Recently we had a pretty funny conversation with our Microsoft premier support tech. It was clear that a memo had gone out from up above and he was doing his part to push bing out to everyone that he could. Unfortunately, he forgot he was talking to engineers. We’re smart ass bastards and he should know better.
The conversation went something like this.
Tech: Have you guys tried Bing yet?
Us: Yeah, but I don’t see us switching anytime soon. Google is still the better search engine.
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. That’s right, the Unix guys is the lead developer hitting a very Microsoft-centric product. Normally this would be done by a .Net developer.
So I was checking out CNN today and I found this article titled Mac share grew after Windows 7 debut.
In the article, you’ll see some gems such as this:
If Microsoft (MSFT) was hoping that the launch of Windows 7 would halt the erosion of its operating system market share — and curb further inroads by Apple (AAPL) — there is no evidence that it’s working yet.
In fact, preliminary data released overnight Sunday by Net Applications show Mac OS X’s Internet share growing by 2.73% in October, from 5.12% to 5.26%.
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.
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.