The decision was made by the executive team at the tiny firm where I work to abandon the infrastructure and m0ve to 100% hosted services. Here are some of the ‘gotcha’s’ if you have an existing Active Directory infrastructure and you move to a hosted provider:

1) Don’t forget to export your old profile in Outlook to an archive file before you create your new profile. You will long to see that history in, oh, about five minutes after you see a shiny bright (but empty) new mailbox.

2) Your migrated calendar items will not allow you to edit them. Outlook (correctly) thinks you are a new user. You will have to destroy and recreate the item if you need to change it.

3) Your mobile phone profile must be recreated (same reason as above)

4) Shared resources should not have their items moved, rather, they should be recreated all together

Of course, it goes without saying that you should research your vendor thoroughly in advance to understand:

1) Support. I mean like, do you get to talk to a live person if you need it? The selected vendor in this example prefers that you do NOT call; rather, post your issue on the support site and wait for an answer. While this is expensive in terms of your time, with this particular vendor it proved valuable in the sense that the extremely poor advice they were giving was documented.

2) SLA’s. Yes, yes, everyone claims 99.999% uptime. But what recourse do you have when the provider posts a message on their website apologizing for Exchange 2007 being down, we are working with Microsoft now, check back later please?

3) What services are they actually providing? Using the vendor that my soon to be former employer chose as an example, while their website states things like, “standard 14 day deleted items retention for Exchange 2007 subscribers”, this translated to eight hour deleted item retention unless you ‘upgraded’ for a ‘nominal fee’.

Michael Osterman, a leading analyst in the messaging and collaboration space, I wish we could have retained you to help choose a vendor rather than the ‘Picked the top Google search vendor’ approach.

Technorati Tags: Corporate Life

Apparently Virginia is a significant source of spam and the courts here have real expertise in adjudicating antispam cases. There is a new court case expected to be filed against spammers by ”seeking the identity of individuals responsible for harvesting millions of e-mail addresses on behalf of spammers.”

“It is clear that the key to stopping spam is identifying those responsible for it, and getting that information into the hands of those capable of doing something about it,” [the prosecuting attorney] said.

“… if we can take two or three major spammers offline, that’s a huge victory for the Internet as a whole.”

Vacations are good. I recommend them. I am back from a cruise in the Caribbean and to a person everyone at my place of employment has commented on how rested & relaxed I look.  Heh.

Naturally I come back to a full plate, so I will be sharing some of those challenges with you as the week progresses.

I was in shock this afternoon when I read that Kathy Sierra has been receiving death threats on her blog. Read what others are saying over at Techmeme or Scobleizer since they can probably articulate this issue better than I.

We are truly living in a mad world when someone is attacked in this manner. I think Kathy said it best when she said:

“If you want to do something about it–do not tolerate the kind of abuse that includes threats or even suggestions of violence (especially sexual violence). Do not put these people on a pedestal. Do not let them get away with calling this “social commentary”, “protected speech”, or simply “criticism”. I would never be for censoring speech–these people can say all the misogynistic, vile, tasteless things they like–but we must preserve that line where words and images become threats of violence. Freedom of speech–however distasteful and rude the speech may be, is crucial. But when those words contain threats of harm or death, they can destroy a life.”

Update: Climb to the Stars seems to have the best set of links to help understand the background of this issue

Me: “I am dying for something salty, crunchy, yummy right now…because I can’t get this Exchange restore to work. Have I mentioned I hate our backup software because it is so hard to use?”

Coworker: “I have some rice cakes around here somewhere, I think. They are probably pretty old…”

Me: “Oh, I have almonds, whole wheat crackers and gum at my desk. Naw, I want chocolate or Breyer’s Rocky Road Ice Cream or some of that really great Tom Yum soup from my favorite Thai restaurant“

Coworker: “You know what would be really good? Chocolate dipped pretzels OR pretzels dipped in Nutella.”

Me: “You are killing me. I am running back to my office & drinking more green tea to try to GBTW!”

I headed to downtown Washington DC on Tuesday with hundreds of other IT professionals to witness the launch of Vista, Office 2007, see many other products demonstrated and of course, get our free copy of Office 2007.

This event was well orchestrated. My favorite part? The ‘Ask the Experts’ room. I have already been working on installing Sharepoint 2007 so I had questions and I also got to see one of my favorite Outlook MVP’s ever, Sue Mosher. As usual, she knows how to impart knowledge in a way that makes you go back to your desk thinking and inspired. Thanks for the insights Sue!

There was another event happening in the same area where the vendor booths were and if you look closely at this banner, you have to ask yourself, “Coincidence that this event was happening the same day that Vista is launched?!?” I think not.

Jim Allchin of Microsoft was quoted as saying, “It’s rock solid and we’re ready to ship. This is a good day.” Ha, well, I won’t run to the bank with the solid comment but I am excited nonetheless.

I know there are lots of things that didn’t happen with this version of the OS but I am so glad this product is out!

The last few patches for Windows have done something bad to my version of IE (version 6). It crashes constantly until I clear out the cache or reboot.  More than ever I am ready to move to Vista and all the newer versions of the various components I have grown accustomed to like IE.

My Vista machine remains incomplete since I still have not re-ordered a new processor. I need to try to get that done in the next 24 hours…

I am still struggling with a weird MAPI issue.  I was finally able to get the issue of the user mailbox from locking by giving him view only permissions to the Information Store. But it hasn’t really resolved the MAPI issue since he continues to get knocked off of AOL Instant Messaging (IM). I need to download some sort of sniffer and start reviewing the traffic to see if I can see what is traveling along the wire. Maybe try TCPview.