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.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of side work for friends and family putting together some low traffic ‘business card’ sites. I used to do a lot of custom programming for each of these where I would put up the site and then have a CMS on the back end so they could log in and update the content.

This worked out for a while and I had a pretty basic CMS built that I could plug in where needed. But, as with everything, the feature set that I needed kept growing and I was pretty short on time to implement the features that I needed.

Good lord! I can’t believe that people haven’t learned yet. In the past week, I have seen 2 stories about some dumbass losing hundreds of thousands of dollars to a scammer in a 419 Scam.

First we have John Rempel who sounds like not only did he lose his own savings, but decided to take some friends and family along with him. Nice job John!

Next up, we have Richard T. Howell Jr. which was another form of the 419 scam. Now, Howell got caught up in something a lot more sophisticated. But even he admits he was a dumbass.

Well done T-Mobile, well done! Will this video make me want to switch, not necessarily. But you’ve set your self apart from the rest of the phone carriers by having a clue about viral marketing.

I’ve been meaning to write out this for the past week and just haven’t had the time.

Last weekend, I was thrilled to get a call at midnight from someone on my team telling me that one of our primary authoritative DNS servers was having issues. We have 3 so this typically isn’t a huge deal but seeing as this is the one that the others sync off of, it tends to get a higher priority.