An Exchange 2007 Upgrade Is Like a Poke in the Eye

I’ve upgraded our internal Exchange organisation over the last week and I’ve got to say Exchange 2007 is a completely different ball game. Now for seasoned Exchange architects and administrators a lot of the Exchange 2007 upgrade process is probably not new, but for those of us who don’t look after Exchange full time it’s a steep learning curve. The biggest challenges for me have been around the new Exchange Management Shell. I think the implementation of PowerShell as the basis for all Exchange management is a good thing - there’s nothing like being able to paste the exact command line into your change log. However there’s been a couple of issue that I’ve got with Exchange 2007:

A Quick Look at the Windows Vista MMC Consoles

There’s got to be a quicker way of getting to the management tools in Windows right? Well here’s a quick look at the MMC files included in the base install of Windows Vista. I’ve put together a list of those files and whether you need to elevate to run them. If you do need to elevate you will have to do so by running them from an elevated command prompt. Note that you can run these without having to add the .MSC extension. The exception to this is SERVICES.MSC.

The Joy of a New Laptop

A couple of months back my old Toshiba TE2100 laptop that my wife has been using packed it in and it was time to look at a new one. I settled on a Dell and took delivery of a Dell XPS M1210 laptop last week. So far I’m pretty impressed. Here’s a breakdown of the features that I picked up for AU $2840:

Adventures in Access Gateway 4.5 Upgrade

Upgrading our Access Gateway last night proved to be a bit of a challenge where perhaps it should not have been. The problem was not with the product, more due to the time between installs. Access Gateway is generally requires little administration after deployment and it’s certainly not a product I get to work with every day. So what problems did I run into? Well, things that should have been quite obvious from the start, so here’s how I got there and fixed them and how I won’t make the same mistakes twice.

Pagination