831747 – Overview of the Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 Update: Windows Small Business Server 2003

831747 – Overview of the Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 Update: Windows Small Business Server 2003

Microsoft has released an update to Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager. This update allows Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 users to configure a Microsoft Exchange Server service in their mail profile, as long as the Exchange Server is a Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003-based computer. Previously, this was not a supported configuration.

I found this KB by reading Chapter 6 of Brelsford’s new book, Windows Small Business Server 2003 Best Practices. This CRM reminds of the features found on salesforce.com but is better because it links to the email I have in Outlook. It is not a fancy CRM but is fairly useful because I will have a more complete customer history. To make this work with my present setup I had to move the email I was storing in a public Exchange folder back to my email folder.

I got chapter 6 as a free download. I have his previous version of the book and I heartily recommend it.

McChris template modifications : Revisted

I think I finally have the new template working for both IE and Firefox. The final issue was the differences in the way Firefox and IE handle image overflow. If you have a large image in a post, IE will resize the divs to handle the image. The causes the border to disappear and the righthand div to more right. I thought overflow:hidden would fix the problem but it did not work for me so I set the width on the image. This may not be the most elegant solution but it works. I have one image that was giving me this problem.

Cygwin: space in file name

I recently fixed a problem with the profile script that is used by cygwin. It had a problem with a space in the filename, “My Documents”, and was generating several errors and not ending up in the correct directory. I tried several things that I thought should work but I ended up changing the script to use the “short” version of the filename. The DOS command “dir -x” will tell you its name.

Exchange 2003 SP1

I applied SP1 to Exchange 2003 last night. Today I noticed I was not getting any local mail. I used google to find a thread that recommended re-applying sp1 because store.exe was probably still at the old version. After applying sp1 and rebooting, the mail got delivered after a couple minute delay. I did not find any error messages to help my debug the problem. I did confirm that store.exe had not been updated the first time I applied sp1. Oh well!

McChris Revisited

Last night I got bored with television and started working at modifying McChris’s templates. It was much harder than I thought but par for the course. The hacks caught me again. Once again Firefox was easy and IE was frustrating. I used the cow template as my example and the default wordpress template for most of my design elements. It works for the most part but I am still bothered that I cannot IE to center the div block. I am missing something. I will probably modify the template page to make it look closer to the default but I will leave that for another day.

Reverting back to the default css

I decided to go back to the default css for wordpress. I was wasting too much time trying to get the screens to look the same in firefox and IE. I learned a little bit more about css but obviously not enough to get the job done the way I wanted to. Maybe I will try again when I have more time.

Wasting time with css

Wow, I have really wasted a lot of time trying to get my weblog to look the same under Firefox and IE. All I want is for the right content to fit in a smaller screen when I ask it to resize. Firefox displays the screen how I would like it to appear. IE is not bad but it leaves the content off the screen to the right. Very annoying!

Listamatic: Unraveled CSS Tabs

Listamatic: Unraveled CSS Tabs
Unraveled CSS Tabs

Use combinations of padding, borders and a:hover to achieve different list effects. From Unraveled CSS Tabs.

I am pretty sure I used this for the Legacy Farm Ltd. website. I have been looking for this for some time. I think I have been to both of these sites before.

RE: SQL Server Reporting Services Webparts for SharePoint

Bryant Likes has published his solution to show SQL Server Reporting Services stuff in SharePoint. For the latest releases, you can visist the GotDotNet Workspace. Nice work Bryant!

[Via Jan Tielens’ Bloggings]

Bryant has done something that really takes advantage of Sharepoint’s SQL capability. There are several alternatives out there so I will have to go through the choices when I have more time.

SpamBayes: Bayesian anti-spam classifier written in Python.

SpamBayes: Bayesian anti-spam classifier written in Python.

The Version 1.0 release candidate (both source and Windows binary installer) is now available!

This is another sourceforge program I use daily. The Junk email filter in Outlook 2003 seems to be doing a good job but this catches the rest. I will wait until the stable version is released. All spam programs can detect spam but the good ones avoid false positives.

ISA SP2, Exchange Intelligent Message Filter, and Exchange 2003 SP1

I downloaded and installed ISA SP2 last week. I did not encounter any problems. Today I downloaded the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter and in the process of downloading the deployment guide. They highly recommend that you read it before installing. That ruins all the fun!

Exchange 2003 SP1 is 100 MB. I decided to order it instead. I have more of an issue with spam than I do with Exchange fixes. I can wait for these fixes.

80/20 and the design blogosphere

Archives ~ 14 April 2004 ~ Authentic Boredom

Okay, this i missed! This list by cameron is what he believes are responsible for 80% of the website design innovation. This is an excellent start at improving your knowlege of website design. I have read many of their contributions in the past so I respect their work. They are very good and I am not, enough said!

RE: Fedora Core Doesn’t Like to Dual Boot?

Yea, this is bad news for dual booters like me. The Bugzilla Bug 115980: will not boot to windows partition using grub menu that this post refers to is pretty lengthy.

schwatoo writes “It seems Fedora Core doesn’t like to boot alongside Windows 2K or XP. According to a bug first reported in February on Fedora’s bugzilla site …

[Via Slashdot]

Yea, this is bad news for dual booters like me. The Bugzilla Bug 115980: will not boot to windows partition using grub menu that this post refers to is pretty lengthy. The first entry is on 17-Feb-2004 and it is still open. Evidently the new kernel used in Fedora Core 2 does not read the disk geometry correctly and as a result something(parted?) in the installation process corrupts the partition table. I was planning on upgrading to Core 2 but I will wait until they figure this one out.

Design Eye for the Usability Guy

Design by Fire: Design Eye for the Usability Guy

Further, in the spirit of sharing, I decided I’d gather up some knowledgeable designers and help Nielsen in return with a little bit of design advice. The Design Fab Five, right here, right now.

Great article on redesigning Jakob Nielsen’s website, useit.com. Everyone likes to take their shot at making Jakob’s site a little lot more attractive without losing the usability that Jakob recommends. Many of their recommendations are appropiate for almost any website.

wehuberconsultingllc.com updates

wehuberconsultingllc.com
Welcome to the new wehuberconsultingllc.com website. My fascination with phpWebSite has led me to create this site using that package. As a low cost CMS I think it has a lot of features that will appeal to a lot clients. Sometimes the best way to explain a package is to demonstrate it so I plan on incorporating the features I find most intriguing. Some of the projects I am looking at are:

1. Create a new theme modeled after ideas I got from meyerweb, alistapart, glish.com, and wordpress.
2. Create an Amazon bookstore
3. Create a best practice/FAQ for SBS
4. Create and update a web link that has influenced the most.

Trying to keep up with WordPress

It has been hard for me to blog here on a regular basis due to various errors in WordPress. I am using the bleeding edge(i.e. CVS version) so I am at fault. My problems originally centered around using w.bloggar. First I got an error message saying I did not post for an unspecified reason. I tried it a second time before I figured out that the first actually got through. So I checked the CVS for an updated version of XMLRPC. I found one, so I updated my files. A day or so later I could not delete a post. Some more files had changed in the CVS, so I updated. A couple days later I found I could no login using w.bloggar. I had been using the b2 configuration. The forum said try a custom version. It didn’t work either. Some more files had changed in the CVS, so I updated. You catch the drift. Confused

Now let us see if we can post this…