DevDog

For our Hosted Exchange 2007 environment, we offer a BlackBerry Enterprise Server that allows users to connect their crackberries and have the full functionality that one expects with these devices.

Various automation scripts have been put in place that make it easy for the user to see who has BlackBerry enabled for their account, add additional users and so on. Today, we discovered a rather annoying feature that exposed a bug in our code. Not a horrible bug, but one that did affect the user and their experience with the customer portal.

I follow quite a few blogs of various people that make headlines and have a coding background. One person in particular that somehow made the list many moons ago that I have failed to remove is Leah Culver. I think it was her ties to the midwest and the fact that she seems to be putting her ass out there with Pownce (which has since had to close its doors).

In her latest post, she talks about writing a plugin for Django. If you are unfamiliar with django, it is a web framework written in python which loosely follows the model-view-controller design pattern (source).

Recently, PC Mag ran an article titled OpenOffice.org: 7 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do. I’ve always been a big fan of Open Office and have found it a nice alternative to shelling out the major bucks for the Office suite from Microsoft.

Here’s the run down of the list.

1. Edit two or more parts of a document at the same time.
2. Use OpenOffice.org to open legacy documents.
3. Play a vintage Space Invaders game.
4. Turn off the blinking light bulb.
5. Save files in Office formats by default.
6. Automate actions easily.
7. Fix those single quotes.

Looking through the list, #1 seems like a good one, #2 is very useful when digging through old files, #3 wait…what the f*ck?!?

With my recent project, I had to do some research for the bits that make up the msRTCSIP-OptionFlags field in Active Directory for OCS users. There were certain operations that are not 100% supported by HMC so often times you have to fill in the gaps. The definition of this field is as follows:

This attribute specifies the different options that are enabled for the user or contact object. This attribute is a bit-mask value of type integer. Each option is represented by a bit. This attribute is marked for Global Catalog replication.

As I’ve written before, the main engine that we are using to provision users on our Exchange system is Microsoft‘s Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) framework.

I’ve had a few issues with it and various hoops that I have had to jump through. Many of which I have not had a chance to document on this blog. Those will hopefully come out in the coming months.

Today, I was dealing with a speed issue that we have been having in our customer portal that hits HMC. The page is pretty basic, it gives a listing of all the users, the name, login address, what package they are assigned and then some actions that can be taken on the user such as edit, delete, disable. This is all in house code that shows this information with calls being made to HMC to get the data.