Mike Talon

Exchange 2010 has been released to the public, and with it comes a whole array of compliance, archiving, redundancy and other features. While this would – on the face of things – appear that Microsoft is crowding out vendors who create 3rd-Party solutions for Exchange, under the surface lies a set of opportunities for those same vendors. Of primary concern is legacy support. Microsoft is famous for limiting or eliminating support for earlier versions of Exchange with each new release, and 2010 is no exception to that paradigm.  Support for Exchange 2000 is completely discontinued, and 2003 has moved to the Extended Life Cycle, meaning no additional feature sets will be produced, only security and bug fixes.  Exchange 2007 has not reached end-of-support, but has been severely depreciated in terms of development and marketing efforts in the Microsoft world.  This leav... (more)

The Case For 3rd Party Software

If I had to classify the questions I get on a routine basis, among the first in the list would be “Why should I buy software for reason X when Microsoft has built it in free. X could be anything from firewall software for desktops through availability tools for SQL Server. It’s absolutely true that Microsoft builds a ton of great tools into their products these days, but that doesn’t mean you should rule out the need for 3rd-party solutions, and here’s why. Let’s take the case of anti-virus as an example. Windows 7 – Microsoft’s upcoming desktop OS platform – will not have a b... (more)

Of SCR and CCR – Double-Take and Things

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax– Of cabbages–and kings– And why the sea is boiling hot– And whether pigs have wings.” – Lewis Carol, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There Over the course of the last 18 months, many more clients have been experimenting with the new data protection technologies in Exchange 2007, most notably Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) and Server (or Standby) Continuous Replication (CCR).  These tools were included with Exchange 2007 RTM and SP1 respectively, and celebrated a milest... (more)

Into Each Engineer’s Life, Some Migration Must Fall

Into each engineer’s life, some migration must fall. What started out as a simple necessity when something broke; has evolved over the years into something that gets done about once every three to five years. Hardware doesn’t break as quickly as technology changes, creating a double-edged sword for the folks on the front lines of the technological revolution. Instead of an easy and manageable flow of workloads from one platform to another, we’re instead faced with a mad dash to get everything onto the new hardware platform before 1) the old one gets so outdated nothing works pr... (more)

Life at a Law Firm’s IT Department

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