The conversation went something like this.

Tech: Have you guys tried Bing yet?

Us: Yeah, but I don’t see us switching anytime soon. Google is still the better search engine.

Tech: Really guys? I haven’t found that to be the case. Bing has been really great!

Us: Ok, let’s do an experiment shall we, Go to bing and search for “Exchange 2007 SP2 rollup 1 download”. You’ll find a bunch of blogs talking about the download, but not the actual download page itself. Now go to google, type in the same thing and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button.

At the time of this conversation, the “I’m feeling lucky” link took you straight to the download page, the bing results did NOT have the download page listed on their first page of results.

Tech: Oh, yeah…I guess we have some things to work out.

Us: We’ll try again once Microsoft figures out how to index their own site.

Unfortunately, that conversation happened a couple of months ago. The results are getting a little bitter for bing, but google is still the king of search.

Now, we tend to do things a bit differently at my current job. For example, I’m pretty sure I’m the only developer in the US that is hitting HMC (again, a Microsoft product) with PHP hosted on our linux based customer portal. That’s right, the Unix guys is the lead developer hitting a very Microsoft-centric product. Normally this would be done by a .Net developer.

So what does the Resource Manager give you? Well, the resource manager allows you to add, edit, remove mail databases for use on the system in the Exchange world which is what we are mainly going to focus on. When you first setup these resources, you set certain parameters for the mail stores. Do you want the domains on there to be tightPack or minStoreCount. TightPack attempts to use the smallest number of mail stores. MinStoreCount attempts to minimize the number of stores allocated to each org. We have gone with the minStoreCount model as we want to have all the users of the same domain live on the same store if possible.

Which is good in theory, but Microsoft has an extremely poor implementation of this.

Here’s an example. There is a domain on our system. The users used to live in 2 mail stores. We moved the users, through HMC calls, to all live in the same mail store. Now, when we create a new user, we do not specify the mail store. We rely on HMC and the resource manager to put the user in the correct location. Unfortunately, Microsoft drops the ball big time here. Instead of putting the user on the correct mail store with the other 30 accounts, it instead picks the old store that has no users on it. It fails to figure out that the mail store has been abandoned by that domain and continues to put users there.

Nice right?

So how do we get around this? Simple, write our own and tell them exactly where to put it. Yes, that’s right, recreating the wheel. Well all know we don’t need a rounder wheel. But in this case, we’re actually improving the functionality of the system.

I can’t go into the detail of how we actually implemented our system. But I can tell you, its already paying off by putting the users in the correct location.

But but but…is that it? Is that all you really solved? Do you really care if the users are spread out? Well, yeah, we do. We want them to be in the same mail store to help save on space for those messages that have the same attachment that went out to every users in the organization. Its not going to save you a ton of space, but it does save a lot more than you think it does.

But the placing of users isn’t the only improvement that we got from writing our own resource manager. One lacking feature of the resource manager is the ability to mark mailstores as non provisionable. I’m sure I’m going to get someone from Microsoft telling me that yes you can, there is a bit you can flip. And I’m here to tell you, they’re right, but they completely missed the boat on actual implementation.

It is true, you can mark a mail database as non provisionable. However, when you create a new user, HMC will ask which databases the domain lives on and picks one of them. note, it doesn’t query for all the databases that are provisionable, it asks for ALL of them for the domain. There is a chance, a very GOOD chance that HMC may automatically pick one of the stores that you have marked as not provisoinable. Awesome I know.

So how do you get around this little gem. Well, you can mess with the resource manager as we ran for a while. We had a script that would run daily and check a list of databases that we had marked to not have new users on them. Then it would check out the free space on the system and mess with the resource manager basically tricking the resource manager that it would be out of space. This had the same effect of not having new users allocated to it on the system as the resource manager would at least check to see if there was enough space on the database when putting a user on there. But even this had its drawbacks. For example, what if you have a system setup where you have plans in place where a user can have a 1GB, 2GB and 4GB mailbox. They have the 1GB plan and want to upgrade. Guess what, if the datastore doesn’t think that there is any more space on the drive, you you CANNOT upgrade them. Why in the world would you ever want someone to upgrade their account and spend more money with you. Crazy talk I know.

I’m sure you’re thinking, how in the heck did you ever come up with these crazy ways of mail database retirement. These suggestions came from Microsoft themselves. Even our premier tech support guy (who is awesome btw) didn’t know that these changes would cause such ass ache. Its like they never ran into a situation where someone would want to mark a database to not have any more new users allocated to it.

Our solution, write our own resource manager. not for the weak of heart, but I’m also not a pansy when it comes to this sort of thing. What we have done is put in place a system that keeps track of where each user, domain and mail store is located, how many users per store and where each domain lives. We can easily query this for the best place to put a user, but also the best place to put a user even if you have retired all the stores that the domain lives on, the system is smart enough to place the user on a new datastore for that particular domain. now when a new user is created, our provisioning system queries the resource manager, gets the appropriate store and we put that once “optional” parameter in HMC in the request XML and basically bypass the pile of shit resource manager that Microsoft has given us.

I’m sure that the big boys out there in this space will laugh at this post. I’m sure that they are way past where we are at. Or they have a bigger team that ran into this problem and put in their own solution. But if you happen to be starting out and are relying on the HMC resource manager, you might want to think again on that one. Eventually, you’ll write your own.

In the article, you’ll see some gems such as this:

If Microsoft (MSFT) was hoping that the launch of Windows 7 would halt the erosion of its operating system market share — and curb further inroads by Apple (AAPL) — there is no evidence that it’s working yet.

In fact, preliminary data released overnight Sunday by Net Applications show Mac OS X’s Internet share growing by 2.73% in October, from 5.12% to 5.26%.

Wow…really? Up 2.73%! Holy crap they’re kicking the crap out of Microsoft. Sell your M$ stock…they’re royally f*cked now!

Not quite.

Microsoft is still at 92.54% of the market share if you can trust these numbers, which are probably pretty accurate. So for those keeping track at home, that means that Microsoft is only up by say 87 points. Its still not even close people. So even though this is a CNN article that links to their fortune.com site, I wouldn’t read too much into this one. Is Apple making some gains, sure. But they’re still so far behind its not even funny.

And I’m an Apple fan!

Today was another day for battle. And an interesting battle it was.

So here is the situation that I was running into. Within my code in the customer portal, I have a notification that is sent out that has a full back trace of what happened on the system, what was inputted and what was the error message that was returned. I of coarse try to give the user a friendly version of the error message to the screen before sending off this plethora of valuable detail. Out of this pile of data, I find the following error message has been returned:

“A device attached to the system is not functioning”

Really? Let’s look at that again. Because surely no one in their right mind would return such a generic error!

“A device attached to the system is not functioning”

Hmm, my clue-by-four hasn’t been brought out recently and plane tickets to Redmond aren’t that expensive right now. I guess I could go out there and start handing out clues. But why would I need to. This error message is clear and concise. A device attached to the system is not functioning. What more could I possibly need from this error message. It gives me everything I want! There’s a device, its one of 30 or so devices in the system, that is not functioning.

HOW ABOUT WHICH DEVICE YOU FUCKTARDS!!!!!!!

So we check out the domain controllers, the MPS servers, the web servers, OCS pools, exchange queues, look at SCOM alerts. Nothing pops out at us. Then I take a look a bit further at the error message. here is the full error message that I get back:


Server was unable to process request. ---> Unable to create 'cn=user@domain.com'./A device attached to the system is not functioning. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007001F)/Create Object -- ><response><errorContext description="Unable to create'cn=user@domain.com'./Adevice attached to the system is not functioning. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007001F)/Create Object" code="0x8007001f" executeSeqNo="58"><errorSourcenamespace="Error Provider" procedure="SetError"/><errorSourcenamespace="Managed_Active_Directory" procedure="RethrowError_"/><errorSourcenamespace="Managed_Active_Directory"procedure="TryCreateSamObject_"/><errorSourcenamespace="Managed_Active_Directory"
procedure="CreateSamObject_"/><errorSourcenamespace="Managed_Active_Directory" procedure="CreateUser_"/><errorSourcenamespace="Managed_Active_Directory" procedure="CreateUser"/><errorSourcenamespace="Hosted Active Directory"procedure="CreateUser"/></errorContext></response>


The CreateSamObject_ raised a red flag to two. If you search Google long enough you’ll eventually find something from MSDN stating the following:

From MSDN:

User account names are limited to 20 characters and group names are limited to 256 characters. In addition, account names cannot be terminated by a period and they cannot include commas or any of the following printable characters: “, /, \, [, ], :, |, <, >, +, =, ;, ?, *. Names also cannot include characters in the range 1-31, which are nonprintable

Eureka! We have found the issue!!!

The sAMAccountName for our system is pretty generic. Cut down the upn to 16 characters. Add a period and a unique key that we keep for each of our domain names. This way, the chances of you duplicating names both inside and outside of your OU is pretty limited. However, in this case there was an error with retrieving the unique 3 letter key for the end of the name so the sAMAccountName that we were attempting to set looked something like this:

<property name='sAMAccountName' >
<value>user_domain.</value>
</property&gt

This was an easy fix once we found the issue. But man, could there be a crappier error message from HMC? I mean seriously, how do you get from unable to create the sAMAccountName to a device attached to the system is not functioning?!?!?

Anyway, I figured that I would type this up, let the search engines find it and hopefully someone else can benefit from our digging through the depths of HMC.

Ready for some numbers this morning? Some scary, scary numbers for Xbox 360 gamers? Game Informer, current king of the smoldering ruins of the print gaming magazine empire, polled about 5,000 of its readers to get a feel for their gaming experiences, including just how many of them had unlocked the fabled “Red Ring of Death” achievement. We’d heard estimates ranging from 16 to 30 percent, but even the most pessimistic guesses don’t line up with the survey’s findings of a staggeringly high 54.2 percent failure rate. That’s five times higher than the PS3’s 10.6 percent, with the Wii coming in at 6.8 percent. Mind you, the Xbox 360 was the most played console, with over 40 percent of Xbox gamers button mashing for three to five hours a day, compared to 37 percent of PS3 gamers, and less than an hour’s worth of gaming per day for 41.4 percent of Wii owners. However, game consoles should be designed to shrug off marathon sessions and just keep on spewing polygons, something that the first revisions of Microsoft’s baby obviously couldn’t manage.

Source 1 Source 2

Are game sales that strong that Microsoft can get away with a 50% plus failure rate? Pretty freaking amazing if that is the case.

Here’s the announcement.

Google has developed a way to help companies move onto Google Apps–and away from Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail software–without forcing a migration to the Gmail user interface.

Microsoft’s Outlook has been the dominant e-mail client within the business world for years, and Google’s new Apps Sync for Outlook plug-in acknowledges that some business workers just aren’t ready to give up that familiar interface, even if their CIOs are anxious to get everybody onto Google’s version of the cloud. Businesses who have already signed up for Google Apps Premier Edition–as well as Education Edition customers–will be able to roll out this plug-in across their networks and allow Outlook messages, contacts, and calendar appointments to sync with Google Apps.

Google is trying to expand its presence inside the world’s corporate IT departments with products like Google Apps, which the company says offers a cheaper and more reliable alternative to traditional IT software companies. Quoting data from Forrester, Google’s David Girouard, president of Enterprise products, said companies who chose to use Google’s hosted Gmail service save about $17 per user per month as compared to companies that build and host their own e-mail servers.

Demo:

Now, I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there thinking that we’re screwed. And I’m not sure that is completely true yet.

First off, we’re the first hosting provider to tie in hosted OCS with Broadsoft. Not something that everyone has done. But what does that have to do with Exchange? Everything. Its about presence. The killer application for exchange is NOT email, its calendering. OCS + Broadsoft is an extension of that. Having your IM status update because you are on a call is pretty cool and not something that a hosted service can typically offer.

Second, is Google ready for the Enterprise? Is the Enterprise ready for Google? There is still the perception that Google is beta (more below). Exchange can safely say that they are a carrier grade solution. They have done some heavy lifting for enterprises for many years and enterprises are well entrenched in their Exchange systems. Having an outlook plug-in may break that for some of the smaller guys. But I highly doubt that they will be converting the big boys with the 20,000-30,000 users.

Now, how well does this play in the SMB space? These would be the 5-50 email account systems. Well, I think it will play fairly well for those that want to shell out the cash for the premier version which will be required for the outlook plug-in. But for most, even when the costs are cheaper, there is still a group of admins out there that will not outsource their email to Google. Here’s an example:

Recently, one of my former co-workers a few jobs back was talking about putting up a new email system. They were working away from having it dog food off their hosted service. This way in case there was a catastrophic issue with the system, they could still get support email. The system has been around for many many years and new development isn’t part of the daily routine anymore so moving it out makes logical sense.

Now, he mentioned how he was putting together this box that would allow IMAP, POP, incoming and outgoing mail and webmail access. I had to ask him why? Why not just setup Google apps for domains? You could be up and running with all those services in under an hour and with the number of employees there, it would cost him nothing which was an important selling point. Because believe me, I’d love to sell him my service but the budget just isn’t there. His response to me was two fold. First, he doesn’t want to use a beta product. I don’t think that the email is beta anymore but even if it is, I’ve never had an issue. Second, he doesn’t trust Google. Now that one I’m not sure any convincing on my part would be able to overcome. But this isn’t the first time that I have heard it. There are some people that are drinking the Kool-Aid and think that Google can do no wrong. There are others that sense something is not right under the hood there. I personally don’t have major issues with them. I think that they collect a lot of data which makes them a bit dangerous, but so far, they haven’t done anything to jeopardize my trust with them.

So where does that leave us? I’m not 100% sure. I’m not sure having the plug-in will suddenly make people look around and go, “Holy crap, I could move all my email to Google and still use outlook, freaking awesome! ” The area that I think it will play pretty well is the smaller customers that really need the calendaring and are big time outlook users. They might start struggling for a bit of money and maybe they decide to take the leap to Google away from their hosted Exchange service to save a few bucks. But I’m pretty sure that this won’t suddenly convert a huge group of the IMAP / POP crowd as they have always had the calendaring issues and use an array of clients. So they’re not 100% sold on the outlook side of things.

Time will tell I guess.

But this sort of crap really needs to stop. Yes, its their operating system. But that doesn’t excuse installing add-ons to 3rd party applications and disabling the uninstall options. I’m with the writer of this article, this is a great way to get your customers to not trust you and precisely the reason I haven’t had windows on my desktop for 8 years.

A routine security update for a Microsoft Windows component installed on tens of millions of computers has quietly installed an extra add-on for an untold number of users surfing the Web with Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser.

Earlier this year, Microsoft shipped a bundle of updates known as a “service pack” for a programming platform called the Microsoft .NET Framework, which Microsoft and plenty of third-party developers use to run a variety of interactive programs on Windows.

The service pack for the .NET Framework, like other updates, was pushed out to users through the Windows Update Web site. A number of readers had never heard of this platform before Windows Update started offering the service pack for it, and many of you wanted to know whether it was okay to go ahead and install this thing. Having earlier checked to see whether the service pack had caused any widespread problems or interfered with third-party programs — and not finding any that warranted waving readers away from this update — I told readers not to worry and to go ahead and install it.

source

Microsoft plans to charge mobile-application developers $99 to release upgraded versions of applications they submit to the Windows Mobile Marketplace, and will also charge them for minor updates unless they are released within seven days of the application’s debut.

When Microsoft announced plans for its Windows Mobile Marketplace application store earlier this month, it said it planned to charge developers $99 a year to participate in the program as well as a $99 fee per application submission–although as part of a promotional offer developers who registered this year could submit up to five applications for free.

The goal of coarse is that you will spend extra time developing your application for a higher quality product. OR, what will probably happen is, there will be bugs, developers won’t give a rats ass if it is a minor bug and they’ll never update their code. So you’ll have a marketplace filled with shitty, un-maintained applications.

Apple has it right on this one. Sure, charge a fee to distribute the app, take some of the money the developer charges for the app seeing as you are serving it up for them. But let them continue to develop and enhance their application as much as they want for free! Higher quality apps, happy programmers.

Now, if I could get someone at Microsoft to give me some bits to play with, I would be much happier. hint hint

I’m pretty proud of my team and the work that we have put in. We had a few obstacles in the road that we had to deal with but the guys came through in a huge way. It wasn’t easy, but the good stuff never is.

Links:
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