Unified Comm

Read about it and download it here.

It contains all the fixes from update rollup 1 and 2, plus:

KB 931328 - An integer is added to the end of the legacyExchangeDN attribute of a newly created mailbox in Exchange 2007

KB 930468 - The attachment is not displayed when you use Outlook 2003 to open an e-mail message that contains an attachment

KB 931842 - Error message when the sender or the receiver of a meeting request has a double-byte character set (DBCS) display name in Exchange Server 2007: "The requested property was not found"

KB 932207 - Error message when a user tries to open a forwarded message to accept or to deny a resource request in Exchange Server 2007: "Cannot open the free/busy information"

KB 932515 - You receive a 5.2.0 non-delivery report (NDR) message when you send an e-mail message to an Exchange 2007 server that is running the Isinteg.exe tool in a dismounted mailbox store

KB 934887 - DBCS characters are converted into two question marks in a forwarded e-mail message in Exchange 2007

I’ve been onsite at a client all month so my time to scoot out and take advantage of these expiring vouchers has been limited. It was either find a place that would test after 5pm (only found a VUE center in town), or take the test during my lunch break. I ran out today to grab a bite to eat, went to the Prometric site that was down the block, took the test in under 45 minutes and was back before lunch ended. Passed it, almost 800 – need 700 to pass. I’ve done a lot of LCS 2005 in the past so I was hoping I wasn’t overconfident. The test was not easy, I don’t think. It was downright tricky in spots.

This might seem like a bit of a teaser but it really is true. The best content I've found for studying for this exam is right here.

What is it you might ask? Live Communications Server 2005 with SP1: All Technical Documents
28 MBs of pure knowledge.

That typically is the best way to learn anyway, along with real world experience and hands on use.

One of my favorite PocketPC / Smartphone applications has just been updated to support Windows Mobile 6 phones (such as Sprint Mogul/PPC 6800) and lastest Cingular 8525 ROM.

Download the PDANet 1.80 pre-release version from here.

What does PDANet do exactly? PdaNet will make your Smartphone your high speed wireless Internet Service for your laptop/desktop computer instantly - no extra hardware or setup necessary, no need to kill ActiveSync or perform any tricky hacking to your device, and no $15/month tethering charge from Verizon.

I had a few free vouchers for TS exams at Prometric and Vue, so I have been using them up this month because they all seem to expire June 30th. I'm not sure why that seems to be the magical date but I've had 2 from Prometric that expire on that date and one from Vue that expire on that date.

Thankfully I have been able to find an exam place that stays open after 5pm on the weekdays so I can squeeze in some of these tests in without taking time out of my normal work day.

Overall, if you are familiar with Windows Mobile 5.0 and setting it up properly in an Exchange 2003 environment, you should be able to do well on this test too. I use my Motorola Q more as a computer than a phone so I'm various familiar with the OS and the concepts behind it.

I like having another 'knock in my belt' too though.

Postini offers SMTP mail filtering and other options as a service. You typically configure your mail server to use their mail servers as a smarthost so that you can get accurate metering of your e-mail flow and various other add on features.

Postini doesn't use the typical 'store-and-forward' method but reflects the destination's mail server messages back to your server. Typically, this isn't a problem with Windows 2000 and 2003's SMTP server. It is however a problem with Exchange 2000 and 2003's modified virtual SMTP server.

This issue has been talked about at length in the Exchange newsgroups here without any real resolution to the problem. Various things tried were setting the SuppressStateChanges registry key, which is a good idea anyway if you ever plan on going to Exchange 2007, and also shortening the Glitch Retry Interval value.

The problem happens when you have a batch of e-mails destined for various mail servers and you have one (or more) e-mail that triggers an error.

As an example, if you have 200 messages to deliver through Postini, and you have your SMTP virtual server set to deliver 200 messages per connection, if one e-mail gets rejected by any server, all 200 e-mails will get dumped into the Messages with an unreachable destination queue. More outgoing e-mail will start to pile up on top of the 200 e-mail messages, until the retry interval is reached or you find and delete the offending e-mail that punted all the e-mail into the unreachable destination bin.

The not exactly elegant, but usable workaround? Set the Limit number of messages per connection to: in your SMTP virtual server to 1. It isn't the most efficient method of transferring e-mail, but it will at least keep your e-mail flowing without using various registry hacks to short circuit Exchange's routing engine.


I wouldn't advise setting your retry value to 1 minute, as suggested in the newsgroup link above.

If you have a slow Internet link and send e-mails that are larger than a few megabytes, Exchange will see that the original message still has not been sent successfully and open up yet another connection to send the large e-mail out after a minute has elapsed. You basically end up with an endless amount of bandwidth being used up to send a single e-mail message that never quite makes it to the destination.

Hopefully someone out there will find this helpful, because it is an interesting "case study" in interoperability.

This might be good to know/have if your Office Communicator / Speech Server is stuttering for no good reason with Windows 2003. The Vista KB/hotfix is located here.

SYMPTOMS
You record audio by using a USB microphone on a computer that is running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or that is running Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, or Windows Vista. However, you find that the quality of the recording is poor. For example, there may be gaps or pauses in the recording. This problem occurs on a computer that is using 4 gigabytes (GB) of RAM or more.