Ant Drewery

Prompted by an post that Gary made of the US states he’d been to I thought I’d produce a map of the countries I’ve visited. So far my 17 countries only totals 7% of the globe!

create your own visited country map

We have a few Windows Mobile 5.0 devices appearing and need to get them hooked up to our Exchange 2003 system. We have the infrastructure already in place as we use Outlook Web Access and Outlook Mobile Accesss. We have our front-end servers load balanced and port 443 mapped through from the outside world.

Like its predecessor Windows Mobile 2003, WM 5.0 lacks a wide selection of trusted root certificates installed by default. If you’re using a non-maintream or self-issued certificate you’ll need to do a little extra configuration to get ActiveSync working over the air. With WM 2003 there was a tool to disable certificate checking but it’s not compatible with WM 5.0. Instead follow these instructions:

With the certificate successfully installed you should be able to synchronise over the air.

We have active/passive clusters connected to a SAN for our back-end mailbox servers. I’ve been digging around for installtion notes but can’t find anything from Microsoft specific to SP2. From a few other blog posts that I’ve read it seems that the process hasn’t changed from SP1 so I’ll be following this article:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=867624.

We’re in the process of deploying Exchange 2003 SP2 to our boxes. In the release notes it says that you should remove previous installations of the Intelligent Message Filter before applying. On some of our servers the service pack installation halted as it had detected the IMF even though we couldn’t find it under Add/Remove Programs. We checked under various user profiles but in the end resorted to re-installing the IMF and then removing it. After this the service pack installed without complaint.

Gary Slinger has written an excellent post on managing large volumes of email using the Getting Things Done methodology:

Gary Slinger » Blog Archive » On GTD and “Conversational” Email

Welcome to my blog. I’m Ant Drewery and I currently manage the Messaging team at an international container shipping company. I’m responsible for our global messaging systems and the team that supports them. At 6000 mailboxes our Exchange implementation certainly isn’t the largest around but it does have a degree of complexity due to the way we use email and because we’ve consolidated 5 separate Exchange 5.5 organisations into a single Exchange 2003 deployment. We’re currently running in mixed mode whilst we decommission the remaining Exchange 5.5 servers.

I’ll mainly be posting about Exchange with the odd posts on Windows Media Center Edition or gadgets. My intention is to share some of my experiences, issues faced and the solutions found. I hope you find them of use.