Supporting iPhones and Exchange? Today could be a very bad day…
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Security, Email, Apple on
If you’re an Exchange admin, use the “Require encryption on the device” policy, and you’ve got users out there who are using first and second generation iPhones to get their mail over Exchange ActiveSync, then be prepared for a whole rush of support calls as users update to the latest version of the iPhone OS.
Why?
Because iPhones have stopped lying to Exchange servers.
The hardware on earlier iPhone models doesn’t have the power needed to support whole device encryption -you need the 3GS for that - and that means that if your business needs to secure its mail, then most of the iPhones out there can’t be trusted. Apple’s earlier versions of the iPhone email software just ignored that policy setting, and reported back that all policies had been applied.
That meant that devices that should have been encrypted (either for corporate or regulatory reasons) weren’t - and all the mail on them was available for anyone with a USB connection and the appropriate software.
As I’m sure you can guess, that drove a coach and horses through your security policies, and opened your business up to all sorts of regulatory problems.
Now at least those phones will stop getting mail.
But it’s a bit of a worrying thought that one of the most popular phones in the world was skating past security policies. Of course that leaves us with two more worrying thoughts:
First, how many other phones out there are doing just that without you knowing?
And secondly, just how are you going to tell your bosses that they can’t use their phones for email any more?
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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Getting the icons right
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows 7, Applications, Enterprise, Windows, Email on
User experience is a complex thing, with the smallest elements affecting everyone differently. Big changes in an OS UI can have significant impacts of applications that were designed to work with another version. Take Office 2007 for example. It’s a productivity tool that ends up running your online world. I spend most of my time in just three Office applications (and a web browser) - running Outlook, OneNote and Word.
It’s Outlook where the problems appear. If you’re using XP or Vista the option to hide minimised windowx from the task bar, you’ll end up using Outlook’s status bar icons to show if new mail has arrived and to open and close your inbox. It’s a simple way of working, and one that completely falls apart once you upgrade to Windows 7.
It’s purely down to the new task bar. Icons in the task bar are large and compelling. They show when an application is running, and when it’s closed. Unfortunately they don’t show an application as running when it’s hidden - so using the old “hide Outlook” approach fails. The task bar icon becomes the place to click for new windows, and suddenly your PC is running multiple Outlook instances, chewing CPU and memory, and slowing shutdown times.
There is a simple answer - turn off the hide when minimised option, and move the Outlook status bar icon to Windows 7’s new status bar overflow bubble. Suddenly you’re back to doing everything with the task bar icon (albeit without all the information you used to have). One Outlook, one window - and a task bar preview to help you find the things you need to run your day. It’s just a pity that you had to throw away all the useful information you got from the status bar.
One thing occured to me a while back: the icons on the Windows 7 task bar are large and clear - so why shouldn’t they be a tool for displaying information about running applications. After all, my iPhone uses dynamic icons to show me how many messages are unread, and even just what day it is… The keynote at Microsoft’s TechEd here in Los Angeles showed that Microsoft has been thinking the same way, and is adding subtle status icons to the task bar in Office 2010.
The most obvious was in Outlook 2010. There’s no need to keep looking at the status bar for new message indicators - they’re now an overly on the task bar. New mail shows as the familiar envelope image - but as part of the Outlook task bar icon. Read the message, and the envelope vanishes.
It’ll be interesting to see how many other software vendors start using dynamic icons in the Windows 7 task bar. It’s a technique that makes a lot of sense, turning placeholders into a means of delivering quick hits of contextual information, simplifying interactions and giving developers a new way of delivering content to users. You can imagine workflow applications that display current tasks, or to do lists that alert you out of the corner of your eye. The Windows 7 task bar will become what it really needs to be - a dashboard for your PC.
–Simon
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BlackBerry and the lizard brain
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in smartphone, Telecoms, Enterprise, Futures, Email, Wireless, Mobile on
What’s the difference between me walking down the hall, head down and totally absorbed in reading email on my BlackBerry because I didn’t stop to do it before I left the hotel room (well, the coffee is downstairs), and Jim Balsillie co-CEO of RIM walking down the hall so absorbed in reading email on his BlackBerry that he doesn’t hear me say good morning? Mainly that he has the good manners to have a member of staff walk with him so he doesn’t walk into anyone; I’ve never noticed anyone leaping out of my way to avoid getting trampled because you simply don’t notice when you’re that absorbed but I have taken some sudden swerves in railway stations to get out of the path of an oncoming commuter with their eyes fixed on their device so I assume it works both ways.
If your users carry BlackBerrys you can give them a little more to get absorbed in by rolling out the new BES 5. you’re going to want to; if the automatic failover for redundancy, manual failover for maintenance and 64-bit support don’t grab you, you’ll like the full Web-based remote admin (although it does need ActiveX in the browser). They’ll like email flags, being able to file messages and manage folders and - if you enable it - better access to fileshares behind your company firewall.
That’s all instant gratification of a sort, which appeals to the lizard brain. After the other CEO of RIM, Mike Laziridis, introduced BES 5 and celebrated ten years of BlackBerry (and 25 years of RIM) and Bob IBM of RIM showed off some very IBM-centric predictions about the evolution of enterprise collaboration based on smartphones and contextual information (which would have been visionary a year ago and now are just documenting established trends), ex-Disney Imagineer and US intelligence service CTO Eric Haseltine talked a lot about the lizard brain and how to take advantage of it to move your company in the right direction, because it isn’t going away any time soon.
Concept cars matter to the car industry because they show you a physical object you can imagine using rather than describing a service you can’t. The concrete, visual, tactile, tangible prototype appeals to the other big part of the brain, the visual and processing area. And given that in every enterprise the urgent trumps the important and most decisions are the emotional lizard brain arguing with the rational brain, you can do with getting more of the brain on your side.
At Disney Haseltine worked on the Park PDA; back in the 90s this was a handheld device that did everything from video conferencing to games. Of course the killer app wasn’t any of the big concept ideas; it was the text message that told you where in the park Mickey Mouse was so you could go get a photo of your kids with the rodent. Your smartphone can do a lot of that today, but Disney still does great business selling the Pal Mickey; a gadget that knows when you’re standing in line for a ride and likely to be bored, buzzes to offer your kids a secret message and uses a proximity sensor so that when they hold it up to their ear it can whisper at them about the ride they’re queuing for.
Haseltine’s point isn’t so much that your big idea is never go to match what users actually want but that the sooner you can give them something to try out, the sooner you’ll find out what they do want - and then you can use that to move a little further in your long-term direction, supported by users who are getting what they want as well. The people who will be most likely to take the time to try your prototype and give you useful reactions are not just the early adopters but the ones who are actually suffering in some way because they can’t do what they need; there’s always more incentive to get out of the discomfort zone.
And for support, don’t turn to executives or the formal development process; he suggested looking to the counterculture, the “underground informal rebel alliance who think the bureaucracy doesn’t get it”. Every company has them, and if you’re in IT you’ll probably have quite a few working with or for you. They’re going to be doing some unapproved skunkworks projects, so they might as well be something that suits your agenda.
His favourite recent example is the billions of dollars that the various US intelligence agencies spent on knowledge management and collaboration tools which had the same success as any other KM project; utter failure. (When we first watched Criminal Minds we assumed the show didn’t want to reveal the sophisticated IT the FBI must be using; I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that a technical analyst who could retrieve information from a variety of sources is something most FBI teams only dream of). Over at the CIA, a handful of agents got together and set up a completely unapproved and doubtless career-limiting copy of MediaWiki. Helped by the fact that a third of CIA officers are now what Haseltine calls “the Facebook and MySpace generation” (no figures on how many CIA agents are actually on Facebook), Intellipedia became something of a sleeper hit, delivering the knowledge sharing all the formal systems never managed.
Smartphones came into business the way that PDAs and PCs did; because users who thought they would be useful just started using them and demanding that IT support them; social networking and IM arrived the same way. The best way of getting some control over whatever comes next is to be involved in bringing it into business; your counterculture revolutionaries will be in the thick of that and if you can give them enough rope to drag your agenda along you could kill two birds with one stone.
-Mary
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Arizona, Utah and the myth of the perfectible network
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Networking, Telecoms, Wireless, Email, Mobile, Internet, Uncategorized on
Why bother with local storage and heavyweight applications when you could just use the cloud? Because they always work, that’s why.
To prepare for six solid days of meetings and presentations, crowds, queues and the three-ring CES circus, we’ve been driving through the quiet, cold American southwest. It’s been extra quiet and peaceful without email and phone calls. It’s not that we swore off connectivity to take a holiday. It’s not that there isn’t 3G and HSDPA coverage out in the wilds. We didn’t forget to enable roaming or run out of battery and I have a bag-ful of handsets to try out… It’s that the cellular networks that serve the Navajo Nation and many of the surrounding counties don’t have international roaming agreements.
Yes, there’s hotel and motel Wi-Fi - but you’re often sharing a very slow DSL connection with everyone else in the hotel that everyone else is using to upload their photos to Flickr. Plus, you don’t want to be tied to the hotel when you’re wanting to explore.
Cloud services and cloud storage are great for collaboration and for having files available on any machine you happen to pick up. But switching entirely to the cloud assumes that the network is always there, always working, always fast enough, always cheap enough and doesn’t run down your battery too much. Back in the real world, it’s too easy to run out of power or drive out of range for online to be your only option. And don’t say it’s a contrived case and only a few people will be driving around wanting to do email or update their diary in Monument Valley: there are plenty of places in Las Vegas where you can’t get connected either.
-Mary
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Email is the new smoking
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in People, Enterprise, Business, Email on
Doing email has the same random gratification built in as playing the slots, with the added excuse that a lot of it is work-related and sending or replying to a lot of email and emptying your inbox feels like you’ve got a lot done. Usually though, you’ve either asked other people to do things or, in my case, confirmed what real work I’ll be doing when I can drag myself away from the inbox. After all, I have email in my pocket most of the time, I have a laptop in the bedroom….
Except. I check email on the go when I’m waiting for a message, or when I’m on a tube and don’t have a book. I use the bedroom laptop for email, LiveJournal (a mix of blog and social network), Web surfing
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Spam Fighting in Exchange
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
How can you fight spam with one of the most common email servers out there? After all, surely that should mean it’s an easy play for the spammers, with enough holes to get every V1agr4 advert and pump-and-dump scam into your users’ mailboxes.
It turns out it isn’t - and that the built-in tools are effective spam blockers.
If you’re not using Exchange 2007 Content Filter (or Exchange 2007’s Intelligent Message Filter) turn them on. This is one of the most effective weapons in your arsenal. It’s regularly updated, and it scans messages for common spam formats. Mesages are categorised and given spam ratings, which you can use to reject, quarantine, or file messages in users’ Junk Mail folders. CF is surprisingly easy to use - set it up, set the basic filtering rules, and then occasionaly check your quarantine mail box for false positives.
Exchange 2007 has even added whitelisting for persistently filtered false positives. Once a domain is whitelisted, there’s no more delving in the spam folders for Twitter invites or press releases from Kaspersky and Sophos.
I’d been running my server like that for some time, when I discovered another trick that turned out to make a huge difference. Exchange actually supports using real-time block lists (RBLs), which are lists of spam IP addresses hosted by services like SpamCop and Spamhaus. It’s trivially easy to add new block lists to Exchange - just find the lookup address on the block list site (Spamhaus’ is zen.spamhaus.org), and add it and the provider name in the Block List Provider section of Exchange’s anti-spam tools.
Without RBL support turned on I was getting 500 or so spam messages in my quarantine a day, making it hard to filter out the few false positives. With it on, I’m down to less than 100. Managing my spam is a lot easier - and with whitelisting, I’m having to look in the spam folder a lot less often…
–Simon
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