Ladies and Gentlemen, today you are going to learn a lesson on why you do NOT edit the active directory directly for exchange attributes.

Background

A long time ago, we had a very crappy provisioning system for our hosted Exchange 2003 platform. It worked ok, but missed a lot of things that we wanted to have set. They also were kind of pricks when it came to licensing so making a ton of money on the platform was hard to do. So, we decided to roll our own. It wasn’t that hard to reverse engineer what was being set for users, groups and contacts. There were a few obstacles of coarse but we were able to get a pretty good provisioning system setup. However, this too had its faults. Sure we had total control over the code and could update things as we needed. But we were still working in a void. We really didn’t know _everything_ that was happening on the system that needed to actually happen. Plain and simple, we were missing things. Not to mention future services would require the same amount of dev time reverse engineering what needed to be set. That’s not a scalable solution.

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.

Every once in awhile, these things just suck me in. Enjoy your Friday!

Over the past couple of years, I have been able to tolerate Microsoft a bit more than I used to. When your primary income relies on people purchasing Exchange and OCS accounts that you provide the back end provisioning and automation for, you quickly realize where your bread is buttered.

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.

This guy has way too much time on his hands. But still impressive that he was able to get everything to work seeing as the hardware is 45 years old.