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February 21, 2005

Moving towards completion

Just finished up the preface chapter and sent it off to Robbie; now to turn my attention toward addressing the technical reviewers' comments in my assigned chapter (we just got a new batch in last night). I've already found one incredibly stupid error I made in one of my recipes, and thanks to their vigilance the world will never know how dum I am.

It actually feels like a book now. I am getting excited to see it. I have started checking the O'Reilly website on a regular basis to see when information about the book goes up. I know, I know; rookie move. I said I am excited.

Posted by Devin Ganger at 09:24 PM | Comments (0)

February 14, 2005

A Theme of Synchronicity

One of the last original recipes I wrote for the book (for the revised Chapter 8) dealt with the topic of creating custom OWA themes. It's horribly easy to do.

So what do I see last night on You Had Me at EHLO but this wonderful article by Eileen Brown, containing a great 8-minute webcast on how to create a new theme. It uses the Xbox look and feel and gives you the various graphics files so you can examine everything closely. I even caught one small omission I made in the recipe, so I'm making a mental note now to fix it when that chapter comes back from tech review.

Posted by Devin Ganger at 06:39 PM | Comments (0)

Almost done!

Devin turned in his edited version of Chapter 7, which was the last remaining chapter for technical edit. This past week, all four of us have been busy addressing comments from our technical reviewers (William Lefkovics, Tony Murray, Michael B. Smith, and the redoubtable Joe Richards). The first four chapters are complete and ready to go on to production; the second chunk of chapters should be back from the tech reviewers this week, and they've just gotten the final three chapters. So what? Well, we expect to get the rest of the chapters through TE and wrapped up by month's end, which would put the book on the shelf sometime in late April or early May. No word yet on what our cover animal will be, but I'll post it here as soon as I find out.

Once the book's in production, that means the writing part is finished-- that'll free some of my attention to go toward this blog, so I can start posting the scripts included in the book. Stay tuned!

Posted by Paul at 06:08 AM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2005

Patch time!

Time to patch Exchange again! MS05-012 (Vulnerability in OLE and COM Could Allow Remote Code Execution (873333)) has been released for pretty much every version of Windows, Office, and Exchange, since they all use the component. It's rated severe, so don't wait; grab it now, get it into testing, and get it into production.

Note that if you're using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) faithfully, you probably already know about this patch. If you're not running version 1.2.1, go download that and start using it. It helps you figure out exactly what you need.

And if you were using Software Update Services (SUS) or its currently in beta replacement Windows Update Services (WUS), you'd automatically be notified about this patch and be able to control deployment throughout your organization.

Posted by Devin Ganger at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)

February 01, 2005

Call for Papers: Exchange Connections Fall 2005

Ordinarily I wouldn't post this announcement here, but I'm going to break tradition and do so because I'm one of the conference co-chairs. As such, I have to help find speakers, so I want this call for papers to go out far and wide.

Windows IT Pro is now accepting session proposals for the Oct-Nov. 2005 Windows Connections conference. We're heading to San Diego October 30 to November 2, 2005, for the premier Windows technical conference, and we'd like to hear from you!

If you're interested in speaking on Exchange-related topics at the show, send your abstracts to paul@robichaux.net by February 18. We want proposals for regular 75-minute sessions, as well as 1/2 day and full day pre-conference and post-conference sessions.

Note that we have a limited number of speaking slots, and all participants must be able to present a minimum of three 75-minute sessions. There are three basic requirements:

• Send a minimum of 3 session proposals (4 or 5 is ideal for discussion purposes)
• Include a biographical statement with your session proposals
• Include any additional pre- or post-con session proposals, if applicable

Please adhere to the February 18 deadline as we need to make speaker and session selections right away. (We plan to have a conference brochure ready to distribute at TechEd in June.)

Posted by Paul at 07:30 AM | Comments (1)