TenBrink Tech Technology | Life

Exchange and the User’s Need to Send-To-All

One of my fellow bloggers and Exchange PM, KC Lemson, has blogged some thoughts about users having the urge to — as I like to say — "Send To: All".

We had a similar instance here recently with the growth of folks leaving the company and I was summoned to a meeting to discuss the restriction of large distribution lists. Fact is, if a user is determined to "Send To: All", they have many means at their disposal. Expansion of the GAL is right there on the TO field in Outlook. Just click on the plus sign enough times and you’ll have all recipients.

The good ‘ol Shift-Click in the GAL works as a select-all, but you’ll have to be patient with Outlook if you take that approach.

Or, how about the directory harvest? Dump those GAL entries to your contacts list and then send the email from home…or a nice exported CSV spreadsheet with a mail merge.

As you can see, the possibilities are endless.

This isn’t an isolated story. It has been repeated many times over the course of my 10+ years in working with Exchange email systems and each time management comes at me with the "what can we do?" look — once again trying to solve a people issue with a technology.

The fact is, if people want to circumvent sending restrictions or rights management, there is nothing to stop them. It is a deterrent as much as a speed bump is in a parking lot. It will keep 90% from speeding through the lot, but the other 10% have figured out if you go fast over the bump, and aren’t driving a low-rider, you can keep going.

Of course, KC hinted at some technology in Exchange 2007 that may help us here, but it will likely be a user management issue for the foreseeable future.

But you'll probably still want to keep exmerge with your bulk remove scripts at hand.

Exchange Continuous Replication Demo

The Exchange Team cranks out a new video to show off some of the great features of Exchange 2007. One of these is the Local Continuous Replication system.

I’ll have some reaction to the video later once I get a few minutes to watch.

You Had Me At EHLO... : Video: Exchange 2007 Local Continuous Replication feature in action.

Test Post

Test Post from Word 2007.

Vista / Office / Longhorn Server Beta 2′s released today

Downloading now. Along with everyone else in the world who is part of the core beta group, MSDN, or TechNet Plus.

Maybe a torrent system wouldn’t be too bad for this? But, it would have to be secured and authenticated, and work through restrictive corporate proxies.

MS-Word Exploit Information

MS has now posted an advisory with details about the latest “buzz”, the “Word Exploit”.

Microsoft Security Advisory (919637): Vulnerability in Word Could Allow Remote Code Execution.