mstehle: The CDOs and CDONTS of Messaging Development : OT

OT: Email Tips from Raymond Chen

mstehle — Thu, 10 May 2007 18:23:00 GMT

...Sorry I haven't written much lately, I have plenty on the way. Counting down 3 months until my wedding and life just keeps getting busier and busier. Here is a look into the world of a support engineer at Microsoft and some related comments from Raymond Chen that I couldn't help but talk about since they are so on point...enjoy...

My job as support engineer is as much about communication as it is debugging. A large amount of that communication is done through email whether it be between me and customers, product team members, account managers, other support engineers, consultants, etc. A large amount of that traffic happens on internal discussion groups where people from all these different roles can post questions and provide answers to one another. This interaction is such a vital part of the support and consulting while also providing product teams with real life scenarios, bugs, and questions that they can use to improve their products. It exemplifies the cliche, "None of us is smarter than all of us."

Turns out there is an etiquette to be observed as well that has evolved over time. Most of it comes from respecting the time of others, especially the guys on the product team. This is a community interaction and although we couldn't function without it, providing answers to this groups is considered going "above and beyond". In the end it all works out, I may be able to answer some quesetions in the VSTO group or Outlook Programming group and in return I'm sure at some point someone will help me out on the Vista or Powershell groups. The key is to be respectful of the community and not abuse people's time and willingness to help out (especially people like Raymond Chen).

Raymond has a couple posts that talk about to the two most blatant violations of discussion group etiquette that are quite frequently broken at Microsoft, the dreaded "RESENDING:...." email due to "no response" and the ever popular "spam the world" tactic of trying to loop as many people into a problem as possible without letting them know. These posts hit home so precisely to life in these discussion groups that I couldn't help but link to them...

Email tip: People didn't answer your first email for a reason

Email tip: Don't ask the same question multiple times in different groups

OT: Proper Pronunciation of CDONTS...

mstehle — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 18:38:00 GMT

FYI IMO there a lot of TLA's out there these days. Some acronyms get pronounced phonetically like ISAPI ("eye-sap-ee") and MAPI ("map-ee") while others are enunciated simply by reading the letters like ESM ("E-S-M") and NTFS ("N-T-F-S"). Usually the presence of vowels in acronyms or resemblance to an actual word determines this. However there are some cases where a precedent forbids this rule...

Let's look at CDONTS. I humorously use it in the title of this blog as a play on one of the common mispronunciations. Obviously CDO is pronounced by reading the letters ("C-D-O") and CDONTS is known as CDO for NT Server or CDONTS ("C-D-O-N-T-S"). Pronouncing each letter here keeps its association with CDO in tact. Unfortunately CDONTS looks a lot like "C-don'ts" or the most unfortunate pronunciation, "C-donuts"...

As a support professional that is still relatively new to this gig, I recognized CDONTS as "C-D-O-N-T-S". You can imagine my confusion when I got my first "C-DONUTS" case, haha...

Oh and BTW, CDOSYS is half and half of course, just to keep it interesting, "C-D-O-sis"...

OT: Sober Virus is Back

mstehle — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 21:46:00 GMT

There is a new strain of the Sober virus roaming inboxes lately. Yahoo has more. The virus arrives in an email with an attachment. Many of the messages will proclaim they are from the CIA or FBI asking you to open the attachment to answer some questions. Some attachments claim to be video of Paris Hilton or Nicole Richie. In short don't open the attachments.

...Add this to the long line of virus that are avoided if you just don't open attachments or view email from people you don't know. By this time everyone who owns a computer and gets email via Outlook or some other mail client should be running antivirus software. A huge benefit of using web based email services like Hotmail is that most provide server side virus scanning on attachments before you download them. If you connect via POP3 or IMAP to Hotmail or Yahoo! or *Mail then you are responsible for scanning mail and attachments with your personal antivirus software.

OT: MaxiVista is great!

mstehle — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 01:55:00 GMT

I don't get any kickbacks I swear. Check out MaxiVista it is truly a great product a number of people here use everyday. It is a simple client/server application that provides software based multi-monitor and KVM functionality.

...Really, I don't have an affiliation with them what so ever. It is just a great product. If you bring a laptop to work like I do, it is a necessity. Instant KVM and Multimon without waiting for new hardware. Enjoy and please pay for it if you use it, they've earned it!