or reliability of an Internet connection. ...Read the rest of entry >>

Concerns about cloud security have helped dampen enthusiasm for cloud computing among some IT professionals, a perception that Microsoft hopes to reverse with some findings from a study it commissioned....Read the rest of entry >>

Mozilla and Google seem to be having conniptions over the fact that Chrome and Firefox won't be allowed to run as Desktop applications on Windows 8 RT, even though they will be able to run as Metro apps. Chrome and Firefox will be able to run on the standard x86 and x64 Windows 8 desktops. Just not on the desktop of the specialized Windows RT version. Outside the Mozilla/Google echo chamber people find this odd because neither organization seems to have raised much of an objection to not being able to run their browsers on the iOS platform. Apple has very similar conditions to those that Microsoft is enforcing for Windows 8 RT - you can use WebKit or you can deploy on another platform. I can only imagine that Mozilla/Google are making so much noise about Windows RT because they concerned that the unreleased Windows 8 tablet OS is eventually going to surpass the market share of both iOS tablets and Android tables. Why else would they be concerned specifically about not being able to deploy to Windows when they are currently unable to deploy to the platform that dominates the market, Apple's iOS? If you thought that it was going to be a minor player, and you don't get excited about being unable to deploy to iOS, you wouldn't bother getting angry about being blocked on Windows RT. Should vendors have the ability to control which applications run on platforms? Given that there isn’t a monoculture when it comes to tablet OS, why shouldn’t vendors be able to choose a strategy that suits them?...Read the rest of entry >>

Google is the undisputed king of internet search, but Microsoft has been a distant (albeit tenacious) competitor. Microsoft hopes to change that situation with some forthcoming updates to the Bing service. ...Read the rest of entry >>

One of the more interesting (and esoteric) sessions at TEC 2012 in San Diego was given by ESE developer Brett Shirley on the topic of how to write ESE applications. ESE is, of course, the Extensive Storage Engine, the database engine that underpins Exchange and Active Directory databases amongst other things. The flavor of ESE used by Exchange is “Jet Blue” as it’s tailored to meet the specific needs of Exchange. Scheduling a session about a database engine that is generally not well known amongst the Exchange community seemed like an extraordinarily brave step for the TEC organizers to take. Nevertheless they put Brett’s session on the schedule and I toddled along to take in the delights of discussing the many code examples that Brett positively delighted in explaining. The other highlight was the amazing outfit that Brett wore in an attempt to garner positive feedback from his audience. Suffice to say that his overalls were of a pattern and color sufficient to make some go blind if viewed in sunlight. ...Read the rest of entry >>