Archive: October, 2009

Microsoft Virtualization Best Practices for Exchange Server

No comments October 29th, 2009

Microsoft have got a webcast coming up next week to discuss recommendations for virtualizing Exchange server and the benefits of using Hyper-V + System Center for virtualization.

The webcast is on Wednesday, Nov. 4 at 10am Pacific time, which is Thursday, Nov 5 at 5am for those in Sydney.

For more information and to register for the webcast, click here

Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer has been updated!

No comments October 20th, 2009

The Exchange Team have released an updated version of the Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer

The tool simulates several client logon and mail flow scenarios. When a test fails, many of the errors have troubleshooting tips to assist you in correcting the problem. You may recall reading about it before..

Some new features include:

  • Updated user interface
  • New CAPTCHA implementation
  • Updated the Outlook Anywhere test logic to work with Exchange 2010
  • Added a password confirmation text box to ensure the proper password was entered before running a test. This will reduce the number of tests that fail simply due to a typo in the password.

 

Additional tests include:

  • Exchange Web Services – This allows you to perform connectivity testing for Exchange Web Services client such as Entourage. Developers can also use the Service Account Verification test to ensure things are configured and working properly for access with an alternate account or Exchange Impersonation.
  • Outbound SMTP – Performs Reverse DNS testing, DNS RBL Checks, and SenderID validation against a provided "outbound" IP address

 

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Climate Change..

No comments October 15th, 2009

That’s right, you have not misread the heading.. not the kind of thing you would expect to see on here, right?.. Before you ask, I have not lost my mind, well.. not entirely.. today is Blog Action Day ‘09 and this year’s topic is Climate Change so I thought I would try to talk about that a little. I’ll be the first to admit that I am no expert on the subject, I don’t drive a Prius and I don’t always remember to take my own shopping bags when I go shopping.

We’ve all seen the lists right? “25 Ways to Help Curb Climate Change”, etc.. etc and these usually contain things like “Recycle your newspaper” and “Take the bus as often as possible”. Firstly, who still reads the newspaper? we geeks are all about RSS feeds and Kindle’s anyway and if you live in a city, chances are you already take the bus daily.. don’t get me wrong, I think these little tips are important, but, I think its time some of these get revised.

I am a great believer that technological innovation will contribute significantly to reducing the effects of climate change. Other factors, like population growth on the other hand is often overlooked in this debate. Continuous population growth and an expected increase of 2.3 billion people on the planet by 2050 is multiplying the impacts of climate change. Perhaps greater access to family planning is the key? in fact, according to a London School Of Economics study, money spent on contraception is five times more efficient than money spent on clean energy technologies.

Lets look at little ways technology can help. LCD monitors.. not only do they look cooler and take up less room on your desk, they use less than half the power of a traditional CRT.

One of my personal favourites is Blackle. “Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search”. But why? here’s why.. An all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. lets do a little math and see what could be saved by moving a high volume site to the black format.

Google gets about 200 million queries a day. Let’s assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode on a CRT monitor, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8 300 kilowatt-hours per day, or about 3 000 000 kilowatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that’s $75,000.

If you are reading this off my actual blog (not via RSS) you are probably looking around right about now and thinking something along the lines of “this site is not black!” well, yeah.. and I don’t get 200 million hits a day either, if i did, it would probably be black.. black is the new white after all.

Other links:

Exchange 2010 launching at Tech-Ed Europe 2009!

No comments October 9th, 2009

The Exchange product team have announced that Exchange 2010 is Code Complete and they are looking to launch at Tech·Ed Europe 2009 in early November.

Congrats guys, great effort!