Category: Software

If you’re getting The Schlog via RSS feed, you probably haven’t noticed anything different. But if you’ve been to www.theschlog.com (a.k.a. www.davidschrag.com/schlog), you’ve seen that there’s been a major makeover. The Schlog has been commercialized. I’m not under the illusion that putting ads on my blog is going to let me quit my day job. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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. […]

Microsoft is conducting a survey of people who use Small Business Server about their experiences with the Windows SBS Community. I have some serious problems with the survey and I’ve expressed them here. I’ve gotten some heat for my criticism here (and maybe here — I’m not sure exactly what Vlad is getting at.) Feel […]

Ever since Microsoft bought Winternals two years ago, there has been a great deal of confusion about whether IT consultants are free to use the Sysinternals software utilities on their clients’ machines. The license agreement stated that the tools could only be used on “your” systems, not those owned by anyone else (including, it would […]

I have posted a substantial update to my instructions for installing WSS 3.0 on SBS 2003 Standard. If anyone has time to double-check my work and fix any problems, I would greatly appreciate it.