sys.blog

This week I upgraded my desktop to Windows 7 and Office 2010. My laptop has been running both for about 2 months, but I finally broke down and installed it on the desktop. Don’t think it was because I have a problem with 7 or 2010. On the contrary, I love them both…they’ve reignited a passion for PC computing that I was lacking in the post-Vista world. No, it was merely the huge pain it takes to rebuild your PC exactly the way you like it after wiping the OS. Four days later and I’m just getting settled in.

But one thing that I let fall to the side in my months of Office 2010 use was the Outlook Social Connector. It’s this handy little tool that will interface your Outlook connections with your Facebook and LinkedIn connections (and MySpace and others, depending on who makes a plugin and if you install it). When I redid my desktop I chose 32-bit Office to support the LinkedIn plugin and gave it a twirl. What I didn’t expect was how creepy it might become.

What the Social Connector does is aggregate all of the Social Media data about a person for you right inside of the Outlook interface. The new People Pane in Outlook is one place where it does this. The People Pane is a section at the bottom of the email preview screen that shows all of the relevant prior email, appointments, and chats with all of the recipients or senders of an email message. So when my business partner sends me an email, I can see his past emails and our past meetings all in one handy place; pretty cool! The Social Connector adds in LinkedIn and Facebook information streams to the People Pane, including…their picture.

Hello There!
When I was pricing out a POS hardware solution for a client this week, I spoke to Dell on their cool OptiPlex 160 line of mini PCs. The sales rep kindly sent me some links via email to go over the features, which was a huge help. But when I opened the People Pane, I saw it not only found his picture from Facebook, it also found his (unprotected) update stream, his LinkedIn profile, and placed all of it right into my Inbox.

Needless to say, it was a bit creepy to find this all here at my fingertips without the sender of the email knowing. After a little digging, I found at least three dozen others on various mailing lists and discussion groups where I’m a member who had wide open Facebook accounts identified by the Social Connector. Even when the account is protected, it shows me their profile picture. Sometimes even several profile pictures if they have a Facebook and a LinkedIn account with profile images designated.

While I don’t think I’ll uninstall this tool from Microsoft, I think maybe limiting the display to only my friends and connections on the various networks might be a good upgrade. Then again, maybe people should learn to secure their accounts so only friends see that information. Or we can follow the Zuckerberg model…I mean, you don’t have anything to hide, do you?

I’m an old school Dreamweaver user. I’ve been using it since the Macromedia days, starting out with version 2 in high school. Because it always tightly integrated into their suite of applications, I never had need to dust off Photoshop because I had Fireworks. It always served its purpose, but when Adobe bought Macromedia back in 2005 I figured my time was up. Adobe couldn’t possible maintain two separate image editors in their lineup, I thought, so I set out to try learning Photoshop so I wouldn’t be stuck using MS Paint when the other boot dropped.

Fast forward 5 years, and I still haven’t learned Photoshop and Adobe still hasn’t canned Fireworks. I guess I really wasn’t the only person out there using Fireworks, after all, despite the fact that I’ve never found another Fireworks user in my life. Still, it fits a niche and I guess Adobe is happy to fill it. Still, I’m drawn to Photoshop, if only for the truly amazing designs I’ve seen from people who use it. So, today I flipped open Photoshop and tried to design a simple one-page site for our email marketing service.

While I can appreciate the similarities between Fireworks and Photoshop in their CS5 iterations, they are only cosmetically similar. When it comes down to the actual operation, I was so lost it wasn’t funny. Eventually I figured out how the layers system works and managed to get the text tool to behave, even got a little fancy with the formatting, but it still wasn’t what I was expecting. Everyone who has scoffed at me using Fireworks has expounded endlessly on how wonderful Photoshop is and how easy it is to use. But, in my experience, I’ll stick with Fireworks for page design. The web slices and integration with Dreamweaver just makes it too good to pass up.

The result is here, and overall I’m pleased. I think it turned out well for my first shot at web design using Photoshop. Let me know what you think!

I recently needed to rename a Hyper-V server (which is essentially a server core install of Windows Server 2008 R2). It took so doing, but I found the command.

Netdom renamecomputer oldname /newname:newname /userd:someuser /passwordd:*

Replace the computer names with valid ones and a domain admin user, and the command will prompt for your password. That’s it, reboot and you’re set!

I’ve been beating my head against the wall for a week on trying to forcibly remove a corrupted Exchange 2007 install on one of my servers. The AD Configuration tree became corrupted and a restore did not fix it, so I rebuilt a new server and migrated the mailboxes there. Problem solved! Except, now how do I remove the old server…when I try to uninstall, I get warned that Public Folder database still has replicas. Well, the only way to get rid of that is to replicate them to another server, but that’s not possible with this crippled server.

Solution? Delete the database from the configuration partition of Active Directory manually. To do so, you need to launch an ADSI edit session in the MMC and add the ADSI snap-in. This requires the Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools or the Remote Server Admin features for AD in Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2. I usually go to a domain controller to do this, as it has the ADSI plugin already installed.

Once connected, expand the tree to your server in question. You’ll find the storage group with your public folder store listed:

There, you will find the store in the right-hand pane:

All set! I successfully uninstalled Exchange 2007 from this server as soon as that was done. Since it contained no vaild public folders, I didn’t care if any data was lost. But be careful, it will ruin your public folder stores if you have not successfully and verifiably replicated the public folders to your new server.

This one drove me nuts for four days before I figured out what was going on. A client is deploying OCS 2007 R2 in their environment and ditching WebEx and GoToMeeting, as well as the other conferencing and collaboration features of the product.

However, the main goal of getting users outside of the organization to access meetings was just making me rip my hair out. No matter what I did, each time I tried to join a meeting it would pop up and demand credentials on the client’s domain. All three of my external test machines did the same thing and I could not, for the life of me, figure out why.

A quick search did reveal some permissions issues, and I corrected them according to KB 2018725, and they are running Windows Server 2008 Standard x64. After setting the permissions, though, I still had issues.

Finally, I managed to find a Microsoft forum post that explained it all. When I was testing the external access with the MOC client, I was logging in to the client’s network as my domain user. That was pre-populating the user information in LiveMeeting with my SIP URI information on the client’s domain. Deleting the account info instantly fixed the issue on all three test boxes. In addition, three new user machines that had never before connected to OCS were able to connect to a LiveMeeting session without any errors or prompts.

Good luck!