One of the OCS projects I’m working on is building out a provisioning system for both Exchange UM and OCS voice for their upcoming OCS voice pilot.  If you’ve ever dealt with OCS automation you know its all WMI-based.  WMI isn’t the most friendly...

I haven’t posted recently – I know.  Between my current customer and some of the other things I’ve been doing, it’s been hard to find time to write. That said – working on some things in the background that I’ll start talking about in due time… in...

As the title suggests, I work in Microsoft Consulting Services as a field guy.  This usually means that I work out of a backpack – have trusty laptop, will work anywhere.  Most anywhere, that is. Doing messaging and infrastructure projects,...

My current customer uses a strong naming convention for their Exchange Servers.  This enables them to quickly and easily determine what role and which domain a server is located in. Their algorithm for naming goes a little like this: EXCH-<DomainID>...

Updated: Added an image for the registry entry and clarified some details. As a follow up to my last post about overriding the hard block for Windows Server 2008 in the Zune 3.0 setup launcher ( http://blogs.msdn.com/dzazzo/archive/2008/09/16/installing...

UPDATE:   If you are looking to upgrade Zune 3.0 to Zune 3.1 on Windows Server 2008 and used this or a similar workaround in the past, check this updated blog post out on how to do that. The Zune team released version 3.0 of the software and firmware...

While researching a problem with message size limits at a customer site the other day, I stumbled across a very interesting situation with a setting of "unlimited" for the organization-wide message size limits. To configure organization-wide...

I've been somewhat dark on writing as I was just going through an internal boot camp for new hires in Worldwide Services called Microsoft Services University.  Two week intensive course.  Whew! My new Dell system arrived a couple of weeks ago...

I'm taking an accelerated class next week for Windows Server 2008 and Active Directory in Charlotte, NC -- part of the class itself is a pretty in-depth self-study component. Covers everything from the marketing and positioning that we're doing along...

On the internal Directory Services mailing list, John Sanz (a Premier Field Engineer) posted this handy dissection of a user's SID.  The original question was whether or not someone could determine whether or not a particular SID was created on an...

As part of my Unified Communications technical readiness (and my general fascination with OCS and Exchange 2007 UM), I've been working on building out a virtual environment at home that uses my VoIP phone number, and eventually farms it out to OCS and...

So, this week, it's TechReady6, an internal "conference" designed for folks within Microsoft Services.  Staffers from all over the place come out to Seattle for this -- TAMs, Consultants, folks from DPE (still haven't found out what that...

So, I've set up my MSDN blog. This should be obvious since you've stumbled across this initial posting. Thanks for coming. A little bit of background on me: I've recently joined the ranks here at Microsoft Consulting Services. I'm an infrastructure...