Tim Long

Where did the Mail control panel go?

2008-08-15T09:15:49Z

If you’ve installed a 64-bit version of Windows Vista then loaded up Office 2007, you might have noticed that the Mail control panel applet is missing. That makes it kind of difficult to create multiple Outlook profiles and manage your data files, especially if you’re having some issues with Outlook itself.

It’s taken me a few months, but I’ve found it! It’s hidden behind the right mouse button. Click start, right-click on your Outlook icon and select Properties.

“Voilla!”

SBS/EBS Training

2008-08-12T18:45:54Z

via Allison Pauli, Partner Marketing, Windows Server Solutions:

Get Ready for the Windows Essential Server Solutions Launch with Technical Training Series

The November 12, 2008 launch for Windows Essential Server Solutions is fast approaching! Prepare by attending Partner Academy Live technical training sessions for Windows Small Business Server 2008 and Windows Essential Business Server 2008 starting on August 15, 9am PDT with “The Small and Midsize Business Server Platform: Which Is Right for Your Customer?”. Topics include planning and installation, migration, security, management, virtualization, and more for both Windows SBS 2008 and Windows EBS 2008.

Scared of Your Own Shadow

2008-08-05T11:49:16Z

I really like Windows DreamScene, I think it is a really cool feature of Windows Vista Ultimate, especially if you add StarDock DeskScapes. It’s just unfortunate that it is afraid of its own shadow. The slightest little problem and DreamScene commits suicide. It’s a real PITA having to go in and re-enable it all the time. I can sort of understand why Microsoft did this, after the problems of ActiveDesktop. But a feature that keeps disabling itself is one that is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Don’t Fall at the Last Fence

2008-08-04T09:57:04Z

I was reading this post on Transparency. Feedback. Connection. Participation. - Announcements - Community Server. Well there is transparency all right. All the images are 100% transparent.

As for the Feedback, Connection, Participation? This is a great example of how not to do it. There is no way to comment on this post and the author has not published any personal contact details, so no-one can tell him its broken. It’s such a shame that so many people put effort into creative work and then apparently fail to check it from the point of view of their audience. Maybe I am guilty of this too. It is something I will try to watch out for.

Is Your ISP patched?

2008-07-31T22:46:39Z

Is your ISP patched against the DNS cache poisoning (US CERT advisory) exploit? There are confirmed attacks in the wild. My ISP is patched. I asked them, and actually got an intelligent response. They escalated my ticket and a day later came the response:

“Thank you for contacting us And again thanks for the posted information , can assure you that all the necessary security measurements from our side are taken i order to prevent this "DNS Cache Poisining" ,there is nothing that you should worry about ,once again I thank you for your advise.”

These people (Be Unlimited, www.bethere.co.uk, a subsidiary of O2) actually seem to know what they are doing, even if the Bulgarian call-centre staff are a bit shaky on English grammar.

If your ISP isn’t patched, or you can’t get a sensible reply out of them, see the SBS Diva for a mitigation.

Windows Live Writer and Community Server 2008

2008-07-19T13:04:02Z

I’ve been having an issue with my blog since we upgraded to Community Server 2008. CS2008 uses a new filing system on the server and when posting entries containing images, the new filing system is confusing Live Writer, the result is that old images get overwritten, so old blog posts suddenly have their images changed. If you look back over my last few blog entries you’ll see the problem. I’ve tried hard to raise the issue with both the Live Writer and Community Server teams but I’m not sure how effective that will be. We just have to wait in line and see if this gets fixed.

The problem is this: in Community Server 2007 blog images were uploaded to a folder called

/blogs/<blog-name>/WindowsLiveWriter/<entry-title>/Image_N.<ext>

where N is a sequence number that starts at 1 for each new blog entry and increments for each new image. In Community Server 2008 there is a new way of storing blog files, the new upload folder is:

/filestorage/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/<blog-name>/Image_N.<ext>

As you can see, the folder structure is much flatter and results in all images ending up in the same folder. Remember that Live Writer always resets its sequence number to 1 for each new blog entry and it should be clear that the generated file names are no longer unique. This results in old images being overwritten, a data loss condition.

It is not clear whether this is a Community Server problem or a Live Writer problem, but Community Server was the variable that changed and broke a working system, so I reckon they should probably take responsibility for fixing it.

One happy accident that came out of investigating this is that I discovered a new technical preview of Windows Live Writer that was released back in June. It has some nice new features like auto-linking to items in your link glossary and the ability to crop and rotate images. You can download the preview. I wonder how many of my previous posts this image will ruin?

Why TiGra Networks Chose TrixBox For Our Telephony Offering

2008-07-18T21:33:09Z

In November 2007 TiGra Networks embarked on a project to evaluate various digital telephony solutions, with a view to implementing our own infrastructure and, in the process, gain the necessary knowledge and experience to offer digital telephony solutions to other businesses. We are now ready. After months of trying various alternatives, we settled on TrixBox CE (Community Edition). Today we operate two linked digital exchanges across two sites in South Wales with multiple extensions in three locations spread around the UK. Our system provides least cost call routing, ‘Follow Me’ features enabling incoming calls to find us wherever we are, voicemail with email integration, integration with our Microsoft CRM system, click-to-dial from Microsoft Outlook and many other such features that you’d expect to find on enterprise PBX systems costing many thousands of pounds. We can now offer our solution to SMEs at a very reasonable price for an entry level system that will scale to hundreds of users.

This paper documents why we chose our final solution, TrixBox CE, and how we arrived at that decision.

Begin With the End in Mind

Our primary motivating factor was the provide the end user with the best possible experience and a rich set of features that you'd expect from a 21st century digital telephone system. We decided to focus on Cisco 7900 series IP Phones, a high quality industry-proven device, connected both directly and via the Internet for tele-workers. I worked as a firmware engineer in the telephony industry for around 20 years. Having worked for Nortel Networks on digital telephony products and then for Cisco Systems on their IOS operating system and worked on the firmware development of many telephony products, I knew the Cisco phones to be very capable fully featured units with a good quality noise and echo cancelling DSP based speakerphone. The phones are user-friendly and enable most operations to be completed using the context-sensitive soft keys next to the large LCD display, eliminating the need to remember cryptic numeric command strings associated with most PABX systems. This is what sets Cisco phones apart. Many phones cram too many functions into a tiny keypad and one-line display and expect the user to remember cryptic strings of numbers to do basic tasks like transfer a call. Most users don't bother. The Cisco 7900 phones sport a large display and use it to full advantage, walking the user through most operations. Cisco phones support advanced XML-based services enabling them to act as terminals for simple applications such as directory lookup and browsing of RSS feeds and we wanted our solution to support those features. Another important consideration was the ability to brand the phones with ring tones and a logo. Cisco IP phones are readily available both new and used/reconditioned as replacements and/or cheap alternatives and are popular within the asterisk community. We therefore began our quest with high expectations for the end user experience and that has influenced most of our subsequent decisions.

Cisco phones have certain infrastructure requirements, some of which are common to other IP phones and some of which are not. The phone is typically supplied preconfigured to work with Cisco Call Manager and requires a different firmware load to work with SIP protocol. They also require specific configuration files, bound to the phone’s MAC address. These configuration files must be created and stored on the network where they can be delivered using TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol) at boot time. This requires TFTP, DNS and DHCP servers to be available to the phones. Ideally, the TFTP service would be incorporated in the telephony solution for best manageability, but the DHCP and DNS services would typically already be provided as part of an existing LAN infrastructure. DHCP is required to manage phone IP addresses and to supply other boot options such as the address of the TFTP server. This is critical to the deployment and provisioning process and without it each phone would have to be hand-configured, a time consuming and error-prone process. Then there are the advanced services, which require a back-end web server and custom web content to generate the necessary menus and screens. This all adds up to a powerful argument for adopting a system that directly and specifically supports the Cisco IP Phones.

We have evaluated Linux solutions based on Asterisk, and several of its derivative products, namely AsteriskNow, SwitchVox, TrixBox CE and TrixBox Pro. In addition I have considered Axon by NCH SwiftSound, which runs under Microsoft Windows. Commercial considerations aside, these are my technical findings.

Axon (NCH SwiftSound) runs on Microsoft Windows which makes it attractive from a manageability viewpoint, however support for specific devices is completely absent and Axon relies instead on generic protocol support. Axon provides support for SIP protocol and also has a Skype bridge, but it quickly became clear that it was not going to be easy to use with Cisco phones and was therefore not considered further.

Asterisk (Digium) is an open source product that is free to download and use. Of the remaining Linux based solutions, Asterisk is the underlying foundation and provides most of the functionality of all the other products. However, there is no direct support for endpoints (telephones) and everything must be configured by hand-editing the configuration files, of which there are many dozens. This requires detailed knowledge of telephony and the arcane macro syntax and sadly, as is typical with open source software, the standard of documentation is atrocious. I did not really feel that this was an easily supportable solution because of the complexity and poor standard of documentation. It would theoretically be possible to support the Cisco phones but it would be hard work to commission and maintain a system based on ‘vanilla’ Asterisk with anything other than a very small (<10) endpoints. The fact that it is a free product does not make up for that and it would be almost impossible for non-experts to understand and make changes to the settings. Whilst TiGra Networks would be capable of maintaining such a system, we did not feel that it was a solution we could package and recommend to our customers.

AsteriskNow (Digium) is largely obsoleted by SwitchVox and TrixBox. We did evaluate it but found it lacking in features and device support. We felt that there would be no point in adopting an obsolete solution and quickly dismissed it in favour of more recent alternatives.

SwitchVox (Digium) is a relatively recent introduction and adopts the philosophy of completely isolating the end user from the dozens of configuration files. All configuration is performed through a web-based GUI, which is professional and well implemented. This is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the base product Asterisk, where everything must be hand-edited.

This approach is not without merit. The fixed dial plan and user-friendly interface make it a very usable product while removing any temptation to hack the configuration files. The achillies’ heel is that you can’t do anything that hasn’t been built into the web GUI. There is no direct support for Cisco IP phones and although Digium claims that they will work in theory, we have not been able to obtain acceptable results. Furthermore, there is no support whatsoever for deployment and provisioning of endpoints or Cisco’s advanced services, which for a deployment of more than a few phones would be a serious limitation. If Digium were to add configuration and provisioning capabilities for Cisco phones, then this would be the best product of the bunch, but as of today the product is not really capable of supporting Cisco phones to our expectations.

TrixBox Pro (Fonality). Fonality’s enterprise (EE edition) and call centre (CC edition) offering is based on Asterisk with a proprietary configuration front-end. Fonality describes this as a ‘hybrid hosted solution’ and the configuration web application is hosted on Fonality’s servers. The actual hardware is on-premise for direct connection of trunks and extensions. The TrixBox Pro software establishes a VPN connection to Fonality’s configuration servers and all configuration and software updates are pushed from there.

Some specific types of telephone are directly supported by the management interface – but not Cisco IP phones. Once again, while they can probably be made to work, provisioning will be a challenge.

We were concerned about the management interface being hosted offsite. While there are pros and cons to this technique, if for any reason the control panel became unavailable then the box would no longer be configurable. That is an unacceptable risk to us. although in some situations we would certainly consider using TrixBox Pro for a customer installation.

TrixBox CE (Fonality).

We finally settled on TrixBox CE (Community Edition) because of its endpoint manager with direct support for Cisco IP phones. While far from polished, TrixBox’s endpoint manager was the only product to have any support at all for Cisco IP Phones and with a little experience it is a perfectly workable solution. The endpoint manager enables easy creation and editing of the required configuration files and provides TFTP support for provisioning the phones. The PBX itself is configured using the FreePBX web interface, but when necessary all of the configuration files are open for inspection and modification. There is also support for the Cisco advanced XML services which provides directory lookup. TrixBox CE supports all of the telephony features of the other variants and has the advantage of being free to download and use. Support is available from Fonality if required. TAPI support is provided through a client application – HUD Lite – which enables calls to be dialled directly from Microsoft Outlook and provides screen pop-ups upon incoming calls. For our purposes, TrixBox CE represents the best blend of features, device support, flexibility and price.

We're Back! Better, Faster, Cheaper

2008-07-16T20:43:07Z

New broadband installation is complete but was not without some pain. That's not really surprising as domestic providers aren't really geared up for supplying businesses. The line was swapped over by about 10am and I promptly got a text message to inform me that I could connect my new "Be Box" ADSL router. The supplied CD-ROM failed to install on my Vista x64 PC ("Not designed to run on your operating system"). I suspect they haven't heard about 64-bit processors yet. Never mind, I hate those CDs anyway. They usually do more harm than good and I certainly wouldn't let it anywhere near my server.

The "Be Box" is actually a Thomson Wireless Multi-user ADSL2+ Gateway. It seems to be quite a capable box. If you backup the configuration (an INI file) and edit it in notepad, it has loads of settings, akin to what you'd expect to find in a Cisco router rather than a domestic Internet gateway. I couldn't get it to put my server in "DMZ" mode. I called tech support. The good news is that the call centre is not in India. Bad news is that it is in Bulgaria! That said, apart from the thick eastern European accent, the lady I spoke to knew exactly what I was asking her. "Oh, you need to put it into bridge mode to do that". They gave me a configuration file to upload to the router, and it promptly went into bridge mode, transferring all traffic directly to my ISA server, which assumed my new public static IP address.

Downloads are certainly faster, As a test I downloaded SQL Server 2008 RC0 X64, a 1058Mb download. IE struggled to beat 10Mbps throughput but as soon as I gave it to my download manager, the download was sliced and diced into 12 parallel streams and the throughput shot up to about 2412Kbps and stayed there. The whole download was done in just about 10 minutes, less time than it took me to write this blog entry. 24Mbps as promised. My VoIP service is a lot better too, completely jitter free so far, mainly due to the better upstream speed.

Oh, and the bill. A pleasant surprise. They gave me free installation. No charge for the modem/router, no charge for installation. Because I've joined the service in the middle of a billing cycle, they pro-rated to fee. Total cost to dump Demon 8Mbps and upgrade to Be Broadband 24Mbps? £9.99. I was expecting to shell out close to £50 for the upgrade. That's a big thumbs-up from me for Be Broadband.

Scheduled Broadband Upgrade

2008-07-14T19:17:43Z

TiGra Networks is having a broadband upgrade this week so we'll be offline for perhaps a day while that happens. We'll be completely off the air for a while and there will be a bit of disruption while we install the new equipment and update our DNS records and stuff like that, so if you visit one of our web sites and get a 'not found' then please bear with us. We'll be back!

We've used Demon Internet for several years and they had always proved reliable and made appropriate investments in new technology. However, since they sold out to Thus plc they have outsourced their customer service to India and seemingly stopped investing in their infrastructure and the competition has left them in the dust. I gave Demon the opportunity to keep my business by upping my bandwidth or dropping their price, but the call centre agent didn't have the authority to make that decision, so I've voted with my bank account and switched to a competitor.

We'll be using Be Broadband (a division of O2), tripling our downstream speed, quintupling our upstream speed and saving a couple of pounds a month compared to Demon's service. The clincher for me was the upstream speed. Be Broadband allows me to sacrifice a little downstream speed and get faster upstream speed instead. So at the cost of getting only (!) 20Mbps downstream we'll get 2.5Mbps upstream speed. This is exactly what I need for the various web sites, mailing lists and blogs I host, and even more important, our VoIP PBX which has remote users that are currently struggling for quality of service. I only wished they allowed me to go further, I would happily take 8Mbps symmetric over 20 down/2.5 up. I asked Be Broadband what their contention ratio was and they replied 1:1 - a figure I find difficult to believe. They've either found a new way to define contention ratio or their service is unbelievably good for the price. I hope it is the latter, but time will tell. Be Broadband is a Local Loop Unbundled (LLU) provider so it is not beyond the realms of possibility.

This should all happen Wednesday if everything goes to plan. See you on the other side.

Adding Silverlight 2.0 to Community Server Blogs

2008-07-14T05:20:47Z

Silverlight 2.0 is going to change the web so much. I've just completed an experimental blog theme for Community Server that uses a Silverlight masthead. You can view the finished result over at Grace's blog.

The Silverlight masthead was created using Expression Design, Expression Blend 2.5 June CTP and Visual Studio 2008 with the Silverlight 2.0 beta 2 tools. The theme is based on the Paperclip theme with a few minor changes to the CSS and some changes to theme.Master to add the Silverlight control. At the moment the Silverlight content is hard-coded into the theme, it would be nice to make this dynamic so the user can change it from the control panel.

First, in the top of the theme.Master file, we need to register the Silverlight assembly.

<%@ Master Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="CommunityServer.Components" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="CommunityServer.Blogs.Components" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="CSUserControl" TagName="UserWelcome" Src="~/utility/usercontrols/UserWelcome.ascx" %>
<%@ Register Assembly="System.Web.Silverlight"
    Namespace="System.Web.UI.SilverlightControls"
    TagPrefix="asp" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional-dtd">

...then in the body section, we need a ScriptManager and the Silverlight control itself. Note that I've used the Windowless mode so that HTML elements can appear on top of the Silverlight control.

    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server">
    </asp:ScriptManager>
    <TWC:Modal runat="server" CssClasses="Modal" TitleCssClasses="ModalTitle" CloseCssClasses="ModalClose" ContentCssClasses="ModalContent" FooterCssClasses="ModalFooter" ResizeCssClasses="ModalResize" MaskCssClasses="ModalMask" LoadingUrl="~/utility/loading.htm" ID="Modal1" />
    <div id="masthead">
        <asp:Silverlight ID="HeaderXaml" runat="server" Source="~/ClientBin/TiGra.Silverlight.LABSBlog.xap"
            Version="2.0" Width="1028px" Height="221px" Windowless="true" />
        <div id="userArea">

I had to modify the CSS styles for #userArea and #title because the Silverlight control pushed them down the page, so I moved them back to the correct position by giving them relative positioning and a negative top offset. This is done in the file style.css, like so:

#title
{
    position: relative;
    left: 63px;
    top: -192px;
    width: 151px;
    height: 74px;
    overflow: hidden;
    text-align: center;
    font-size: 11px;
    /*border: solid 1px #ff0000;*/
}

#userArea
{
    float: right;
    margin-top: 16px;
    padding-right: 6px;
    position: relative;
    top: -218px;
}

Community Server currently targets .NET Framework 2.0 but Silverlight 2.0 requires .NET Framework 3.5, so it is necessary to obtain a copy of the Community Server SDK and upgrade it to target .NET 3.5. Upon opening the solution in Visual Studio 2008, it'll prompt to upgrade to .NET 3.5. From there, make a copy of the Paperclip theme (/Themes/Blogs/Paperclip) and edit as above. Copy your ClientBin folder, which contains your Silverlight application packaged in a .XAP file, from your Silverlight project into the Community Server web site (I created my ClientBin folder in the root folder).

Build the solution, then right-click the Web project and publish it to your web server, as shown in the screen shot. If your web application pool was being shared with other applications, you'll need to move your Community Server site to its own App Pool, as ASP.NET cannot run different versions in the same App Pool. I use an AppPool dedicated to Community Server so that avoids any such conflict. Now remember to add the application/x-silverlight XAP mime type to your IIS web server or it'll refuse to serve up Silverlight applications.

Microsoft MVP renewed

2008-07-06T15:58:13Z

I'm proud to announce that Microsoft has renewed my Most Valuable Professional award for 2008/9. Once again my competency is Windows Server System - Small Business Server. There are currently (as of today, according to the MVP web site) about 55 such awardees worldwide, 2 in the UK and I'm the only one in Wales, so this is indeed a special honour bestowed by Microsoft.

Microsoft has slightly changed the way it classifies MVPs to recognise that they can have technical interests in more than one field. My online profile currently lists the following areas of expertise: Small Business Server (of course!), Dynamics CRM, SharePoint Server and Visual C#.

2008 will be an exciting time for SBS MVPs with a new version of Small Business Server 2008 and the introduction of a new product called Windows Essential Business Server 2008, both slated for public availability in the November 2008 timeframe. One of the roles of an MVP is to help Microsoft improve its products and TiGra Networks is actively involved in the pre-release beta testing for Small Business Server 2008 and I take part in regular conference calls with the SBS team.

The term MVP is less familiar in the UK than in the USA, where it is traditionally used in popular sports such as baseball, American football, hockey and basketball. A player will be nominated MVP, meaning Most Valuable Player, either for one specific game or for an entire season or major event such as the Superbowl. The term MVP is, therefore, fairly well established in American culture and Microsoft has borrowed from its popularity for its own way of recognising leaders in the technical community.

Silverlight Training Hots Up

2008-07-05T13:46:15Z

If, like me, you're trying to get up to speed on Silverlight 2.0 beta 2, you should know about Jesse Liberty's webcast series. Jesse has a new approach to coding webcasts where instead of watching the presenter write code live (which takes time) he records himself doing the coding in advance, then plays it back at 2x or 4x speed and talks you through what he is doing. Sounds odd, but it does seem to work. Jesse has also accelerated the pace of training in response to feedback, combining some webcasts and upping them from level 200 to level 300 and moving others up the schedule. Go visit the blog of The Silverlight Geek for more information.

ServerQuest: eighties retro chic

2008-06-25T12:07:12Z

Move over Minesweeper! I received a link to this from my MVP lead and I'm hooked, despite the blatant advertising. The cleverly done retro-chic "plinky plonky" music, chunky graphics and office politics takes me straight back to the early 1980s, Sinclair Spectrum and BBC Micro (model "B" of course!).

You might have guessed from the title of my blog that I'm a child of the 80s at heart, the age when personal computers were new and exciting, anything was possible, and stories had happy endings. So check it out. Oh, and here's a video clip of the song from which I took the name of my blog: Forever in Electric Dreams!

A Clean Slate

2008-06-16T02:33:38Z

My ClustrMap has just been archived, which means that my site usage will look a bit empty for a little while until you all pay me a visit. ClustrMaps does this annually to stop the image turning into a read smear. I've suggested to the team at ClustrMaps that they use a rolling average instead of wiping everyone's map clean once a year. They assure me it is on the to-do list. Until then, on your left is a clickable image of this year's final total. On the right, for comparison, is the previous year's total, almost exactly an order of magnitude increase! I wonder how long I can keep that up for?

Upgrade to Community Server 2008

2008-06-15T16:48:08Z

Our blog/forum/file/photo gallery server, based on Telligent Systems' Community Server, has just been upgraded to Community Server 2008. We had a few initial teething problems that seem to have been caused by outdated/missing binaries in the Upgrade package which meant the MetaBlog API threw exceptions. I worked around this by downloading the SDK, recompiling everything then copying the binaries over to the live site in the /bin folder. We now seem to be up and running again. Please let me know if you have any problems accessing the server.