KC on Exchange and Outlook

Jason Mayans is the PM lead for many of the more end-user-oriented features in Exchange 12 such as improved calendaring and search.

He's kicked off his new blog with some cool historical posts on how we designed Smart Scheduling in Outlook/Exchange, including some screenshots of the designs over time which is always interesting to see:

The Evolution of “Smart Scheduling” in Outlook 2007 – Part 1

The Evolution of “Smart Scheduling” in Outlook 2007 – Part 2

I already threatened him with bodily harm if he starts a blog and then doesn't post to it regularly, we shall see if my threats have the desired effect. :-)

I'm feeling guilty for not having posted regularly much[1] lately, so just going through an archive of useful little tidbits I've archived over the years, I ran across this one:

Q: What is the name of the attribute that controls whether or not a public folder is mail-enabled?

A: Set PR_PF_PROXY_REQUIRED to true, and PR_PUBLISH_IN_ADDRESS_BOOK to true to - you'll never guess on your own - show the entry in the address book.

The process of getting the proxy object created and subsequently assigned an email address is a very asynchronous process, don't expect delivery to the public folder to work immediately after setting these props.[2]

[1] I have two kids and a full time job. Nuff said.
[2] I stole this sentence verbatim from an awesome dev.

We threw up a wiki for beta 2 to experiment with the format (hooray for slaveintern labor!):

http://www.exchangeninjas.com

(it's named after the e12 icon, which we call "the ninja star")

Or if you insist on being boring, http://www.theexchangewiki.com

If it ends up being a useful resource for the community, we'll see if we can keep it going after RTM. That will only happen if the community gets into it, however, so please go check it out, register, and edit a page to add your favorite tip, link to a blog entry with a useful tip in it, or ask a question.

At BlackDigital. He must have spent a lot of time on that, very cool to see.

Last week at Tech-Ed, I did demo duty for a series of meetings with various reviewers, showing off all the cool features that you'll be able to see in Exchange 2007 Beta 2. One of these meetings was with Paul Thurrott, during which we ran way over schedule, but I didn't want to stop because I was having a blast demoing all the fantastic ways you can use monad to manage exchange. Apparently it was time well spent, as Paul wrote in his latest set of "tidbits":

The new PowerShell (formerly code-named Monad) -based Exchange Management Shell (EMS) is sure to cause some palpitations, especially if you happen to be a UNIX old-timer. This is excellent stuff and surprisingly intuitive for a command line environment.

<pat self on back for demoing how intuitive and easy to use monad is in e12>

<pats the systems management team on back for giving people palpitations - that's a good thing, folks!>

It was interesting, because I walked into these meetings thinking that I had to show the reviewers how much GUI there was in exchange system manager (now called exchange management console or EMC) - our beta1 did not have a lot of GUI in it, and so there was a perception that you had to do everything via the cmdline, which was absolutely not the case. In the last coding milestone (after beta 1), we put a ton of GUI into EMC... so I wanted to show that off to the reviewers so they would realize that using the shell is not required, for administrators who aren't comfortable with it.

But as Paul saw the demos, he didn't seem at all worried about having enough GUI - within a minute it was quite obvious how much there was, and how clean and well organized it was. Instead, he drilled into concerns about the discoverability of monad, would non-programmers understand it, etc. Fortunately we have several key features that really help with discoverability of the cmdline and how to use it, as well as general ease of use of the cmdline.

I'll write up a blog post with an official demo script when I get a chance, and show y'all what I showed the reviewers... I didn't have an official script while demoing, because I just demo'd whatever the reviewers were interested in. I stole most of my tricks from our monad PM Vivek Sharma, anyway - check out his blog for more goodies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose has a "last updated" of just a couple of weeks ago, June 3rd.

I mean really, is there that much that can be said about the firehose, that wasn't already said prior to June 3rd?

It is 3:50 AM and I awake, bright and perky and minutes away from leaving for the airport to go to Boston. I'll be hanging out at the Exchange cabana most of Monday and Tuesday, see you there!

Vista is doing some really sweet stuff, visually... there's http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista which is just stunning, and now this ad on the front of microsoft.com which just kicks ass:

How cool is that? The answer: very.

I wrote an article for TechNet a few years ago called "Top Ten Tasks for New Exchange Administrators". I originally had 11, and I tried very hard to get the TechNet team to title the article "We turned it up to 11: Top 11 tasks for new exchange admins" but they wouldn't because "it won't localize well".

Even the graphic on MSDN's vista site about getting the beta is cool:

I promise, we really are cool... it's just hard to convince the powers that be that you can be cool and still be a professional-grade server app, and that IT professionals won't think less of the product if we try to make any jokes or pop-culture references in our documentation or any official communication.

Sheesh, you might as well just not even display this dialog, or maybe put a picture of a boogie man or a 'hazardous waste' icon on it:

It's amusing enough that the software in question has an error case due to an incorrect peripheral cable termination... but even more amusing to think that it is somehow useful to the user to inform them of a possible incorrect peripheral cable termination.

If you want to amaze and wow your friends (well, at least the geeky/dorky ones), you can fake your way around this limitation by composing a message and putting the DL on the To field and the BCC field. Using Outlook's handy-dandy DL expansion feature, you can expand the contents of the BCC field and then send the message as you normally would.

This feature is a lot like IRM in that it's a feature to help improve security... but like IRM, it is not a silver bullet to prevent users from emailing each other (although we have some awesome improvements coming in this area in Exchange 12, more on that in a later post!). On that note, here's another fun trick: when you receive an IRM-protected email where you're not allowed to reply all, click forward instead, change the "FW" to a "RE" and copy in the recipients to the appropriate fields, send the mail, and watch the head-scratching start.

Security purists or slashdot readers will point out that IRM-protecting a message to ensure that it doesn't leave the company doesn't actually protect that mail from being leaked. That's absolutely true. If a user receives an email and they want to disclose the contents to their favorite reporter, they don't need any fancy screencap software or DRM-cracker, they can just call the reporter and read the mail over the phone. Fortunately, that's not what IRM is all about. As office.microsoft.com itself states: "IRM...can't protect information from every threat, every person, or every set of circumstances. IRM is a highly effective deterrent to the office busybody, the careless coworker, or the small-time information thief. To a determined, technologically sophisticated, and well-paid corporate spy, IRM might be little more than a temporary setback.".

So what's a security-conscious exchange administrator to do? The simplest answer that helps with one of the more common uses of Send restrictions (DLs with huge memberships) is to set a restriction on the number of recipients permitted on mail. If you get complaints about a user using this tactic and you already use journaling, you can look up the journal reports of how the mail was sent to confirm the abuse. You could also choose to hide the DL from the GAL or hide the membership of the DL from users, in the hopes that out of sight = out of mind. But at the end of the day, these features are but tools in your arsenal; at the end of the day, a lot of things come down to users.

I've blogged previously about using ldp, a handy tool:

• Look up a user in the AD using LDP
• Finding a user in a large container using LDP

I had to use it again recently to look up the DLs a user was on, but the default display in LDP does not contain enough characters for that attribute to show the full results for any real-world case (I myself am on... let's just say way too many DLs).

So in order to get the full list, I had to use ldifde (which should be on any win2k3 box by default). The syntax is as follows:

ldifde -d "DNOfTheObject" -f c:\export.txt

So for example:

ldifde -d "CN=Exchange Goddess,DC=corp,DC=mycompany,DC=com" -f c:\export.txt

Then look in export.txt for MemberOf.

Of course, this can be used to look up any attribute... I just find it handiest for MemberOf and use ldp for most everything else.

I can only assume that I sound like a 12 year old girl. Every time a telemarketer calls, they inquire as to whether or not I am a decision maker in the home and when I say yes-and-please-put-us-on-your-do-not-call-list, they pause as if they don't quite believe me. I need to insert something into my standard response that 12 year olds wouldn't know about. I was thinking a short diatribe on crime rates, or how young kids use curse words, or stuff costs more these days... any suggestions?

So anyway, onto the point of this post. This evening, I received a phone call:

Her: "Hi, may I speak to David Lemson please?"
Me: "He's not here, can I take a message?"
Her: "This is Rita from the American Cancer Society..."
Me: <interrupting> "Listen, let's just cut this short, please put us on your do not call list."
Her: "May I ask why?"
Me: "I don't like getting calls from people I don't know."
Her: "...<pause>.... Um, I'm from the American Cancer Society."

What exactly did she think I meant? Ohhh, you said Rita from the American Cancer Society, I thought you said Skeeter from the American Nosepickers Association. Now that I know you're from the American Cancer Society, now I want you to interrupt me!

For certain types of folders, you may find it useful to have the folder list display the total number of items in the folder, not just the unread items (which it does by default).

For example, I set this on some folders that contain messages to certain distribution lists, where there will always be threads I haven't read (and knowing how many are unread doesn't help me since it's not a goal for me to read everything sent to the DL). I do find it useful to see the total number of items in the folder at a glance because when it creeps up too high I will go to the folder and shift+delete the older items so that I don't hit my mailbox quota.

To enable this, just right click on the folder in Outlook and choose Properties. Select "Show total number of items" and hit OK.

Customizing OWA themes is quite simple to do. Here's an example of a theme I just put together, I call it "MOOWA":

The fun part about this theme isn't so much the graphics as the sounds: included are a "mooooooooo" for the new mail sound as well as a cowbell[1] for the reminder sound.

For more information on customizing themes, here is a comprehensive article. But if you want quick steps on how to get the above one up and running, here they are:

1. Log into OWA as a test user with IE. Go to the Options page and choose the "Silver" theme.
2. Download the zip file and save it to your server. Unzip it.
3. Copy reminder.wav and notify.wav to C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\Exchweb\Img, or wherever Exchange is installed on your server. Make sure to make a copy of the existing ones first.
4. Go to C:\Program Files\ExchSrvr\Exchweb\Themes
5. Make a copy of the "2" folder and name it 2.original
6. Copy the files from the zip into the "2" folder, overwriting the ones already there.
7. Use notepad and open "OWAColors.css" in the "2" folder and make the following changes:

Explanation	Before	After
Puts the cowprint behind the list of messages	.msgViewerCont, .msgViewerGroupCont {  background-color:white; }	.msgViewerCont, .msgViewerGroupCont {  background-color:white;  background-image:url(/exchweb/themes/2/logo.gif); }
Makes the bar above the message view black.	.fldrTitleBar {  background-color:#706F90; }	.fldrTitleBar {  background-color:#000000; }
Makes the background behind the MOOWA logo in the upper-left black.	.nbTableMain {  background-color:#706F90; }	.nbTableMain {  background-color:#000000; }
Makes sure that the column you're currently sorting on still shows the background image	.vwSortCol {  background-color:#F5F5F6; }	.vwSortCol { }

All that's left to do is Ctrl+Refresh IE while logged in as the test user from step 1 to make sure everything's kosher.

[1] While testing the theme, I demo'd the sounds for my husband. He said "Play that one again" about the reminder sound, which I did. Then he said "It needs more cowbell."

These are so cool.

[via Nino]