Happy Holidays from the SBS team!

Hi Folks,

Just a quick note to say Happy Holiday's, and a grand New Year. From Small Business Server Product team to our valued partners and customers, all the best in the new year.

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Using Outlook to Schedule Clients

So one of the most interesting requests that has been emailed to me as of late is how to use Outlook to schedule clients. In this particular case, SBS 2003 and Outlook were used to schedule a photographers time to take pictures of clients coming in to have their family pictures taken. The problem this particular small business was having was the calls were coming in too quickly and free/busy wouldn't be as up-to-date and clients would get double booked.

Outlook 2003, and Exchange 2003, free/busy information is all published through public folders on the server, and each client has to go get the free/busy information, which happens on a schedule basis. Outlook 2007 against Exchange 2007 has an "instant" view of the data retrieved on the scheduling tab, so this problem will disappear with the release of SBS 2008.

... But it's 2006 (at least for 11 more days)

KB Article 197088, expains how to speed up replication of Outlook 2003 clients to the server to make things faster than every 15 minutes (Which is the default).

In addition to speeding up the process, you may want to reference KB Article 291616 how to direct book resources, in this case a photographer (or even a camera).

The Exchange team did a blog post on how free/busy is generated which will explain more how things happen in the background.

Hope this helps with your resource scheduling, and no, Exchange 2007 will not be available for SBS 2003, you'll have to wait until SBS 2008.

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Having trouble with Free/Busy?

Here's a tip for Office 2007.

Close outlook down (ensure it's closed in the task manager), and then launch Outlook 2007 with the command line:

outlook.exe /cleanfreebusy

Takes a while to load, but it'll re-download all the free/busy data. If that doesn't work, you'll get to rebuild your offline storage file.

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Vista Firewall Client Available TODAY!

So the ISA team has come through with an early Christmas Present!

The Vista Firewall Client is now available for download from the Microsoft Download Site here.

So now you early Vista Adopters, can have Internet connectivity!

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The Vista ISA 2004 Firewall Client Update

Wow, I've had an overwelming comments or emails from my Vista Update for SBS 2003 about when the ISA 2004 Firewall client will release.

Asking around internally, you guys are in luck! The Vista Firewall Client is targetted to ship around the same time as the consumer Vista's and the Small Business Server Vista Update. So, come January sometime, you'll have all three in your happy little hands. :)

Hope this helps with your planning, now you can at least target a date!

Oh, and just for completeness, here is the Updated Firewall client for 32 and 64 bit hardware running on Windows XP.

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Microsoft's new Reality TV show?

Poking around on MSNBC.com, I found an interesting article about Carolyn, The Donald's peer in the TV series The Apprentice was recently hired as a judge on Microsoft's reality TV show.

According to This Article, Microsoft is using the competition to promote a new version of its Microsoft Office Accounting software and services for small businesses.

I wonder if my idea to sell server solutions into small business will ever take off?

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The Vista Update for SBS 2003

I've had a lot of questions about the Vista update that's coming to fix client deployment to work for Vista clients. Everyone by now has seen the How to run Vista RC1 on SBS. This post applies to Vista RTM (The final release bits) as well.

Unfortunately, the Vista Update for SBS 2003 (code named "RipCurl") won't be ready until Vista ships to consumer customers. Yes, I'm aware that Vista RTM is available to MSDN and other package subscribers today. In addition, volume license customers (enterprises, etc) will be able to get it within the week (November 30th is the date I've heard rumors of, no holding me to it though!). And In Jan/Feb of next year is when Vista and the Vista Update for SBS 2003 will be available to all customers.

I appologize for those SUPER early adopters (hey, because you're exactly like myself!).

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Wanna Run Windows SharePoint Services v3 on SBS 2003?

Tomorrow Windows SharePoint Services version 3 will be available. If you're a geek and have to have the latest, then this one's for you, or if you think you could use some of these features, you might want to install it at your small business

My two favourite features are:

• A recycle bin. A what? Recycle bin! You mean I can actually un-delete stuff? Oh yeah!


• Offline folder storage (requires Outlook 2007)

Well, the Small Business Server Business Productivity feature team has been working their butts off to help you get this up and running, side by side with your existing SharePoint version 2 site.

To get started, you'll need the following:

• The whitepaper on how to install WSS v3 on SBS 2003


• Windows SharePoint Services version 3

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How to "White List" the Senders to a Distribution Group

I run a jokes list through my home server. I mean really? what is the Internet for? work! buh! Jokes is where it's at!

Unfortunately the email address of the DL got out to our neighbourhood spammers, and now folks are getting more spam than jokes on this list. I had to do something, and I wasn't going to let a spammer force me to change the email address, so I created a whitelist of email addresses that could send to that Distribution list.

Here's how

1. On the server, click Start, Server Management, and select Distribution Groups


2. Right-click the group on the right you wish to add a sender white-list to and choose Properties


3. Switch to the Exchange General tab


4. Select Only From in the Message Restrictions section, and choose the Add button as many times as neccessary to add all the people who can send from this list.

The cool part here, is you can also add Contact objects into this white list. Since I already had contact objects for each person on my Distribution list, I just added them all in.

Now any email that comes to that Distribution List is checked against that list of email addresses, and rejected with the error:

You do not have permission to send to this recipient. For assistance, contact your system administrator.

(i.e. the sender gets an NDR, and the message is not sent to the DL)

In addition, you can create a Black List by simply inverting the "only from" to "From Everyone Except".

And while I realize this isn't optimal for groups that change frequently, it's perfect for groups that don't.

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A Cry for help from Centro

I personally have a fondness for Small Business Server, but I understand that businesses grow (heck, if I had one, I'd want it to grow). So now is the time for you to step up and help out.

Kevin, the SBS and Centro community lead, is calling out all stops to get some Centro Beta Testers.

We are looking for a few good testers to help influence the direction of this new Microsoft® Windows Server Solutions Product. Do you have three 64 bit machines that you can spare to test some of the most exciting technology Microsoft is working on? I know the system requirements are a daunting one, but this is the only way we can test "Centro". So, if you are already on the Longhorn Beta or the Exchange Beta, then you are already two thirds of the way there.

Details:
If you are interested in joining the "Centro" Beta please go to http://connect.microsoft.com click on Invitations sign in with your Windows Live ID (Passport ID) and enter the following invite ID; Extr-GHBC-JCJM. You will be asked to take a short Survey. Once you complete the survey look for an email from MsftConn@microsoft.com. If you don't already trust this address, please add it to your trusted email addresses.

Microsoft MVPs:
Please contact me directly about this techbeta. I have a different invite ID to the Beta for you.

If you are really serious and would like to do the TAP, here is a message from Mike van de Merwe who is running the TAP for Centro:

You know you want to be more involved in Centro. You even want to start using it to run your business! Techbeta doesn’t let you do that but TAP does! We are looking for more people to nominate themselves for the Centro Technology Adoption Program to do exactly what you want to do: run Centro in your production environments. Why would you do something like this? You get access to product support once you deploy Centro in production; you will have an assigned program manager from Microsoft who will work with you to mitigate risks in deploying and maintaining Centro; and you will be invited to participate in 1-2 onsite training sessions in Redmond.

If you have any questions what so ever, please post a comment here or send me an email direct, Kevin.

Centro Press Release

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Troubleshooting Mobility - Another reason why it won't sync...

This weekend I went to the seahawks game, and it was about as depressing as my ActiveSync on my phone. Friday night it was working perfectly, Saturday morning, it wouldn't sync. Usually my phone is the first thing to tell me that the server is down.

I saunter out of bed. OWA works, what's up with that? My phone won't sync. One of the messages in my inbox was "Mailbox is over it's size limit". Being the administrator, I could easily go in and give myself a bigger mailbox, but what kind of corporate citizen would I be if I did that?!

So, to make a long post short, if your phone is having trouble syncing to the server, make sure you're not over your quota limit on the server.

I'm off to delete more email so this doesn't happen again.

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Running Vista with SBS Premium (i.e. w/ ISA?)

Hey Folks,

A little while back, I posted the Looking to run Vista RC1 on SBS 2003? blog post. Those step didn't include how to configure the network if ISA 2004 was involved.

Becky has provided me again with more steps, here they are:

Add this after the section for “Create your user and computer account on the SBS Server”

Before joining a client if ISA Server is running

1. Ensure your Small Business Server has the ISA 2004 SP2 installed and running


2. If you have x64 Vista clients, install the ISA 2004 hotfix from KB 917902. As stated in the KB, you need to call PSS to obtain this hotfix. (note, there isn’t a charge for the PSS incident to get this hotfix)

Note, if you are running the Premium version of SBS w/ ISA 2004, the ISA Firewall Client currently has compatibility issues w/ Vista. See KB article 911077.

• Several of our most excellent SBS MVPs (thanks Cris and Susan!) have suggested running ISA Firewall Client in XP compatibility mode. It’s not a perfect solution, but does give you a temporary workaround. See Susan’s blog post for more info.

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Vista Tip - Copy as Path!

So this is pretty cool. In some cases, it's important for me to copy the path of a file into a program, like the command prompt. Vista has a new feature where you can Copy As Path, which will copy the fully qualified path to the file into the clipboard, but not the file itself.

To do this simply:

• Click on the file once


• Hold the shiftkey down and right-click on the file


• Choose the Copy As Path from the list


• Paste anywhere you like, and the fully qualified path will be pasted

Pretty neat. And yes, this is my first Vista tip with many more to come as I install Vista on all my PCs.

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5 Years Today

Today is October 1st, 2006. It was exactly 5 years ago today that I walked into NEO (New Employee Orientation) at Microsoft. At the time we were in the beginning development phases of Small Business Server 2003. Since then I've owned feature areas such as:

• The Import Files Wizard


• The Fax Configuration Wizard


• The Backup feature area (wizard and functionality)


• The Service Pack 1 XP SP2 Firewall Changes


• ... and now, core networking

It's been quite a ride here at Microsoft, where I've gone from my own window office as an intern, to a doubled up internal office as a full time employee (shows you how many people Microsoft has hired in the past 5 years :o) ). I'm looking forward to the next 5!

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