technical solutions and commentary

Microsoft has made available a once only Premier Support utility that will automatically diagram your Active Directory enviornment. The “Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer” reads the AD configuration and then automatically generates a Visio diagram. It diagrams both AD and Exchange (2000+) topologies. It includes domains, sites, servers, admin groups, routing groups and connectors. If you have the full version of Visio you can manually makes changes to the diagram as well.

Get it directly from Microsoft downloads.

After installing the new Zune client software on my Vista PC, nearly all of my albums and artisit listing got messed up. I went through the entire library music twice and reset the “Artisit” and “Album Artisit” properties to match. Unfortunately when I ripped my music from my CD collection to MP3 using Windows Media Player (10 & 11) it didn’t populate the ‘Album Artist”. For some odd reason when the new Zune software was installed, it almost seemed like the “Album Artist” info was filled in by some wierd defaults that made no sense.

There is a fix published for this problem I found in the forums that point to the KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945319?sd=zune. Performing these steps worked for me, but this should be a lot simpiler to do, especially for the non-techie consumers that don’t understand this stuff. The Zune team should release an update to address this problem.

I also ran into a problem of not being able to download songs after purchasing them. The download runs all the way to the end and then gives a strange meaage about an ‘unknown’ error and gives the error code. The funny thing is that if you search on the error code in the Zune Support Forums it finds it with many, many people posting about the problem so it’s obviously not an “unknown” error. I finally got the music downloaded, just by trying over and over again until they all downloaded. Looks like this needs to be addressed in the next Zune software update too.

The Microsoft ForeFront team has a fun video that you interact with… choose a villian, and a defense to lean how to defeat them. Try it out http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/easyeasier/index.htm

Ars Technica is reporitng that the OpenOffice.org community conflict leads to Frangmentation. I have included a compressed version of the article below. Please link to the original article to get the entire story.   

…Developer Kohei Yoshida expresses his frustration with Sun’s excessively bureaucratic specification process and unwillingness to compromise and communicate with members of the community. Although Yoshida is making his code available under the suitably permissive LGPL license, Sun is now attempting to reimplement it from scratch because Yoshida refuses to assign the copyright to Sun, and the company is reluctant to permit inclusion of code that it does not own itself.

Novell OpenOffice.org developer Michael Meeks has condemned Sun for refusing to be a team player. “Ultimately, it seems to me the current setup is not a winning, open approach, but a dangerous situation that hobbles OpenOffice.org, and leaves us in a bind,” says Meeks. “Regrettably though, it appears that some of these [improvements] can never go up-stream, as Sun refuses to accept them. Thus, it seems the best approach is to continue working where we can with Sun on OO.o, (helping them eat by improving their core)—while simultaneously providing our rejected features directly to users somehow,” Meeks suggests.

Although this isn’t a full fork, it’s still serious fragmentation, and it’s definitely not a good thing for the OpenOffice.org community. Sun’s obstinate and heavy-handed way of interacting with OpenOffice.org community contributors is leading to fragmentation.

In another article in Ars Technica entitled,”OpenOffice goes Premium,” it brings out the following information… 

Now, a group of OpenOffice enthusiasts have released OpenOffice Premium, a new bundle that includes the OpenOffice suite and a grab-bag of extras, such as clip art, document templates, and fonts. The idea is to provide a package that is similar to a new installation of commercial office suites such as Microsoft Office and Corel Perfect Office, both of which come with a plethora of clip art and other goodies.

The choice of the word “Premium” for this bundle is somewhat misleading, as the package is available as a free download. Like many SourceForge web pages, the download page is more confusing than it could be, but I quickly found an international version of the bundle that came in at 243 MB. The full install is 441 MB, which is about twice the size of my install of Microsoft Office XP. This rough doubling of system requirements carries over to RAM usage as well: with the same document open, OpenOffice Writer used up 50 MB of memory, compared to 22 for Word.

For the full story see the article on Ars Technica… OpenOffice goes Premium

Links to OpenOffice.org Developers Blogs…

• http://kohei.us/
• http://www.gnome.org/~michael/

When a product is released, there are a lot of lessons learned as to understanding theproduct, upgrading the environment, keeping the current on the latest hotfixes and service packs, and decomissioning server. I have put together a collection of KB articles around Exchange 2007 which are helpful to understand when planning, or maintaining your Exchange Organization. 

• Common Mistakes When Upgrading Exchange 2000/2003 to Exchange 2007

• Requirements for Exchange Unified Messaging integration

• Exchange services do not start after you install Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2

• What’s New In Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1

• How to remove Exchange 2007 from a computer

• The product service strategy for Exchange Server 2007

 With the addittion of Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) in Exchange 2007 SP1, there are some new concepts to understand. For example, a Storage Group that is a source for SCR can only have one mailbox database. To get the technical details see the TechNet TechCenter Article on SCR.

December 11, 2007 - Microsoft released Service Pack (SP) 1 for Office 2007 Suite, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 . There are over 600 bug fixes across the Office Suite that SP1 addresses. This SP should be tested in and applied to any Office 2007 installations as soon as possible.

Specific information on the fixes is found at:

• MOSS 2007 SP1 Description
• MOSS 2007 SP1 Fixlist
• WSS 3.0 SP1 Description
• WSS 3.0 SP1 Fixlist
• How to Deploy Office 2007 SP1 KB
• Office 2007 Suite SP1 Whitepaper

You can get the update from Windows Update or from the Office Online site. The direct link to the download SP1 for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 20007 is here.

Microsoft has a great spoof website with Cobert Report style satire around the Microsoft Windows Home Server. It’s hilarious. http://www.stayathomeserver.com