Category: Technology

Actually, let me rephrase that title. I think it should be "Why? Is SBS 2008 better than SBS 2003?" There are few if any people on the planet more familiar with Small Business Server than Microsoft’s Sean Daniel. Sean recently posted a feature comparison between SBS 2003 and SBS 2008. What strikes me about this [...]

You’ve read my rants about Microsoft licensing for years. Now you’ve got a chance to tell them what you think. One minor problem: they may not be listening. I submitted my feedback this morning, and here’s what I got in return: Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients. Subject: What [...]

In his brilliant book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes the tremendous impact that the Pepsi Challenge had on the soft drink industry in the 1980′s (see pp. 155-159). Pepsi was trailing way behind Coke in market share, but it looked like there might be a sea change. Pepsi began running ads featuring the Pepsi Challenge. The [...]

I was fully prepared to wait an hour or more in line, and even to return on another day if necessary, to get an iPhone. The timing was right. My wife’s phone had just died and it was out of warranty. We were at the end of our contract with Verizon Wireless, and we were [...]

It’s harder than you’d think to produce a list of all the e-mail addresses that are on your Exchange server. I found a Visual Basic script that will produce such a list. A sample entry for a single user looks like this: cn: David Schragmail: david@schrag.netProxy Addressessmtp:David@schrag.localsmtp:dschrag@schrag.netSMTP:david@schrag.netsmtp:dave@schrag.net (I really should have replaced the @ symbol [...]

Microsoft Response Point was announced sixteen months ago. Today — maybe! — it’s worth checking out. As I noted last November, the initial release of Response Point had a very 1.0 feel to it and was lacking many features already present in competing phone systems. Just this week at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft announced [...]

I had to create a support ticket at Dreamhost. I like their style. Here are a couple of the questions they ask, along with the options available in the pop-down menu: I’m not sure how well these responses work for people whose first language is not English, but I definitely appreciated the effort.

Microsoft really, really wants small businesses to start buying Vista instead of XP. For the next three months, they’re offering “Windows Vista Small Business Assurance,” which gives free support and “one-on-one coaching” from “specially-trained support agents.” Support is available 10 AM to 7 PM Pacific time, or 1 PM to 10 PM Eastern. (In case [...]

I narrowly averted a serious problem on a client’s server today. I got an alert from the server that the C: drive was down to about 50 MB of free space (and falling). That’s very bad. It turned out that the problem was caused by an expanding log file created by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. [...]

Problem: The SSL certificate for mail.myclient.com expired. The certificate had been purchased from GoDaddy and was installed on the server by a former network admin. No one had any idea whose GoDaddy account had been used originally, and GoDaddy couldn’t tell us for security reasons. So there was no easy way to renew the certificate. [...]