Another STC award for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out

The nice people at Microsoft Press have been in contact with me again to let me know that my book Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out has now received an “excellence” award from the Society of Technical Communication (STC), the professional body for people who work with technical publications covering subjects from computers to science.

The notice I received from the Publisher of Microsoft Press said:

You’ll remember, I think, that your book Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out won a regional award of Distinguished from the Society for Technical Communication, Puget Sound Chapter.

But, wait – it gets better J Your book has now won an award of Excellence in Technical Communication from the international STC – the highest award they bestow on any book. It will be displayed at the 2012 STC Summit (May 20-23), in Rosemont, Illinois, and will be viewed by hundreds of conference attendees.

We have not yet received the judges’ evaluations, but we’ll send those along as soon as possible. STC describes the award this way: “An entry that wins an award of Excellence consistently meets high standards in all areas. The entry might contain a single major flaw or a few minor flaws. The entry demonstrates an exceptional understanding of technical communication principles.”

Apparently this makes Exchange 2010 Inside Out one of the top 50 books published last year in terms of its technical content and design.

Clearly I’m very happy for the book to be recognized in this manner as it makes all the hard work done to write, edit, copy-edit, technical-edit, layout, design, index, and publish worthwhile. The folks at Microsoft Press really did an exceptional job with this book.

Now on to Exchange 2013?  Perhaps…

- Tony

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Ten years on: The HP-Compaq merger

On May 3, 2002 HP announced that it had completed the acquisition of Compaq. The new HPQ stock began trading on May 6 as the new company launched into action around the world.

For those of us involved in the merger, it certainly was an exciting time. Based on an assumption that stockholders would approve the merger agreement, the senior leadership from both companies assembled in San Francisco for the week immediately before the merger closed to consider topics such as “Building the 100 day plan” and “Organization Design and Structure” (ODS) and “Adopt and Go”. I ended up in the Hyatt Hotel beside San Francisco Airport and joined my Compaq colleagues in meeting our HP counterparts for the first time and form the teams that would the various parts of the new company. The first introductions were slightly strained but the desire to get on to achieve swift progress soon kicked in to help us move forward.

Having gone through two major mergers (Compaq-Digital and HP-Compaq), I think that people selection is the hardest part of the process. ODS was a very structured process that forced managers to first define their goals for the new organization and then lay out what positions needed to be filled to achieve those goals. And then the real horse-trading began as the very natural tendency for ex-Compaq managers to advance cases for ex-Compaq people and vice versa on the HP side swung into full motion. There were many sidebar discussions to describe the strengths of various candidates. At times it was like speed dating. And the worst thing was that everyone knew that eventually they’d have to fill slots with people that they didn’t really know – and that some of the people that had done a great job for you in previous organizations would lose out to a candidate from the other company and would probably be made redundant.

There were safeguards in place to ensure that managers didn’t end up with a team selected exclusively from one company. My recollection is that whilst everyone acknowledged that a 50-50 selection to get to a balanced HP/CPQ team would be almost impossible to achieve, we all knew that 60-40 was attainable and that became the benchmark. In some cases, making the final decision about a slot to get to the desired balance was incredibly difficult.

One of the highlights of the pre-merger week was a session with Carly Florina. I know that there are many who think that Carly was a bad CEO for HP and lament her lack of regard for the “HP Way“, the almost mythical set of values operated by Bill Hewett and Dave Packard, HP’s founders. In 2007-2008, I occupied an office in Palo Alto beside Bill and Dave’s old offices, which were preserved in the same state as when they had left HP. Almost every day visitors would arrive to look over the offices and examine the awards and trophies that HP’s founders had accumulated. One interesting fact is that reasonably soon after the merger – maybe six months or so – there were more new people working for HP than those who had been there before the merger. The erosion in “true-blue” HP people allied to the upheaval around the merger and the subsequent market pressure on HP to perform to justify the merger are factors that I think undermined the HP Way and weakened the connection that many employees felt to the company.

I don’t share a negative view of Carly because all of my dealings with her were positive, including the times when she would attend CTO meetings to convince the technology leadership of the company to be more inventive. I can also say that her performance in front of many doubting managers at the Hyatt Regency at the Embarcadero in downtown San Francisco was compelling. She was in jeans, clearly tired after flying in front the east coast where she’d been arguing the case for the merger with bankers and investors, yet she did an incredible job of firing everyone up for the period that lay ahead, including a dynamic and unscripted Q&A session where she gave the impression of being a CEO that had both a vision and the drive to accomplish that vision.

Ten years later on I think that lots more good resulted from the merger than bad. There’s no doubt in my mind that the PC-centric culture of Compaq would have eventually led it to bankruptcy. Perhaps it was my Digital background, but I thought that Compaq’s energy was badly focused and misdirected. On the other side, HP had some great things going on (mostly in the realm of a terrifically profitable printing business) but was woeful at PCs and industry-standard servers. I also think that HP’s services business was in a bid of a mess, especially on the consulting side. As it happened, the two sides came together reasonably well and soon jelled to become more productive and profitable. And although there have been some hiccups since 2002 (CEO woes continuing, the strange case of WebOS, and probably a failure to seize more of the high ground in the Linux space), HP has proven to be a company that leads in many places.

Challenges lie ahead for HP. Enterprise Services is still not as strong as it should be. The printing business seems to be in a slow decline. The PC market is under huge cost pressures as well as the morphing nature of the devices that people really want to use (Windows 8 tablets will be very important to HP). And HP’s cloud initiative is possibly a year or so behind where it could have been had some decisions to invest been taken earlier. But overall, I think the work done ten years ago to bring Compaq and HP together has proven to be very successful, even if the stock price isn’t where it should be (fair disclosure, I own no HPQ stock) and Meg Whitman’s new team has some heavy lifting still to do.

Upwards and onwards to the next ten years.

- Tony (CTO of Compaq Global Services before the merger, and thankfully selected to be CTO of HP Consulting afterwards)

PS. Fortune Magazine has a great article about the recent trauma @HP. It’s a good read.

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Should Exchange 2013 force an Active Directory upgrade?

One of the interesting debates at the Exchange Q&A session at TEC 2012 was the question whether the upcoming release of Exchange 2013 should force companies who want to deploy the new software to upgrade their Active Directory infrastructure to a level higher than Windows 2003. Specifically, the proposal was that the deployment of Exchange 2013 within an organization should first require the Active Directory forest to run at Windows 2008 functional level on Windows 2008 R2 servers.

I should be clear that Microsoft has not put this requirement on the table and that I have seen no formal press release or other communication from Microsoft that even hints that they might move along this path. However, private conversations with a number of Microsoft engineers reveal a certain frustration that so many customers operate Active Directory based on outdated software running on old hardware. After all, Windows 2003 is now pretty elderly and is rapidly approaching the point when it becomes unsupported. Lots of people run Windows 2003 domain controllers and global catalog servers on old 32-bit servers whose best days have long disappeared in the rear view mirror.

Exchange was the first major Microsoft application to take advantage of Active Directory with the release of Exchange 2000 in 1999. This wasn’t altogether surprising because the first generation of Exchange was based on an X.500-based (loosely based in the eyes of some) Directory Service that looked, felt, behaved, and generally responded very similarly to Active Directory. The advent of a fully-fledged enterprise-quality Active Directory was good for Exchange because it could drop its own Directory Service and take advantage of a directory that was much more tightly integrated into Windows. The situation has persisted to this day.

The transition from Windows NT to Windows 2000 was slowed a tad by the need to plan for Active Directory. We learned a lot in those early days and soon became accustomed to dealing with forests and domains. Best practice slowly evolved after a few hiccups (such as the assumption that the domain is a security boundary) and the fears that administrators had about operations such as schema upgrades faded with time and familiarity.

Aside from the introduction of the Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC), which isn’t supported by Exchange, not much seems to have happened to Active Directory in terms of new functionality or dramatic new capabilities since. Or so it seems on the surface. And perhaps it’s because Active Directory is so familiar (like a comfortable old shoe) that we’ve forgotten that it’s important to keep it fresh and updated to meet the needs of new applications and new operational imperatives, such as need for increased automation.

I can’t quite work out why people would want to keep on running Windows 2003 domain controllers and global catalogs. Hopefully these are 64-bit systems rather than the antiquated 32-bit servers that Windows 2003 began upon, but even so, the facts are that Windows 2003 is old and needs to be removed from corporate computing environments. Moving to a more modern platform (my recommendation is to use Windows 2008 R2) provides Active Directory with a new lease of life with an operating system that is maintained and more secure than its predecessor. It also allows Active Directory’s functional level to be upgraded to take advantage of new features such as the recycle bin (something that should probably have been part of Active Directory from day 1 anyway).

Overall, I think that it would be a good thing if Microsoft declared that the deployment of Exchange 2013 required a modern Active Directory infrastructure. Let’s face it, you can expect that Exchange 2013 will require a schema upgrade to accommodate new features. Every other version of Exchange since Exchange 2000 has extended the schema so there’s no reason to suspect that the new version will break the habit of a lifetime now, so it’s probably a good opportunity to take a hard look at Active Directory and figure out how to improve and enhance your deployment at the same time.

Putting Windows 2003 functional level into Active Directory’s wastebasket will help Exchange too because it will reduce the complexity and amount of testing scenarios that the setup and deployment team has to go through. And if they’re relieved of the need to test deployment on outdated Active Directory infrastructures, the engineers should be able to use their time more gainfully to test new Exchange 2013 features.

I accept that some companies might have a problem if Microsoft requires Windows 2008 functional level as a prerequisite for Exchange 2013. So be it. Given the track record of every other major release of Exchange, I sincerely doubt that there will be a rush to deploy Exchange 2013 soon after general availability, so there’s plenty of time for those companies who have an issue (maybe there’s an application that depends on Windows 2003 or some form of now outdated authentication scheme that’s no longer supported) to sort things out and bring their infrastructure up to scratch.

The debate at TEC on this topic was spirited. At the end of the day, a large majority of the companies who were present saw no issue with Exchange 2013 forcing those who are stuck with old Active Directories to do the right thing and upgrade. You know it makes sense.

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Exchange Keynotes at “The Experts Conference”

Southwest 737 on final approach to San Diego airport pictured from the Marriott Hotel - Landing @SAN is usually a bonus when attending a conference in San Diego

One of the signs of a better conference is the quality of the keynotes. I’m not qualified to offer an opinion about the Monday morning keynote for the Exchange section of TEC 2012 as I was the speaker. You can download a copy of my keynote for your reading pleasure. Now that my stuff is out of the way, let’s focus on what Kevin Allison (Microsoft General Manager for Exchange) had to say during his Tuesday keynote, loosely titled “the state of Exchange”.

If you want, you can refer back to his comments at TEC 2011 (April 2011) and Exchange Connections (October 2011). Kevin is a regular speaker on the Exchange circuit whose next stop must be at MEC 2012 in Orlando next September. No doubt he will have a lot to say about Exchange 2013 then.

In some ways it’s a difficult time for a Microsoft executive to speak because we are currently right in the middle of the product doldrums at a point when the previous product generation (Exchange 2010) is showing some signs of age and the new generation (Exchange 2013) hasn’t yet been formally announced. Faced with such a situation, many executives elect to mutter some banalities and vague aspirations dressed up as product directions that convey little or no insight to the audience. However, to Kevin’s credit, he delivered a session that was full of information and insight as to the future directions of Exchange and Office 365l, even if he declined to answer the inevitable question “what’s in Exchange 15?” (aka Exchange 2013). Microsoft is obviously keeping its powder dry for MEC, which Kevin said would be “full of technical information about Exchange 15″.

Kevin to Tony: "Are public folders really like cockroaches"?

As an introduction, Kevin’s responsibilities broadly break down into two parts. For on-premises Exchange, he owns:

• Sustained engineering – think service packs, roll-up updates, and testing
• Setup and deployment
• Support tools

For Office 365, his focus areas are:

Removing technology blockers that prevent a smooth sales process (in other words, making sure that Office 365 delivers what customers need in order to want to buy)

• Deployment of Office 365
• Sustained engineering
• Compliance

All in all, it’s quite an array of tasks over which to have oversight.

Kevin started by explaining three important factors that influence the way that Microsoft has thought about the future of Exchange. Mobility and the ever-swelling number of devices that can connect to Exchange through ActiveSync is clearly huge, with over 1 billion smartphone users expected in the near future, all of whom are potential consumers of Exchange. Then there’s the small matter of iPads, Android tablets, Windows 8 tablets, RIM BlackBerry devices, and so on.

Developing the topic, Kevin said that Anywhere Access is just an expected given today. He cited the growth in possible clients for Exchange in just the last five years from the relatively small collection that typically connected to Exchange 2007 just after it launched to the array that can connect today. In one respect, ActiveSync has become a huge success for Microsoft but the widely differing implementations across devices and even across different versions of device families is causing some management challenges, especially as companies succumb to user desire for “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) and the ability to plug in just about any wireless-enabled gizmo into their network. Consumerization is truly something that companies absolutely have to sort out to the mutual benefit of both users and the business.

Kevin noted that we’re at a point in time where three generations of workers need to be catered for and that this has never happened before.  I guess because people retired earlier or otherwise didn’t have such long careers, only two generations in the workplace was the norm up to now. The real point here is that the newer generation of workers has been raised on IM and SMS as their preferred way of communication and therefore have a very different perspective of how and when to use email. To experience the difference, try explaining how faxes and telexes worked to your kids. The blank looks will tell the story. The issue for a product like Exchange is to figure out how to integrate new methods of communication in as elegant a fashion so as to accommodate the changing communication habits.

The final big factor is the cloud. Kevin said that he expected 130 million enterprise customers to be “in the cloud” by 2014. He wasn’t specific whether these folk would all be consumers of Microsoft cloud services or across all the services offered by different cloud providers. Interestingly, when Kevin refers to Office 365, he calls it “the Service”. Maybe this is a form of “the Matrix”…

Moving back to Exchange, Kevin spoke about some of the issues that companies consider when they think about moving to the cloud. Control over data by handing physical control to Microsoft evokes many emotions. It also means that the data cannot be used for reporting (for example, analyzing the message tracking logs), a weakness in Microsoft’s service that Kevin acknowledged. However, he said that Microsoft’s view is that data always remains the customer’s and is never owned by Microsoft. Office 365 data is managed regionally today. In other words, if you’re a U.S.-based customer, your mailboxes will be in a U.S. datacenter. This aspect might change in the future to allow customers greater flexibility in deciding where their data should be stored.

Exchange Online follows a cadence of three-month, six-month, and annual updates to keep the service fully patched and as up-to-date with features as possible. When new features are introduced, everyone gets them at the same time. Some customers have difficulty with this aspect of the service. For example, if a new version of OWA is introduced it can have downstream consequences for on-site user support. Microsoft is figuring out how to allow customers to have greater choice and control over when (but not if) new features are deployed to their users. In passing, Kevin noted that the last major refresh of thousands of Office 365 Exchange servers took five days in total (four days patching, one day testing and monitoring), all done with a great deal of automation built using PowerShell and other tools. Exchange Online maintained its 99.9% SLA during this time and no one suffered any loss of access to their data. This is an impressive performance that demonstrates the importance of automation to the success of massive online operations.

Casting his mind back in time, Kevin reflected that Microsoft’s decision to invest in what is now Exchange Online came about as a result of recognizing that Exchange administration was becoming increasingly complex and a real challenge for many customers (given all the new features in Exchange 2010, it’s even more complex now). It therefore made sense for the company who built the software to offer it as a service to customers. The current operations model is likely to evolve over time. For example, Microsoft might offer a service whereby they install hardware on customer sites and then do all the management across the network (a service that seems similar to those offered by companies such as Azaleos today).

Talking about migration, Kevin expressed some frustration that it can take some companies a long time to move to Office 365. The migration process can be long drawn-out and tiresome with work required from Microsoft and the customer as well as potential assistance from third party consultants. Tools such as those offered by ISVs such as Quest or Binary Tree help, but it’s up to Microsoft to improve the migration process to make it much easier and much faster for customers to move to the cloud. One idea was to automatically create a tenant domain when an on-premises deployment of Exchange is done so that the customer has then “reserved” their place in Office 365 and can move from on-premises to hybrid or all-in-the-cloud as they like.

Kevin pointed to the need for high-fidelity migrations to ensure that all of the data that reaches Office 365 is fully functional and behaves in exactly the same way as it does on-premises. As an example, he compared Microsoft’s approach to that taken by Google where calendar items are migrated but have then to be manually reinserted into user calendars to become functional calendar items again.

A video created to show the possibilities of future collaboration technology provoked the question of how much of what the video showed is possible today. Most audience responses were that we’re a while away from what was presented in the video. Kevin’s view was that much of the technology (such as automatic speech to text translation) existed but that a lot more work had to be done to achieve the necessary degree of integration to make everything work so smoothly together. And then there’s the small matter of creating and shipping production-quality versions of the devices that appeared.  Perhaps everything will come together in the next five years.

When questioned from the audience whether a future existed for on-premises versions of Exchange after Exchange 15, the response was that there will always be a certain percentage of customers who want to control the implementation of their messaging system and Microsoft will meet that need with new versions of Exchange. However, the question is what that percentage will be. It could be as low as 5% by 2016 or maybe as high as 25%. My feeling is that the cautious nature of large enterprises will make the percentage figure higher rather than lower, at least in terms of number of mailboxes. We shall see.

On another topic, naturally Kevin uses a Windows Phone and I had the opportunity to compare the weight and general appearance of his Nokia Lumia 900 against the smaller Nokia Lumia 800 that I’ve been using since January. I didn’t think that the extra weight and size compensated for the additional screen area and am quite happy with the 800. It just does the job and has gotten much better in terms of battery consumption since Nokia released the latest firmware.

I’m traveling home to Dublin today, just as the weather in San Diego picks up. All day Monday and Tuesday morning it did a pretty good job of resembling classic Irish April weather (cold, low clouds) rather than the sunny paradise San Diego represents itself to be.

- Tony

Follow Tony’s ramblings @12Knocksinna

April 2012 articles published on WindowsITPro.com

Here’s the digest of articles published on my WindowsITPro.com blog in April 2012.

FAST searching coming to Office 15 server applications (April 26) reports that the Office 15 wave of server applications (Exchange 2013, SharePoint 2013, and Lync 2013) will share a common enterprise search capability powered by the FAST technology acquired by Microsoft in 2008. For the first time you’ll be able to search across multiple repositories in one operation, something that will be popular for those responsible for compliance within large enterprises in particular.

Offline access through IE10;maybe an OWA feature in Exchange 2013? (April 23) speculates that Microsoft is about to add the ability to work offline to Outlook Web App in Exchange 2013. Some of this work is tied up with the march to HTML5 and it will be interesting to see just how pervasive Microsoft can make this feature across the browser set (IE, Safari, Chrome, Firefox) that they currently support for “premium” access.

Does Microsoft Explain Cloud Outages Better Than Google? (April 19) considered how Microsoft and Google handle customer communications when things go wrong in their cloud services and concludes that Microsoft probably does a better job of explaining the root cause of Office 365 outages than the somewhat secretive approach taken by Google when failures occur for Gmail or Google Docs.

Exchange’s monopoly and its importance to Microsoft (April 17) considered some of the comments made by a Venture Capitalist about the importance of Exchange to Microsoft and how this might play out over the next few years. Of course, a monopoly is not a good thing to have in place within a market…

Exchange 2013 to RTM in mid-November 2012? (April 13) Possibly one of the worst-kept secrets around the Microsoft campus is that Office 15 is locked and loaded to achieve RTM (Release to Manufacturing) status towards the end of 2012 with general customer availability in early 2013. I don’t see this schedule being compromised unless some horrible bugs come to light. Product schedules have a life of their own and gather momentum as they progress to RTM. We’ll just have to wait and see whether a brand-new version of Exchange is ready for deployment in January 2013 or thereabouts.

Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003 enter the final two years (April 12) It’s time to put a stake through the heart of Outlook 2003 and Exchange 2003. At least, that’s what you might think if you’re worried about long term support. Seriously though, if you’re running this software, it’s time to make plans to upgrade. Unless of course you like life on the edge and believe that the software will run just fine without Microsoft’s imprimatur.

Dispelling myths and other half truths (April 10) This article got more traffic than any other in April. A blog post written by someone who knew Zimbra’s server (ZCS) well attempted to compare ZCS to Exchange and got so many things wrong that I simply had to say something (not that I patrol the Internet to locate erroneous blogs – that sounds very much like a task similar to cleaning the proverbial Augean stables). In any case, you can read the myths and my responses and see what you think.

The Finer Details of Exchange High Availability (April 5) The documentation available for Exchange has improved dramatically over the past few years and continues to get better all the time. However, so much is published online or available elsewhere that it’s sometimes hard to focus in on what’s important or to understand important details. Everyone knows that Exchange 2010 includes native high availability in the form of the Database Availability Group (DAG), but a number of really interesting details lurk in the undergrowth about what happens when things go wrong and Exchange has to activate a database copy and use transaction logs to make sure that all the data is present.

Immutability, Perry, and Exchange (April 4) This might also have been titled “All about the dumpster”. I took the chance to point people to a set of video interviews given by Perry Clark, a Distinguished Engineer who’s been working in the Exchange development group since the late middle ages and probably now represents the technical conscience of the group. In this case, he’s talking about immutability and how Exchange 2010 protects data that might be needed for compliance purposes. Perry has made videos about other Exchange topics too and the series, all available online, are worth viewing.

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On the road again… to San Diego

This week I traveled from Dublin to San Diego to attend “The Experts Conference” (TEC). The conference organizers took care of tickets and I was routed via JFK on Delta rather than my normal choice (probably Aer Lingus to Chicago and onwards on United). The good news was that Delta surprised me with their service, which was better than I remembered or anticipated.

The other point of interest was the chance to see the Space Shuttle mounted on a 747 in a hanger in JFK. I took the photo below with the camera in my Nokia Lumia 800 out of the window of our plane as we taxied to the gate. I was surprised at the quality of the resulting  image as I really didn’t expect much due to the motion of the plane, the intervening aircraft windows (never clean and usually with a curve), distance, and so on. It just goes to prove that the cameras built into phones these days are really quite good, which is one of the reasons why traditional “point and shoot” cameras are under pressure in the market.

Space Shuttle on a 747 at JFK airport (April 28, 2012)

The remainder of the journey to San Diego passed uneventfully, apart of course from the fact that my glasses disintegrated en route with both arms snapping away from the lenses. I put this down to the impact against an air bag that I had during last week when my car was rammed by a driver who went through a red light. In any case, my glasses were fixed by the very efficient team at Eyes on Fifth in San Diego. I should really remember to bring my eye prescription with me on trips as it’s impossible to get new glasses without an examination and grinding of new lenses and that usually takes just too much time when you’re on the road. Yet another thing to add to my list of things to bring away.

If you’re looking for a good read, you might consider Stumbling through the tulips: An American Family in Holland by Dan Martin, whose blog provides a weekly insight into the trials and tribulations of his family life in Switzerland. Dan, who calls himself “the world’s first baby-boomer”, is an interesting guy whom I worked with at Digital, Compaq, and HP. He was the project manager for the introduction of Microsoft Exchange at Digital and he and I didn’t quite see eye-to-eye on that topic way back in 1996. We managed to patch up our disagreement and have gotten on well since. Dan writes in a particularly quixotic manner and you might just enjoy his book if you’re looking for something in the travel domain.

On another topic, I couldn’t agree more with the opinion expressed by David Gewirtz in his article on ZDnet.com about the rip-off that consumers experience when they buy electronic accessories. David focused on HDMI cables and the extraordinary prices that stores want to charge compared to online sources. Now, I’m quite sure that a) it costs a reasonable amount to build, test, package, and ship a high-quality cable that will handle the demands of PlayStations, Xboxes, Hi-Def TVs and so on, and b) inventory, display, sell, and provide after-sales service for the same items. But with consumer electronic prices for most items dropping in so many areas, it’s baffling that HDMI cables occupy such a lofty position on the pricing spectrum.  As David says “Most HDMI cables will work just fine. You don’t need to buy HDMI cables strung from the gold in Rapunzel’s hair.” Indeed.

Now back to the business in hand. TEC really begins today and I have a keynote to deliver and a number of sessions that I want to at least drop into, including “Writing your own Extensible Storage Engine (ESE/Jet Blue) application” by Brett Shirley from Microsoft. Given that ESE is Exchange server’s database engine and not much information exists about its internal working in the wild, the title is probably enough to scare people off and it will be interesting to see how many turn up. Brett insulted me about my defunct coding experience last night so I’ll just have to go along and heckle him today.

- Tony

The Citadel of St. Tropez

Port of St. Tropez

Most people who visit St. Tropez on the French Riviera probably think about the glamour side of the town – its up-market shops, the restaurants dotted around the port that can charge an extraordinary amount for an ordinary pizza, the yachts that broadcast the fact that their owners drip with cash, and the film stars and other well-known individuals who spend time in the town. And yes, St. Tropez offers all of these things once you manage to arrive in town after navigating slow and cluttered roads en route and find a place to park.

But if you’re planning a visit to St. Tropez, why don’t you discover a somewhat unknown gem in the town’s Citadel, or fortified castle, that occupies a hill overlooking the town and the bay. The Citadel was built between 1590 and 1607 to protect St. Tropez against enemies that have varied over the years, but most often the Spanish or English. It’s a protected landmark that is currently being renovated. The main castle building is inaccessible but all of the ramparts and surrounding out-buildings are available to be explored.

The town of St. Tropez viewed from the Citadel

Getting to the Citadel is simple. Go to the port and head upwards. St. Tropez is small enough so that you won’t get lost. Once you reach the park that surrounds the Citadel you’ll face a reasonably steep ascent up some rugged steps that will probably be an unpleasant but short climb in the midst of a Riviera summer.

Head of Louis XIV, the Sun King, on a cannon at the Citadel of St. Tropez

The entrance fee is EUR2.00 each and you’re free to wander around the buildings for as long as you like, subject to seasonal opening hours. Various cannon and other artifacts are to be found in the grounds, but I suspect that most will head over towards the sea to take in the breathtaking views over the Mediterranean.

View of the Riviera from the ramparts of the Citadel of St. Tropez

Apart from the views, my favourite parts of the Citadel were the walled garden and amphitheatre. I imagine that a concert held in the Citadel on a warm summer’s night must be a very pleasant event to attend. Or, as you can see in the photo, it’s a nice place to stretch out for 40 winks and allow the day to just pass on by…

Amphitheater in the Citadel of St. Tropez

Walled garden in the Citadel of St. Tropez

So if you can tear yourself away from the other attractions offered by St. Tropez, take an hour or so to climb the hill to explore the Citadel. Kids will enjoy the adventure and adults will enjoy being able to work up a thirst for some of the excellent rosé wine that is grown around St. Tropez.

- Tony

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