Alex Scoble's IT Notes - An Information Technology Blog

Preventing User From Deleting Emails From Exchange 2003

I've been asked recently if it's possible to prevent an Exchange user from deleting their email while still having access to it, being able to send, etc.

From what I've found and through some experimentation of Mailbox Rights it doesn't look like it can be done. In order to prevent a user from deleting emails, you basically have to take the rights to the mailbox away.

If anyone knows of some way to do this, please let me know.

Which Is Better Phone, Blackberry or Treo?

This question keeps popping up in our search for the right remote email PDA solutions. Which is better as a phone, the Blackberry (such as the 7100T) or the Palm Treo 600?

I've had direct contact with one person that said that the speakerphone functionality on the Treo was superior, but they didn't say that actual phone quality was different.

If you have knowledge on this subject, please share it and please quantify the differences (give me the why's and the how's) as much as possible.

Any input would be much appreciated.

Possible Effects Of Legal Dispute Between RIM And NTP On Existing Customers

We are currently in talks with T-Mobile to get Blackberries and the Blackberry Server deployed into our organization.

One possible sticking point might be the ongoing legal dispute between RIM and NTP over patent infringements.

Does anyone think that the worst case scenario of RIM no longer being able to sell Blackberries in the US will have an effect on existing customers?

Also, I really have to say that I find 1) the fact that someone can patent an idea as general as a device that can receive emails wirelessly ludicrous and 2) these sorts of patent cases ridiculous. Whoever thought it was a good idea to allow the patenting of general business practices and ideas (one click internet shopping is another egregious example) had no business being in control of the patent process in the first place.

These sorts of patents do NOTHING to foster innovation, in fact they put a chill over the whole process, and create an environment of incredible uncertainty in the US business environment. Uncertainty is anathema to business growth in my humble opinion.

KI Template Package and Remote Systems

I wrote a short blog entry about 8 months back or so that we had chosen to use KI Systems Law Office Automation Tools as our Word template/macro package. It's a pretty good bunch of software that has been customized by Kristi at KI to meet our needs. It's got a SQL back end for a functional client/matter based address book and to hold all of the user data and favorites as well. The templates are all stored on each user's local machine and each user still gets a customized normal.dot specific to them and not to the machine (although there was some debate as to whether there should be a normal.dot per each user or just one for every machine).

The software has some usability issues that make it a bit complicated to use for some things such as labels. Our secretaries much prefer the WordPerfect macro that they have for our "letterhead" labels as it allows you to select a block of text that has the addressee's name and address in it, click a keystroke combo and the label is automatically filled in. Whereas with KI, they have to click the KI menu button, select the label that they want, either tell it to just create one page of blank labels with the "letterhead" or for each label they want filled in, they have to select persons from the address book which adds further steps...You get the picture.

Took a lot of work, testing and more testing to get the customized templates looking and working how we wanted, but I can't imagine that it's any different from any other customizable package out there. I don't think that a turnkey package even exists out there and it certainly wouldn't meet the needs of the average lawfirm.

Kristi at KI, who's the founder/president/head programmer, is knowledgable about her product, is easy to work with and provides good support. For the most part, she's been able to give us everything we asked for (a lot of it at $135 an hour) and been able to resolve the issues that we have had.

The software is integrated with our WORLDOX DMS system, which is nice as it's able to do certain things such as automatically add the document number where it's supposed to be in a template...but that integration also has it's drawbacks as you will soon learn.

Anyhow, for users that work remotely and aren't always connected to the network, either physically while in the office or via VPN, things get a bit more complicated. If you leave the KI software and Word as is and open Word while you aren't connected to the network, the KI software "macro" template bombs out while trying to connect to the SQL server. This in turn causes Word to disable the KI template, which in turn causes WORLDOX to not function properly and actually makes it so that users cannot save documents that they are working on, if they don't realize that this has happened.

To prevent this from happening, a piece of software called KI Remote is installed on each remote system which basically points the KI template to either the SQL server database or makes a copy of the database and stores it on the local PC.

As we have found out, this whole process is too complicated for our userbase. It's not that lawyers can't handle complication, it's that time is money for them. Time is fleeting for most of us these days, but when you are trying to squeeze as much billable work as possible into an hour, complications really mess with things, especially when they don't work right or you forget all the steps, etc.

My question and the whole point of this long post is if it's possible for add-in templates in Word to programatically check for the existance of the SQL server and switch to a local copy or simply switch off in a way that allows Word to function normally.

Because the biggest issue that I have with this whole mechanism is that if it doesn't work or the user forgets, Word just does not function properly. The user isn't able to save, the autosave function doesn't work at all and it can cause an attorney to lose a lot of work...which is very bad.

Rights Issue On Windows Server 2000

In the last three weekends, one of our directories on our accounting server (the one that happens to hold all the data for our "time and billing" software) has changed to read-only access for all users.

It only happens once a week, but I can't figure out exactly what time, but seems to be sometime on Saturday night. Event viewer has not show much to shed light on the issue. About the only thing I have scheduled is a thorough virus file scan at 6am Sunday morning. I've turned that off on that server, so will have to see if that is the issue.

Pretty odd though as the rights "look" right in Windows Explorer on the server, but if I go to the folder in question and go to the Advanced Rights window and select for inherited rights to be reset, the problem goes away.

Anyhow, something to monitor.

Microsoft Is Paying Attention

Or at least it's employees are. Got an email from one of the Exchange support people today regarding an issue that I had blogged about a while back. The issue was that Exchange 2000/2003 handle incoming SMTP emails a bit differently than what I was used to in 5.5. No longer could you set up a global domain alias (IE translate all emails coming to apples.com to oranges.com instead). In 2000/2003 you have to set up aliases in each account.

As one person mentioned there are tools to do this to existing accounts, but the Microsoft Support person gave me this link to a knowledge base article on Microsoft's website that details the strings that can be used to set up recipient policies and how to use them. Oh, this will actually change all existing accounts by adding the proper email addresses as well, but don't worry, it's not destructive for any other addresses you have entered into accounts manually.

So for instance we have 3 separate domain names here. We have two naming conventions that are applied to each of the 3 domains, they are first initial last [email protected] and first middle last [email protected]. So for instance mine are [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and you get the picture.

The strings to do 1st initial last name are %1g%s@<domain Name>. The strings to do first initial of all three names would be %1g%i%1s@<domain name>, but in our case we don't need this, all we need is @<domain name> as this gives you <username>@<domain name> and since we use a user's initals for their username, this renders out as [email protected] for instance.

Anyhow, thanks to the support person at Microsoft who sent me that article link.

Funny Snowman

OK, this has nothing to do with IT whatsoever, but it has me laughing so much, I figured I'd share it with whoever wants to look.

My friend Chris Greene (who is a phenomenal graphic designer by the way, if you are in the market for one) came up with this character design for a client he's working with. If you can't laugh at that, your right brain must be misfiring or something.

Snowman character design

OK, back to work. :)