Microsoft likes Apple again

Microsoft have announced that they will once again release a product for the Mac that will support Exchange Server.

According to http://tech.yahoo.com/news/macworld/20090106/tc_macworld/expomicrosofttoenhanceentourageexchangesharepointonthemac (and probably other places too), they'll be releasing a version of Entourage that uses Exchange Web Services.

Who cares? Well, Macintosh users account for about 5% of the user base although probably less when it comes to those with access to an Exchange server. Nonetheless, the media industry loves Macs and Mac users don’t like Outlook 2001 for Mac which was clunky and only ran under OS9 / classic mode.

With this announcement, Microsoft are showing that they support the Mac platform and Administrators will no longer need to use Entourage as an IMAP4 client and have to pick up the GAL over LDAP which was a pain unless you had someone incredibly knowledgeable and talented to configure it called Matt.

To support it, you’ll need Exchange 2007 SP1 or later. Eric Wilfred, the General Manager of the Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) announced this in conjunction with the Document Collaboration Companion which integrates the Mac into Sharepoint, Document Library and Office Live Workspace.

At the moment, a Mac user has a choice of Entourage as an IMAP4 client to Exchange or Outlook Web Access Light (due to the lack of ActiveX controls on the Mac browsers). Not only will this go away with the EWS enhanced version, but there’s a public Beta this month and a full release later this year and its FREE.

Exchange 2003 running slowly

End user problem: Exchange 2003 is running slowly.
Symptoms: Ave disk queue length is huge, disk response time poor.

Red herring: It isn't the array, the controller, the OS, defragmentation, the stores, the Exchange installation. But by all means check them - I did.

The problem: If you are using Entourage (IMAP4 client for Apple Macs), that client requires MIME encoded mail. If you do a move mailbox from one store to another, you get all email converted BACK to MAPI. In other words, once you have moved users, their IMAP client has to convert it all from MIME to MAPI again which results in the disk thrashing and subsequent slowness of Exchange.

The more times you move mailboxes to counter this problem, the worse the problem becomes as Entourage/Exchange has to start again. By default, IIS converts these but IIS can run out of memory for large attachments and I've got lots of those.

Reg hack (terms and conditions apply, back up everything and only touch if you know what you are doing, do this at your peril etc, etc):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeWEB
Create a new key called DAV
Add a new value in that new key:
Value name: MaximumResponseSizeInBytes
Data type: REG_DWORD
Radix: Decimal
Value data: value

Where value is the maximum msg size in BYTES. It has been suggested to set this to 1GB (1,073,741,824 decimal)

Then restart the Exchange Application Pool within IIS Manager.

Bearing in mind that some of the messages internally here are over 100MB, the IIS default was not entirely enough. Hopefully that has put that issue to bed.

The great Mac versus PC debate

The Silicon CIO Jury reports: http://www.silicon.com/ciojury/0,3800003161,39167825,00.htm

The Mac versus PC debate...

Quote from Gavin Whatrup of Creston: Macs are 33% more expensive than their Dell equivalents. My take on that? They aren't getting the discounts I'm getting from Dell.

Apple Mac Pro. 1GB RAM, 250GB HD, DVD burner, nVidia 7300GT graphics. Costs £1,500 including tax / VAT. There's no monitor with that.
Dell Optiplex 745GT. 4GB RAM, 160GB HD, DVD burner, ATi Radeon X1300 graphics, 20 inch digital flat panel. £900 inc tax / VAT.

I make it 66% more expensive and you get a 20 inch flat panel on the PC thrown in.


Next?

Nicholas Bellenberg, IT director at publisher Hachette Filipacchi UK, said his company runs lots of Macs with good cross-platform compatibility with Microsoft applications - though he added Entourage on the Mac doesn't match Outlook on the PC for functionality.

Hmm, "doesn't match". Yup - like a screwed up sheet of paper doesn't match an ICBM.