Paul's Down-Home Page: Exchange, messaging, collaboration, security, and more

Live Meeting Lotus Notes plugin

2009-06-22T18:22:41Z

From the I-had-no-idea-this-existed department: Microsoft has a downloadable Lotus Notes plugin that provides integrated support for scheduling Live Meeting sessions and meetings hosted by OCS 2007. (It doesn't yet support OCS 2007 R2, sad to say.)

E-mail overload and enterprise attention management

2009-06-19T19:20:19Z

Craig Roth has a great blog post up on e-mail overload and how "attention management" technologies can help reduce the burden on us puny humans. I thought I'd take a stab at describing how Outlook, Entourage, and Exchange 2010 implement attention management technologies. (You'll probably want to refer to this map as you read the below points). I've taken Craig's bulleted list and added notes about how Exchange + Outlook support (or don't support) each proposed attention management feature.

Scheduled delivery: Outlook and Exchange have supported scheduled sending for some time; you can schedule a message to be sent "not before" a certain time, or just in the next send/receive. However, there's no built-in way to schedule receiving. This would be fairly simple to implement via an Outlook plugin (or Entourage AppleScript) that switches the client to offline mode until it's time to pick up new mail.
Maintain whitelists to bypass blocks and delays: this would be tricky to implement if scheduled delivery were implemented using my crude method of going offline, and I'm not sure how useful it would be anyway.
“Move to discussion” greys out “reply”: A "move to discussion" feature would be a great addition to Outlook, and (from Microsoft's perspective) would be desirable as a way to drive people to SharePoint.
Automated routing and prioritizing: this is a wicked-hard problem. Microsoft's solving it by letting you build workflows that manage e-mail, so that organizations can build workflows to handle incoming e-mail, IM, and voice traffic according to whatever rules make sense. This isn't really an end-user-targeted capability, though.
Un-bury turning off or freezing of “toasts”: I prefer to work with toasts turned off altogether, but I understand that some people want them. Craig's right, though, that it should be easier to toggle this functionality. One easy thing for Microsoft to do would be to integrate "do not disturb" mode in Communicator with the Outlook equivalent. This already sort-of-works (e.g. during a full-screen PowerPoint presentation you don't get toasts) but it could be made better.
Enable e-mail hyperlinking: does anyone remember the Exchange 2000 Web Storage System? Every item in the store had its own uniquely addressable URL, but this turned out to be pretty much useless in the real world. This is less an attention management issue than an e-mail data management issue; there's little storage penalty to forwarding messages once they already exist.
Enable role-based profiles: Craig's idea is to provide a mechanism for defining standard profiles that control attention-related policies. Based on my experience, I think this would go over poorly, as most executives insist on having highly personalized workspaces. Regardless of what I think, though, Microsoft doesn't provide a way to do this at present.
Enable sender tagged e-mails: this is one area where the tools available in Outlook and Exchange far outpace their actual use. I need to do a separate post on message classifications, retention tags, and all the other sender-tagging goodness.
Stop attachment abuse: Outlook already supports sending documents to a document workspace or shared library, although this feature is buried somewhat (and Entourage doesn't have it at all, sadly).
Presence-enable recipient lists: Outlook already does this, in spades. The below picture shows a number of Outlook's built-in presence capabilities, including automatic display of presence icons for presence-enabled users, enhanced status (like "away for XXX" or out-of-office messages), and click-to-communicate with multiple communications modes.
Enable group-based rules: Exchange and Outlook don't currently do this, although you can simulate some aspects of it with query-based distribution groups. Honestly, though, this strikes me as only marginally useful; I'd probably rank it close to last in terms of which features I'd rather see first.
Turn e-mail into generic small-content tool: Not a bad idea, although I think you could use a much lighter-weight tool like the excellent Windows Live Writer to do this more easily.
Manage multiple inboxes: this is a tremendously useful feature of Entourage, which has long supported multiple Exchange accounts. Outlook 2010 is reported to support multiple Exchange accounts too; I'll post a more detailed article on this once Microsoft releases publicly-available bits.
Provide inbox analytics: this sounds like the kind of cool but not-very-practical feature that analysts love :) I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but it's not clear to me that having analytical data is actually going to change anyone's use or misuse of e-mail.
Token systems: see previous bullet. What if you run out of tokens? Do you just quit work for the rest of the day?
Remind sender if no reply: I have to do this manually, either through CRM or a manual task, so I'd love a button that would automatically create a task to remind me to follow up if no reply is received by a certain date. This would be simple to script in either Entourage or Outlook.

There are a couple of Outlook and Exchange features that Craig didn't mention that I think fit into his taxonomy. Chief among them is the new "Ignore" functionality in Outlook 2010 and OWA 2010; when you ignore a thread, the client silently creates a server-side rule to automatically delete messages in the same conversation, so that you just don't see them. (An alternate name for this feature, the "mute button", better describes it IMHO). It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft makes a move to include more attention management functionality in future versions of Office and Exchange. I bet they will, given MSR's investment in this research area, but we'll have to wait for Office/Exchange v.Next to see for sure.

The iPhone as a mail device, 3.0 edition

2009-06-17T13:32:31Z

[ Updated on 23 June 2009 to fix a couple of mistakes and add a few new tidbits ]

Last summer I wrote a post about the utility of the iPhone 2.0 as an e-mail device for people, like me, who are heavy e-mail users. Now that the 3.0 release of the iPhone OS is upon us, I wanted to post an update to see what Apple's fixed, or not, from the original complaints. I had hoped to get some hands-on time with a Palm Pre as well, but haven't quite made it there yet. However, I have spent some time using the version of Outlook Mobile from Windows Mobile 6.5, so that's now my baseline standard for comparison.

Executive summary: Apple invested a ton of time in the 3.0 release, but most of it went to other aspects of the OS, not into the messaging and calendaring experience.

Policy and account control

I didn't spot any changes here. The big one I was hoping for was the ability to create and manage multiple Exchange ActiveSync accounts. Sadly, Apple didn't include this. ~~The extended policies in EAS version 12 (like forced disablement of the camera or Bluetooth) still aren't supported. You still can't install your own certificates, either.~~

[Update]: As Chris Haaker pointed out in the comments, you can indeed disable the camera using Exchange 2007 EAS; for a complete list of the policies 3.0 supports, see this doc at Apple's site; and, of course, you can install your own certs by e-mailing them to the device, using the over-the-air configuration utility, or distributing profiles with the utility. In addition, Apple improved certificate support quite a bit: 3.0 adds the ability to provide client certs for authentication, and it now uses OCSP for checking certificate validity online instead of depending on static CRLs.

E-mail

In my initial review, I started with basic e-mail operations. These are essentially unchanged: the look and feel of the Mail application is identical to the 2.0 version for the most part. The annoying automatic expansion of EVERY SINGLE FOLDER YOU HAVE is still there. You still cannot delete messages while the iPhone is offline. Instead of fixing this issue, Apple has chosen to deactivate the "delete" icon on the message toolbar. However, when you're in the message list view, you can still use the swipe-to-delete gesture, or the Edit button, to delete a message... and then you get the same error that the message can't be moved to the trash. Fail.

You can queue replies or forwards while offline, which is a welcome improvement.

One area where Windows Mobile 6.5 really shines in comparison to the iPhone is in the new conversation view for e-mail. There are a number of other WM 6.5 mail improvements that I won't cover here; suffice to say that the new Outlook Mobile extends Microsoft's lead by providing a better pro-level e-mail experience than the iPhone 3.0 does. Apple could definitely improve things just by using the correct EAS verbs for reply and forward, though, which they still don't do

Oh, that bug with not properly sending IMAP EXPUNGE commands to remove deleted messages: still there. I guess Apple thinks it's a feature.

Calendar

If you didn't like the iPhone 2.0 calendaring experience, you won't find much to change your mind here. You can now create meeting invitations for your Exchange calendar (but not for your MobileMe calendar, a baffling omission given that MobileMe is marketed as a service useful for families). I am hopeful that the forthcoming Exchange support in Apple's Snow Leopard OS will force Apple to make iCal more useful, and that those changes will ripple out to the iPhone. Until then, though, Windows Mobile still kills the iPhone in calendaring usability.

Speaking of usability: since my original review I found a few more annoyances:

meeting cancellation notices show up on your calendar as "Canceled:whatever"; there's no way for you to use the cancellation notice to remove the event.
If you receive an invitation on the device, then accept it from the desktop or OWA, it will still show up in the calendar app as a pending invite until you try to open it.
You still can't see .ics files that arrive in IMAP-connected Exchange accounts. Fortunately, Exchange 2010 includes an OWA link in meeting invites, so you can click the link to jump into OWA and accept the invitation there.

[Update] One nice addition that I forgot to mention: when you get an invitation, you can see where it falls on your calendar, and there's a new disclosure chevron next to meetings you create that lets you view the status of the invitees (provided you're using Exchange 2007).

Tasks

Nope. This is another promised Snow Leopard feature that will hopefully make an appearance on the iPhone at some point. In the meantime, I've been using imTasks, which works flawlessly with all of my Exchange accounts. I also tried TaskTask, which has a somewhat nicer interface but which hasn't worked very well for me.

Contacts

Steve Foskett summarizes this better than I could. Bottom line: it's like the Mac OS X Address Book in your pocket, with all the good and bad that entails. No support for contact public folders, no way to add a GAL contact to your own contact list, and a 100% chance of getting duplicates if you use Entourage + Sync Services to sync contacts to the device through MobileMe.

New iPhone 3GS features [UPDATE]

Apple says that the 3GS has "hardware encryption". It's not really clear exactly what this means. In the enterprise deployment guide, This blog entry suggests that remote wipe is so much faster on the 3GS because it's essentially a decommissioning operation-- erase the master encryption key for the device and you've effectively erased all its data. I haven't seen any confirmation of that, though, and it's not clear what other value there is to encrypting data on the device given that apps are sandboxed and there's effectively no external storage. (You also can't force encryption on with EAS, as you can on Windows Mobile).

The Appeal (Grisham)

2009-06-11T17:29:18Z

Let me save you the effort of reading this cynical and depressing book: the good guys lose. All of them, in fact: the lawyers who go nearly half a million dollars in debt financing their client's suit against an egregious polluter, the plaintiff herself, a Mississippi Supreme Court justice running for re-election, and even the candidate who replaces her. The only winner is a slimy, money-grubbing billionaire. I don't expect every book I read to be Pollyanna, but I was surprised by the degree of cynical commentary that Grisham slipped in here. Not recommended.

Ad hoc travel

2009-06-11T13:02:52Z

Normally I plan my trips well in advance, but not this time! I went to San Jose to meet with a customer on short notice. How did my routine differ?

First, I packed ultralight. Toiletres and fresh clothes went into my laptop bag, meaning that I didn't need a separate bag.

Second, I went reservationless. I dent reserve my rental car until I was on the airplane. I didn't reserve my hotel until I was parked in its parking lot. This was slightly nervewracking, but it gave me maximum flexibility to accomodate my customer's schedule.

Now I just want to get home!

New OCS 2007 R2 virtualization white paper

2009-06-03T16:03:57Z

I mentioned this during my TechEd session (which, btw, will also be the topic of a TechNet webcast in August), but I forgot to link to it. There's a pretty good white paper available explaining the ins and outs of virtualizing OCS 2007 R2. In skimming it I was surprised to find that Microsoft doesn't support virtualizing the update server; I'll have a more in-depth analysis once I have a chance to read it more thoroughly.

TechEd, days 2 and 3

2009-05-14T19:23:34Z

Tuesday, day 2 at TechEd, was one of the busiest days I've had in a while. I spent part of the morning preparing for my afternoon Interactive Theater session on Microsoft's Business Productivity Online offering, then worked a three-hour booth shift, this time in the Protection and Compliance booth. I was a little surprised with the number of questions that centered on Active Directory Rights Management Services; lots of people wanted to know more about Outlook protection rules (the new feature that lets you push a policy to Outlook clients that requires them to apply specific RMS templates to certain messages) and transport rules for RMS application. We also had a few archiving and cross-mailbox-search questions too, although not as many as I expected going in.

In the afternoon, I held UNC01-INT, a live demo and chalk talk on the Business Productivity Online suite. It was fairly well attended; I'd guess that there were about 40 people in the room. Thankfully my demos all went well; I showed the Microsoft Online Customer Portal, which you use for signup, billing, and so on, as well as the "my company" portal and the BPO single-sign-on agent. For the web-based portions of the demo, I used Windows 7 RC with IE8, and it performed flawlessly-- a good sign for the stability and utility of the release version.

The Business Productivity Online team scheduled a thank-you dinner at Ciudad for the people who spoke on BPO topics, and they were kind enough to invite me to join them. At my end of the table, I had a former commercial fisherman who was born and raised in Alaska, a man who worked two summers in college as a commercial fisherman in Alaska, and an avid fisherman from Seattle. You can probably guess what we talked about!

Wednesday was the big enchilada: UNC304, my talk on OCS deployment and management. However, before I could do that session, I had another turn of booth duty, this time in the deployment and management booth. I could distill the bulk of the questions I got into two individual queries: Is it true that you can do online mailbox moves in Exchange 2010, and if I'm using Exchange 2003 right now, should I move to Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010? These were popular enough questions that I'm working on separate posts for them.

The session itself went well, although I was in one of the cavernous 600-seat rooms, so it felt kind of empty. I demoed the OCS 2007 R2 topology planning tool and showed some screen shots of the new device management console (having neglected to bring a real device with me to manage!) Afterwards I got into a long discussion with some folks from the University of Florida about how their helpdesk might use OCS, plus I met Tyler Regas for the first time face-to-face. Following the session, I had to duck out and grab a taxi to the airport to catch my flight home.

One post-show update: in UNC304, I mentioned the client interoperability matrix for using multiple points of presence, or MPOP. Microsoft's Peter Schmatz was kind enough to send along an updated link to the most recent matrix; it's here.

TechEd, day 1

2009-05-14T19:18:51Z

Monday was my first full day of TechEd. It was pretty uneventful; I worked a shift in the Technical Learning Center at the "Anywhere Access" booth, along with Microsoft's Adam Glick. We got quite a few questions about general Exchange 2010 features, but not that many that were specific to the booth area. (This pattern would prove to repeat itself over the next few days). After my booth shift was over, I attended some MVP deep-dive technical sessions that Robin Martin-Emerson, our MVP lead, had arranged with the product team. The most interesting one to me was the one that covered the detailed process of moving from on-premises Exchange to the Exchange Online service. I'll have more to say about that in a future post.

After the MVP sessions ended, I went back to the hotel and did some preparation work for my sessions, and went to an MVP dinner with Rajesh Jha (Microsoft's corporate VP in charge of Exchange) and a number of members of his team. Dinner was good (the Palm is supposedly famous as a celebrity hangout), but the conversation was better-- we had a number of spirited conversations about topics as diverse as mixed martial arts, baseball, and LA traffic. All in all, a pretty good day; the cab ride home (six MVPs, one cab) was a great finish.

Exchange 2010 UM supports MP3!

2009-05-12T16:44:28Z

I can't believe I forgot to mention this before, but there's an extremely cool new feature in Exchange 2010's unified messaging engine. Exchange 2007 supported three different audio codecs for UM: WMA, GSM 06.10, and GSM G.711. You could pick a codec for individual users, but that wasn't a great solution for non-Windows Mobile devices.

Exchange 2010 changes this support; it now comes with MP3 support, and MP3 is the default codec used for voice messages. This greatly improves the experience of working with voice messages by making them easier to open and manage. Try it, you'll like it!

Meeting forward notifications in Exchange 2007

2009-05-11T23:58:22Z

Exchange 2007 has a nifty feature that can nonetheless be annoying: it generates tattle-tale messages that tell you when someone forwards a meeting notification. Say that Alice schedules a meeting with Bob, and Bob forwards the invite to Carol. When Exchange sees the forward, it generates a notification in Alice's Inbox. (Or, in this case, Paul schedules a meeting with Anup, who forwards it to James).

One problem with this feature: you can't turn it off! I'm not sure why the Exchange team designed things this way, but they did. However, there are two mitigations.

You can prevent Exchange from sending the messages to external domains with the set-remoteDomain cmdlet (Set-RemoteDomain -MeetingForwardNotificationEnabled $false will do the trick). This allows you to avoid spamming your correspondents with notifications when you forward a meeting invite internally.

You can also force Exchange to automatically move a user's meeting forward notifications to her Deleted Items folder with Set-MailboxCalendarSettings -RemoveForwardedMeetingNotifications $true. If this switch were enabled on my account, when Anup forwards my invite to James, I wouldn't see the forward notification.

(Note: I haven't checked to see what changes, if any, Exchange 2010 makes to this area. More info once I've had a chance to do some digging.)

TechEd, day 0: my schedule

2009-05-11T14:05:10Z

Actually, I'm a day late-- I should have posted this last night, but I was too tired! I had an uneventful flight from DTW-LAX on a crowded but bearable NW A320, then a remarkably expensive yet reasonably safe taxi ride to the Sheraton Los Angeles downtown.

I'm in Los Angeles for TechEd 2009, where I'm presenting and working in the Exchange booth. Today I've got a couple of phone meetings with my 3Sharp posse, then a session in the "Anywhere Access" section of the Exchange booth from 1115 to 1445. Following that, I plan to attend a set of MVP deep-dive sessions that the product group is putting on, then I'll be able to take a short break before having dinner with some folks from the Exchange product team.

Tomorrow things heat up: I have booth duty (this time in the "Protection and Compliance" area) from 0930 to 1230, followed by a session (UNC01-INT) from 1445-1600 in the Interactive Theater "Yellow 1" area on Microsoft's Exchange Online offering. I plan to do a bunch of demos there, so if you're interested in how Exchange Online works, stop by!

Wednesday I have booth duty again (0930-1230 in "Deployment and Management"), after which I'm doing a session (UNC304) on OCS 2007 R2 deployment and management. That should be fun, but I'll be watching the clock (and trying hard to finish on time, something I rarely do) in order to make my flight home.

If you're in the area, feel free to stop by and say hello!

Employees don't get to make retention policy

2009-05-05T18:05:15Z

As I said in a recent webcast, if you depend on employees to implement whatever your e-discovery and retention policies are, you don't have a policy; you have a set of suggestions. It looks like Judge David Nuffer of the US Federal District Court for Utah agrees. In the case at hand, the plaintiff, Dr Philip Adams, was suing ASUS for patent infringement. ASUS failed to produce a number of records that Adams alleged should have been produced. Upon investigation, it turned out that ASUS largely left compliance with discovery policies up to individual employees, some of whom didn't do a very good job of actually following those policies. Individual employees were responsible for deciding what information to keep, then storing it locally on their computers-- but they were also responsible for preserving information when they got new computers (which, given that ASUS makes computers, probably happened more often than it does for most of us!) Here's part of what the judge said:

The culpability in this case appears at this time to be founded in ASUS' questionable information management practices. A court--and more importantly, a litigant--is not required to simply accept whatever information management practices a party may have. A practice may be unreasonable, given responsibilities to third parties. While a party may design its information management practices to suit its business purposes, one of those business purposes must be accountability to third parties.

In plain English, that means that it's not OK to assume that your employees will always do the correct thing to safeguard critical business information. This decision is great news for archiving vendors, of course, but it should also be a warning to those who depend solely on employee actions (even when combined with messaging records management) to protect their interests. Two simple takeaways:

If you don't have a records management / discovery policy, you'd better get one because letting individuals make up policy on their own is now proven to fail
If you already have a policy, you'd better have an automated means of implementing and enforcing it.

Exchange 2010: information protection and control

2009-05-04T03:53:38Z

There's a whole lot to talk about from an information protection standpoint in Exchange 2010. The two biggest features I want to talk about are transport protection encryption (TPE) and protected voice mail. Oddly enough, these two are related even though they may not seem to be.

Transport protection encryption is what Microsoft calls the new integration between Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) and Exchange transport rules. Simply put, you can define transport rules that automatically apply AD RMS templates to messages in transit. You can use the same predicates and conditions available to transport rules in Exchange 2007. However, there are now actions that let you automatically apply a selected RMS template to messages that match the conditions and exceptions in your rules. For example, you could automatically apply a "company confidential" template to any messages sent to your outside law firm-- not a bad idea given the ease of accidentally sending messages where they don't belong.

Outlook Protection Rules is a new client-side feature (implemented via an add-in for Outlook 2010). The add-in allows you to apply a transport rule-like mechanism to get client-side protection. For example, you can push an Outlook protection rule that automatically applies a certain AD RMS template to a message before it's sent. The user may or may not be able to override the rule, depending on whether you made it mandatory or not. When you use these rules, the message is protected at the desktop so that administrators can't read it. This is useful protection for scenarios where a third-party hosted service (like, oh, this one) might otherwise be able to gain access to sensitive items.

In Exchange 2010, the transport and journaling components can read IRM-protected messages. This means that these messages can be journaled, indexed, filtered, and so on, and that transport agents can apply signatures, disclaimers, and message hygiene policies.

Another thing that's very, very cool: AD RMS is supported in OWA 2010 and on non-Windows Mobile devices. This builds on the AD RMS prelicensing agent shipped with Exchange 2007 SP1, which will proactively request a license for protected content before delivering the message containing that content to your mailbox. The client access server (CAS) will request the license and, on the fly, render the message for the client's display.

Now, I promised to mention protected voice mail. Many legacy voice mail systems let you mark messages as private, but Exchange 2007 didn't include this feature. Exchange 2010 does, though. It's implemented using AD RMS; when a caller marks a message as private, the UM server applies a do-not-forward template to the message before it's submitted to the hub transport server. (Often-asked question: can you use other RMS templates instead of do-not-forward? No, you can't.)

Moderation is another awfully interesting feature, but I'll have to write about it later-- my dinner, a bag of tasty microwave popcorn, is done!

"It takes work"

2009-05-04T03:36:48Z

While in Monterey, I had the chance to attend the local ward. I'd forgotten that it was the first weekend of the month, so I was a bit surprised to discover myself in the midst of a testimony meeting. One testimony in particular caught my ear. A young woman (whom I'll call Jackie) got up and said that her husband was gone, "but not for that long-- it's only for four months!" That made my complaining about a two-week business trip seem very minor in comparison. She went on to tell the story of Barbara, a family friend who, though somewhat eccentric, was unfailingly cheerful and outgoing. Barbara was well known in her ward for cheerful and willing service to others. She was going through a rough patch, and the speaker said she thought to visit Barbara and cheer her up. Barbara greeted her at the door with hair askew, no makeup, and swollen cheeks from a recent visit to the dentist. However, Barbara's greeting was as heartfelt and cheerful as always. Jackie marvelled at this and said "Barbara, how can you always be so cheerful?" Barbara's reply, delivered by Jackie with a wonderful swooping voice, was simple: "Well, it takes work!"

Jackie's point was simple: we can choose whether to be happy, or not. We can choose to be positive about our circumstances, or not. We can be thankful for what we have, or we can complain and lament what we don't have. Being positive and cheerful is as much a choice as deciding what clothes to wear in the morning. That's not to say that it's always easy to choose that mindset. We're all often tempted to be bitter, angry, resentful, or just plain unhappy. Sometimes we have good reasons for these feelings; other times, we take small things and blow them out of proportion, then use them as justification for these feelings. These are choices we get to make. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent-- for that matter, they can't make you feel anything else either!

I am a firm believer in this principle. Most people, I think, are as happy as they make up their minds to be. While this is probably a gospel principle, it sure isn't exclusive to Latter-day Saints. Some of the kindest, most service-oriented, happiest people I've ever known are those who despite poor health or other circumstances choose to be that way! I'm reminded of Sister Morgan, an elderly lady in our ward who is probably the most positive person I've ever met. She always seems to be in good spirits,and if she ever wasn't she'd probably be thinking about what good spirits she'd like to be in. I try to emulate her example, and y'know what? It works, but it takes work.

Twitter integration test 1

2009-05-04T03:17:39Z

This is a simple test to see whether MT properly runs the MT-Twitter plugin when I post a new item. (I know that Ecto's plugin works already.) (Update 1: nope, it didn't work.)