Archive for the ‘Exchange’ Category
Posted by eileenb on November 11, 2009
Well its great to be helping out in an area of TechEd that I know really well, and I know lots of experts in UC so it’s good to catch up with old friends from around Europe.
I’m also pleased to be helping out at Interact09 as this will be my third Interact event and my second this year.
The sessions are really up close and personal, the conversations are amazing and the swag is nice.
But the really great thing about Interact is the opportunity to influence the Product team directly. The techy part of the team too. The guys who actually write the stuff.
And I think that’s the main value in my opinion.
We invite people who are influencers in their own UC circles. Bloggers, Tweeters, customers who look after UC installations – and people who work with UC, whether in Support or Sales will all have really good interactions with the UC product team. And they listen to you, your concerns, your comments and your questions.
And that feedback goes into the pot for the next version of the product.
And that’s why you need to attend. Hopefully there’ll be Interact sessions at a place near you soon. I’ll let you know if there are… 
Posted in Events, Exchange, Technical, collaboration | Leave a Comment »
Posted by eileenb on October 7, 2009
I missed this, but Andrew pointed me towards the Microsoft Learning Clinic offering Exchange 2010 free online learning. There’s 2 hours of learning in the collection…
Very useful if you want to get your head around all of the extra new features in Exchange 2010. from what I’ve seen so far, Exchange 2010 OWA is significantly better than any OWA I’ve ever seen and I’ll spend a bit of time playing with it before reporting back here.
Meanwhile – take advantage of this free offer whilst its on…
Posted in Exchange, Technical | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on April 21, 2009
Last week at Interact2009, I grabbed some time with Ian Hameroff (@hameroff) to talk about the features of Exchange 2010 that we’ve announced.
We snuck into the filming room where they were filming the Windows 7 videos during a coffee break and captured some of the key features of Exchange – straight from the product team…
Thanks Ian for missing lunch to do this – and well done for getting it all filmed in one take too
and the URL for you to click is: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010
Posted in Exchange, collaboration, messaging | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on April 20, 2009
Ewan has finally gone ahead and posted this amazing tool externally. Thousands of us have been using this internally at Microsoft for years. I make no apologies for reproducing his post (for those of you who don’t click links to other blogs)
![TC[1]](http://blogs.technet.com/blogfiles/ewan/WindowsLiveWriter/OutlookThreadCompressordownloadnowavaila_CCE0/TC%5B1%5D_thumb.jpg "TC[1]")
Included in the v5 beta (which is a real pain to install nowadays – the previous v4.2.030 version has nearly the same feature set and is a lot more self contained), was a piece of logic which captured stats on TC usage and emailed them back to me.
Since many people at MS are still running that beta (it’s a long story, but the source code went south so it’ll never get out of “beta” state), I still get maybe 20-30 statistics mails a day…
Since August 2003 when the first statistics email arrived – from me, kind-of naturally – until 24th April 2007 (when I last did an analysis of the stats), TC v5 beta had scanned over 400m email messages and had compressed over 30m, worth nearly half a terabyte of email data.
![TC4[1]](http://blogs.technet.com/blogfiles/ewan/WindowsLiveWriter/OutlookThreadCompressordownloadnowavaila_CCE0/TC4%5B1%5D_thumb.jpg "TC4[1]")
I can honestly say that the Thread Compressor has been great for my productivity and is the first thing i install on my PC after a rebuild… It’s small, neat, efficient – and cuts the mail down in your Inbox dramatically – allowing you to have lots more coffee!
Do read the warnings though that Ewan blogs about. This DELETES your mail So of course there are disclaimers over on the site . But it will save you a heck of a lot of time too…
Great stuff mate – Forgiveness, not permission
Posted in Exchange, Office, collaboration | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on March 23, 2009
Yes, that’s right. Invitation only to Interact 09. on April 14th. That’s unusual enough. Usually we open the event up to everyone in the hope that we can inspire you to see some new products and learn about the products you already have installed.
But Interact is an exclusive event, open to invited guests only. This gives you a much better ratio of audience to MS staff. At Interact 08 we found that the conversations flowed much more readily, with enough MS staff on hand to make sure your question got answered – sometimes by the person that actually wrote the component! We’re streaming a live keynote over from Redmond (which will be at the end of the day on the UK to allow for time differences), and we’ll have someone over from Redmond (both on the OCS and Exchange sides) to answer your roadmap questions.
Interact09 is an event focused entirely on Communications – OCS, OC and Exchange so it’s not the sort of event that anyone would want to come to. if you’ve been around a while you may remember the old MEC – well its different – but similar in theme. Lots of insider information, lots of “extra” knowledge, lots of ideas.
So what if you really needed to go but haven’t received your personal invitation from us? What if your company is just planning your UM infrastructure and you haven’t told your Microsoft account manager yet? What if you don’t have a Microsoft account manager but really really need to get to this event. What if you talk about UC all the time to anyone who will listen?
Well you can persuade me. I’ve had clearance from corp to accept requests from people who really want to come along to this event and are not already on our invite list. I can send you an invitation code – but you need to mail me and convince me first
How could you convince me to invite you?
Perhaps you could tell me about your active unified communications blogging habit. Or you might tell me about the local community activities you support – speaking engagements and user group meetings. Or perhaps you’ve got a tremendous amount of UC expertise.
If that’s you – and you want an invite. mail me (email address can be found here) and I’ll allocate the few remaining invitations based on your mail.
and I hope to see you there…
Posted in Exchange, collaboration, messaging | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on March 17, 2009
We’re planning a Virtual conference in May this year as we’re not going out on the road this summer with the TechNet roadshow. Alex, who writes the TechNet Newsletter, has created an online poll so you can vote for the sessions that you’d really like us to deliver.
We’ll be creating the Virtual Conference based on your answers to this Poll so please can you vote for the sessions that you’d most like us to deliver and we’ll schedule the day round your responses.
George has the information about all of the sessions on her blog if you’d like to see what the sessions are all about before you vote.
I’ll share more information about the sessions when we have a decent number of votes to make a good choice of sessions…
Posted in Exchange, Office, collaboration, messaging | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on March 9, 2009
With all of the announcements for Exchange online (and SharePoint online), I thought I’d do a little digging and find out where our documents are which talk about it in a general way (an earlier post has some links to techy documents )Here are the features that a subscriber would get with for Exchange Online – Standard
Exchange Online subscribers benefit from a set of features that are common to all Microsoft Online Services offerings:
Secure access: 28-bit Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. Anyone who intercepts a communication sees only encrypted text.
Business continuity: Geographically dispersed Microsoft data centres which act as backups for each other
Intrusion monitoring: Systems are monitored for unusual or suspicious activity, notifying the customer if necessary.
Security audits: compliance policies, antivirus signatures, configuration and security updates.
High availability: 99.9 percent scheduled uptime.
Support: Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the service administrator.
Administration Centre: For managing all Microsoft Online Services. You can add and delete users, add contacts and distribution lists, and create and configure SharePoint Online sites.
My Company Portal: Access services such as e-mail, create a SharePoint site etc.
Sign In application: Sign in once and access all services without being prompted repeatedly for their password.
Virus filtering: Automatically removes viruses and spam. Also scans for viruses in intracompany e-mail and in all documents that reside in SharePoint Online sites.
Directory Synchronization tool: Keep your on-premises Active Directory and the Microsoft Online Services directory in sync.
A similar white paper is available for Sharepoint online here:
Posted in Exchange, collaboration, messaging | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on February 20, 2009
Posted in Exchange, General musings, collaboration | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on January 15, 2009
I’ve been watching all of the buzz about the next Exchange 14 for a couple of days now I didn’t have a chance to blog it before as I’m at the BETT 09 show and answering loads of technical questions on a huge amount of topics (and demoing songsmith to teachers as I’m the only one on the technical desk to have played with it properly).
The Exchange team have released a video about Exchange 14 and blogged about it yesterday. it’s also on TechNet Edge. So David,
There are over 3.5 million students using hosted Exchange 14 in the US and giving some great feedback – it shows how it scales too.
Great video by the way KC – and stop slouching!
Posted in Exchange, General musings, collaboration | Comments Off
