1) interacting with clients when scoping projects and remedial work – to capture and groups the tasks and further analyse requirements.

2) managing the delivery of work and providing the client with feedback on progress.

3) delivering information via the meetings function so as not to have to attend face to face meetings when a short remote “presentation” will suffice.

The things that I would add if I were capable would be project management and reporting tools like TeamworkProject Manager which I mentioned before here . I’d also like a graphical tool for whiteboarding with clients – along the lines of yellow sticky notes which could be moved around screen and used to allow prioritisation of tasks / ideas so that the client is able to participate more in the design and analysis of their own projects. I’d also like the ability to export my information for use in documentation and to import structured list – like project information from other tools like MS Project.

The rule of thumb for me is what tool do you reach for each time a project appears. If its consistently the same tool you are probably getting the 80% of functionality you need straight away. In the current distributed world of business – where clients can be in multiple locations but still trying to work collaboratively without breaking the bank – tools like LotusLive Engage and its successors provide a very important mechanism for facilitating cost effective and simple client interaction that leads to successful projects and other business interactions.

The default SignatureMaxLength value is 4096 (4KB) and the maximum value is 16672 (16KB).

HKEY_LOCAL

so you need to add to the registry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeWeb OWA

SignatureMaxLength – DWORD  and set value to  4120 in Hex or 16672 in decimal

or save the lines below to a .reg file on the server in question and import that way

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeWeb OWA]
“SignatureMaxLength”=dword:00004120

First upload the image you wish to include to a web server and make a note of the full path. ie, http://www.yourdomain.com/images/companylogo.jpg.

Then create a new signature in Outlook and ensure the path of the image on the signature points to your webserver. You can find the raw signature files in “C:\documents and settings\username.domain\application data\microsoft\signatures” on Office 2007/XP.

You can then edit the raw signature in Notepad for example. This is an ideal opportunity to tidy up the messy html created by Outlook when designing the signature in the first place. Find the image src and edit to point to the full path of the hosted image

Send an email with the signature embedded to the users email address and open the email within OWA (in IE). Copy the signature then go into Options -> Email Signatures and paste in the signature.

Having seen this recently in correspondence – I check with a colleague and was reminded that there was a reg fix for this. Transferred  a .reg  to the client opened and accepted it and lo the  pesky message is gone.

So if Outlook seems to be displaying the characteristics mentioned the reg fix is

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\RPC]

“UseWindowsUserCredentials”=dword:00000001

Then the problem appeared. Mail that had subsequently been delivered to the SBS server could not be responded to or forwarded.  When checked the messages had what appeared to be email addresses for the recipients relating to the previous 2003 SBS server from which they had been exported.

IMCEAEX-_O=XXX_OU=FIRST+20ADMINISTRATIVE+20GROUP_CN=RECIPIENTS_CN=Production+2ELine@xxxxxxx.local
#550 5.1.1 RESOLVER.ADR.ExRecipNotFound; not found ##

was the type of information reported back by exchange where XXX was the previous domain and xxxxxxx.local was the current SBS domain.

This problem occurs because while the Outlook auto-complete cache stores SMTP addresses for e-mail sent to external addresses, it uses X.500 addresses for e-mail sent to addresses within the Exchange organisation. Even though we had given the user account all the old SMTP addresses, the old X.500 address which Outlook was sending to was missing, and this was causing Exchange to reject the messages.

The use of X.500 addresses goes back to before Exchange 2000, when previous versions of Exchange maintained their own LDAP directory.  Since Exchange 2000 the mailbox’s X.500 address has been stored in the legacyExchangeDN attribute in Active Directory.  The legacyExchangeDN value is set when a mailbox is created, and includes the name of the Exchange administrative group where the mailbox belongs.  LegacyExchangeDN values typically look like this:

/o=Organisation/ou=Administrative Group/cn= Recipients/cn=Username

if you’ve ever wondered why the Exchange 2007 admin group has the name FYDIBOHF23SPDLT,  it’s the text EXCHANGE12ROCKS, with all the characters shifted to the right by one!)

So adding a custom X500 address or each user in the format of

/O=XXX/OU=FIRST ADMINISTRATIVE GROUP/CN=RECIPIENTS/CN=brendan.mulvaney as an example

Where XXX is the old domain proved enough to allow all the old mails to be forwarded and replied to without issue.

When adding these addresses for each users – use the custom mailbox option – put the user name in in the default format for your recipient policy and use X500 for the address type

Saw an update this morning and thought – hey this could lift a cold wet August day but no….

When trying to connect my Bold 9000 for synchronisation to Outlook after the update we get the “A 64Bit version of Outlook 2010 has been detected. Before you can synchronize you organiser data you need to install the 32 bit version” message.

The message relates to a KB article

http://www.blackberry.com/btsc/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=KB17149

which basically says

Currently, BlackBerry Desktop Manager 5.0.1 and Desktop Software 6.0 do not support Microsoft Outlook 2010 64-bit version for mailbox connectivity and synchronization of organizer data such as Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, and Memos. BlackBerry Desktop Software 6.0 provides support for Microsoft Outlook 2010 32-bit version only. Support for Microsoft Outlook 2010 64-bit version will be available in 2011.

And the workaround they suggest ?

BlackBerry Desktop Software 6.0 only has support for the 32-bit version of Microsoft Outlook 2010.The 64-bit version of Microsoft Outlook 2010 is not supported.

If you are using a 64-Bit version of Microsoft Outlook 2010 and require support though the BlackBerry Desktop Software, you can work around this by installing the 32-bit version of Microsoft Outlook 2010.

For information on modifying the installation, contact Microsoft support.

It really beggars belief that RIM could think that this was an appropriate answer and that 64BIT users should wait at least 4 months for something that should have been ready at the launch of Office 2010.

The issue was twofold – a domain had been hijacked or at least the web site related to it had and secondly a related domain was not responding at all.

Once it was confirmed that the first website was intact and that in fact it was a site ranked first on a Google search for the domain name in question was in fact hacked. This then lead to the second problem why was the other domain not resolving to the intact web site as it had been previously.

Identifying the provider responsible for the site lead me to the tool that intodns.com provide and the simple mechanism I could use to get the information required.

The site describes itself as

IntoDNS checks the health and configuration and provides DNS report and mail servers report.

And provides suggestions to fix and improve them, with references to protocols’ official documentation.

As an example using http://www.intodns.com/ibm.com   where ibm.com is the site I’m using to illustrate passing a domain to the tool gives a huge amount of useful info such as

Nameserver records returned by the parent servers are:

internet-server.zurich.ibm.com.   ['195.176.20.204']   [TTL=172800]
ns.almaden.ibm.com.   ['198.4.83.35']   [TTL=172800]
ns.austin.ibm.com.   ['192.35.232.34']   [TTL=172800]
ns.watson.ibm.com.   ['129.34.20.80']   [TTL=172800]

h.gtld-servers.net was kind enough to give us that information.

Using this information I was able to identify the provider who was responsible for the domain (and whom had said that they had transferred the domain some months before in another conversation with them) and get them to reinstate the link between this domain and one hosting a web site with content.

I really liked the means of submitting the domain name in the url and would suggest that this is a good start for your research into DNS and MX issues as they arise for you or your clients.

On returning to the office I noticed that my main machine was unable to synchronise with my Notes Domino server. Yet I could see other remote connections to the same server were working fine. After consulting a Notes admin specialist and checking connectivity we were left scratching our heads for a few minutes.

The machine in question could see and communicate with the remote server in a number of ways but just not at the notes replication level. The error messages from the Notes client suggested that it could not find or communicate with the server but comms tests showed otherwise.

At this point I remembered a similar issue with another application and a vigor router  where a cached session in the NAT table was preventing the session from establishing again. So a quick reboot of the router – and lo and behold the client was able to connect to the server !!

This router is going to get a backup and a reflash this weekend – but hopefully this will help someone else.

This type of robust programming should be a target for all developers web and traditional. The confidence it gives and the professional look of the updating process in WordPress is what we should expect in all apps but sadly its not what we typically get. I hope to influence a project that I’m on to facilitate something similar in an application that we are hosting and developing.

So after all this time WordPress is 3 (in version terms) – I’m hopeful that it will continue to develop and improve the blogging experience. Perhaps yet more people will embrace the product and us it to make their comments and contribution to the Web. Your chance to give something back.

Things I would add – a visual planner – to allow scoping out of project and then allocation of tasks to the project team. A more wide ranging set of options for reporting – planned versus actual – being able to view all tasks for all team members. Perhaps a better meeting mechanism to allow whiteboarding or other brainstorming.

Having looked at so many of these products – I have to say this one just does what it says on the tin.

Off to create a bigger project plan for another client in Teamwork Project Manager of course !!