From time to time you will find that there are employees that receive time sensitive emails. This means if they are gone for a few days, and no one is around to answer…customers start to get testy.

I know the easy answer to this problem is to setup a distribution group. Have this group send to everyone in that department. This is not a convenient, or good answer in all cases. It may be only temporary, and you don’t want a whole group of people seeing confidential email.

The other way (And this is what I am going to show you today) is to temporarily forward all inbound mail to another user.

To do this you will need to be on the Exchange server. Open the user’s properties under Active Directory Users and Computers.

Click on the “Exchange General” tab.

Now that you are on that page, click on delivery options

Now, the options are shown. You can change the email to forward (1), and select the user you want to receive the email from active directory.

Second, you can also allow the user receive the email in addition to the user receiving the forwarded email. This can be accomplished by checking the “Deliver messages to both…” (2).

Click OK, and email is immediately forwarding to the new user.

Thats all there is to it.

When the user returns, you can simply switch it back to “None”, and the email is no longer forwarded.

I got a chance to try out GFI Mail archiver this week.

The name does not do it justice. At first glance you would think it is a tool for backing up your email, but it does much more. A quick rundown of its features:

1. Keep a copy of every email on your Microsoft Exchange server

Every email can be grabbed by the archiver. Even if it has been deleted right away by that user. I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked by customers for a way to do this.

2. Easily search through email

Need to see if anyone within the organization received an email from a specific person? It can do it. The interface is web-based, and you can search across thousands of emails in less than a few seconds:

3. Give users granular access to other users folders

You can give a manager access to email of the employees they manage, but not the president of the company.

4. Take the load of email off your exchange server and move it into GFI Mail archiver.

You can setup each user to have access to their own archive. That way they can delete old emails, but still access them from mail archiver.

With the amount of email users receive these days it is easy to exceed the maximum message store size of exchange – this can help keep those mailbox sizes lower.

If you are looking for a way to keep track of email within your organization – Give it a spin and try it out.

Earlier I had written that Vista SP1 was available on MSDN and Technet – I was wrong. I assumed this because Microsoft had released it to manufacturing. In the past this always meant that it was on MSDN right away.

I didn’t notice this because the MSDN site was getting slammed by people downloading Windows Server 2008. Once the dust settled I started looking for the RTM Vista SP1 download. I couldn’t find it.

After searching around the internet I discovered that for various reasons MS was not releasing it to subscribers until the rest of the public was getting it. As you can imagine this caused a huge blow up among the paying subscribers to MSDN and Technet.

Finally, Microsoft has caved and they are now allowing Technet subscribers to download it:

I will be testing it as soon as my download completes. Still the question remains – why not on MSDN? Don’t developers need to see this release early too?

Looks like Australia has some new DST updates coming up. We have updated our Network Administrator, and free Daylight Saving Patch to include the changes.

You can get them both from our download section

I started getting that message when I moved our internal SharePoint server from a physical machine to our VMWare server.

We have made lots of customizations to Sharepoint – so when ever we touch the thing it creates headaches. We were getting this message for *all* web parts, so I knew it couldn’t be a specific issue with just one of them.

After searching around for a while I found a very easy fix:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/826786

Essentially you need to give the local group named STS_WPG permission to write the the C:\Windows\Temp folder.

After I did that, I refreshed the Sharepoint website and it was working fine again.

How did it lose this permission? Well after we moved the Sharepoint server we had to run windows repair (VMWare had a different set of hardware). This resets the permission on this temp folder.

Well the day has finally come – Windows 2008, and Vista SP1 have been released to manufacturing. If you are a MSDN subscriber you can download both of them – if you can get in.

Right now it looks like the MSDN servers are being crushed by the number of people trying to download:

For Windows 2008 the highlights are:

-Significantly improved performance of IIS

-Built-in virtualization (Hypervisor)

-Faster file sharing (There have been many good benchmarks on this one)

-Introduction of the Core edition (A stripped down command line only version)

More information about the Windows 2008

For Vista SP1:

– 50% improvement of network file copies. (Sure hope this is true)

– Resuming from sleep mode significantly improved

– Many common causes of crashes addressed, and fixed

– Faster RDP sessions.

Some more detailed information from Microsoft:

Notable Changes in Vista SP1

Overview of Vista SP1

Microsoft has announced the upgrade paths available for Windows Server 2008:

A few important points:

1. Except for Windows Server 2008 for Itanium, the above applies for both x86 and x64 versions. Cross-platform upgrades are not supported (Ex: x64 to x86 or x86 to x64)

2. There is no upgrade path for Windows Server 2008 Server core edition (Since this is a new product line)

Well we hear in the news today that Microsoft is trying to buy yahoo. This would be for a cool $44.6 Billion. 62% more than the current stock price.

Obviously this is Microsoft’s desperate bid to out maneuver Google. I don’t think Google has anything to worry about.

Lets look at the latest marketing campaign for Windows 2008. It is called Heroes Happen Here (HHH?).

They have released a comic strip to go along with it. Here is one of the latest comics:

HUH? What it is this? They must have a giant vat of cool aid laced with happy juice over in Redmond. How could they possibly think that this will help promote Windows 2008?

I don’t even ‘get’ the cartoon. Call me stupid.

So back to Yahoo. What could MS possibly add to Yahoo? Zip. They will systematically make it disappear. In 3 years it will look like live.com

Google will still be #1. All the while Apple will still be eating away at their declining desktop market share.

Meanwhile we need to run our businesses on the software that they build. It gives me the shakes just thinking about it.