Exchange

Living the Dream: Exchange, SharePoint and Lync

Richard Green on

If you happen to work for a Microsoft prodominant environment and you either are thinking about deploying the holy trinity of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync or you are interested in the integration between the services, then check out these two posts from DrRez on the TechNet Blogs. These two posts go into techincal detail about the integration between the services and how to actually setup some of them.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/drrez/archive/2011/04/26/lync-2010-exchange-2010-sharepoint-2010-and-office-2010-integration-part-1.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/b/drrez/archive/2011/04/27/lync-2010-exchange-2010-sharepoint-2010-and-office-2010-integration-part-2.aspx

One nugget I learnt from reading it was that for Exchange to see the LDAP thumbnailPhoto attribute to allow it to publish the pictures into the Global Address List and Outlook clients is that you ust update the AD Schema to allow replication of the thumbnailPhoto attribute to Global Catalog servers.

Failure with Concessions

Richard Green on

Today wasn’t the greatest day for me in one respect. Unfortunatly I flunked my 70-236 Configuring Exchange Server 2007 exam for the second time, and strangely, with months more Exchange experience under my belt (and I mean that because we’ve faced our share of issues and undertaken our share of mini-projects on infrastructure engineering since my last attempt), and with loads of preperation, I actually scored roughly 75 points lower than my first attempt.

I purchased a three exam pack through Prometric earlier in the year which expires December 31st 2011, so I’ve got to try and get two exams passed before the end of the year still, with MDOP being my next exam and still undecided on the third, but Exchange better look out, as once I’ve done my two remaining in the pack, I’ll be going back for my MCITP for Exchange Server 2007 and 2010.

The concession in all of this is a feeling of self-enlightenment. Tomorrow, my trusty laptop will be going back to the office from home so that I can re-deploy it with SCCM to install my yummy new SSD disk (I would clone the disk, but I have a feeling BitLocker might not accept that too kindly). To make sure I didn’t loose any data, I hooked up my VPN this evening and made sure that all of the data on my laptop was safe and sound on the file servers and work, and then I turned my attention to OneNote.

I’m an avid OneNote user, and will use it over written notes whenever I possibly can. Being a Windows Phone 7 user, I also enjoy the OneNote integration in the phone giving me super access to my personal notes. I quickly realised that through the course of migrating through various working practices at work, I had one notebook in my SharePoint 2010 MySite and another locally on the laptop, and then a third in the Windows Live SkyDrive cloud. I’ve just combined them all into my SharePoint 2010 MySite notebook and I feel great for it.

Unification for the win 🙂

So Long, So Busy

Richard Green on

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything and for that I am disappointed, however I do have just cause.
Since my last post, me and the wife Nicky have been working the Cambridge Weight Plan and in one week I lost 10lb which is amazing. We’ve got Nicky’s Dad over this week helping us with some lose ends of DIY in the house too, so my evenings are packed with DIY work.

Back in the land of tech, I’ve been busy on a MIMEsweeper for SMTP training course, a Websense training course, and working feverishly hard on System Center Configuration Manager and Exchange. I’m hoping I’ll be coming out with a couple of posts soon on these subjects, along with some bits on Windows Home Server 2011.

Configuring Plain Text Email Delivery

Richard Green on

For a project at work I documented how to force Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and 2007 to delivery emails to a mailbox in Plain Text format even if the sender sent the message as HTML or RTF. This is highly useful for server-side email ingestion processes which do not support HTML or RTF.

I have re-produced the document in a global audience format, and I have made it available for download on my Windows SkyDrive account.

Please feel free to use this document for your own personal means, and if you have any feedback then please let me know.

SIP VoIP for Home and the Day of Sadness

Richard Green on

Today is a sad day, because yesterday I came up with an evil super plan, however today I realise that it just cannot be.

My evil super plan was this. To purchase a SIP line from an ISP, configure my Cisco 2651XM with CME and have the SIP line trunked into the router. From here, I was going to replace our existing Windows Home Server with Windows Small Business Server 2008, which I would install Office Communications Server 2007 R2 onto.

The combination of SBS and OCS would give us the ability to use Unified Messaging (UM for Exchange) and would allow us to use the Office Communicator client on the desktop and Office Mobile Communicator on our Windows Phone devices. I would then have configure the 2651XM and OCS to trunk the SIP line between each other using guides available online for configuring OCS and CME to talk so that inbound calls on the SIP line would be routed to the OCS server.

This just gets better now, because the second part of the plan was to configure a hunt group in OCS which would group both me and Nicky together. If someone were to ring the home phone, it would ring both of us simultaneously and then the first one to answer receives the call (that’s the hunt group at work). If nobody answered then the caller could leave a voicemail on the OCS server which would be delivered to both me and Nicky to our SBS Exchange mailboxes using UM.

Just stop for one minute to think of the power and the feature set am talking about here?

  • Imagine being able to answer your home phone anywhere in the world from either your PC or mobile?
  • Imagine being able to receive voicemails left on your home phone from your inbox anywhere in the world via PC, mobile or Outlook Web Access from an Internet cafe?
  • Imagine making phone calls to numbers anywhere in the world just like using a normal telephone but at the fraction of the cost?

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