Future talk: Messaging

Jan 31, 2007 | blog

In-Case-of-EmergencyThat’s one meeting I spent a few hours in – talking about future messaging plans for my employer.  Yeah, we’re on Exchange 2003 just like about 90% of the rest of the world – and it works pretty good.

But you can’t rest on your laurels, and just because Exchange 2003 SP2 has been nice and stable, doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for improvement.  Of course the varied interests around the table always brings a spirited debate that brings out great ideas.  There were no revelations as there sometimes are in these types of meetings, but it was a great session on getting a game plan together for identifying our next steps.

The most interesting thing in our recent “Future Technology” discussions is that there is more focused discussion on solving and preventing problems than there is of wiz-bang golly-gee tech stuff.  That kind of stuff is usually saved for the last 10 minutes or so, just to get it on the (bottom) of the list.  Hey, I’m still a tech geek and like to push the envelope as much as possible!

Of course, you’d expect that kind of productivity from this group, we’ve all worked together, oh, coming up on 10 years now.

So what’s on the list?  Oh, mostly boring stuff to simply make email work better, redundancy, DR contingencies and so on.  Other things like an in-house conferencing server would be more fun down the line a bit, so I’m holding out hope.  Got to have a stable foundation to build on as they say.

Ok, enough boring stuff.

DST 2007 & Microsoft Outlook or Exchange

Jan 31, 2007 | blog

WTF?

How many people have read the KB article (931667) over at Microsoft concerning the “Addressing the daylight saving time changes in 2007 using the Outlook Time Zone Data Update Tool“?  Go read it, I’ll wait…

Ok, glad your back – now I know that it was really congress that passed this smelly turd along to everyone – thanks bastards – but it seems to me that Microsoft really dropped the ball on this.  I mean, in the original design phase of Exchange and Outlook, they could have asked the question “what if the DST parameters change” and followed the conversation, just to see what ideas come up.  Maybe there would have been a better design, maybe not.  Maybe the way Exchange stores this information is the same way every calendaring system stores it.  That’s a scary thought – that nobody ever thought of handling this kind of change on the fly!

Not only do you need to patch the systems so that the new range of DST for 2007 is properly set up in the system, but you have to run an update tool to convert all the appointment data in the data stores to the proper time for the meeting.  That means that you have to run the tool on anything that stores its own calendar information.

So a stand-alone user needs to run the tool, and enterprises need to run the tool on their Exchange servers.  This is all well and good, and hopefully will be a one-time deal, but what about all those archived PST files?  What if someone pulls some archived recurring meeting and resends it to people?  If you read the KB, there is a usage scenario that actually points out that it will not contain the correct meeting times.

There are more.  If your mobile device (or other types) are not updated with the proper DST 2007 information, you could create an appointment or meeting (Task?) with a time setting that would not trigger a reminder at the time you expected it to – it would be an hour late.

Maybe I’m making too much out of this, but all I see for our help desk at work is a flood of calls that could have been prevented by MS long ago.  Tell me I’m wrong!

Link to: Addressing the daylight saving time changes in 2007 using the Outlook Time Zone Data Update Tool

Windows CE is not Windows Mobile

Jan 31, 2007 | blog

Windows CE As some may know, I’ve been a longtime PPC user, actually starting with the old “Palm-size PC” back in 1998 or so.  But the topic of this post is the parent operating system of the Pocket PC (and Windows Mobile for that matter) called Windows CE.

So we’ve been working on some Windows CE based devices for our warehouse management system at work.  The goal, of course, being a fast-booting, lightweight client device to use for a web-based WM tool.

The main trouble with the devices we had, was really the WinCE operating system and its ability (or lack thereof) to be able to use EAP-TLS to secure the wireless network.  Eventually a network stack update from the manufacturer did the trick, but it was frustrating to have everything configured correctly, but have the damn software not be able to connect up.

So, it’s one more chapter in alternate operating systems.  If it’s not this it would be something else, perhaps Linux of some flavor.  I’d actually like to have the ability to work with a Linux system at work – I think there is a huge potential for the OS in what we use PCs for.  But that’s another story.

Fortunately its almost over – its been kind of fun, writing some scripts and such.  Scripts are something that I don’t get to write as much.  We use most tools right out of the box (or try to), so there is as little custom work as possible.  Still, once in awhile a need comes along for a good script, and this was one of them for me. 🙂

As much as I’ve liked Windows CE based systems in the past, I’ve had about enough of them at this point.  Working with these systems has brought the operating system’s deficiencies to the surface, and they are not pretty.

Working with Pocket SharpMT on the MDA

Jan 30, 2007 | blog

Today is a blogging day using the Pocket SharpMT blogging client for Pocket PC. I’ve used the software before, but had not really pushed it’s limits yet.

So here today, I’m using it for a few posts – and to make good on my last post about not writing about more day to day items. Like what I do at the real job (it is daytime isn’t it?)

Pocket SharpMT

The main interface of SharpMT on the Pocket PC is the post creation interface that frankly is quite bare. Its out of necessity of course, there is very little space on a QVGA screen for all the fancy buttons and options normally shown on a WYSIWYG editor that most blogging clients have. All the basic post creation tools are here – bold, italic, links, etc…

The biggest thing that I had a problem with was getting the picture embedded. There as no obvious tool available to do this until I dug a bit deeper. Then I found the functionality to specify a file to upload – I just hope I set it up correctly. 😉

So that’s it for now, I’ll probably post a bit more on SharpMT as I use it more. This was mostly an experimental post to see what I can and can’t do with the tool. The one last test was adding the Technorati tag info at the bottom of the post.

UPDATE: I did have to manually tweak the tags below – it got all goofed up.  Kind of cool though.

Technorati tags: pocket+sharpmt

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