Info Worker

Very cool proof of concept / festive geek-out project. Take advantage of the Lync 2010 SDK, Micro .NET Framework and some parts to make the holiday lights change color based on Communicator 2010 / Lync presence information.

Watch the video here and get the background information about the setup on the forum located here.

Thanks to @DrRez for posting this very cool use of technology on Twitter.

Reminds me of some of the projects over at Hack-a-Day.

Update: I guess I should check my RSS feeds more often - this was posted on Hack-A-Day this morning before I ever posted this entry. Oh well!

The wait is over and native support for Exchange 2010 RTM/SP1's archive mailbox inside Outlook 2007 is here!

Hopefully, you'll soon be able to download the binaries for the December 2010 cumulative update from this link.

Notable limitations about the Outlook update:
1. Working with Archive policies
2. Independent searches of the archive and the primary mailbox

The following Office editions are supported for archival support with this update:
Office Ultimate (retail), ProPlus (volume license), Office Enterprise (volume license), and Outlook Standalone (retail/volume license)

Thanks for the announcement, Ankur Kothari!

Update: You can request the binaries from this link here. It looks like the KB release notes have not hit the web caches yet but you'll be able to view the release notes for the Outlook portion here.

Update 2 - 12/20/2010: Sounds like there are some known issues with this update so I would hold off using it for now. You can read more about the issues here.

As a follow-up to my blog entry about the Outlook 2007 update for Exchange 2010, we have an update released for Outlook 2003 for Exchange 2010! I didn't really expect to see this show up but it will help users when the Exchange 2010 SP1 calendar repair agent kicks in.

There is only one fix mentioned in this update for Outlook 2003:

When you use Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 or Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 in a Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 environment, the body of the meeting request may be changed to the following text: One or more problems with your meeting were detected and fixed.

I'm expecting to see an update for Outlook 2007 sometime soon to add support for Exchange 2010's personal mailbox archives. Outlook 2010 supports them out of the box, and Exchange 2010 SP1 allows you to store the archive mailbox in a different information store (i.e. slower SAN or drives).

Exchange 2010 introduces a Calendar Assistant, which can be handy for automatically marking incoming meeting requests a tentative, and other very handy functions that can execute out side of the client side experience.

In this one particular scenario, embarrassingly, was my own mailbox for a few days.

I had no control over meeting requests. They were getting rejected and accepted without me ever seeing the request come in.
I checked my phone for any strange settings.
I checked over the Calendar Assistant and disabled it completely, from the Outlook Web App control panel and in Powershell just to make sure it was "super disabled".



Calendar items kept auto-answering for me so I had to dig deeper, into a section I rarely go into unless the mailbox is setup as a resource.

Lo and behold, somehow and at some point, all of these items had been clicked on within my Outlook profile.

I don't know if I did this on accident one night or my kids got into my Outlook settings (never underestimate the comedy gold that can come from smart 8 year olds) with that said:



As you can see, these options were what was killing my Calendaring. Very "stupid user" to not check this spot first but it was originally acting like something the Calendar Assistant was doing and I had forgotten about the resource room settings being buried in Outlook 2010.

So, I got to wear the dunce hat for the day. Maybe me posting this will avoid some other dunce hats getting passed out to others. It was definitely a 'palmface-slap' moment when I discovered the root cause.

I now have complete feature parity with a 64-bit OS (Windows 7) running 64-bit Office 2010 with LiveMeeting and Office Communicator, that I had with 32-bit Office 2007 not too long ago.

You can read about the changes for LiveMeeting here and the changes for the Conferencing Add-in here.

You can download the updated LiveMeeting client here and the updated Conferencing Add-in here.

For the add-in, you will have to choose 32-bit or 64-bit which depends on which flavor (32-bit or 64-bit) of Office you are using. The only 64-bit version of Office to date is the Office 2010 Technical Preview/Beta. Any version before that is 32-bit.

Anyone running a 32-bit OS is going to use 32-bit Office and will want the 32-bit version.

You can certainly run 32-bit Office on a 64-bit OS, and in this case, you would want the 32-bit Conferencing Add-in. One reason I can think of is if you want to keep using Xobni until a new version of that application comes out, or you have other 32-bit Office plugins that you use.

I am using 64-bit Office primarily for a relatively strange reason. Sure, running native applications is a good thing, but I am mainly interested in applications not "mucking around" with my Office configuration by adding in things covertly.

The biggest offender I can rattle off the top of my head is the plugin that iTunes installs into Outlook without asking. It has a notorious history of causing problems with delaying Outlook to shut down. I'm not picking on Apple, I just wish it was an optional component of iTunes.

Plus, I'm just a fan of 64-bit applications in general.

Note: One limitation of using Live Meeting on a 64-bit OS still remains - uploading Office documents other than PowerPoint to LiveMeeting and having LiveMeeting dynamically convert/scale the documents to each client's workspace. I generally don't use this feature so it is a non-issue for me.

The technical reason - a 64-bit Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) print driver does not exist.

I used to subscribe to product specific RSS feeds to catch new cumulative updates for Office but now there is a dedicated site inside TechNet which makes this practice redundant.

Go here to check out service packs and cumulative updates for Office, Forms Server, Groove Server, PerformancePoint Server, Project Portfolio Server, Project Server, Search Server, SharePoint Server, and Windows SharePoint Services. Very handy to bookmark.

Some PBX integrations can be particularly tricky, especially when they are legacy PBX is multiple versions behind the current releases or the hardware is failing. It reminds me a little bit of some of the old Exchange 5.5 and Novell migrations I have done in the past, except in a different kind of environment. On a good note, you eventually become pretty knowledgeable about different PBX systems and their quirks, and how to work through them the best you can.

With that said, I stumbled upon a particularly interesting blog post by a MS employee about using the MSPL scripting language to manipulate SIP packets and fake a 180 ring back. Ultimately, the ideal fix is to get the existing PBX to do the right thing, but sometimes that is not always a viable option.

Read about the ring back workaround here.

In the upcoming months, I'm going to dig more into MSPL and see exactly how creative you can get with this language. It could prove to be very handy for problematic/buggy SIP implementations or as a stop-gap measure to work around something that OCS normally cannot handle. I'm thinking of situations where you need to do something special/different between the mediation server and the PBX gateway to make things work correctly.

Of course, keep in mind any custom made scripts you deploy will be the first things that Microsoft PSS will want to disable in a troubleshooting scenario. It definitely would put you into an 'unsupported' scenario.

I blogged about a post-SP2 Outlook 2007 release that optimized Exchange server connections and now there is a new cumulative update available that adds some performance improvements for certain operations with Windows 7 and for those that have experienced slow performance with Office 2007 Service Pack 2.

The June 30th, 2009 Outlook update (KB 970944) includes many updates that are of interest mostly to developers but I have highlighted a few of the updates that have proven to be noticeable to end users:

This hotfix provides an improvement to Outlook 2007 if performance is slow after you install 2007 Office Service Pack 2 (SP2).

In your mailbox, a folder contains thousands of subfolders, such as the Inbox folder or the Calendar folder. After you install the February cumulative update, when you try to check the size of the folder, you receive an error in the Folder Size dialog box. After that, when you try to open the folder or some subfolder, you receive the following error message: Cannot display the folder. Your server administrator has limited the number of items you can open simultaneously. Try closing messages you have opened or removing attachments and images from unsent messages you are composing

You start Outlook 2007 in Cached Exchange Mode and with the reading pane active. If an e-mail message that contains a custom form that has code is displayed in the reading pane, CPU usage increases or Outlook even crashes. This problem occurs after you install Office SP2.

When you are running Outlook 2007 on a Windows Vista-based computer that uses high DPI (for example, 120 DPI), icons for custom forms will not be displayed.

On a computer that is running Windows 7, the Delete and Sync operations perform slowly in Outlook 2007 after you install SP2.

A hotfix enables you to set the download mode for IMAP accounts in Outlook 2007 and to configure the setting to sync the mailbox when you exit Outlook 2007

When you send an e-mail message from a shared mailbox in Outlook 2007, the sent message is not saved in the Sent Items folder of the shared mailbox

In Outlook 2007, when you view a group schedule in Calendar, the text in the group schedule is blurry. In this case, visually-impaired users cannot read the text in the group schedule.

I've been known to be a bit of a 'chronic tinkerer', which if you think of in health terms, sounds rather disturbing.
I'm referring to my habit of finding new ways to use tools or devices in ways they weren't originally designed for.
Our home's wireless network infrastructure and internet connectivity are shining examples of these mad scientist experiments.

This trend continues with the box that is sitting in front of me: The eBox-3300-JSK, as part of the Microsoft Sparks will Fly contest.

My daughters like working on projects with Dad whenever possible, especially if it involves computers or animals. It doesn't surprise me too much based on our household. My youngest daughter (now 5 years old) completely "owned" her computer in 2008, much to my chagrin. My oldest daughter (almost 8 years old) was showing me map exploit tricks to use in a popular XBox 360/PC zombie game this past weekend.

In an effort to put that kind of knowledge/curiosity to good use, we're going to build an embedded solution for our chickens. It will involve webcams, internet connectivity, motion detection and servos. I am mostly going to use items that are around the house, due to budget and time constraints. My free time to work on this in the short term will be limited, but I have some good ideas to run with. I like to dabble in programming when it isn't part of my regular job, so this will be fun.

In a somewhat related topic, I have some articles/postings coming up in the near future once work and life settles down a bit.

If you browse the long list of updates for this Outlook 2007 SP2 update (which can be applied to Outlook 2007 SP1 from the looks of it), you'll notice a fairly innocent looking fix:

"When you are running Outlook 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 on a client computer, Communicator unexpectedly creates persistent Outlook connections to Exchange Server."

This is a bit of an understatement because I've noticed a difference in the number of connections (logical and physical) even when Office Communicator isn't involved with Outlook 2007.

To give an example, this is what my connection status dialog box (outlook /rpcdiag) looks like before:


After:


Take into consideration, many times my Internet connection is over an EVDO Rev A data line and the importance of this change skyrockets. I want every little extra bit of bandwidth left for other applications if at all possible.

As pointed out by some of the Exchange gurus at Microsoft, the connections listed in those dialog boxes represent the 'logical' RPC connections back to the Exchange server. The actual amount of physical connections (as in, connections viewable by doing a 'netstat -a -n -o' and filtering for your Exchange client access server) will drop by a smaller amount.

Either way, this has sped up Outlook a considerable amount even compared to unpatched Outlook Service Pack 2, which is leaps and bounds faster than any previous Outlook 2007 version.

This has the potential of reduced bandwidth usage and reduced connection counts on your Exchange server and/or ISA setup. Overall, a great update so far.

Read more about the update and request the binaries here.

Thanks go out to Gary Cooper for pointing out this Outlook update.

Found the soon-to-be-active download link to Office 2007 SP2 while reading a KB article published here about performance improvements in Outlook 2007 SP2. It looks like this is in addition to the speed improvements seen in the Feb 2009 and late 2008 Outlook updates.

Too long to list here overall but a good read.

This tool originally was a long fabled internal Microsoft tool that finally has a somewhat proper "official" release to the web with plenty of warnings and caveats. It is an add-in for Outlook 2000/XP/2003/2007 which removes unnecessary emails, on the assumption that most people reply to mail and leave the original intact, so you could keep the last mail in each branch of a thread, and remove all the others. You would be surprised how often this happens!

It reduced the size of my Outlook mailbox by almost 1/5th tonight. Down to nearly 400MB from the original 500MB size.

Keep in mind - this program can and will delete e-mail content!
If you're in any doubt about this, then do not use this add-in.



You can download the add-in from here and read more about it. The installation instructions might seem a little daunting, and it can act a little quirky on initial launch, but it is definitely worth running from time to time.

Original description rom the website with some history behind the plug-in:
Thread Compressor is an add-in to Microsoft Outlook, which removed unnecessary emails from a "thread" - reducing the amount of storage required (maybe keeping your mailbox within its size quota) and reducing the number of emails you need to read.

TC was developed inside Microsoft from 1999 onwards, and attracted a large following (up to 30,000 users) but has never (officially) been made available externally, due to the fact that it will delete data unless it is configured not to. I've decided to share it more widely now.

Originally spotted here.

Issues fixed:

Communicator 2007 R2 update for Microsoft Online Services

You experience one-way audio when LG-Nortel IP8540 or Polycom CX700 phones are used in an Audio Video call on Windows XP

Error events occur when you disconnect a computer that is running Communicator 2007 R2 from the network: "Event ID: 3" or "Event ID: 7"

Initial changes for the integration of Office Communicator 2007 R2 and the next version of Office after the Office 2007 release

Communicator 2007 R2 stores the Actual Remote Number (The number that is dialed) for outgoing calls to a remote party

You cannot see features in Office 14 builds if you are running Communicator 2007 R2 RTM or earlier versions

The font in the Conversation window is very small when you run Office Communicator 2007 R2 on a Windows Vista-based computer that has high DPI (120 DPI) with Internet Explorer 8 installed

You cannot click the password field and enter a password when you sign in to Office Communicator 2007 R2

Office Communicator 2007 R2 update to support Polycom roundtable devices

In Office Communicator 2007 R2, User A gets a failure-to-deliver message after sending an IM to User B even though User B receives the message.

You can read more about the issues fixed in this release here.

Download the Office Communicator 2007 R2 client update here.

The update changes the build number from v3.5.6907.0 to v3.5.6907.9, which can be tracked inside the OCS 2007 R2 administration panel, under 'Database'.

Now for the $1000 question: How the heck do I install this update onto my OCS server so that my clients will automagically download the update when they connect in the next time? I cannot find how to configure the Office Communicator 2007 R2 Automatic Client Update functionality anywhere on the Internet or in the official documentation. I admit, I've only searched for about a half hour, but it is extremely frustrating. I already have updating the Phone Editions working 100%.

Update: Thanks to this blog post and a few e-mails later - I have a solution to the $1000 question here.

Thankfully, there is a relatively simple workaround for Outlook 2007 and an additional registry setting needed for Outlook 2003 SP2.

Step 1 (Exchange 2000/2003 only): Add a SIP proxy address in Exchange Server for the user account that specifies the user's SIP URI.

Step 2 (Outlook 2003 SP2 only):

By default, Outlook 2003 SP2 does not search for the user's SIP address to get the presence information.

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then press ENTER.
2. Locate the following registry subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\PersonaMenu
3. Click Edit, point to New, and then click DWORD value.
4. Type QueryServiceForStatus, and then click OK.
5. Double-click QueryServiceForStatus, type 2, and then click OK.
6. Click Edit, point to New, and then click DWORD value.
7. Type EnableDynamicPresence, and then click OK.
8. Double-click EnableDynamicPresence, type 1, and then click OK.
9. Exit Registry Editor.

After you create these registry keys, Outlook 2003 SP2 shows presence information.

You can read more about it here.

In case you have unsolved issues with Outlook, check the list of issues fixed here to see if they might finally be resolved now.

I’m hearing good things about Outlook 2007 SP2 in regards to performance, and this seems to be a step in the right direction (even though it isn’t SP2 yet).

It brings your Outlook build to:
12.0.6335.5000 SP1 MSO (12.0.6333.5000)

Outlook update from October was:
12.0.6331.5000 SP1 MSO (12.0.6320.5000)

Super fun fact for the curious:
The MSO build/revision number is related to the Office shared DLL called MSO.DLL. It is used by practically all the Office suite. Most of the fixes in this release seem to be related to the shared DLL.

Noteworthy fixes (to me):
When the sender of an e-mail message has Send As permissions to another mailbox, the From field of the printed e-mail message incorrectly contains "on behalf of" text.

The same profile is listed two times in the Choose Profile dialog box of Outlook 2007 when you create a new profile that contains some extended characters in the name. This issue occurs if the Outlook Mobile Service Add-in is enabled.

Outlook 2007 may crash if an application on the Microsoft Exchange server responds to port 80 requests for availability information from Outlook.