Anyway, I tried to live without it, but it just irritated me until I HAD to replace it. So, here’s my step by step, it’s not rocket science, and about halfway through you’ll get it and probably ignore the rest… Here goes.

Outlook 2011 has a concept of ‘Smart Folders’ you should see them in the LH folders column.

Open Outlook, click the search box.

This opens the search ribbon, click ‘All Mail’ button.

Now click Advanced.

On the dropdown (little arrows) that appears and will currently say ‘Item Contains’,

click it and select ‘Read Status’

This brings up 2 more boxes, you want ‘is’ and ‘unread’

Now click the little + symbol to add another condition.
This time change the second condition to be ‘Folder’ ; ‘Is Not’
On the 3rd option, click it and select ‘Choose Folder’
In the pop up box, type ‘Deleted Items’ and then select it from the results and click Choose

By now you should see all your unread emails, in all your folders, and your search conditions will look like this

We now need this to be repeatable, so, now click ‘Save’
This should prompt you to give a folder an appropriate name under SMART FOLDERS, I called mine Unread Mail

That’s it, you’re done. Now whenever you just want to see all your unread email, just click on the smart folder you saved.
Also, you can now sort that folder in whatever way you like, my preference is to sort by folder or conversation.

Hope it helps!

All that aside, back to the update, the headlines are:
The database and the rebuild utility are improved
As mentioned above, this ha been a real issue for us, not only wasting user time, but also admin time. Time will tell if things are vastly improved, but I thought it was worthwhile to comment on the upgrade process itself. It’s pretty lengthy, when you complete the install of the patch and load outlook for the first time it will prompt you to select which profile you would like to upgrade. This is also good news as you might want to leave a backed up profile alone. One you start the process, it is pretty length and is of course entirely dependant on the size of your mailbox. Be prepared to give up some time to it, you can NOT cancel it once it’s started.

Which identity would you like to upgrade

IMAP account sync that includes support for synchronising with Gmail is improved.
Not tried this as yet, but as a lot of organisations fall in love with the Cloud, reliance on Gmail will inevitably increase.

Outlook for Mac performance in key scenarios is improved.
So far so good! My Outlook session has been grinding to a halt more and more lately, and since the install I’ve noted a vast improvement in reaction speed and in opening mail items.

Exchange email message sync is improved.
We’ve got a lot of people who are connecting via wifi and 3G, and although that is normally ok, when you’re on the edge of coverage, or something like Edge (E) or HSDPA (H) or GPRS (G) then you can really struggle. Being able to pull just headers and also pull the message in parts is great for poor bandwidth areas

Support for calendar scheduling resources is improved
The scheduling area in the calendar is vastly improved, a picture tells a thousand words, so here’s what it now looks like.

Week numbers are added to the calendar display.
AGain this is configurable, so you can put the week numbers into the Calendar view. It’s not a huge one for me, but I can see how that will be a vast improvement for some people.

Distribution list expansion functionality is included.
A real user improvement, our organisation uses loads of distribution lists and mail enabled security groups, and our users have been used to being able to check membership or alternatively be able to expand a group to remove 1 person (say when it’s about a birthday treat or something)

Some of the other bits I liked were the improved 2 line ‘Toast’ email alert, you get a wee bit more info now to make you decision on whether or not to read.

In short, this one gets my vote, some proper improvements and some listening has obviously been done by our friends at Microsoft.

There is plenty of good documentation available here, but when we followed it, we managed to import users, but they were detached from their meetings, and as those meetings had no owners, they in turn vanished. This could have been a disaster, but we had of course made a full system backup before we did anything.

So, the aim was essentially 2 separate processes; change the DNS suffix and lookup; make the system AD integrated somehow.
In integrating MeetingPlace Express with an external directory, there are 2 methods to do it, LDAP and AXL SOAP API. They will both authenticate against CUCM or a CUCM related/generated directory. It pretty much depends which version of Call Manager (CUCM) you’re running, for 4.x and earlier, ldap is recommended and for 5.x and above, AXL is supported. As I wanted to authenticate against Active Directory and not CUCM, I opted to do it with ldap, it’s by far the simplest way.

The procedure is like this:

Export all users to csv text file.
Log in to Cisco Unified MeetingPlace Express and click Administration. Click System Configuration > Usage Configuration.
Complete the fields available

• Cisco Unified Communications Manager/ Cisco Unified CallManager version: Set this field to Cisco Unified CallManager Release 4.x
• LDAP URL: (Make sure that this URL starts with ldap) ldap://server.whateveryourdomain.com:389 (Make sure that there are no spaces after the URL)
• Directory username: Use the format of an LDAP distinguished name: cn=serviceaccount,dc=whateveryourdomain,dc=com
• Password: Self explanatory
• Cisco base: Leave blank if you are not using the Cisco Unified CallManager DC-Directory to authenticate Cisco Unified MeetingPlace Express users.
• User base: dc=whateveryourdomain,dc=com
• Directory type: ADS  (Active Directory Services)
• Click Test LDAP Configuration to test that the configuration parameters work correctly.
• Click Save.

The test should dictate your success.
So, if like us you have existing users and want to convert them to AD authentication, you will need to take your exported file and modify it.

The procedure is like this:
1 Export all users again as before, safety first.
2 Open the file in Excel and then import as comer separated CSV
3 Edit text file, and modify field ISUSERLOCAL set to NO
4 Save the file, as csv, (however you cannot import using csv, the file MUST be text or it will corrupt on import)
5 Drop into a file manager and rename the file extension to .txt
6 Now import user TXT file and select the option to overwrite any existing users
7 Check you can now still login with AD credentials
8 Check meetings are all still visible. Test

Don’t change settings for admin users, or guest user as these must stay local.

You should not have all your users still with their existing meetings, but authenticating against Active Directory!

Now to change the domain suffix…

To change network parameters post installation, you can use the net command to modify the network configuration settings. To access the net command, you can use the Meeting Place terminal via the GUI, or SSH into it as the user called mpxadmin and then enter the command net.
In order to change the network settings, you must shut down the application by entering the following: sudo mpx_sys stop

The options pretty much speak for themselves, to change the DNS suffix, option 5; to change the DNS servers, option 6 and so on.
Option 8 when you’re done modifying settings, and don’t forget to reboot for the settings to take effect. (shutdown -r now)

With MeetingPlace now authenticating against your domain, any users who weren’t already enrolled will have accounts created on the fly when they attempt to login. It’s great, lowers the support overhead and is much quicker for the users too.

When a new user signs into the macbook with his Active Directory credentials, his account is created on the fly (assuming you’ve deployed your topology to do so). At the same time your Outlook 2011 profile will set itself up with your email address, and providing your Exchange DNS records are configured correctly, all server addressing will be configured on the fly.

So, here’s the scenario, new (to the macbook) user signs into Outlook, all appears well, his mail is there, contacts etc. He or she sends an email to colleagues who receive an emails where the From: field appears fine, as in it shows their name.
However when you reply, you notice that the To: field derives a ‘Microsoft Office User’ preface to the full email address.

You get a result that looks like this:

From: Luke Darby <Luke@lukedarby.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:24:11 +0000
To: Microsoft Office User <lukedarby@lukedarby.co.uk>
Subject: RE: I have a name you know!

Initially this was a huge issue for us as it seemed to be linked to the “This product is licenced to” field. In short, it’s not directly related, but indirect.

Outlook 2011 creates a contact for you when you first create a profile, called ‘Me’ If it doesn’t have all information available, it uses your email address and the licences to field. In Essence you get a ‘Me’ contact which has ‘Microsoft Office User’ as the contact First and Last Name and your Work E-mail completed with your primary SMTP alias.

Me contact

You find this contact by clicking on Contacts -> Organize -> Me

Outlook Me contact

Once in there, you can manually complete the details you want, OR….
Scroll down and you should see your AD Directory contact detail. A handy ‘Update Contact’ button is provided for convenience to fill all the fields for you.

Once done, restart Outlook for good measure and you won’t see the issue again. It’s annoying, but simple to solve, and the user can do it themselves.

If you gave the bulk distribution licences to name as something else, then you’ll need to change THAT name in your Me contact.

Anyway, all that said, Microsoft have released the patch, download it here.

However take note of the kb, pre reqs:Before you install the Communicator 2011 13.1.2 Update, make sure that the computer is running Mac OS X v10.5.8 or a later version of the Mac OS X operating system.
In other words, if you’re running the pre-release, GM or the full release, AND have regressed your Communicator 2011 install to 13.0.0 then the upgrade won’t work. A neat guideline is that if Microsoft Autoupdate doesn’t ‘find’ it, then you’ll get an install error like this

Thanks for the image Nick!

This is pre-release btw. To resolve this error make sure you install the ‘broken’ 13.1.x version update first, THEN the patch will install.

This is made clear in the KB : Additionally, you must install Microsoft Communicator for Mac 13.1.0 Update or a later update before you install the Communicator for Mac 13.1.2 Update.

Successful install of Communicator2011-13.1.2

So to recap, the patch will install on pretty much any version of Lion or Snow Leopard(tested), but you must have patched Communicator to 13.1.0 minimum for it to install. If you regressed your install to 13.0.0, then patch it again, THEN install 13.1.2. Easy way to do this is let AutoUpdate work for you.

Anyway good news for a lot of folk who have put their money into Communicator/Lync etc, justifying the spend on these products is tough enough without having to explain to CEO’s that you’re waiting for a patch and have to roll them back to an inferior version (no screen share, EDGE etc)

Oh and connecting via EDGE … If you’re running Snow Leopard  it still works with 13.1.2… Currently testing it on Lion, I’ve had 2 successes and 1 fail, so far I’m going with it still works! good news.

I know it’s life on the leading edge, but still, come on Microsoft, keep up!

http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Jetstress-Field-Guide-1602d64c

According to the Exchange Team, the highlights are:

Updated for version 14.01.225.017 of Jetstress
Added Exchange Server 2003 instructions
Added more troubleshooting information
Added guidance for running Jetstress on a production Exchange Server
Included guidance for testing Raid Arrays
Included information and guidance on Background Database Maintenance
General corrections and clarity improvements

If you’re building or are about to build an Exchange setup, it’ worth a good read. Use it.

I guess the start for me was Sun buying Storagetek, that was back in 2005, but I mark it as one of the very early indicators of change. However after that, things appeared settled, but as a Storagetek customer, there was a shift from what felt like a more intimate organisation in Storagetek, to a very rigid feeling environment within Sun. The irony of that was even further bureaucracy and rigidity was to come in 2009 when Oracle purchased Sun.
I guess I was pretty close to both these acquisitions as I was a Storagetek customer throughout. As a customer I felt the changes quite severely. When using Storagetek for support, I felt like I could reach into the heart of the organisation to get advice or help, with Sun, those portals closed, things became very regimented, almost certainly better for a company with scale, but as a customer it was sometimes frustrating.

With Dell continuing to resell EMC, they didn’t have that storage piece they could call their own. Dell had long since been in the server space, if you didn’t buy HP/Compaq, you bought Dell tin. They went shopping and Dell bought Equallogic.
This of course soured their relationship with EMC for a while, but it seemed to more or less heal. My thoughts are here on that. Equallogic was a move away from the traditional frame based FC type SAN, with it’s iSCSI technology. It was an expensive purchase, (to put it mildly) the largest ever cash purchase of a private venture backed technology company! That said they’ve made it work for them, a very established and profitable product line now.

HP, not to be outdone, realising the changing and growing storage space, go out and acquire Lefthand Networks, who are pretty much an Equallogic competitor. Interesting in that it’s a like for like purchase, and really only touching the Enterprise level market. Lefthand a heavy iSCSI pioneer.

Oracle purchasing Sun posed many questions, with a lot of speculation that they would drop the storage, they only purchased MySQL. At the time I maintained the storage piece had value as Oracle DB turn key solutions, and low and behold that’s exactly what they’re offering now, tuned storage to create a harmony between software and hardware.

Dell, had hoped to sew up their Entry/Mid/Enterprise solution with the Equallogic and clearly with designs on 3Par products in mind went shopping and made a very interesting purchase by purchasing a storage technology company called Ocarina. They’re a dedupe/storage optimisation technology. This signalled their intention to invest further in their storage offering and continue to innovate.

In the same month IBM announced the acquisition of Storwize a data compression specialist. One can only assume they have the intention of offering it as part of their product suite.

Along comes HP, predominantly a server, printer and desktop tin vendor, they had the EVA storage solution,  it had issues and was becoming a bit of a dinosaur in a rapidly changing storage technology market. The LeftHand acquisition had put them in a good place, and for a while were the all round vendor. If you went to HP, it was pretty much a 1 stop shop. However the EVA was ageing, Lefthand wasn’t making inroads into the heavy enterprise user markets, they lacked mid to enterprise punch, a storage piece that would move them on to next generation technology. A bidding war ensued between Dell and HP for the independent 3Par. 3Par had great technology, an excellent reputation and was perceived as a fantastic purchase by both HP and Dell. HP won out. Some say they paid way over the odds, probably, but they were ahead in the race!
Ironically I don’t feel HP are pushing the 3Par sales very hard, I suspect it’s because it just doesn’t integrate into their Storageworks management platform, and that’s a piece of development that is ongoing. Just take a walk around their website, it’s all Lefthand P-series and EVA, 3Par seems to exist as a separate entity. Try and engage HP about 3Par products, you’ll see what I mean.

Step into 2011 and events occur at pace.

Dell expand their empire again. While Equallogic is a great product, it sits pretty much in the entry to mid level space, whereas they were filling Enterprise heavy orders with the EMC offerings. To take on that market themselves they needed that heavy hitter, they lost 3Par, so they went to their closest rival Compellent. The recession had meant that R&D for the smaller storage houses was slightly under funded, and of course made them ripe for purchase. Compellent has fantastic technology, a well respected support operation and has potential for scale and improvements. Compellent also makes a nice model for the Ocarina innovation. Dedupe in-line anyone?

Then the pace steps up!
Western Digital announces the acquisition of Hitachi disk arm. This is a very interesting purchase on many levels, clearly WD are making a play here to up the ante on Seagate, their closest rival. Hitachi parting with the disk arm is curious, they’re a storage array vendor themselves and part of their sales pitch is that they make the array end to end.. well, not anymore! Odd. That puts question marks over Hitachi HDS, are they ripe for acquisition?

Confused by that, NetApp announces their acquisition of the the LSI storage arm, Engenio. This is HUGE news. Underneath a plethora of arrays, sits LSI tech. Oracle’s 6000 series, IBM DS and FastT to me are the big fish. NetApp and Oracle compete for the same business in that market, Oracle aren’t going to want to buy from NetApp – NetApp aren’t going to want to sell to Oracle or indeed IBM, they want that business for themselves! The PR on this is that all is well, OEM relationships are safe… yeah, ok. This is business and big money. At present I can only see the end of the line for those big ticket OEM ranges. This one change puts huge question marks over further investment in those technologies, and without committed re-assurance from all parties, to my mind it’s time for change!

Next thing we know Seagate upsize to catch WD, and acquire Samsungs disk arm!

To emphasise the pace at which events occur, I’ve put together this timeline.

This isn’t exhaustive by any means, little twists and turns have come and gone, but for me these were the ones that had knock forward effect and therefor the most impact.

What next?! Rumour and prediction collide…

Cisco buy NetApp: Well, Cisco are desperate to get a slice of the storage/server market, they’re largely regarded as a 1 trick pony, king of networking. They do an AWFUL lot of collaboration with NetApp… feels like only a matter of time.

Oracle dump Hitachi and LSI/Engenio: they aren’t going to want to buy from the competition, they either buy them or drop them.

Oracle buy NetApp: They have a choice to make, dig deep and buy NetApp, which makes a lot of sense on many levels, but would be costly.

IBM buy NetApp: Similar reasons for Oracle to buy them, get back control or lose a chunk of their range

IBM buy EMC: This would also make sense for IBM, EMC has the enterprise (banking) marketplace very well sewn up and IBM has that sort of support operation to match.

Sometimes you HAVE to invest, and if you take the hard line that it’s strategic or an upgrade with an existing vendor relationship, you can’t go far wrong. Otherwise, it’s becoming a small storage vendor list, my advice, watch now, buy much later.

One very decent document I read was the upgrade guide. It’s pretty simple to read doc and contains good information about the upgrade process.

Sun Storage 6000 Series Array Firmware Upgrade Guide

To that end, it’s not exactly obvious, since the move away from Sunsolve, how to find the software in the MOS portal. To locate the 6xxx series software for the firmware upgrade process, I’ve put together this ‘where is it’ step by step.

1. Login to My Oracle Support at https://support.oracle.com/.
2. Along the top of the window that opens as your first page, click on the ‘Patches & Updates’ tab.
3. In the Patch Search pane, click on “Product or Family(Advanced Search).”
4. Tick or check the box for “Include all products in a family.”
5. In the Product field, clock the drop down and select “Sun StorageTek 6000 Series Software”
6. In the Release field, select “Sun StorageTek 6000 Series software 1.0″. It should already be selected, but just check.
7. Select the platform to install the tool and click search OR as i wanted to see all I just clicked Search.

8. This will take you to a new window with your search results. -Patch 10265930: “Sun StorageTek 6000 Series Array Firmware Upgrade Utility”
9. Download the zip file and extract the executables.

Once you have the file extracted and installed, we proceed to the firmware updates themselves.

The main thing I was after was the addition of Exchange server side rule manipulation. I’ve had a few questions about this from fellow members of staff, they adopted Outlook for Mac to replace Entourage or Mail.App etc and have had to keep a Windows Outlook session on hand to manipulate rules.

I went straight to the rules section, and got this:

Looks like I’ll jhave to press on with that Exchange 2010 upgrade! 1 step forward, 2 back.

Another addition is the ability to resend a mail, so far it was a faff, having to either forward/reply your mail and edit the content and subject line accordingly to make it look like a fresh mail. The ‘Resend’ option is now available on the Message menu and the right-click context menu.

For more detail on what fixes are in the service pack, look here. To download the file, it’s here

I’ve not paid too much attention to what is updated in Word, Powerpoint and Excel, I’m a pretty basic user of them all, so long as spell check and SUM work, I’m pretty covered .

We’re busy embarking on a Cisco Unity Connection install, to replace our old Unity 4.X installation. We’ve made a few test builds, but that’s largely been to get comfortable with the install process. We wanted to see some of the technology in action, hear some of the marketing and also get an informed demonstration.

Unity Connection: Features like Visual Voicemail and its ability to store voicemail ‘offbox’ in Exchange are what have attracted us. It’s an interesting way to achieve Unified Messaging without incurring the expensive Microsoft licencing costs. I like that unlike Unity, Unity Connection is now a linux appliance, it’s AD integration isn’t some masked Exchange 2003 installation. The only aspect I am currently not impressed by is the personal contacts feature, it’s a manual upload of contacts, with limited fields. It’s not dynamic at all, not linked to Exchange, it’s a one time import via a web portal.

Jabber: Cisco have started to combine open standards based XMPP technology obtained through the Jabber acquisition. This is being integrated into the WebEx and CUPS and CUPC products. There are ‘Cisco Jabber’ applications available for the Android and Apple platforms, and lots of work in progress to bring in more features towards the end of the year. Blackberry solutions require MVS which is essentially some glue to get it to work under the RIM framework. It creates a SIP trunk into CM, to enable you to use your mobile to make calls via CM trunks.

Cisco Quad: A very interesting product, I’m sure there are many ways to describe it and frame what it is, but it’s essentially a fully fledged ‘corporate-facebook-intranet-in-a-box’ That somewhat undersells it, a recent piece of work has seen our company develop its own intranet with social collaboration in mind, this has met with mediocre success. The Quad product would have pretty much full-filled all the technical needs for us in a turn-key solution. I’m not saying it’s all things to all men, but I was suitable impressed. As a social collaboration suite, it tops my interested list. There are Android, iPad and iPhone applications available for Quad.

Cisco CUPS: I’ve known about CUPS for ages, but it’s always been this monstrously huge product, that was a sledge hammer to crack a nut. It always felt expensive and cumbersome. I’ve no doubt it’s still quite a challenging install, but it’s mediation/federation offering to lash together CUCM and OCS/Lync that mean I will definitely be looking it over again now. The CUPC client is also much improved and is very polished. It has become a very polished and attractive product. The product was re-written with the Jabber technology and is now open standards based. Federation will be achieved using XMPP. Version 8.5.

Show and Share: I’d describe it as corporate YouTube. It enables users to share and collaborate with video/media rich content, tagging and making video content searchable. You can record a piece via a video enabled device and with 1 click publish it as online content. Also known as Cisco Digital Media Manager.

Video Conferencing (Telepresence): Cisco has done a lot of work integrating the Tandberg end points into their product range. I was impressed with the speed that this integration seems to have happened.