TenBrink Tech Technology | Life

Feature Suggestion

At support.microsoft.com, there is a cute little box on each KB article that tells you the version number and the date last updated.

In my perfect world, it would be similar to a wiki where you can see the history and changes to the article. That would help folks like me who see "updated" and would like to pinpoint what has changed.

Thanks.

Funny experience of the day

Driving home from work last night listening to my XM radio in my awesome Xterra I passed by a Portland Police officer who had pulled over a car. As I passed by, my radio listening to the RoadyXT which sends its signal to the truck radio by way of its own mini-FM transmitter, faded out briefly as if someone nearby was using the same FM frequency. Doesn't happen often (only the second time I can remember), but can with iPods and XM radios roaming about.

The comedy was to come shortly after. As I approached an intersection, here came that same police car. It had completed its traffic stop and was blazing up on me in the right lane as we approached a red light. He was code-3, lights and sirens going. As we both paused at the stoplight and he went ahead into the intersection and flipped a u-turn in the intersection to head the other way, my radio faded out again.

It had to be the police car jamming on his iPod. The song that I heard on my radio?

Theme from Beverly Hills Cop.

Oh yeah. Do-de-do-do-de-do-do-do-de-do-do-de-do-do, in all its 80's electronic synthesizer glory, as the cop is speeding away to his call.

Hey, why not have some theme music while on the job, right?

Exchange 2007 LoadGen Tools Available

You know, it's about time. Two months after RTM, we now have LoadGen (the shiny 2007 version of load sim) in both x86 (huh? test only?) and x64 flavors.

One of these days it won't seem like Exchange 2007 was rushed to market. Maybe? Naaaa.

Exchange DST Tool First Look

The Exchange DST update tool has been released, a little late, and a little short on ability.

My first impressions are not good. At the same time, I sympathize with the developers that poured a lot of work in a short amount of time into this tool.

Let's get right to it. I fired up our favorite VM image, logged in as an Exchange admin with read permissions on all mailboxes. Set the .ini file settings to read from our three Portland-based servers, with the exhaustive search function (which was not as bad as the KB article made it sound by "significant"). Here are the results.

Number of Mailboxes: 3570

• Mailboxes with only one data point (others=blank): 1049 (29%)
  
• Mailboxes with mismatched CDO/OWA/Outlook: 132 (26%)
  
• Mailboxes with NO data (blank for all fields): 1453 (4%)
  
• Mailboxes with matched CDO/OWA/Outlook: 936 (41%)
  

Yep, not very good. In all fairness, the time zone information hasn't been there to get for a long time. But, on the other hand, it's there now in Exchange 2007/Outlook 2007, so why didn't we think of this before? Other countries have this problem every year.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand. With so many ambiguous time zones the only good course of action is to push the Outlook tool to the clients and hope they click "YES" to the update dialog. This will be accompanied with lots of communication, but you know the success rate of all-hands emails in your organization.

We'll have to run the Exchange tool on some mailboxes. Most notably those shared calendars and resource calendars in the organization. We'll take a stab at the correct time zone to update them from/to on those based on their server location.

If there is anything to learn, it is that we need to be more prepared next time. In the fall comes to mind first when we'll have an additional week of delta DST period then. Hopefully your workstations will all be patched and remain well patched in the interim.

Also, instruct your users to follow the following best practice advice.

• Include the time of the meeting in the e-mail request so that invitees can double check the correct meeting time (such as, "Project brainstorming - 11:00 A.M. Central Time").
• Exercise caution with the appointments and meetings in the extended DST period. When in doubt, verify the correct time with the organizer.

  [source]

And remember all those forwarded meeting requests? Yeah, those are going to be broken for sure. Send this and this to your users regularly (if you don't already).

Happy patching and fixing. It's going to be a crazy next four weeks.