The ÜberGeekGirl blog

Microsoft Exchange Connectivity Analyzer

By Jessica | Published: September 1, 2010

Microsoft Exchange Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer.

Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer answers your Exchange operations questions, such as:

  1. Can my Exchange server receive inbound Internet/SMTP email?
  2. Can my Outlook Anywhere (aka “RPC over HTTP” in Exchange 2003) clients connect from outside the firewall?
  3. Can my mobile users connect using Exchange ActiveSync phones/devices?
  4. Does AutoDiscover work for Outlook 2007 clients?
  5. Does AutoDiscover work for Exchange ActiveSync clients?
  6. Are the certificates used for these services valid?

I cannot tell you how useful this tool has been in my server admin work. If you haven’t tried it yet, take it for a spin. Let me know if it has helped you! With thanks to Dave Shackelford at ThirdTier for this great resource.

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Why I (still) do I.T.

By Jessica | Published: August 4, 2010

This is a little bit of a rant, but with a positive spin. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Look around you, how many women in IT (technology) do you see? Yeah, not so much huh?

I used to be a secretary. Not a very good one mind you, because I was bored to tears. Then the universe gave me a big ol gift of being slammed into by a garbage truck while driving my little Honda Civic down 28th St. in Minneapolis. Now most people wouldn’t see this as a positive and I sure didn’t at first. But here’s the deal. My left hand was broken in about a bazillion places. Not so good for typing eh? I simply had to change careers, or least change jobs. I ultimately landed another admin position but I loved it, I was doing simple admin stuff but not very much typing. I was surrounded by technical people as I have been in most jobs. But somehow this was different. My bosses noticed that I had some talent, some drive and I was progressively given interesting tasks. I was still very young and didn’t know all of the “rules” and kept asking and pushing the envelope. There were actually technical women in the department I worked in and it was very inspiring. Read More »

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On becoming a boss

By Jessica | Published: July 28, 2010

As an entrepreneur for 5 years, I’ve always held onto the belief that no one could do the job as well as I can and my clients would never tolerate anyone else coming to help them out. Over the last year or so, I found that belief wasn’t really serving me or my clients well. I found myself exhausted and approaching burnout. Because I believe so strongly in providing the best computer service experience to my clients, I knew that I needed to make some changes.

Once I made that decision, a great thing happened. A former colleague contacted me about a possible employee. I spent several months interviewing, background checking and just putting them through my paces. As it turns out, I’ve gone ahead with hiring this person and I look forward to the benefits my clients will experience with additional support.

Feel the fear and do it anyway!

Posted in Opinion | Tagged | 1 Comment

It’s always DNS

By Jessica | Published: July 14, 2010

Last week I had a call from a client who was reporting slow internet speeds. In particular, their yahoo email start page was really dragging. I arranged for a remote session to see if I could find the cause easily. I also instructed the client to reboot their modem, router and switch. Nothing obvious came up in my troubleshooting session so I arranged for an on-site visit.

After performing some routine maintenance, I stopped and just looked at the problem with a “beginner’s mind”. As I watched the page load ever so slowly, I noticed in teeny tiny writing at the bottom of the Safari window “resolving host….” As the light bulb went off in my head, I said to myself it’s DNS!

I called their ISP to see if there were any particular issues with the standard DNS servers.  Of course their answer was no and that their servers were working just fine. So after using this very cool utility from Google http://code.google.com/p/namebench/ I replaced  AT&T’s DNS server entries with Open DNS which was reportedly 300% faster.

Wow, what a difference. It’s pretty rare that I change the DNS servers from the ISP, but I’ll be doing it more often after this experience.

Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged | 1 Comment

Blackberry Desktop Manager Incompatibility with Outlook 2010

By Jessica | Published: June 30, 2010

The consulting community seems excited about Office 2010. There are lots of great features and some significant improvements. I’m writing today about a particular configuration issue that will only be applicable to people in Exchange environments that access another user’s folders.

In prior versions of Outlook, in order to see another user’s contacts in your “windows address book” you had to follow a convoluted 10 step process that was a nightmare to implement in any reasonable amount of time. Now we can simply add a second exchange account and see the additional address book. This is a big time saver.

With BES services, we can wirelessly sync your Blackberry to your Outlook folders. However sometimes we need to sync the Blackberry to a different folder, perhaps your boss’ contacts folder. Now we have to install Blackberry Desktop Manager and disable wireless sync on your contacts. Then we can specify an additional folder to sync.

Throughout the different versions of Outlook, there have been lots of issues with compatibility with Blackberry Desktop Manager, most notably in the scenario above, we cannot use cached exchange mode. But now with the release of Outlook 2010, the desktop manager won’t connect at all. There are various workarounds, none of which are realistic for consultants or clients for that matter.

I believe that this failure of RIM to stay in compatibility with what I consider their main partner is just another reason they’ll continue to lose users and market share. If I as a consultant, cannot do what my clients need and expect, then I won’t use or recommend the product anymore. The most frustrating part of this is that in many stores, I can no longer purchase Office 2007.

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