December 2006 - David Overton's Blog

Exchange 2007 - what a product :-) I was guilty of underselling it at the Bristol SBS Partner Group. I said some of the features people wanted were only in the Enterprise Edition, but I was wrong, they are in the Standard Edition, but require the Enterprise License (which is a top up on the standard License). Obviously SBS 2003 can work with Exchange 2007, but only on a seperate server as SBS 2003 is 32-bit only and production Exchange 2007 is 64-bit only. The enterprise CAL is only a few dollars on top of the Standard CAL, so if you want the features, definately something to look for. So, what is the difference between the two version? http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/editions.mspx Exchange Server 2007 Edition Offerings Feature Standard Edition Enterprise Edition Storage Group Support 5 storage groups 50 storage groups Database Support 5 databases 50 databases Database Storage Limit No software storage limit; storage limit is hardware dependent No software storage limit; storage limit is hardware dependent Single Copy Clusters Not supported Supported Local Continuous Replication Supported Supported Cluster Continuous Replication Not supported Supported Exchange Server 2007 CAL Offerings Feature Standard CAL Enterprise CAL* Standard CAL + Enterprise CAL E-mail, shared calendaring, contacts, tasks, management Outlook Web Access Exchange ActiveSync Unified Messaging Per-User/Per-Distribution List Journaling Managed E-mail Folders Exchange Hosted Filtering** Forefront Security for Exchange Server** For pricing and information about the CALs, go look at http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/howtobuy/default.mspx Exchange Server 2007 Standard CAL - $67 US The Exchange Server 2007 user/device CAL is required for each user/device gaining access to the server, and entitles access rights to both editions of Exchange Server. Exchange Server 2007 Enterprise CAL License and Software Assurance (L&SA)* - $25 US The Exchange Enterprise CAL provides access to Unified Messaging and advanced compliance, as well as Forefront...

If you are using Vista and ISA, you will be used to getting a compatibility warning when the client loads. Well, this KB and download gives you a time when that is no longer the truth :-) From the joys of Susan B's blog View article... .. How to obtain the version of Firewall Client for ISA Server (December 2006) that includes Windows Vista support: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929556 Finally the ISA firewall client that will support Vista is out today and there's a new WSUS category to boot! As always, be careful when playing with your systems ttfn David

Vista has lots of new features and while the new user interface (UI) is very cute, cuddly and even makes life easier, one of the most useful features that I find is the new search facility. I recently heard the term “stop searching and start finding” and realised that this was probably a great description to goal of searching – it still takes effort, so time to spill the beans on how to find things easier in Vista. One quick thing to point out is that Vista will index not just the file names and dates, but also the contents of your files too. This process will busy itself on your machine when Vista is 1 st loaded, so give it some time, but once it is done, it is done. I let this onetime slowdown happen while I was asleep as I left running overnight to index my 40-50GB of documents and photos. There are four places where the search tools show their hand in Vista before you start putting other applications on that use this technology, such as Office 2007: Start Menu (find programs and a quick file search tool) Search Window (full blown search UI) Explorer windows (when browsing your hard disk) Control Panel (finding things in Control Panel just got easy) Customising your search engine Before we get into the searching itself, we should probably talk about customising the search to meet your needs. To do this, fire up the control panel and click on “System Maintenance” and then the “Indexing Options” to get the control panel we want. Once here, pressing modify will allow you to change the places that are searched, although you will need to press the User Access Control (UAC) “Show all locations” button to add your drives. Ticking a drive will enable search across the whole drive. Likewise the advanced option will give you the capability to fix any indexing woes by rebuilding the index (save this tip as it was a must in early betas) or moving the index locations. However, for more useful customisation, you need to go back to Control Panel, choose “Appearance and Personalisation” and then select “Folder Options” – on the...

Updated with game URL This is a simple festive one. The UK Partner team have a simple set of questions, which if you get enough right answers (of course you will all get 5 out of 5) then you get to throw snowballs at them. Fancy playing the quiz and game yourself? While they are all heros for the work they have delivered this year, including content for the SBSC members, the person I would personally aim for is Karl (suited on the left). I've only had a chance to play once, and I scored 17. Let me know how you do in the comments!! Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year from everyone at Microsoft, and from me!! ttfn David

I love the small business community. Some days I hate it too. This year we have seen great strides forward, but the fear by me has always been how many people are driving it. Don't get me wrong - I think the community is amazing and more than capable at driving things forward for itself, but some pigs are more equal (driving) than others. This year there have been some stand-out heros, who have consistently provided feedback to Microsoft as to what more we should be doing to help. That is what I see easily. They also lead their groups, build the local community and put business opportunities in front of people around them. Three of those people have moved from group leaders to being back into community at large - and I am not sure that this has been recognised - both in terms of their efforts to the community and also the help they have given Microsoft. The three people are Tom, Richard and Susanne. They all did great things with their groups - taking them to new heights (other group leaders do this, but have not moved on yet, so I will shout out to them later) - but they are now "just" members of their groups. Richard sent this to his group "I said at the meeting in May where we made a lot of the decisions regarding the self-funding, and elected the various officers of the group, that I would be standing down as Chairman in October. I had decided this for several reasons, but mainly the fact that I now feel that we have a strong core of a group, and that someone else should come in with new ideas and drive to push the group forward. It is always a danger in such an organisation, that the founder stays too long, and the organisation becomes 'his' rather than reflecting the needs of the members." Susanne sent this a couple of days ago "And I take the opportunity to inform you all that I will be stepping down from my role within the Kent group and this meeting will be my last as leader – I have had a great year and a bit organising it but I feel it is time for others to take more control. Thanks to everyone who has...

I was reading the CNet news article at http://news.com.com/100+years+of+Grace+Hopper/2100-1007_3-6142101.html and it reminded me of having to learn COBOL at University. While it can be a pig to do graphics and other things in, it is a great language to write business applications. COBOL for .Net exists, as do many, many libraries to make file, graphics and web services a reality. There are even some small buziness apps written in COBOL as its ability to manage business rules and maintain integrity is still good. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a .Net developer, but many of the good practices in development today have their heritage in COBOL (or Pascal ;-) ) So this is just a raised glass to the language that will never die (a bit like Mainframes). ttfn David

I saw this over at the Wall Street Jounral ( http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116490323676636989-HnHPKLzkyy9xKy2wnokbd2bc_bE_20071130.html ) and it made me think. Can I point to Innovation from Microsoft in the small business arena? I'd be happy on your thoughts, but her are some areas I think MS is innovating: SBS - an amazing package of great technologies, not just the "enterprise" version at a lower price, but some thought put in to make the wizards workable for small businesses, with defaults that won't scale to 5,000 users, but will work just fine for 100 Publisher to enable small businesses to participate in marketing and image management without having to learn a package as complex as Pagemager or Quark Express - something I used to earn great money training people to use Office 2007 - making great presentation of documents accessable without a marketing degree Vista - Getting the balance right between onus on the user vs the system for security I have some more in mind, but what do you think?

I got a mail from one of the community leads the other day about "downloading Office 2007 for a 80% discount". These mails are always fraudulent - in many cases you will not even be sent any software, pirated or stolen, but your credit card details will be re-used. Should you be sent something, as said, it will not be legal, so at best will be stolen, at worse, will be hacked together and probably contain spy/malware too. This business damages us all, so if you are in the UK and wish to report it, please just foward these mails to the UK Piracy team at ukpiracy@microsoft.com . thanks David

Time and again the number one question I get outside the technical arena is people want leads from Microsoft - "go and advertise for me and hand me the leads so I can do business with these customers." I know this sounds pointed, and it is meant to, I have had partners be even more direct with me as to what they think Microsoft should do for them to make them acquiring customers easier! Now we do do advertising, but we don't "hand" the leads to you. We take customers to the "find a partner tool" on bCentral and ask them to find a partner. If the find you, click on the link for you, but the web site does not entice them to call, there is nothing we can do about it as Microsoft - (have you asked some prospective customers to look at your website to see if it is a plus or a minus?). So what can we do to help, well, besides our campaigns, we can help you run mini-campaigns that align to what we do ourselves, but you get to customise it to your needs. To find out how this works, how to do it and who captain campaign is, click the nice graphic above! To help get a bit of fun into the process, we also have a funky screensaver that can be downloaded from https://partner.microsoft.com/UK/salesmarketing/createdemand/40035272 As always, let me know what you think, or if not me, why not let Lorrayne know - more about her at http://blogs.technet.com/msppuk/archive/2006/12/05/who-fits-size-9-red-boots.aspx ttfn David