technical solutions and commentary

I had the privledge of having someone demo the Office 12 suite for me. This product look great. Seeing the ribbon menus in action added to the experience, there are some other menus that automatically fade in depending upon what you are doing in the application such as highligting a block of text. The screen shots on WinSuperSite where great to see, but seeing this product in action definitely added to the the experience.

One of the more valuable things I saw as well was the graphics and charts that can automatically generated and modified my the user, and they look 1000 times better than the current built in fuctionality. Tey look like a professional graphics artist designed the graphics just for your doucument.

Excel ad some additional changes that finding all the available formulas much easier to find and apply. This will make finding a formula much faster than trying to use the help menu.

I was also shown the file changes, the .docx XML based format. Wow. You can actually open the office file you create in a zip archive program and view individually all the files that make up the Office file. For example if you embed a graphic into a Word doc a jpg image is actually contained in the archive .docx file. This means that if a piece of the Office file becomes corrupt, it doesn’t corrupt the entire file.

In the 15 minute demo, I saw quite a few things that definitely add business value.

There has been recent talk about Cisco’s new WebVPN Services Module . This allows you to create a VPN tunnel by connecting to a SSL (port 443) encrypted web site on the VPN device using any web browser. Using this VPN you can then publish internal web sites such as the company portal, OWA, or any application that runs through a web site.

There is also a OpenSource Web based VPN solution that is available free, runs on any server (Windows, Linux, All POSIX systems) called SSL Explorer and is supported by 3SP. I downloaed the install package for Windows, installed it on a Windows Server 2003 running on a 650MHz Pentium 3 desktop, and configured my firewall to redirect all port 443 to this device. It took about 20 minutes to figure out how to install and configure the software following the quick start guide.

SSL Explorer has plugins you can install into the SSL launch page so so can not only publish internal web pages throuh the connection, but you can also launch RDP, ICA and about 20 other applications using this secure connection. After you log into the SSL Explorer site, it does prompt you to install a Java based VPN client on your local machine that runs in the task tray. It’s a very light client and unintrusive.

I did run into issues at one point trying to use this connection at a compnay that has stricter than normal firewall policies. I was able to log into the SSL service, but couldn’t launch the Java based client. I haven’t had any problem connecting to this from any other location. For a PC that I picked up for $50, a NFR copy of Windows Server (you can use any 32-bit Windows OS; 2000 Pro, XP, etc), and a free download I have a VPN solution that cost me $50 bucks and about 2-3 hours of time if you include the OS installation time. Not bad if you are considering implementing a SSL based VPN solution. If you try it out, let me know what you think of it.

Testing a Blog posting application… Ecto is a desktop application that allows you to write and edit posts for your blog. Its provides a list view of the last 10 posts on the blog site. You can edit current posts or create new ones. Choosing categories is easy, as they appear in a list on the side window of the application. It also allows you to enter key words which is great. You can save draft posts directly to the blog and well as publish. Has spell check too. (It thinks it’s name “Ecto” and “blog” are a misspellings — must use the built-in dictionary that MS provides.) It has an easy to publish a graphic file to the post, using a paper clip icon for an attachment just like in e-mail programs.

The interface could use some work. It’s very functional and reminds me a bit of FrontPage as far as the tool bars and such, but it looks like it was built by a programmer. Functional, but not a real pretty clean interface.

This application opens a new editing window when you create a new post. One annoyance is that every once in a while when writing the post it will jump back to the main application window to provide a preview… in the middle of your trying to type.

You can get the trial version and more info at the ecto blog at http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/
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I signed up on writely.com, a free online document writing application (in beta right now). Writely allows you to use spell check, format you document in using HTML, sort of like Outlook allows you to use HTML text. You can also configure writely to publish directly to your blog. This is nice because you can visually format the post and then spell check it before publishing it. This is my first post using writely.com as a test to see how well it integrates into my wordpress blog. If this works well, I’m going to such to this application for publishing the majority of my future posts.

Okay a few quirks… “Writely” flags it’s own name as a misspelled word. It also flags “online” and “blog”. It does give spelling suggestions however which is cool for an online writing application. It saves your document and allows you go go back to review or edit them and then print or repost to the blog, using the original post. Cool.

A few more things I noticed with using Writely.com… the post obviously reflects the time zone of the web server writely is hosted on. I didn’t see a way to choose any categories from my blog to file the post under.

While attmepting to add the DNS service to a Windows 2003 server through Windows Components, the intallation freezes at ‘Completing configuraation of E-mail Services…’. The Task Manager shows the CPU utilization at or near 100%. Particularly the following services run at high utilization:

This is aparrently caused by the IBM Director Support Program running in the server. The server I experienced this on was a Windows Server 2003 domain controller running on a vmware ESX host. In order to complete the installation, I had to End Task on the frozen installtion of the Windows Compents, then stop all the IBM Director Support services. You can then rerun the installation and install the components successfully. You can restart the IBM Director Client Components and everything will work fine now.

If using IBM Director Support agent, disable the services before attempting to install software.

I finally had time to go through my saved microsoft support cases and other resolutions I had saved. I posted what I thought would be relevant for this site, and hopefully help someone out that runs into similar issues.

Orphaned SQL Server accounts are typically caused from moving database from one server to another. How to detect & rectify Orphaned Users in a Database…

Logins are associated to users by the security identifiers (SIDs), which are stored in the Master database. When you restore a database to a different server, the SID may be different resulting in a mismatch between the Login-User association. These users, without a valid login association, are called ‘Orphaned Users’.

Here’s how you can Detect Orphaned Users:

Use Northwind

Go

sp_change_users_login 'Report'

To associate a Orphaned User with a Login:

Use Northwind

Go

sp_change_users_login 'update_one', 'username‘, ‘loginname‘

It took me a while to locate information on how to remove the SMS 2003 client, so I thought I would provide a link this information here. The the article: “Removing and Repairing SMS Client Software.”

The required SMS 2003 toolkit can be downloaded here.

Cannot Change Read-Only folder attributes on a Windows Server 2003 machine. The Work around for this is in this Microsoft KB 326549 - “You Cannot View or Change the Read-Only or System Attribute of Folders”

Implementing Outlook Web Access with Exchange Server 2003

Exchange 2000 Windows 2000 Connectivity Through Firewalls