It has been a while

So work is busy with lots of juicy projects to keep me occupied. The SQL box is now live and running nicely and I'm just tail ending that project. Next is a seamless move to client side upgrades and then I shall spend a couple of weeks clearing the decks before jumping headlong into the live (and obviously scary) deployment of Exchange 2007 at corp.

Why scary?

Lab work is all well and good but you can never mitigate 100% for all eventualities. By which I mean users, Entourage, 20,000 items in your Inbox, connectors that work in a lab but not when you connect them upto t'Internet...

Maybe I should just exmerge the entire lot to a data server, rip out the Exchange server, put a new 2007 box in and exmerge it all back into a clean AD implementation.

But that would be so much more clinical and therefore less "fun".

Organisational charts - the easy way

Corp appears to have a problem in Active Directory. Each member of staff has their job description, department, phone number and manager completed, all objects appear ok but for some reason I just can't get things going right and there is a gremlin in there somewhere.

Visio 2007 includes a great little organisational chart wizard (yuck, spits on floor and thinks of SBS) that allows the punter to use Exchange / Outlook to query AD and build up the chart that way. So any org whose AD is up to date and completed correctly can have an almost instant org chart.

So I pointed my Visio at AD and a few presses of Next later I have a stunning org chart except that anyone beginning with A is missing along with their underlings. This further cements my contention that AD has a problem. So who do I know that can edit ntds.dit in Notepad in a second language in his sleep? Perhaps I need to give a tiny clue...