I just posted a new entry to the FriendsInTech website about optimizing the speed of Firefox using SpeedyFox. This program worked really well for me – highly recommended.
Thinking about BPOS to host the exchange mail for your small office? – I discovered a small gotcha this afternoon but first a couple of thoughts in our recent experiences between Google Apps and Microsoft BPOS.
We’ve had several requests from clients to host their email in the cloud using services like google apps or Microsoft Hosted Exchange. Our first deployments were with google apps due to the lower cost per year, but as we’ve found out the support from Google is severely lacking. We had a peculiar issue where one users email sent through outlook would get marked as spam all the time, yet if they used the gmail web interface and sent exactly the same content the mail would get sent with no problems. The service that marks the destination mail as spam is postini – now owned by Google so it should really be a simple matter of turning over the problem to Google to investigate. Unfortunately Google’s response so our request was basically “thanks – if we feel like getting back to you, we might do – in a couple of days”. As it turned out, the issue was resolved by deleting the google sync profile and recreating it again.
Contrast this to a Microsoft issue which started off as a pre-sales technical call to get a user id setup and ended up with the gtlv owa issue I blogged about earlier. I had several calls from Microsoft within an hour to work on the issue. They worked really hard to ensure my problems were solved and it almost felt like they were harassing me as they kept following up for a status even though I’d told them a couple of times that I was happy for the case to be closed – I even got a call at 5pm on Saturday afternoon from support – something I’ve not experienced (at least from a end user experience!)
So, after singing Microsoft’s praises – the gotcha. Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange service has a directory sync service that synchronises AD information to the cloud ready for newly created users and distribution lists to appear in the hosted exchange environment. Unfortunately, according to the Directory Synchronization prerequisites the server needs to be running 32bit AND not be a domain controller. Unfortunately for small companies just starting out from a peer to peer network and getting their first server (but don’t want SBS2008 for some reason), this first server is very likely to be 64bit (crazy not to nowadays) and also a domain controller – possibly/probably even THE domain controller. Installing a 32bit member server is totally out of the question. It’s not *that* big a deal as all the information can be created online, but it’s twice the amount of data entry along with the possibility of typos but also every AD change of membership and user creation/deletion now needs to be duplicated online. For large organizations this is not going to be a problem as they’ll likely have extra servers lying around, but for small businesses this is very unlikely. For very large organizations (ie Universities hosting mail through live.edu) it seems that the AD sync program actually requires extra software functionality with the Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) package (however I’m not too familiar with these details just yet)
This is the second flaw in Microsoft’s online feature list that extols the virtues of Microsoft vs Google that I’ve found – Active Directory synchronization is not always possible and the other is the benefit of not having to download an application to synchronize data from outlook to the cloud/google – fair enough a client doesn’t have to be downloaded for that application but instead a single signon client needs to be downloaded to prevent the various Microsoft apps asking for the password multiple times. I did think that was the whole point of the “save password” option is for in the outlook and browser applications!
I was also really surprised that the Exchange online is not running Exchange2010 – the Outlook Web App is so much nicer in 2010 compared to 2007 – as I run Outlook 2010 at home and Exchange2010 in the office I’m spoilt (but I still need Office 2010 on the work laptop – thats hopefully coming real soon)
I was getting the “‘gtLV’ is null or not an object” message when I replied to an email using our Microsoft Online Hosted Exchange email account. Ironically enough, the problem would always occur when I replied to a new email from a Microsoft support engineer. The email would go through but I would get the ” ‘gtLV’ is null or not an object” error message popup on the screen. If I replied to the email again the problem would not occur. A very similar message can be seen in the Microsoft Exchange Server forums where I also posted the provided solution.
After many emails to the very patient support tech at Microsoft (as I would reply and then send an email to let him know if the reply worked or not) we escalated the ticket and I got back the following resolution.
1. type regedit on command prompt or run
2. go to: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
3. create TabProcGrowth (string or dword) and set the value to 0
This solution worked for me. From what I can see at the ie8blog this has the side effect of reducing the protectedmode protection and I think the browser tabs use the same process rather than running in seperate processes. This is a slight downside, but I doubt many users will care – they’re more than happy to have OWA working.
A couple of weeks ago I decided to do a wireless upgrade of my Blackberry. It warns you that it will take a couple of hours to do – and also stated that I need to remove some applications as I was running out of memory. This seems to be a common theme with the Blackberry – I don’t know what is so hard about getting Blackberry to store data on SD cards but instead they insist on storing everything on the devices memory – and Windows SmartPhones and Treo’s were no better from my past experience. Anyway – after the upgrade I went to access gmail and initially gmail would just lock up after loading. Thinking a deletion and redownload would fix it, I went ahead and deleted the application. When I went to download it again, the gmail website stated that gmail was not available for the 8830. I knew it was as I’d been using it about 4 hours earlier! I tried several methods of installing and nothing worked. The Sprint website gave me the ability to download my gmail into the main blackberry email application which then meant I had a mixture of gmail and work mail in one inbox. It was also only downloading some of the emails – not what I wanted. I tried searching online and couldn’t find much information and no solutions on this problem.
For some reason I then decided to do another check for wireless update and sure enough, there was another wireless update. Considering the blackberry state couldn’t get much worse I downloaded the new update and voila – gmail was available again. If this happens again, go to Options, Advanced Options, Wireless Update, Check for Updates. I’m now running v4.5.0.186
So far I’ve not seen much difference but yesterday I did see the option to enhance the call quality whilst on a call (but seeing as though I saw this when trying to work out why neither of us on a call could hear each other I don’t think the button really helped!)
The other difference I’ve noticed is that pushing 1 for Voicemail no longer worked and instead the phone asks me to assign a shortcut for the w key. The solution for this is to delete the empty speed dial entry for w and then reboot by pulling the battery out.
Now that Google Voice is now out of beta and anyone (in the US) can sign up, I think they need to work on their transcription services next. I think the reason it’s US only is the transcription can’t understand the UK accents as this is the transcription of my Mum’s call to me this morning.
Hello and I’ll give you a call. I’m today and I don’t know if you’re not possible we can. Hey Erin, it’s about when you can. You’ve been sent. That’s 9 that meeting. I think. Okay, okay. Give me a well hi.
I thought it was amusing, but Mum should know better than to call at 9am on a Saturday – it’s my only chance for a lie in so it’s unlikely I’ll be awake to answer the phone 😉
I have donated the voicemail to google to assist in their transcription efforts.
Congratulations to Deanna who won the drawing for $30 of Kroger gift cards thanks to the Kroger Family of Stores and General Mills through MyBlogSpark as part of the Pound for Pound challenge. So far I’ve lost 5.5 pounds so I have a way to go to reach my goal but I’m getting there.
I’ve upgraded and if you are seeing this, then the process was the normal easy, couple of clicks upgrade. So far the interface looks cleaner and I’m liking the fact that finally the updates is at the top of the main dashboard menu rather than being buried in a couple of menus and not in the obvious place. It was weird that plugin upgrades were not under the upgrade option in 2.9.2
Let me know if anything isn’t working – I’ll be upgrading the other sites in the next couple of days – it will be interesting to see what is discussed at Wordcamp/Podcamp Ohio on Saturday.
I’ve finally got around to uploading and saving the Dell Configuration and Dell alert script files that will assist in obtaining alerts when Dell Servers detect a problem. The script files are pretty self explanatory – the conf.bat file configures the alerts on the server, dellalert.bat gets activated and sends and email to your email address or pager/sms email address.
Note that for easy transfer from client site to client site, it’s probably best to set the mailserver parameter to be the mx record of your mail server (assuming you allow smtp out from client machines) – this way it’s one less thing to change when deploying at client sites.
For more information check out the OMSA configuration section of this blog although the main post with instructions is at Dell Open Manage Server Administrator OMSA Alert Setup Updated.
Download the Configure OMSA Batch File zip file here
In a somewhat different blog posting (but don’t worry this isn’t going to be a regular event) I have a giveaway for one of my readers.
Kroger is one of the sponsors for the Pound for Pound Challenge – a US wide version of the Biggest Loser. You can go to www.pfpchallenge.com/kroger to sign up and pledge the amount of pounds you will lose by the end of June 2010. For every pound pledged, 14 cents will be donated to Feeding America which is enough to deliver one pound of groceries to a local food bank.
Unfortunately I only heard about it two weeks ago and it expires at the end of the month but I’d like to lose a bit of weight – my target goal is to lose 11 pounds – probably not healthy to do this in 4 weeks but that is my final goal no matter how long it takes me – after that it’s another 10 pounds but that is another story 😉
So far (depending on the time of the day) I think I’ve lost about 4 pounds so I have some way to go 😉
Anyway, as part of the event I will have a $30 gift card to give away to one lucky reader – just leave a comment on this blog post and one lucky winner will be drawn at random on the 26th June (contest closes midnight on Friday). I’ll contact you via email to get your address details so please ensure your email is correct (it will not be displayed on your comment). If you do pledge for the pound for pound challenge then please include this information in your comment but it’s not a strict requirement.
The Kroger Family of Stores gift card, information, and giveaway were all provided by the Kroger Family of Stores and General Mills through MyBlogSpark – a service that provides access to review new products, services and survey entries – and occasionally giveaways to your readers – hence this post. Contest not applicable to family members.
Update Congrats to Deanna who won the competition, replied with her details and the gift cards are on their way.
I registered for PodcampOhio 3 months ago but for some reason it was not in my calendar so it’s a good job they reminded us about it on the blog.
It will be nice to take the dellmini with me next week instead of having to lug the normal laptop around. The only annoying thing is the mouse movement and smaller keyboard so I’ll have to type slower. I’m debating on loading OneNote onto the machine (restricting me to just one OS for the day or just using Onenote WebApp(but that assumes web access is always available)
If you’re going – don’t forget to say hello.
I guess I should have got my act together and submitted a session on “securely logging into your WordPress blog at conferences without needing an SSL certificate”. The most embarrassing thing is that I worked out how to do this last year before the conference and said my instructions were coming soon!