technical solutions and commentary

Microsoft has some good resources for SMB on microsoft.com. Microsoft defines Small business 1-24 employees/end-users and Medium business as 25-500 employees/end-users.

The MidSize Business Home page is focused toward business persons. It has information on business solutions such as Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Etc. Essentially it’s a jumping off point to other Microsoft.com areas on industry or particular software solutions… a “one stop” page for SMB business people to find other MS resources that they waould be interested in.

The Midsize Business IT Center is focused toward IT staff and IT consultants which operate in the SMB space. There are a lot of “pre-packaged solutions” or “perscriptive guidance” papers which will help the IT generalist and even an IT specialist deploy Microsoft solutions in the best way for the business, based upon size and function. The solutions have been developed with the feedback from customers, the input from product teams, and field testing/solution validation from Microsoft Partners. I would recommend any IT person working in the SMB area take a look at this site and seriously consider using these solutions in a deployment. The solutions are designed so they can be mixed and matched and areas can be skipped easily if they don’t apply to the business.

I had the privledge of providing feedback to the product group field during the partner field validation phase of the “IT Solution for Small and Medium Business” during the early formation of this group. I provided them feed back to the solutuon of what I thought worked, what I felt was how something was typically done in the field and so forth. I also recieved a follow phone call and email asking for more information of what I thought of it. After that experience, it’s something I think they are taking seriously in getting solid solutions for SMB into the field through this site.

Microsoft added tabbed browsing capabilities in Internet Explorer. Tabbed browsing is enabled through the new MSN Search Toolbar. According to the toolbar site, the new toolbar is US English only, and the requirements are Microsoft Windows XP/Server 2003/2000 & Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 or later.

Enabling the toolbar and tabbed browsing takes an additional 4-5MB (estimated) system memory. IE adds the options to ‘Open in new background tab’ or ‘Open in new foreground tab’ with a right-click on a link in a web page. Using ‘Ctrl + T’ will open a new tab, as well as using a ‘+’ symbol on the toolbar.

In my opinion, there is a large draw-back to using the tabbed browsing with the MSN Search Toolbar compared to the Tabbed browsing capabilities with Firefox. With the IE tabbed browsing, another toolbar is placed under the MSN Search toobar. This means instead of only having one additional bar under the address bar, there are now two. This takes up more viewable ‘real-estate’ of the browser. Unfortunately, I have not found a way to combine the MSN Search Toolbar and the Tabbed Browing toolbar’s in order to use less space in the header. Another draw back compared to Firefox is that in IE the tabs show up immediately (even when only one page is being viewed in a single Window) and takes up space on the header, whereas Firefox doesn’t display the tabs across the top of the window until a second Window is opened in a tab.

If you like tabbed browsing in Firefox, download the MSN Search Toolbar and give the IE tabbed browsing a try. Don’t expect too much however, because the MSN/IE teams still have some work to do with the tabbed browsing usability in IE. I’m sure the next rendering of IE tabbed browsing will be much improved.

I was working with a company on an issue where they were trying to send mail from a SMTP client (Microsoft Outlook Express in this case) through their Exchange Server 2003 (applies to Exchange 2000 as well) and the person sending the mail would get an error message similar to this:

The message could not be sent because one of the recipients was rejected by the server. The rejected e-mail address was ‘user@domain.com’. Subject ‘Message’, Account: ‘mail.domain.com’, Server: ‘mail.domain.com’, Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: ’550 5.7.1 Unable to relay for ‘user@domain.com’, Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 550, Error Number: 0x800CCC79

At first glance this may have appeared to be an issue with the SMTP relay configuration on the Exchange server. We verified that 1) the Exchange SMTP connector had relay enabled for authenticated users and 2) the Outlook Express client was configured to use Authentication for the outgoing SMTP server. This should be all that is required on the Exchange Server and client side. Obviously, the proper protocols need to be on the firewall as well.

What resolved the issues was disabling SMTP application inspection on the firewall. If you have a Cisco PIX firewall more information can be found here on how to do this. This is a known issue by Cisco, however this info isn’t always the easiest to locate

A client hosting several web sites in on Windows 2000 Server w/ IIS 5 had some issues with the server processing ASP pages. IIS would display an error for any of the hosted sites when an ASP page was accessed. We tested the HTML pages and they worked without any issues.

The local admin had removed Tomcat and Java components from the server prior to ASP pages not processing. We tried several things to fix this issue including re-registering the aspdll.dll on the server… didn’t work. What finally fixed the problem was registering the oleaut32.dll on the server. From the system32 folder at a command prompt type: regsvr32 oleaut32.dll (this is apparently an OLE automation DLL according to sources located with Google).

After this was complete the ASP pages began processing successfully again. No Reboot Required.
Permissions had to be reapplied on the site to allow the IUSR account to read the files in the web site directories. However I believe this was probably related to some other troubleshooting steps that were attempted before I was involved.

A customer with an internal portal that has a web page to e-mail from. Sending mail to external domains would work, but sending to the internal Exchange mailboxes would not. Was working fine – able to send internal and external messages – until the portal was reconfigured to use the SMTP service on the Exchange 2000 Server (was previously using the SMTP service on the portals IIS server).

The portal web e-mail form used a non-existent account to act as the sending email address (portal@domain.com) from the web page. The admin added an e-mail alias of portal@domain.com to an Exchange account as a secondary SMTP address. After the RUS ran, about 15 minutes later, the portal web page could send mail internally and externally.

Exchange obviously checked the Address Lists to see if the originating address was actually valid and when it could not find the portal@domain.com address it assumed somebody was spoofing an address.