Credit to Dell

I wasn't thinking happy thoughts about Dell yesterday when my laptop hard drive died. However, after about 15 minutes on the phone with tech support, a new hard drive was on the way and arrived just about 24 hours after I called. Pretty good turn around.

I've taken the opportunity to upgrade the laptop to 64-bit ultimate since I need to do a reinstall anyway. No sense having a laptop with 4GB of RAM on a 32-bit OS. A 32-bit OS only sees a little over 3GB.

100% Depreciation for Computers

As part of the new budget in Canada, it has been announced that computers purchased between Jan 27, 2009 and Feb 1, 2011 can be depreciated at 100% CCA. This means that computers are effectively treated as an expense and you can write them off in a single year instead of depreciating them over time. This would apply to both workstations and servers. Nice to see.

From a business perspective, it means that your taxes more closely match your cashflow. Or, if you finance, you get the tax writeoff before you are even done paying for them.

Retail or Online Discounter?

I recently purchases some wireless headphones with a microphone. My intent was to use them for creating elearing courses. I thought the wireless option was cool. After shelling out about $130, I got them home and found that the microphone had way too much static for producing elearning. It might have been Ok for playing games, but not something that needs to be polished.

I was very happy that I picked them up at a major retailer and just returned them the next day. I might have been able to return them to an online discounter, but would have been out shipping at the very least.

Ex2003 Public Folders and SSL Cert

When attempting to manage public folders on an Exchange 2003 server using System Manager, I received an error.

The token supplied to the function is invalid.
ID no: 80090308 Exchange System Manager

The problem is SSL being required on the Exadmin folder in the Default Web Site used for Exchange management. This is only a problem when a third party SSL cert is installed because the internal name does not match the external DNS name used on the cert. In addition to disabling SSL for the Exadmin folder, I also had to use ADSI edit to remove the secure port in the Exadmin object in Active Directory. Now life is all good.

Detailed steps are at the bottom of the page here: http://hellomate.typepad.com/exchange/2004/04/public_folder_e.html

MOSS 2007 Audiences for List Items

So, today we found a huge error by omission in the 5061 MOSS course I was teaching. An activity has you active audiences for an announcement list and then assign audiences directly to items. For the first time I actually had a student test the functionality instead of just assuming it works like the book says. Turns out, it doesn't.

Most Web parts are not capable of reading and filtering items based on audiences. The Content Query web part does. So, you need to use a Content Query web part to filter the items in the annoucement list based on audience. Not as pretty, but functional.

Personally, I'd stick with using audiences at the Web Part level rather than item level. There are no special requirements for that to function.