Andy Kemp

For the past 4 years we have been using Windows Mobile and Exchange Mobility I cannot complain it works, since upgrading to Exchange SP2 we have been able to browse the Global Address List (GAL) and sync Tasks, it even worked with the “Push Pull” so the users were continuously receiving their emails to their phones.

The Spartphones we were using at the very beginning were Orange SPV C500’s they were good for what we needed them for, battery life was adequate, would get maybe 2 days full use out of them if we set them to sync every 15 minutes as opposed to always on email. We then moved to Vodafone with their v1415 branded HTC, again these phones served their purpose but that was all they would do, send receive emails/calendar appointments contacts etc… but with the way technology was moving on it was still a basic option, and to my knowledge there were not a great many apps available for window mobile at the time. Symbian Phones like some of the Nokia phone, iPhones and Blackberries all had more apps available for their platform. Before we looked at the Exchange Mobility we did trial the Blackberry solution with Vodafone, but at the time it was an expensive option, we had all the licensing for Exchange so effectively all we needed to pay for was the mobiles, mobile tariff and 2 new servers one for the front end exchange and one for the ISA box.

As I said before we’ve been running with this solution for 4 years and it works! but the business needs are growing and more demanding. A lot of our users have iPhones or iTouches and use them to sync up with the server and they rave about them and about the apps, so that was one option, replace the windows mobiles with Apple devices, I have been using a Nokia 5800 for almost a year now and that has the mail for exchange client on it and again there are lots of business apps for that. However with the price of Blackberries being considerable lower now we thought we would look at these again, and I have to say that so far I am glad we re-visited the Blackberry solution. We opted for T-Mobile this time and they have given us a great service, they gave us a Blackberry Curve 8900 and Bold 9700 to test both of which are nice devices, the Bold supports 3G and uses a track pad as opposed to a track wheel and GPRS but all in all they are both nice devices. My only issue with them is I keep tapping on the screen as I have a touch screen device.

I am expecting a Storm 2 in at some point to test, it is the same price as the Bold so could be an option for us too.

I have to say though the trial we have had has been a huge success with the partners in the office, they all are very impressed with them and the ease of management of them through the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) is incredibly simple. OK so the iPhone has a really nice look and feel to it and of course there is the iTunes App Store, but is it a business device? for a consumer it is brilliant, however after having an iTouch and using it via wifi to sync up and now using the Blackberry I have to say for a business need the Blackberry is far superior, and there is a lot more on the security side of Blackberry that is an added bonus.

I had a look at some of the Apps available for Blackberries today on the Blackberry App World, and I like it, I downloaded Seesmic (for twitter) Facebook, Google Maps, Wordpress, Snap2Twitter and Windows Live.

I wanted to try out Last.fm on it but it was not available on my device or carrier so that is a bit of a bummer, but all in all I am really impressed with the Blackberry. I haven’t tried with the Bold yet but I can double the Curve up as a GPRS modem using the Desktop Software.

I think that we are pretty much ready to sign a deal with T-Mobile and switch to Blackberries. The next question is, do we keep our Exchange setup as it is so users who have their personal devices syncing up jsut have it as unsupported? The issue is security.

Some time ago I wrote a post on the Mimecast Active Stationary and creating a custom email disclaimer with a business card pulling the information from AD. This is a great solution, however there is one draw back, it applies the business card to the very bottom of the emails on replies and threads. IT works well when the email has been generated on the sending end as it applies it directly below.

I had a look some time ago at creating a script that would create an Outlook signature but didn’t get very far. Last week a colleague/friend sent me a link to a technet site

http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/ScriptCenter/en-us/b6dfc6d1-5354-4ed0-9856-9547d19ef670

This is a great script it did exactly what I needed so I had a look at it to see how I could get it to fir in with our “Format” and got it to produce something like this:

The script was written to work with Outlook 2003 and 2007 however it does work with 2010 Beta too :)

Over the weekend I was migrating our Harrogate Datacentre on to a HyperV Cluster, one of the 10 servers was a Windows 2000 Std box running RSA Server. Windows 2000 can only be P2V’ed offline as W2K does not support VSS. In prep for the migration I was trying to create the Virtuals prior to the move on the servers that were pretty static. However the W2K box just didn’t want to work, it would re-boot into winpe and then try and connect to the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) but it timed out after 15 minutes. I tried several times but it just didn’t want to work.

Once I started converting the other servers I started to have a look at this problem in a bit more depth. lots of posts were mentioning about the source server being on the same network as the SCVMM, so I built a SCVMM on the same subnet as the W2K server (I was previously trying to P2V it across a WAN). once I had installed the SCVMM I tried to P2V that particular box and it worked.