August 2009 Archives

Given that I'm in Palo Alto, and that probably half of my coworkers use Macs, it's no surprise that I installed Snow Leopard today. I'm not going to review the OS, or even the Exchange capability, but here are a few notes based on my long-time Entourage use (and not a little time spent with Outlook 2010 over the past few months). Herewith my thoughts:

• The first thing I noticed: Mail.app is smokin' fast compared to Entourage EWS. I mean, we're talking lightning. EWS has much improved sync performance compared to DAV sync, but Mail.app leaves it in the dust when it comes to scrolling, searching, and message rendering. I haven't tried to compare the two programs' sync speed (and probably won't, since it's mostly relevant when you set up a new account).
• Speaking of setup: I was able to set up 4 Exchange accounts in about 10 seconds each: enter e-mail address and password, then let Autodiscover do the rest. EWS Autodiscover works well most of the time, but occasionally it will fail to detect an account.
• By default, Mail creates a single unified Inbox view-- exactly what I use in Entourage (and what I wish for in Outlook 2010). However, nowhere can I find where Mail tells me how many messages are in a folder, something I like to keep track of.
• I like it that Mail.app uses the same sounds for sent and received mail that the iPhone does. On the other hand, I dislike the fact that you can't change these sounds (on either platform). C'mon, Apple.
• Ironically, older versions of Mail would hide some Exchange folders when you connected because Mail couldn't handle them. Guess what? This version fails to hide some folders, such as "Conversation Action Settings" and "Quick Step Settings", that Outlook 2010 creates as ostensibly hidden folders in your mailbox root. Oops.
  
• Entourage seems to do a better job of masking temporary connectivity problems. When Mail.app decides that one of my servers is unreachable, it grays out that server's entire folder tree and puts the little tilde-looking icon next to the account name. By contrast, Entourage will discreetly add "(Not Connected)" to the account name and leave it at that.
• iCal… well, what can I say? I still don't like it after all these years. Yes, it syncs with my Exchange calendars now, but its visual display is ugly compared to Entourage (especially for overlapping events), it's lacking in features, and the task support appears to have been hastily bolted on.
• I've never been a user of the Address Book app. Given the way this version works, I'm not about to start. Too much wasted white space and too many missing features. For example, want to see someone's management chain? Too bad, Address Book doesn't show that. Feel like searching the GAL? Sorry, no can do (at least not that I can find.)

There are other problems, too-- no support for setting your out-of-office status, for example. In terms of fit and finish, there are lots of little grace notes that Entourage gets right but that Apple stumbled with. To show just one example, take a look at these two screen shots, one for each program.

IMHO, Entourage does a better job all around. It tells me that my machine and my appointment are in different time zones. It clearly shows the important data about when my test meeting's invitees are available. Once you type in an invitee's name, there's no way to delete the event in iCal unless you remove all invitees first. Attempting to close the window gives you a chance to edit or send the invite, but not get rid of it altogether. (Bonus: thought it was interesting that Entourage could get and display Atalla's status (OOF, in this case) but that iCal couldn't, even though I took the screen shots on the same machine and more or less at the same time.)

More broadly I don't like going back to the world of having three separate apps for PIM functions. It reminds me of Sidekick for DOS. I much prefer the Outlook/Entourage model of having several different (but related) data types in one place. What makes this worse is that there's relatively little integration among the Snow Leopard apps. For example, if you're looking at a contact in Address Book and want to send that person a mail message-- too bad. There's no way to do so. You can, however, right-click an e-mail address in Mail to open that address' contact card.

Still more broadly, these applications are not very flexible or customizable compared to Entourage. For example, let's say you want your message reading pane on the right. Too bad! There's no way in Mail.app to customize it; you need WideMail or something like it, of which there is no Snow Leopard version (yet).

So, Snow Leopard delivers what Apple promised: basic Exchange integration. There are so many things that they've left out, though, that I remain disappointed, and I'm thinking that the Microsoft Mac Business Unit has a huge lead already as they move into full-scale development of Outlook for Mac

The fine folks at Modality Systems in the UK just released iDialog, an iPhone client for OCS 2007 and OCS 2007 R2. Executive summary: I like it and think it was worth the $10.

Modality have a good FAQ that addresses questions about what the program does. In short, it does everything you could do from within Communicator Web Access. For example, you can send and receive text IM messages, see your contacts' presence state, search the GAL, and control incoming OCS enterprise voice calls.

my own contact card has some editable properties other users' cards have the standard card properties.

I tested iDialog this morning to see how well it worked. The overall experience was quite good; my contacts appeared as I expected. To the left, you can see what my user's contact card looks like. iDialog uses a similar view for your contact card as it does for those of other users, with the difference that you can edit some fields of yours (like the Note and Location fields). To change your presence status, tap the jellybean icon in the upper-left corner of the screen and you'll see the familiar OCS presence states. You can see the iDialog toolbar at the bottom of the screenshot, too. It's as self-explanatory as can be (though a bit plain-looking). Tapping the Chats icon takes you to a list of current conversations, each of which shows you how many pending messages you haven't yet responded to. When you look at the contact card for one of your contacts (or someone that you look up in the GAL), you get a wealth of information (a la Outlook 2007/2010) about the person: their presence level, how long they've been away, their free-until/busy-until state (although the "free-busy at..." text is a bit confusing at first), and so on. Tapping a contact's e-mail address launches a new mail message (incidentally quitting iDialog), and tapping a phone number opens the built-in phone app to place a call over the GSM network (provided you're on a phone; you can't do this on an iPod Touch). GAL searching worked fine in my limited tests: type in all or part of a user's name and you'll get a list of matches back. I've seen a few reports of crashing during searches, but I couldn't reproduce those myself.

The conversation view itself looks a lot like the built-in Messages app, but the bubble sizes and colors are just slightly off. I attribute that to Modality's decision to include more information than Messages does, including the name of the sender of each comment and the time at which it was sent. Check the shot on the right of an active chat session to see what I mean. There's a lot going on here. You can see the name of the person I'm talking to (well, at least part of it), along with a navigation control to go back to the chat list. The Options button allows you to invite additional users or quit the chat (though there's currently no way to kick a user from a multi-party conference). iDialog provides the same "... is typing a message" prompt that CWA does, too, a nice touch. However, what dominates the view of an active session is Apple's soft keyboard, taking up fully half of the available screen. That makes it harder than necessary to follow what's going on. I'd prefer to see the keyboard only when I start typing, a la Apple's SMS application.

MPOP worked fine; during my conversations I remained logged in to Communicator. The experience had a few odd points. Mysteriously, my status was once automatically set to Do Not Disturb, although because I was logged in to Communicator at the same time this may not have had anything to do with iDialog.

iDialog doesn't seem to have a way to edit the phone forwarding settings you currently have in place, so I had to use CWA to turn off my default forwarding. Once I had done so, though, iDialog notified me of incoming calls and let me forward them to pre-defined numbers, just as CWA or Communicator would.

A suggestions to the Modality gang for future releases: when entering an IM in the 1.0.0 release, if the IM is longer than the width of the text view, the text view scrolls right. A better (IMHO) way to do this is to do what the iPhone's native apps do and grow the height of the text bubble. This can easily be accomplished using TTTextController from Joe Hewitt's excellent Three20 library.

Exchange 2010 has a daunting list of prerequisites. Although the installer is pretty good about catching missing items, it's a hassle to start an install, wait a few minutes, and then notice it complaining that you're missing a required component or hotfix. This problem is made worse by the fact that there are slightly different prerequisites for some server roles on some operating systems.

Fellow Exchange MVP Dejan Foro has a great solution: a pair of scripts that automate the installation of the prerequisites for you. You still have to download them all, but the script takes care of installing the right bits in the right places at the right times. I particularly like the "turbo" script, which just slams the prerequisites into place without asking you any annoying questions. Check the scripts out—I think you’ll like them.

Great news from Michael Atalla on the Exchange team blog: the release candidate for Exchange 2010 is now available for download. The RC is feature complete, meaning that everything that will be in the final build has been implemented, though there may still be bugs. I can say that based on my experience with Exchange 2010 in the TAP, and a user of the Outlook Live service, it's pretty darn solid. Check it out!

I know, I know. I've complained in the past about the limited value of netbooks, and now... well, confession time: I bought one, a Gateway LT3103U. I'm going to be using my MacBook Pro as my primary machine, which means I want to leave it plugged in to its monitor etc. at home. Because I'll be commuting by Caltrain I wanted something small and portable to use for light writing, surfing, and so on.

I asked a large social alias at Microsoft for recommendations and got back a dozen or so. Some recommendations were based on price, some on battery life, and some on overall price/performance. I don't need ultra-long battery life, and while I won't say price was no object, I didn't feel like it was the most important factor.

Why the LT3103U? In a word, the screen. It's a beautiful, clear, sharp 1366 x 768. I experimented with a few 1024 x 600 screens at my local {Best Buy, Costco} but they were just too darn small. The Gateway also has a pretty nice full-size keyboard. It's no Lenovo, but it's miles better than most of the ones I tested. Performance with Win 7 is quite nice. Would an Atom N270 be faster? Maybe, but on the other hand I'd have to suffer the squinty little screens common on those devices. (Here's an LT3103U review for your consideration.)

I found instructions to make a bootable Win 7 USB stick and built a Windows 7 Ultimate x64 stick. It worked flawlessly, and I commend the instructions to your attention. I don't know how long the install took because I started it right before bed, but it was done when I got up :)

Chris Moates had notes on getting Win 7 drivers set up for the LT3103U. I didn't burn the Gateway driver DVD (I don't have a USB burner), so I just ran Windows Update on a wired connection. It found the correct ATI and wireless drivers with no problem, so all my hardware is fully functional (although I haven't tested multitouch; that may require the Synaptics touchpad driver).

Now I need to install Windows Live Writer on it and see how it blogs :)

Update: I took it back to Best Buy. It was a delightful little machine, but it was just too small-- the keyboard and screen are both better suited to someone with Arlene's hand size than mine.

If you've ever taken a Microsoft certification exam, you might wonder where they come from. Do storks bring them? Are they made by elves?

Not quite. They're developed by teams of subject matter experts (SMEs). Some of these SMEs work for MIcrosoft, and some come from the broader IT community. The exam development process is too long and boring to talk about in depth; there are several phases to it, starting with "hey, kids, let's put on an exam" and culminating with the rollout of the finished exam.

Along the way, there are usually beta opportunities, where the nearly-finished test is made available to a limited pool of test users who can give feedback to the test development team (i.e. "hey, question 45 is too vague!" or "there's no correct answer to question 15.") For the first time that I know of, Microsoft has opened a public call for SMEs who want to volunteer to work on exam development and to get early access to exam betas. If you're at all interested, visit this site to get directions for signing up. (Hint: it involves Microsoft's Connect web site!)

Bah. This is getting tiresome.

Update: thanks to the server gods, posts made with the MT interface (or scheduled for later posting) now tweet like they're supposed to. All hail Brian and Greg!

This testing is getting pretty tiresome.

Big news on the Mac e-mail front.

First, Microsoft has released the Exchange Web Services (EWS) edition of Entourage, which you may remember from back in January. If you've been using the beta version, you will almost certainly be pleased with the vast improvements in sync speed since the beta. MS has also fixed a number of annoying sync bugs. Remember, the EWS version requires that you have Exchange 2007 SP1 with update rollup (UR) UR4 or later.

Next, MS announced today that the next version of Mac Office will contain... not Entourage but Outlook for the Mac. They have not yet announced the exact details of what "Outlook" means in the Mac context (except to say that it includes support for AD RMS), but the Entourage Outlook for Mac team is well aware of the major features that Outlook for WIndows has, and based on my discussions with them I am pretty optimistic about what we'll see in the next version.

Neato! I just got mail from Greg Taylor, head of the MCM: Exchange program. They're offering a $3,550 discount on the upcoming Exchange 2007 rotation (September 21-October 10). Register here to get the discount. Disclaimer: I teach the UM portion of the MCM class, and Greg's offering instructors a bounty for new registrants, so I benefit directly when people sign up. However, the training is so good that you should disregard my interests altogether and sign up anyway. (If you do, please drop me an e-mail to let me know!)

Ethan McConnell has a long post on the Exchange team blog covering how to set up the Windows Mobile emulators for testing various Exchange features. Early last month he snuck in an update: a link to the Windows Mobile 6.5 emulator images. If you're interested in the differences between WM 6.1 and 6.5, this is probably the best way to satisfy your curiosity for the time being; I don't think there are any actual WM 6.5 devices shipping yet.

From the "you learn something new every day, whether you want to or not" file: there's an IIS extension that lets you doURL rewriting. Chris Lehr has a blog post explaining how to use it to send users to the correct OWA virtual directory no matter what (or almost no matter what) URL they enter. This is a lot cleaner than the other methods I've seen described in the past.