HMC 4.5

HMC CreateFolder

Today I had the chance to get back to some code for CreateFolder which creates a public folder within our Exchange 2007 environment support by Microsoft’s Hosted Messaging and Collaboration frame work. I’ve been highly critical of Microsoft’s code before, and today has taken that to a new level. Here is what I’m dealing with. First, let’s go to the documentation on TechNet: Pretty clear that we have a few required parameters and a few optional ones to set some quotas.

HMC Resource Management

Today I’m going to talk about the wonderful thing that is the Resource Manger for HMC (Hosted Messaging and Collaboration), the wondering framework from Microsoft for provisioning users for Exchange, OCS and SharePoint automagically. 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.

A device attached to the system is not functioning

As you’ve read before, I’ve had a variety of battles with the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration framework from Microsoft. 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.

Ugly Code

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.

The need for speed

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.