First, why doesn’t the Nokia Lumia 800 running Windows Phone 7.5 display a status bar to show the current state of the battery, wireless connectivity, and so on? You can reveal the status bar, but it’s annoying that this has to be done with a swipe rather than just being there. I guess there is an argument that a status bar occupies valuable screen real estate but…

Also on the Nokia, the device is very pleasant to use and is nicer in many respects to my iPhone. However, I have a nagging sneaking feeling that the software is still a tad immature. Little things like phone reboots (two to date when making calls) and the relative slowness of email to show up on the device (same message sent to my wife’s iPhone and my phone ends up on the iPhone first by quite a distance – we both use the same carrier).

And although it’s an excellent feature to have Nokia Drive (GPS maps and driving assistance) available free of charge, three aspects bug me when compared to TomTom or other GPS devices. The Nokia is slow to track its position (moving along a motorway sometimes barely budges the pointer), the pointer can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s going north, south, east, or west, and you have to be online with the phone to be able to look up a destination address. It seems that “online” means a 3G or wi-fi connection as anything else declines to find your destination. The GPS works just fine and seems fast to find satellites, but it would be nice if the application worked better. Those wanting more information on the Nokia Lumia 800 can check out its review on themobilefanatics.com. I don’t agree with all of the conclusions reached by the review’s author, but it is very detailed and provides a good basis for anyone to make their own assessment.

Second, is it just me or has Gmail slowed down a tad? Operations such as deleting messages (yes, I know, you shouldn’t need to delete anything with such a large free mailbox but old habits die hard) don’t proceed at the same fast clip as I seem to remember. It’s not as if I use Gmail for anything complex or have lots of Labs add-ins enabled. I have conversation view and mail notifications turned off but do show snippets of messages. All in all, mine is rather a boring configuration.

Perhaps the slowness is because I am communicating with the Googleplex at bad times or maybe it’s because so much email is now being stored by so many people in Gmail that it’s an inevitable side-effect of success. But perhaps it’s another indication that Google needs to give Gmail a slam-dunk client that’s capable of working offline in a much more intelligent fashion than is available now. After all, a client can do so much to insulate users from the vagaries of networks and servers, a fact that Microsoft keeps on thanking Outlook for because that client has contributed so much to the success of Exchange and now Office 365.

On the subject of Exchange, I see that Neil Hobson has done a good job of explaining how a product deficiency can be overcome by intelligent use of PowerShell. MailTips is a new feature of Exchange 2010 and is designed to inform users that they might be about to do something stupid, like sending a “have a nice day” message to all 12,451 recipients across the organization. The data that MailTips depends on is sourced from the Active Directory (is a recipient on vacation, for instance) or calculated by Exchange (the number of recipients in a distribution group) and the Client Access Server is in charge of the magic that provides the data to clients. Of course, you need the latest clients to be able to use the magic, so those of you still using Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 need not apply.

In any case, MailTips don’t work for recipients outside your organization unless they are known contacts, in which case you can adda custom MailTip to their Active Directory object. Custom MailTips are also supported for the other Exchange objects and therefore can also be added to mailboxes, distribution groups, and so on. Neil suggests that you can scan Active Directory to find mail-enabled contacts for various domains and add appropriate MailTips. His example of scanning for contacts who use Hotmail is a good one as Hotmail is more of a consumer email service than anything else and anyone who sends business email there might like a reminder just in case they send out the latest (secret) corporate results by accident.

Last, I see the redoubtable Glen Scales, master of Exchange Web Services (EWS) has published yet more valuable posts about how to use EWS to solve real-life problems. If you’re interested in programming against Exchange in such a way that you think you need to access mailbox contents, you should bookmark Glen’s web site and check it regularly. His latest epistle on enumerating and manipulating folders is very interesting and should be useful for those who are looking for a good way to start playing with EWS.

Now back to the really boring stuff. I think I have a wall to paint somewhere…

- Tony

First, I don’t think it a good plan to make more use of public folders than absolutely possible. Some companies haven’t deployed public folders because they don’t need them to support older clients such as Outlook 2003. These companies can stop reading now as you’ve only one choice in the matter and that’s to use a shared mailbox.

Over the last decade, Microsoft has disappointed companies who do public folders because they haven’t exactly devoted lashings of care and attention to the development and maintenance of public folders. Every release comes complete with the compulsory “don’t worry, public folders aren’t going away anytime soon” announcement, but the future remains uncertain because Microsoft hasn’t added new feature to public folders for years. In addition, Microsoft hasn’t provided a migration path to other platforms (for example, SharePoint) that can move public folder data and applications in a seamless fashion. You therefore conclude that adding more data to public folders at this point might just end up with more of a migration challenge in the future.

On the other hand, mailboxes remain the natural core focus for much of the engineering within Exchange, as evident by the introduction of continuous replication over the past two versions. It therefore seems to be more sensible to use a mailbox-based feature rather than public folders whenever possible.

Second, the management and maintenance of shared mailboxes is easier than public folders. I know that Microsoft released an updated public folder administration console in Exchange 2010 SP1 that addressed some issues that had irked administrators for ages, but it’s still difficult to do something as simple as view the contents of a public folder. By comparison, the auto-mapping feature introduced in Exchange 2010 SP1 means that Outlook will open shared mailboxes automatically if a user is granted full access. I think it’s also easier for users to understand how to use a shared mailbox rather through Outlook.

Third, public folders weren’t strictly designed to host shared calendars. Sure, they’ve been hosting calendars for years and the implementation works, but the latest background features provided in Exchange 2010 don’t function with calendars stored in public folders. By this I mean the Resource Booking Assistant, Calendar Attendant, and Calendar Repair Assistant. Some of these might mean little to you or not deliver much value to the way that you want to use a shared calendar, but I’ll hazard a guess that automating the booking requests that flow into a shared calendar will be valuable to many.

Fourth, there are many more mailbox manipulation cmdlets than public folder management cmdlets.  Again, this might not be interesting to you but I thought that I’d make the point anyway.

Fifth, a shared mailbox can store so much more than a calendar. For example, you could associate some shared contacts with a calendar. Sure, you can use another public folder to store contacts that you want to use with a calendar that’s in a separate public folder, but there’s something satisfyingly united about keeping all of the data in one place – the shared mailbox – if only because this makes it easier to move the data should the need arise.

Sixth, using a shared mailbox doesn’t cost you anything extra because Microsoft doesn’t require a CAL (or an Office 365 subscription) for the use of a shared mailbox. Public folders don’t cost you anything either so this isn’t really an advantage. However, I thought it worth making the point because some believe that they have to pay for shared mailboxes.

Last, a shared mailbox is not a public folder so you’ll get better and more complete support from Microsoft should anything go wrong. And you have a go-forward plan for future versions in which you can have confidence, and that’s always a good thing.

Anyway, these are just my views. Feel free to disagree.

- Tony

My problem with Twitter is two-fold. First, there’s the low to very low signal to noise ratio of the information contained in the feeds. Second, there’s the public nature of conversations that occur that might better be kept private.

The Wikipedia article on Twitter contains an interesting analysis of 2,000 tweets from 2009, broken down as follows:

• Pointless babble: 40%
• Conversational: 38%
• Pass-along value: 9%
• Self-promotion: 6%
• Spam: 4%
• News: 4%

Your own mileage will vary based on the exact set of tweets used for analysis but I think that the point being made here is accurate: the vast proportion of tweets contain nothing but vapid emptiness.

It seems like the only way to avoid the problem is to be highly selective in the people that you follow. I’ve tried to do this and admit to getting value from @Techmeme, @GuardianTech, @ForbesTech and @Engadget, all of which I use as general-purpose feeds for technology news. The others in the 43 Twitter accounts that I follow are a mixture of technology and rugby commentators plus some personal choices. I’ve found that not falling into the “I’ll follow you if you follow me” trap and dropping those that I follow quickly if their output isn’t valuable are good ways to keep my feed relatively information-rich.

I do use Twitter for output, but the vast majority of my 254 tweets to date have been simply to advise those who care about new articles or blog posts. In short, I try and keep my output information-rich too as I don’t see the point in commentating on all and sundry in 140-character bursts. If people want to know what I think, they can read this blog!

I really don’t see the point of using Twitter to send messages from one user to another. Isn’t that what email was invented for? Or even SMS? OK, you might not have the email address of your correspondent but even so, why would you carry out a conversation in full view of the gaping public and have it lovingly indexed by search engines so that it can be recalled at a moment’s notice in the future? Although I cheerfully admit total bias on this point, a private email seems so much better.

On the plus side, tools are getting better in terms of making it easier to deal with the flood of tweets. I very much like the People application in Windows Phone 7.5 and have not bothered (at all) with the standalone Twitter application. I also use the Twinbox plug-in for Outlook to have tweets available there. I use Twinbox with Outlook 2010 but it also works with Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003.

With access through People and Twinbox, I haven’t used TweetDeck much recently, but it’s also a powerful way to keep an eye on what’s going on, especially if you want to track some trending development. For example, I used TweetDeck a lot during the Office 365 outages last August and September just to keep an eye on what was happening around the world. It was also a good tool during the recent Irish presidential election when one candidate made some real gaffs on live television that provoked a tweet storm.

It’s entirely possible that I am simply an old fogey who doesn’t “get” either the import of or the right way to use Twitter as a communications technology. I’d prefer to say that Twitter has its place in the spectrum of available media but has to be used intelligently to extract value and hold to the point that there’s far too much useless noise in tweets sent today. If not, Twitter can absolutely make twits of us all by either exposing our inane thoughts to the public or by forcing us to read far too much rubbish in order to find any value.

- Tony

I received a note from Microsoft Press yesterday to let me know that Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out had received a technical publications award. The note said:

“Every year, Microsoft Press enters our highest quality titles from the past year into the Technical Publications competition hosted by our local chapter of the Society for Technical Communications (STC). Entries are evaluated on rigorous standards for information design, use and appearance of visual elements, usability, writing and editing, and how well the publication meets the needs of the intended audience.

We’ve received the results from the 2011 competition, and I am pleased to inform you that Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out received a Distinguished award in the Informational Materials category. Distinguished is the highest level of award granted in the competition and signifies very high competence in technical communication. It also means that your book is eligible to be entered into the International competition.”

Now, I have no idea about the importance of this award within the technical publication community (in other words, does anyone care) or the process used to assess entries. However, I do know that “Distinguished” is the top-level award, so that’s good. I also assume that the decision is made on the basis of a review of the publication aspects of the book by at least two independent judges because I received two reports from “judge A” and “judge B”. These reports were very interesting because they help shape ideas for future books.

The criteria used include:

• Organization and content scope (see screen shot below)
• Information design – visual appeal; typography; artwork; consistency of design implementation
• Navigation – table of contents; signposts and cues (headings, etc.); index
• Writing – audience and purpose; technical vocabulary; capitalization, spelling, and punctuation; grammar and syntax; consistency
• Essentials of style – word choice (diction); clarity and conciseness; tone (attitude of writer to audience)

The judges didn’t understand much of the technical material being presented so they can only judge from the perspective of an uninformed person who picks up the book rather than an Exchange professional who wants to find details how something particular works.

Some of the comments from Judge A

I found it interesting that so much attention is paid to writing skills because that’s certainly not something that seems to be highly valued in many third-level courses today, possibly because people believe that it’s more important to get information out than worry about how words and sentences are structured, whether spelling is correct, and if the topic being explained is covered in a clear manner rather than obscured in obtuse text.

It’s also interesting that huge value is seen in well-done indexes. Some publishers have tried to convince me that short-cuts are possible when building indexes for technical books. I don’t agree at all. I also like that focus and attention is put on how books are laid out, the typography, and how things like tips and screen shots are integrated with the general body of text.

I learned a lot from the assessments and wish that a similar job had been done on previous books. It reinforced the need for many quality inputs that are required to produce good books – writing, technical editing, copy editing, indexing, production and layout, and printing. A book suffers if you fail in any of these inputs and I’m just glad that Microsoft Press did such a splendid job in helping to publish Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out.

Now on to the next book, whenever that might be…

- Tony

Although the Outlook application on Windows Phone is good looking, it’s surprisingly slow to synchronize new items and deletions. Being a geek, I have Outlook 2010 running on my laptop at all times (you can never check email in too many places) and can observe when messages arrive there. My experience was that the Mail application on the iPhone was almost as fast and sometimes faster to display news messages than Outlook, which runs in cached Exchange mode so there’s always some lag between a message arriving on the server and being delivered to the client.

Apart from being slower to show new messages in the Inbox, it seems that Outlook on Windows Phone is also slower to synchronize deletions back to Exchange. At least, my observation is that I delete messages on the phone and then wait for the same deletions to be reflected in Outlook running on the PC whereas deletions made on an iPhone seem to happen almost immediately. My speculation is that Microsoft has tuned ActiveSync on Windows Phone to conserve power by optimizing phone to server communications – but I might be wrong. I freely admit that worrying about a matter of a few seconds in client to server communications borders on the maniac. On the other hand, it’s strange how little things attract attention.

I do like the way that Outlook uses a similar search folder capability (or views) to the one implemented on its PC counterpart as it makes it easier to focus in on unread messages.  I’d prefer if the default view shown when you open Outlook was “Unread” rather than “All” as I think that the most common reason people open the application is to see new mail. It would be nice if the Outlook settings allowed you to select a default view. I’d also appreciate if unread messages were highlighted more clearly than at present as the current method (turn the subject blue on my phone) is far too subtle for my old eyes.

I don’t like the way that Windows Phone reports the number of new messages in Outlook’s application tile as it doesn’t seem to update the count immediately new mail arrives. Instead, Windows Phone waits for the phone to be used before it bothers to update the new mail count in the application tile. There is a count of new messages shown on the locked screen that seems accurate, but then you unlock the phone to reveal the applications and watch Outlook’s tile update to reflect the same number. By contract, iPhone shows one number for new mail on the mail icon and that’s the number of unread messages you see when you open the application. It just seems to be a little more integrated, at least in my mind. If Windows Phone can keep count of new mail on the locked screen, why isn’t the same number immediately visible when you unlock the phone?

Waiting until data is needed seems to be the default approach used by Windows Phone as this also happens with the People application, which updates your current news feed when you open the application. I can understand this as it’s probably a very efficient use of resources.

I also don’t care for some of the processing of conversations in Outlook for Windows Phone. On the iPhone, once you delete an item in a conversation the next item is opened for reading. On Windows Phone, if you delete an item in a conversation you’re returned to the list of items in the conversation (if more items exist). The settings available to tweak Outlook’s behavior don’t allow me to opt to have the next time opened. Again, this is a small complaint but like the pea under the princess, the small issues tend to irritate. It would be good if Microsoft allowed users to select what happened after an item was deleted, just like they do with Outlook on the PC.

On the plus side, Outlook does a better job of formatting some of the messages that I receive than was the case with iPhone. Maybe this is just the interaction between Outlook and Exchange, but I suspect that it’s also because there’s more background knowledge about how an application works when both the client and server side come from the same vendor. Not surprisingly, Word does an excellent job of rendering documents on Windows Phone, although I haven’t quite gotten to the stage where I’d like to edit anything using the virtual keyboard on such a small screen.

[Caveat: See comment from Nokia UK below; this could be a glitch that I've experienced] The SMS messaging application insists on splitting SMS messages up to 160 characters at a time rather than supporting the more modern concatenated SMS implementation where clients take responsibility for splitting up, sending, and reassembling long messages seamlessly.  People tend to send more long SMS messages today than they did in the past, possibly because they don’t realize that any limits exist and clients like the iPhone have done such a good job of masking what’s done behind the scenes, so it’s a tad disconcerting to suddenly start to receive fragmented messages with a delay between the arrival of each part. I accept that the messages are shown in a thread but it’s surely not beyond the capabilities of Microsoft to assemble all the parts of a message before displaying it as one item?

I’ve gotten over the initial problem that I had with the Facebook application in that it won’t allow me to click on a URL in an item. I figure that this is simply an indication of the immaturity of some of the applications (the version 1 syndrome) in the Windows Phone marketplace when compared to the development time that iPhone applications have had. In any case, the People application is a much more powerful way to see all the various social networking data feeds in one place and URL links work just fine there, so I use it for my Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter feeds. And one of the best features of the application is that it optimizes all the feeds so that you only see one mention of a post that someone makes, even if they decide to publish on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Applying a filter like this is a very intelligent and worthwhile advance.

The desktop Zune application took me a little while to become familiarized, but I’ll put this down to user error and lack of expertise for the most part. It does the same job as iTunes in terms of synchronizing music, photos, and applications to the device but doesn’t have to go through all the trials and trauma that iTunes users have experienced in the past to synchronize Outlook contacts and calendar to the device as this is done with ActiveSync. Most of the problems between iTunes and Outlook seem to have been eliminated in recent releases but it’s a relief not to have to worry about this aspect as synchronization of this data is flawless. One big advantage that Zune boasts over iTunes is its ability to play FM radio. I realize that this might not seem like a big thing to the iTunes generation, but I really do like to listen to FM radio and its integration into Zune seems to add a nice feature to the phone.

The biggest and most perplexing problem that I’ve had so far is a totally random and explainable phone reboot that occurred in the middle of a phone call. For whatever reason the phone suddenly decided that it was a good idea to reboot immediately after the call connected and while the reboot sequence is fast, the experience still left an extremely bad taste in the mouth because making and receiving calls is the sine qua non for a phone. Anything device is entitled to a once-off glitch providing it stays that – a strict once-off occurrence – but a more frequent happening will make this relationship short-lived.

On the plus side, the Nokia Lumia 800 is a very nice piece of hardware and I really like the graphical interface that Windows Phone delivers. The combination is very different to the iPhone but there’s goodness and badness in that, just like most other things that come to mind.

- Tony

Update 19 Jan 2012: So far I have had two unexplained freezes when making telephone calls. The first was to another cell phone and the phone rebooted automatically. The second  (today) was to pick up voicemail and the phone locked out and required me to reboot it manually. I don’t like this at all because phones are meant to make phone calls reliably.

I’ve used many Windows phones in the past, most of them HP iPAQ models. Some were OK, such as the iPAQ 510 and some were bloody awful, like the iPAQ 6915. All seemed to be handicapped by a mixture of design shortcomings, battery life, and the awfulness of the Windows mobile operating system at the time. All broke my heart in one way or another and moving to an iPhone was a liberating experience.

But the iPhone has become boring and it was time for a change. I therefore took the plunge and bought a Nokia Lumia 800 (Incidentally, the price in the US at $528.95 is much cheaper than the STG399.99 or US$624 charged by Amazon.co.uk, but I guess it costs that much more for a three-prong plug than for the two-prong used in the U.S.). Amazon did their normal efficient job in delivering the phone, complete with a note on the box to attest to the presence of the Lithium-Ion battery inside.

First impressions were good. Nokia has clearly taken a leaf out of the Apple packaging manual as the phone came in a nice blue box. Not quite as nice as the iPhone box but sufficient to say “there’s something good inside”. Nokia include a slim rubberized cover for the phone too as well as a leaflet that contains advice about how to hold the phone to avoid disrupting antenna performance. Perhaps Apple should have done likewise when they released the iPhone 4 or maybe this is just a case of Nokia learning from those who have gone before.

The next step was to transfer my SIM. This task proved to be initially frustrating because Nokia requires you to press down on a button that hides the mini-USB connector and then slide across another piece of plastic to reveal the SIM card. Naturally, my fat fingers made a right mess of this and it took a little while before brain and fingers coordinated action to attain the necessary outcome. I’m sure that Nokia could come up with a better-engineered approach to this problem. By contrast, Apple does a nice job with its pin device that convinces the SIM to slide out of an iPhone. This approach becomes less valuable if you lose the special pin but anything with a slender point will usually do the trick.

The Nokia takes a mini-SIM card instead of the standard SIM as used by the iPhone so a trip to the phone provider’s store was necessary to get a new SIM. Once the new SIM was installed, the work to set up the phone was pretty easy. As you’d expect, it was a snap to connect Outlook to Office 365 and this made sure that my calendar and contacts also came across to the phone.

The longest amount of time expended to setup the phone was installing the Zune software on my PC and then copying all my music and phones over. I also had to take out new podcast subscriptions to the shows that I follow. All of this is pretty well what you have to do with iTunes to customize an iPhone to a user’s taste and the only difficulty arose in understanding the slightly different methods used by Zune and iTunes to find and install applications such as Facebook and Twitter from the respective marketplace (app store) and synchronize data with the phone. Thankfully there are quite a number of helpful articles available on Microsoft’s web site and elsewhere so the process was relatively painless once I understood what needed to be done. I think Apple’s new iCloud approach is probably a little slicker and certainly would have paid big benefits had I moved to a new iPhone.

The Nokia gives an impression of being a quality device with a top-notch 3.7 inch AMOLED 480×800 resolution screen (the Nokia Lumia 900 apparently has an even bigger 4.3 inch screen but I think this device might be a tad too large for my liking). So far I haven’t encountered the same kind of issues that caused a blogger named Matthew Baxter to dump his device after a month, which might go to prove that one person’s dud is another person’s delight. I do think that there value in many of the comments (plus the associated review of Mango for the HTC Titan) that will help you understand some of the differences between iOS and Mango. For example, how notifications (a big part of iOS 5) work compared to the way that the various Windows Phone applications tell you when new information has arrived.

At this point in time, my personal gripes revolve around the way that some of the Windows Phone applications seem less complete than their iPhone equivalents. Facebook is a good example.  Many posts contain URLs that lead to interesting information and on an iPhone it’s a simple matter of clicking on the URL to go to the link. The Facebook app on Mango is attractive but URL links are dead, which is pretty frustrating. Of course, you could point to the fact that links work properly when Facebook provides a feed to the People application (basically a consolidator of various feeds from different sources) but that’s not the point.

To me it’s just a matter of getting used to one device over another but I can see how some of these differences would make people climb the wall in frustration, especially if you are a heavy-duty user of one of an application that’s not quite as “finished” for Windows Phone as it is on iPhone.

In any case, I am now fully across and the Nokia is customized and fully loaded with music, photos, and podcasts. It’s a really nice piece of equipment and I value some of the stuff that Nokia has included such as the Nokia Drive application (GPS guidance), which I am sure will come in useful in the future. In the meantime, I’m happy with a new piece of hardware to play with and accept that not all will be sweetness and light as I get to know the new O/S and its applications. In the meantime, my son’s happy that he has my iPhone to replace his now sadly outdated but very reliable Sony phone.

Some would call this progress, others might say regression. I say that a change is as good as a rest and am looking forward to using my Nokia.

- Tony

This post lists the articles that I posted to my WindowsITPro.com blog during December 2011. Enjoy!

Reporting Exchange Server 2010 Client Access Licenses (December 29) discusses the two types of Client Access Licenses (CALs) supported by Exchange 2010 and offers some advice as to how you can figure out the number of CALs and types of CALs that are needed by an Exchange organization.

Learning how to master PowerShell with Exchange as your tutor (December 23) is based on a survey that found that many Exchange administrators still don’t have a good knowledge of PowerShell. Given that PowerShell provides the base for Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 management and is the foundation for management in Windows 8 Server, this seems like a bad state of affairs. Fortunately Exchange 2010 provides three methods to inform administrators about the correct use of PowerShell, all described in the article.

Finding confidential user information with Exchange Search (December 19) arose from a discussion at an Exchange Maestro training event when one of the participants asked if it was possible to search mailboxes for items that contained information such as account and password data. This is a great example of why you need to restrict the ability to perform multi-mailbox discovery searches and, even more important, access to the items retrieved by searches.

Office 365 Advisor: what plan’s for me? (December 15) reviews a new web-based tool released by Microsoft to help companies decide what Office 365 plan is most suitable for their needs. Like any first release there are some small issues but it’s a reasonable start.

Exchange 2010 SP2: don’t forget the rest of the ecosystem (December 13) offers some advice about how to approach the upgrade of a complete Exchange 2010 ecosystem after the release of Service Pack 2. Very few Exchange servers run in perfect isolation and there are many third-party and Microsoft products that connect to Exchange in some way that might need to be upgraded.

Litigation hold updates in Exchange 2010 SP2 (December 9) describes some small but important changes that Microsoft made in Exchange 2010 SP2 to enhance the effectiveness of the litigation hold feature first introduced in Exchange 2010. Essentially you’re no longer able by default to remove or disable a mailbox that is under litigation hold.

DAGs and clusters (December 7) provides a useful reminder that Exchange’s Database Availability Group (DAG) feature is based on Windows Failover Clustering (WFC), which means that you need to keep an eye on updates and fixes that Microsoft release for WFC.

Exchange 2010 SP2 makes its debut (December 5) marks the formal release of Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2010 and provides some commentary on what I think are the most important points in the update. Unlike SP1, which really delivered some fundamental changes such as a complete revision of Outlook Web App, SP2 is much more of a tidy-up release. However, there are important new components such as the hybrid configuration wizard (HCW) and the introduction of Address Book Policies.

The futility of attempting to recall a message (December 1) was prompted by a tweet from a Windows IT Pro editor that mentioned the usefulness of Outlook’s recall message feature. Or rather, the futility (in my mind) of the said feature. See why I have this view by reading the article.

All in all, a productive month, even if we all seemed to shut down for a large number of days to celebrate the holidays.

Have a happy and productive 2012!

- Tony

There’s something impressive about professional sport when it is played at speed and with precision at the highest level. Wednesday evening saw my sons and I pay a visit to Craven Cottage in London to see Fulham FC welcome Manchester United in an English Premier League game. Fulham had won the same fixture by 3-0 in 2009, the last time that we’d been at this famous old ground by the Thames, a result that had disappointed my sons, both of whom are die-hard United fans.

With a maximum capacity of 27,500, Craven Cottage is an anachronism in the world of modern sports stadia. It’s built alongside the River Thames in the middle of a residential district. The stands are small and the ground is tightly gathered around the pitch. However, it’s a friendly place as the Fulham fans are welcoming and the security staff always seem to smile, which is definitely not the experience that you’ll get in other soccer grounds.

United brought their best game to London and dominated the first half with an impressive performance full of power and speed. Watching soccer on TV has its advantages but it doesn’t deliver the same feeling of movement, pace and interaction between players that unfolds when you watch a game live. It’s the same for any high-level sport. Manchester United played superbly and gave Fulham no quarter to score three unanswered goals in the first half. At least Fulham showed some improvement in the second half before late goals from Rooney and Berbatov, the former a powerful drive from well aside the penalty box and the latter a delightful back-heel, took the winds out of their sails.

View from Putney stand

We sat in the Putney Stand in a position right behind the goal. (above) The Putney Stand is referred to as the neutral end but everyone around us seemed to support Manchester United. At least, they knew the words of all the weird and wonderful football chants that featured United greats such as George Best and Eric Cantona, current players such as Ryan Giggs (clearly a favourite based on the number of songs that lauded his many gifts), as well as the contempt in which United fans hold teams such as Liverpool and Leeds. Many of the songs were not for the faint-hearted. The singing started before kick-off and persisted right to the end with a small gap at half-time. Far worse than the aural assault, the hard-core fans insisted in standing up for the complete game and we were forced to forego the comfort of our seats and stand to watch the game.

Manchester United on the attack

Craven Cottage is a great place to watch soccer and we enjoyed ourselves. What wasn’t so good was the Travelodge Toleworth, which must be the worst hotel that I have ever had the chance to stay at since lodging in an Intourist hotel in Kiev in 1992. The fact that you can get rooms at this hotel for STG12/night is no reason to stay there. Avoid at all costs! Much better were the splendid lamb burgers and home-made chips that we ate at the Royal Oak Hotel in Betws-y-Coed en route to catch the ferry from Holyhead to Dublin. The road through Wales (M54 and then A5) is a far nicer and more scenic route between Holyhead towards London than the hassle of the alternate A55-M6 battleground.

Interesting results from an Audi Sat Nav

Finally, the Sat Nav in my Audi A6 showed some interesting information when we were waiting to get onto the ferry. Apparently we were positioned 10m deep in water off the Welsh coast (above). In any case, all went well and our feet stayed dry.

Happy Holidays to all…

Tony

It was the second weekend in a row that I’d had the unique joy of transferring through CDG. As a rule I prefer direct flights, even if they sometimes cost a little more. Direct flights have the great benefit of getting you to your destination fast and with as little hassle as possible, once you’ve gotten through the “please take your belt off” security routine (has anyone ever assaulted a cockpit with a belt?). But unfortunately there aren’t many direct flights from Ireland to France in the winter and the French rugby teams who play in the European cups are not located close to the airports where the direct flights arrive. In short, if you’re not involved in a game with Racing Metro 92 or Stade Francais (both in Paris) or Toulon (easily reachable through Nice), a transit through CDG is probably required.

The problem is that Air France insists that its regional jets arrive at a distant stand well away from the set of linked terminals that make up Aerogare 2. And because CDG is a sprawling airport that spreads itself over 12.5 square miles, distant means “very far away”. So buses are deployed to shuttle passengers between the main terminal and the stand for the regional jets. CityJet (a fully owned subsidiary of Air France) operates the service between Ireland and France. It’s deemed to be a regional service, so its planes arrive and depart from the distant stand.

I can just about tolerate the seven-to-ten minute ride in from CityJet’s stand to Terminal 2E where border controls and luggage reclaim are located. I can even take the subsequent bus transfer to Terminal 2G to link up with regional flights to airports such as Clermont or Toulouse. I guess my tolerance level is higher on the outward leg, but things seem to be so much more disorganized on the return. Here’s what normally happens.

After landing and an interminable taxi around the airport, you enjoy the mercifully short bus journey from plane to Terminal 2G. This is followed by the passage through passport control in a cramped room often in a queue that is too large for the room’s capacity. Then you get to wait in a holding room, again small, for the shuttle to the main terminal that’s supposed to operate on a 10-minute schedule. The shuttle bus starts off by travelling away from the airport to make a loop and retraces its steps back past the pickup point. It then crawls from one part of the airport to another, weaving its way past chariots towing luggage carts, before arriving at its first stop alongside a stairs up into the terminal. Then off we go again back over part of the route to eventually arrive at the second and final stop. The complete transfer through bus ride, security, waiting, and final bus ride takes about 40 minutes and invariably it’s when you’re pressed for time and just want to get to your final destination.

Last Saturday, Air France surpassed themselves by then loading their Dublin-bound passengers for AF2478 on a bus before keeping everyone there – without explanation – for 25 minutes before starting the journey back out to the remote stand that’s located close to Terminal 2G. In short, back to the point where passengers like me had arrived. Has no one in Air France ever figured out the madness of busing people in and out to the main terminal when some can simply stay put to wait for their next flight?

My mood wasn’t improved by being allocated seat 8E. A middle seat is never something to anticipate with joy unless you’re seated because someone you know. A middle seat in the Avro-85 airplanes operated by CityJet is especially onerous because the cabin cannot be described as “airy”, “comfortable”, or anything like a modern regional jet such as the Embraer-190, which is used by other Air France regional subsidiaries. The overhead wing arrangement imposes its own restrictions on the cabin and the tight seats with minimal legroom complete the misery.

Some light seemed to appear when we arrived at the aircraft because no one else turned up to occupy seat 8F. Alas, the light disappeared when the captain told us that a second bus was on the way (what! after a 25-minute wait on our bus?) and that everything was the fault of the security staff who were on strike. Forty minutes later the promised bus appeared and seat 8F was occupied. My black mood descended again and was compounded by a further 20 minutes waiting before take-off on a 105-minute flight to Dublin. My recollection of flights between Paris and Dublin is that this was a long flight. I don’t know if airlines are throttling back to save fuel or if the Avro-85 is just plain slow. In any case, the flight seemed to go on for ever with the only saving grace being that Air France is one of the few remaining companies that serves passengers with some refreshment on short flights.

Apart from the promise of doubtful coffee and fizzy water, why should anyone fly Air France to CDG? The short answer is that transfers from Aerogare 1, where Aer Lingus fly into, are even worse. Ryanair doesn’t fly to CDG and a transfer from Beauvais, which is where the Ryanair atlas believes is somewhat close to Paris, is not practicable, unless you plan to spend a day or so between flights in Paris.

Of course, sometimes there isn’t a good transfer available. For example, this week’s game was in Biarritz and Air France doesn’t fly from CDG to Biarritz (it does from Paris-Orly). We were booked to fly DUB-CDG and then on to Bilbao, which turned out to be the closest airport available from CDG. Sod’s law being in force, Air France cancelled the flight to Bilbao on Thursday nights due to a storm that hit the Atlantic coast so we were forced to take the coach to Orly and stay at the Ibis hotel in the airport. Thankfully Friday morning’s flight to Biarritz was good and the Radisson Blu hotel in the town was excellent and looked after us very well before we had to go to the ground for a 9pm kick-off.

I suspect that Air France and CDG will inflict further bus transfers on me in the future. C’est la vie. It’s just part and parcel of getting around Europe to places where professional rugby teams play in the winter months. But I can at least behave like the grumpy old man that I have become and complain bitterly about what happens, even if no one listens.

- Tony

PS. If (like me) you’re interested in commercial aviation, take a look at the Plane Finder web site. As the site explains:

Plane Finder works by picking up ADS-B plane feeds used by commercial and private planes to transmit their name, position, callsign, status and lots more. Our servers add additional information such as departure airport, destination and photos for presentation on planefinder.net and in our Plane Finder apps. The ADS-B data comes to us either from our own receivers or from people with receivers who share their data with us over the internet. 

It’s just great fun…

Sending back an unwanted response to 4,000 people is unfortunate. Sending a response that was obscene and rude was quite another and this is what caused the company that he worked for to dispense with his services. Oh well, strike another for the reply/all syndrome.

Some might ask if the designers of email clients such as Outlook might not be able to come up with a way to make reply/all less dangerous. I guess the problem is to strike a balance between usability and effectiveness. Reply/all has its place and it is a useful function when you need to correspond to a group of recipients. However, it is overused and contributes to the endless ping-pong routine into which many email conversations degenerate long past the point where additional useful information is being shared. The need to accommodate all the messages generated in reply/all storms coupled with the default of copying the complete text of previous responses in new replies is one of the reasons why we need massive mailboxes today.

On another topic, in my secondary (but more important) role as the IT manager for my family, I have been struggling with my son’s HP DV6-3111SA PC and its habit of not being able to restore the screen correctly after sleeping or hibernation. This PC has an AMD CPU and includes some smarts that detects whether the PC is plugged in or on battery. Depending on the situation, it seems to switch graphic processor to reduce battery consumption. Sounds good, if it worked. The problem seemed to be that the PC got confused whether it was using the battery or not and didn’t use the right processor so the screen was dim or just plain blank after it came back from hibernation. All in all, a very annoying feature.

After doing the right thing to make sure that the BIOS was up to date and that all available fixes from both HP and Microsoft had been applied, the blessed problem stubbornly refused to budge. The time for sledgehammer tactics had come so I installed a brand new copy of Windows 7  SP1 Home Premium, allowed Windows Update to do its thing to apply whatever updates were necessary, and the problem has disappeared. This doesn’t say that it won’t come back, but for now the PC seems happier to run its fresh version of Windows.

TR