Micro$oft

I’m not a windows mobile developer. And why would you want to be. Seeing this latest article from CNet News, I can’t think of a reason I would want to play in the Micro$oft world of endless, confusing licensing agreements.

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.

I’m thinking that Microsoft is finally starting to realize that the hosted model ‘works’. Seeing this article on cnet is starting to make me feel a lot better about the future of Exchange. As a hosted exchange provider, I can tell you that making Exchange a multi tenant environment is not the easiest thing to do. There are a lot of thing that Microsoft has had to hack in in order to get things to work properly. From the sounds of this article, they’re taking a different approach with 14. Thinking about the service providers first which then easily integrates with the Enterprise. This way, it doesn’t matter if you have 50 organizations on the platform or 1, it simply works.

There are very few times that a company gets to claim that they are first to do something. But today, my project is launching and LightEdge Solutions gets to claim that we are the first service provider to provide this integration. Today we are announcing that we are rolling out our Hosted Office Communication Server 2007 service. The real kicker for this is that we have been able to successfully tie together the hosted OCS system with our hosted Broadsoft phone system. So now when you are on a call, it automatically updates your status so everyone in your company will know not to bother you at that time. This is taking the presence integration to that next level.

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.

Not many people are aware of this. But “Microsoft Office Communicator hotfixes are not part of Windows Update, so it is important to find and deploy them through other means.” (source)

I’m completely baffled on how this happened. In the Mac Messenger version, the update is handled by the standard office update. Someone on the Windows side completely dropped the ball. And I’m willing to bet that there are a _lot_ of admins out there that don’t know that this is the case.