Month: February 2009

Frank McCallister passed away this week. Frank was an SBS MVP. He loved to say he was the oldest MVP. But more importantly he was a real friend. His stories would hold your attention, but the real story was Frank. He called himself “the Old Fart”. But that name does not describe all that he did and would do for people. Frank, we will miss you. In tribute to Frank, I’ve reworked the lyrics of the song “The Gambler”, made famous by Kenny Rogers (YouTube video). The Old Fart (aka The Gambler)Dedicated to Frank McCallisterOn a warm summer’s evenin’ on a … Continue reading Frank McCallister – In Memoriam

For those using Outlook2007, two new hotfixes are now available that address specific speed and performance issues as well as a variety of other issues. Hotfixes, by nature, come with some warnings on their use.  Hot fix 961752 and Hot fix 967688 Note #1: If you have never requested a hot fix from Microsoft, or it has been years since you have, you will be pleased to find that the process is quite fast and efficient. No longer do you need to even call Microsoft to request a hot fix! Simply click on the links above to open up a new window with … Continue reading Hot Fixes for Outlook 2007 Now Available

Those who have worked with SBS 2000 and SBS 2003 will find that many things are not where you expect them to be in SBS 2008! For example, let’s say you want Sally to receive all email addressed to sales@yourdomain.com (in addition to receiving email as sally@yourdomain.com). In prior versions of SBS, you would go to the SBS console, drill down to Users, go to properies for that user and make the change under the Email Addresses tab. So, how do you do it with SBS 2008? Glad you asked! Start up the Exchange 2007 management console, and click on Recipient Configuration > Mailbox. Double click on the … Continue reading Adding additional email addresses in SBS 2008

The SBS offical blog site has an excellent post on how to modify SBS 2008 so that a Windows 7 (Beta) workstation can be joined via http://connect. I have just a couple of observations and suggestions on my part: If you are joining a laptop, be sure to disable your wireless port(s) and join the server using a wired connection! When modifying the XML files, I found it best to copy the XML file over to the ‘My Documents’ folder on the server, edit the file there, and then copy/replace it back to the original directory. Obviosuly you would want to make sure you first … Continue reading Connect Windows 7 to SBS 2008

I’ve been testing out the Windows 7 beta on one of my laptops this week. And following my own best practices, I made sure I installed the WHS connector on it and made several backups during my testing. So, yesterday I tried (unsuccessfully) to join the Win7 laptop to a SBS2008 domain. (Yes, I’m aware of my changes required on SBS 2008 to allow Windows 7 to join the domain via http://connect). But still, it failed. So, when I got home I wanted to restore my laptop to its state before my attempt to join it to a domain. Talk about wasting valuable time! First, … Continue reading WHS Restore CD and Realtek NIC

OK … so I just installed Windows 7 Beta for the first time on Friday, but I already like what I see! The new installation on my Vostro 1510 laptop went smoothly. And already I have discovered several new things that caught my attention, such as: Certainly initial boot up is faster, and Win 7 “seems” more responsive than Vista What used to be called ‘Shared Computer Toolkit’ is now built into Win 7, and called PC Safeguard. This allows you to define a user account for perhaps a training room environment. User logs on, does stuff (creates files, make changes, etc,). But … Continue reading Windows 7 Tips

Enabling SBS 2008 to allow remote users to use their email clients (Outlook, Outlook Express, etc.) or phones to pull down email from the SBS2008 server via POP3 or IMAP4 is just slightly more involved than on SBS 2003. For all the step-by-step details and screen shots, visit the Official SBS Blog site which details these steps in two parts (part 1, part 2). However, you may find it helpful to view the big picture in 5 easy steps, and I will also highligh several GOTCHAS to watch out for! Step 1: Enabling the appropriate Microsoft Exchange IMAP4 or POP3 services on the server (Start … Continue reading SBS2008 and POP3/IMAP4 Clients

After installing SBS 2008, you may begin to see DCOM 10016 event errors being reported in your SBS Monitoring reports as soon as users begin to use Sharepoint/Companyweb. This error is also identified if you run the SBS 2008 Best Practices Analyzer. There have been several posts on how to fix this error, but the instruction always were vague in one specific step. First, here is the DCOM error as reported in the event log and within the SBS Monitoring report: Event Source: DCOM  Event Id: 10016Event Details: The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application … Continue reading DCOM 10016 Event Error

I can’t believe it’s 2009 and we still have issues with DST and calendar items! Several of us just discovered (here on Feb-10-2009) that an event we are entering for August 2009 in Outlook 2007 is showing up an hour earlier on our WM6.1 phones. I’ve downloaded the latest WM/DST patch and installed it on my WM6.1 phone, but appointments are still showing up an hour earlier. I tried rebooting the phone, but no change. AFAIK, Outlook and my Exchange/SBS 2003 box are up to snuff with patches. Very frustrating …

I’ve been install Calyptix AccessEnforcer units recently in several SBS shops, both SBS 2003 and SBS 2008. The AE is a fully featured network security appliance, and comes in various models to fit different size organizations. What I like about Calyptix is its single price — no extra costs for end user licenses or to enable various features. It interfaces nicely with Active Directory for user level filtering and email quarantine. I plan to do more posts in the future on implementing SBS and Calyptix together.