BWAIN*dump

Prince2 foundation training at the weekend, anyone?

2011-08-19T16:03:00.000+01:00

Picture credit: Bask

Are you interested in taking the Prince2 Foundation course and exam on a weekend in London or Croydon?

I'd quite like to get my Prince2 certs, but taking time off work to do them is an obstacle.

I recently asked a training provider I’ve worked with before whether they ever run weekend sessions and the answer was that they will run one pretty much whenever people ask them to if enough people will attend.

Costs are around £900+VAT for the Prince2 Foundation course and exam, but depending on the numbers we could negotiate a discount. (Minimum number of people to run the course is about 5.)

A London or Croydon venue would be ideal for me, probably a weekend in November or December, or maybe early 2012. If I can get this off the ground I'll probably want to schedule the Practitioner course and exam sometime after that.

If you’re interested, please get in touch via comments or message me @Techiebird on twitter.

I promise I'm not posting this for any reason other than that stated, I'm not a training provider, I'm not being paid by a training provider, I'm just an IT pro who wants to do some self-funded training at a time that's convenient to me.

So far I’ve had a few responses via LinkedIn and a piece in the Women in Technology newsletter, but ideally I need a few more to get this at a good rate.

(If you’re a training provider or representing a training provider, thanks for stopping by but I already have a provider in mind for this.)

Outlook calendar synchronisation conflicts and custom forms

2010-12-03T19:33:00.002Z

Have you seen this conflict message?

Cannot update the appointment because the corresponding item in the folder you synchronised does not match this item. To resolve the conflict, open the item. Do you want to open the item now?

If you click Yes, you see a box asking you to choose between two seemingly identical items, with this explanation:

Conflicting edits have been made to the same item. To resolve this conflict, select the item in the list below you wish to keep and then choose "Keep This Item", or choose "Keep All" to preserve all the versions.

Sometimes I think Microsoft use some special SEO technique for their best stuff… in this case Search Engine Obfuscation. So many times I’ve tried to find out why and how sync conflicts occur, and it took me a very long time to get any kind of answer.

Why Sync Conflicts Occur

Here’s a quick explanation of what’s going on: when you use Outlook in Cached Exchange mode, sometimes Outlook will see a small difference between the item you’re trying to save (from the cached copy of your mailbox) and the copy on the server. If it’s one of the ‘standard’ types of item (Mail message, Appointment, Task, Contact, etc.) then Outlook knows which fields are likely to be important, which aren’t, and makes a reasonable guess at resolving the item for you if it can without you even knowing it happened.

If you use a custom form instead of one of the standard forms (like if you have some CRM application which puts extra fields on every Appointment or Contact item), then Outlook doesn’t know what the item is supposed to be. It might be pretty obvious to you or me that it’s an Appointment but Outlook doesn’t make any assumptions. So if some little difference occurs between the item you’re editing (from the cached copy of your mailbox) and the copy on the server… it doesn’t try to automatically resolve the conflict and instead prompts you with the message at the top of this post.

Fortunately there’s a registry key where you can add values for each of your custom forms to tell Outlook what ‘standard’ form it’s most like, and it will try to resolve conflicts for you accordingly. This article on msdn is written for Outlook 2007, but the same registry edits work for Outlook 2003 – you just have to put ‘11’ in the key name instead of ‘12’.

About Conflict Resolution for Custom Item Types (MSDN)

Other Sync Conflicts

If you’re just seeing conflict messages once in a blue moon, it’s probably nothing to worry about. If you’re seeing them frequently, but you’re pretty sure you don’t have a custom forms solution and anyway it’s only affecting one or two people, the easiest and most likely solution is to repair your OST file (or even easier, delete or rename it and let Outlook rebuild a new one next time you connect to your mail server). If you’re not sure how to do that, you’d be safer following Microsoft's official instructions. My usual disclaimer applies.

My 18 essential Android apps

2009-11-26T20:06:00.002Z

Yeah, six months, almost to the day, since my last post. I know, it’s disgraceful. I’ve had numerous reasons, not least that I’m not in a hands-on technical job these days, and it’s taking me a while to find my voice on a new topic. But let’s see how that works out.

Meanwhile, back in my comfort zone, some geek goodness. I’ve only had my Android phone (HTC Magic) a few months, but I can’t remember what I ever did without it. (I prefer to forget the Samsung i600 which turned out to be an almighty mistake.) So these are Android Apps I can’t live without, in alphabetical order because that’s the way they’re arranged on my phone:

ACast – webcast client, which I have pointed at my PodNova account (so I can subscribe to podcasts from any web browser and have them appear on all my clients), which in turn has a feed pointed at a download tag on my Delicious feed (so I can bookmark individual tracks and have them appear as part of a feed). Has the must-have setting to only download when connected to wifi, so won’t cause me to fall out with my network operator. It just works. I haven’t been tempted to try Google Listener, so I can’t tell you which is better. Maybe one day when I’m bored…
AnyClip Pro – gives me a gadget on my iGoogle homepage which syncs text with an app on my phone. Great when I’m at work and I want to check out a link that Websense won’t let me see… paste in my iGoogle, quick sync, and open the link in my Android browser. Vice versa if someone SMSs or gMails me a link and I want to see the site in my desktop browser. Quicker and less hassle than copy/paste and email.
Bluetooth Switcher – gives me an icon on my homescreen to toggle Bluetooth on/off. Simple, quick, and just works.
Handcent SMS – I nearly didn’t include this because I don’t like the new Quick Reply screen as much as the previous one, but it was the first alternative SMS client I tried, and I still haven’t found another one I like better. Has an annoying habit of popping up texts you already closed or replied to in Quick Reply, but otherwise pretty decent. Has lots of UI

Technorati Tags: Android,Gadgets,Lists

options including custom colours if you like that sort of thing.
Locale – a ‘set it and forget it’ app which lets you change phone settings or trigger actions depending on your location. So mine switches the ringer on when it’s at home, and off when it goes somewhere else. I usually have GPS switched off to save battery, so it uses wireless network location which is a bit flaky, but that’s not the app’s fault. The vast majority of the time it works, and that’s good enough for me. Also has plug-ins e.g. an SMS sender, so you can automatically send a “be home in 20 minutes, put the oven/heating/batman outfit on” text to your significant other from a strategic point on your commute.
London Tube Status – when my train is pulling in to London Bridge, I can check if the Jubilee Line is working or not in a couple of seconds, so I don’t have that wasted trudge to the tube station, just to find out it’s not running. If it says “Minor Delays” I can check the live departure board to see how minor. Next trains at 5, 9 and 14 minutes? No thanks, I’ll try some other way.
My Days – it’s a girl thing. Unless you know a boy who wants an app to track the menstrual cycle of the woman in his life. Which would be a bit creepy if you ask me.
NetCounter – useful for checking if that app you installed earlier is suddenly making your network data usage go through the roof. (Twidroid, I’m thinking of you…)
NewsRob – An offline reader for Google Reader. Possibly my single most used app, and I love it. Has the critical “only do full sync over wifi” feature. Not perfect, but they’re constantly improving and updating it.
PaperDroid – I’m listing this although I don’t actually use it much, but I would if I could. It’s a great idea – an offline reader for your ReadItLater account. Unfortunately I can’t tag items with ReadItLater from work, so I’m mostly using Instapaper instead. And waiting for an Instapaper app…
Power Manager – great for commands like “Switch on WiFi when charging, switch off WiFi when battery goes below 80%”, and the brilliant, emergency-call-juice-saving “switch to 2G and switch off Sync when battery goes below 10%”. Just works.
Pure Calendar Info – a more compact calendar widget for the homescreen. Doesn’t seem to impact performance too much.
Record It – remote recording tool for Sky+. Great UI, much easier (at least I think so) than trying to remember the syntax for requesting by SMS, and even though this is a paid app, it pays for itself after a handful of uses.
Steel – my ‘spare’ web browser. The main reason I have this is because it picks up iPhone versions of web pages (sends a user agent string identifying itself as the iPhone browser). So a good backup option for pages that look like crap in the regular browser.
Swift – simple twitter client. Has the annoying habit of telling me again and AGAIN that I have direct messages I received weeks ago, but other than that it’s OK. I prefer TwitterRide, but I’ve found the easiest way to manage two twitter accounts is to use two clients, and this is the second best free one I’ve found so far.
TooDoo – I’m a huge fan of the ToodleDo online task management site, and this syncs with it and even adds features not in ToodleDo. It’s nice to be able to type my shopping list from my PC, add items on the train if I suddenly remember them, and be able to walk around the supermarket ticking them off with a strikethrough gesture - very satisfying. Also syncs with Remember The Milk. A bit buggy though, does tend to force-close a lot.
TwitterRide – quick, simple Twitter client.
Useful Switchers – easy access from the homescreen to some common on/off settings, e.g. Silent mode, WiFi, GPS and a screen white-out that is supposed to work as an emergency torch. (Personally I’d rather save my battery for other functions I’d find more useful in an emergency, but that’s just me.)

So what am I missing?

What Not to Present

2009-05-25T15:44:00.001+01:00

The phrase “Death by PowerPoint” (70,000+ hits on google) has nearly as many miles on the clock as the dreaded Bullet Points Of Doom, but a lot of the good information out there about creating better presentations seems to be preaching to the choir. If you're self-aware enough to have looked for help on being a better presenter, you're probably not on the Most Wanted list of people likely to bore their colleagues or customers into a coma and you’ve probably realised that the default PowerPoint templates are about as beneficial to presentation audiences as tobacco is to beagles.

So, maybe you found your way here via one of my troubleshooting posts and this isn’t a topic you’ve devoted much thought to. But maybe you’ve felt hours of your life tick by while you’ve watched your well-intentioned colleagues read through their screens full of bullet points and tables of data you can’t read from the back of the room. Maybe you have a vague feeling that a lot of presentations are a waste of time, possibly even your own, and would like to break the cycle. In that case, join the club! I hope I’ve improved since I started getting interested in this topic a couple of years ago, but I’m very much a work in progress and I plan to keep learning. I’m far from being an expert presenter, but I’ve listed some useful resources created by people who are at the bottom of this post.

Our managers have learnt to expect presentations in the same hackneyed formats, but that doesn’t mean we have to comply without question. Most presentations where I work (and most places I’ve worked, for that matter) are doomed from the start because they follow a ‘default’ style that doesn’t take account of some basic aspects of human behaviour:

If the audience are reading, they’re not listening. If I’m talking and showing a page of text at the same time, I’m asking them to make a choice between one and the other, and it's not a conscious choice. Unless I’m doing something to catch their eye, the text will get their attention. If the text is all I wanted to get across, I could have sent out a document and saved my breath.
People respond best to visual stimulus, and anyway, some things are difficult to communicate verbally. Graphs and diagrams can make a point at a glance, tables of data just don’t have the same instant accessibility. Photographs can add emotion and impact, which can help deliver a message and help the audience stay awake and interested. Visual stuff is what slides are good for. Words are for speaking.
We have a short attention span. Most adults can concentrate on a speaker for about 10 minutes before we need a change of some kind. So if I have 30 minutes of material without much variation, I’ll have lost even the keenest members of my audience about a third of the way in. I need to somehow break it up, whether that's by building in some audience participation, or an obvious change in dynamics, e.g. blanking the screen, getting out from behind the lectern and walking about to summarise my key points or introduce a new topic.
Skimming my notes and rehearsing to myself is not the same as practicing it out loud. Like most people, I feel like an idiot rehearsing my presentation in the mirror, but not nearly as much as if I rehearse in front of my audience. Every presentation *is* a rehearsal at least the first two times I say it out loud (and to some degree every single time). Like most people, I find the first few attempts are always awkward and clunky. It's up to me who gets to see them. (For the sake of disclosure I should add that I recently made the mistake of trying to deliver a presentation I hadn’t done for months. It didn’t come straight back to me like I thought it would. Lesson learnt, I hope.)

For a really interesting read about how the brain works and how we do our best to stifle it through the ways we set up our workplaces, check out John Medina’s book, Brain Rules or the Brain Rules site.

Anyway, as promised, some links to some real experts. There are lots of great resources out there dedicated to making more killer presenters (killer meaning ‘very good’ as opposed to the literal sense). Here are a few I’ve found helpful:

First is a slide show that made me laugh while making a very good point. It’s more about how to write slides than present them, but I think it should be mandatory viewing for anyone who uses PowerPoint. It takes about 2-3 minutes to watch and doesn't need a headset:

http://www.slideshare.net/thecroaker/death-by-powerpoint

Next, a document from Seth Godin which is a bit more detailed. Check out some of his TED talks to see his presentation style in action.

http://www.sethgodin.com/freeprize/reallybad-1.pdf

Finally, a great example of how to put together the in-person presenting with simple, uncluttered but relevant visual content. Nancy Duarte worked with Al Gore on An Inconvenient Truth amongst other things. (This one is kind of long and needs audio, but the first five minutes are enough to get the gist of her presentation style.)

http://www.duarte.com/keynote/

It's easy to be daunted watching Nancy Duarte in action. She does this for a living, most of us don’t. And some of her graphics probably took a designer's touch to create them. But that's not the point - the reason her presentation works is that she speaks with passion and humour, and her slides add to and complement her spoken words rather than fight with them.

Most of us don’t get to create presentations to save the world, we get told to present to our team about our project status or the recent re-organisation. But regardless of what I’m presenting, if I use visual material I want it to make the content more accessible, interesting and persuasive. Trotting out the same old bullet point format does just the opposite.

Function for returning the nth occurrence of a substring in Excel

2009-03-09T14:57:00.001Z

Here’s another bit of code that you’re either looking for or you’re not. In all honesty, I’m posting this mainly because I use it again and again, and having the code here means I can always get to it.

So, where the built-in INSTR function in Excel VBA (or the FIND worksheet function) returns the position of a substring within a string (e.g. looking for the e in Apple would return 5), InStrNr extends the functionality by returning the nth occurrence of a substring within a string (so looking for the second p in Apple would return 3).

I mostly use this when a string includes a delimiter of some sort and need a way to find the right start position for a MID() function to grab just part of that string, so for example getting back the day from a m/d/yyyy date*. (This is something I do a lot because I’m in the UK where we have dd/mm/yyyy and end up converting by hand when importing from CSV files and the like if Excel won’t figure it out for us.)

Hopefully the argument names should be self explanatory, but to use my earlier example of returning the second p in Apple you’d use

=InStrNr(“Apple”,”p”,2)

Anyway, here’s the code:

Function InStrNr(FindIn As String, TextToFind As String, OccurrenceToFind As Integer) As Integer

Dim ThisOccurrenceNum As Integer, ThisOccurrencePos As Integer

Do

    ThisOccurrenceNum = ThisOccurrenceNum + 1

    ThisOccurrencePos = InStr(ThisOccurrencePos + 1, FindIn, TextToFind)

    If ThisOccurrenceNum = OccurrenceToFind Then

        InStrNr = ThisOccurrencePos

    End If

Loop While ThisOccurrencePos > 0 And ThisOccurrenceNum < OccurrenceToFind

End Function

As with most of my quick-and-dirty code there’s no error handling or validation of inputs, so if the function doesn’t get the arguments it’s expecting you’ll get an error of some sort. Feel free to post a comment if you get stuck and I’ll try to help so much as my meagre coding skills allow!

* For a mm/dd/yyyy date in cell A1 the day would always be =VALUE(MID(A1,4,2), but with m/d/yyyy the ‘4’ could be a ‘3’ depending on whether the month has one or two digits. With a m/d/yyyy date I’d use =VALUE(MID(A1,InStrNr(A1,”/”,1),InStrNr(A1,”/”,2)-InStrNr(A1,”/”,1)-1)). Which looks pretty horrible at first glance but all we’re doing is using the position of the two slash characters to work out where the day part of the date starts and finishes.

Another word thesaurus bug: Broad

2009-03-04T18:32:00.001Z

When I look up ‘broad’ in Word 2007’s thesaurus I’m getting synonyms for B-road. Which made me chuckle.

I think this might be a UK English specific bug (do Americans have B-roads?) but I haven’t had a chance to check yet.

I can’t believe I found two of these… what are the chances?

...and what can Microsoft do about it?

2009-02-26T16:17:00.004Z

Interesting how these things dovetail together. After my rant yesterday, I read this post from Viral Tarpara, where he addresses the issue of 'dumbed-down' marketing because it may be what some customers respond best to. But along the way he addresses the issue of "IT Pros" who don't have a deployment strategy for their next Windows rollout. This ties back into the topic of retention of talent in desktop engineering.

I think a big part of the problem is that there's no way to get recognised for desktop expertise beyond the bog-standard 'desktop support' qualifications which are considered (rightly or wrongly) to be pretty entry-level. The assumption, as I said yesterday, is that anyone who is any good will have moved on to server technologies after a year or two, and only those not good enough for 'promotion' will still be at the desktop. (Not to mention that 'server' products are where the money is.) And I believe the lack of a good desktop certification track only strengthens that view.

MCSE has been widely recognised for a long time as being a qualification that requires a certain amount of expertise and investment of time, but the "supporting Windows desktop" tracks have never gone much deeper than knowing how to uninstall printer drivers and a basic understanding of the results of IPCONFIG.

Some of us in large enterprises don't suffer as badly; we have tiered hierarchies where there's a reasonable chance a hiring manager will understand the value of a skilled desktop engineer, and might have a clue of how to recognise one. A typical hiring manager at an SMB would probably have wider responsibilities so might not be aware of the value of such a person, or be confident that they could pick one out from a lineup, so they rely on tangible things like exam passes and certifications. And if there are no 'engineering' qualifications for the desktop, then surely that means there's nothing to engineer? Just do a vanilla install (or even easier let your hardware supplier start shipping the new OS as your kit gets replaced) and let the support guys figure it out how to make it fit your environment as they go along. Those who hire a firm to do major deployments are likely to go with the cheapest contractor who "gives them what they want". Engineered equals fancy and expensive, they just want something simple, right?

It's going to be the exceptional individuals who don't mind swimming against the tide who also have a passion for desktop technology and don't actively dislike dealing with end-users (can you see how the field is starting to narrow?) who stay the course and become truly expert to a point where they can, for example, create complex automated deployment solutions that scale to thousands of users or are simple and robust enough to be passed on cheaply to multiple SMB customers.

Perhaps Microsoft could help things along by promoting something similar to the BDD MCTS (does anyone outside a very small group of people even know it exists?) and including it in a wider track including e.g. elements of desktop management through SCCM (rather than setting up SCCM architecture), GPO (rather than setting up AD), topics around security that relate to the desktop (rather than focusing on perimeter security), etc. And call it an MCSE so people know it requires the same level of expertise as supporting an Exchange environment or an AD domain! If our skills were better recognised, perhaps more technicians in their first few years working with the desktop would be encouraged not to jump ship to an entry-level 'server' job kicking off VM installs or swapping out disks in a datacentre.

If I sound at all bitter, I have no reason to be. I'm lucky to have worked in some great companies where the end-user experience is prioritised and the investment in desktop engineering has reflected that. I've worked on teams with highly talented people where we've built some truly best-in-class deployment and management solutions for the desktop, and I've done pretty well out of it, thanks for asking.

But I'm only here because I'm a stubborn creature who stuck with something when everyone else told me it was a bad idea. It would have been so much easier to accept the status quo and make that move to setting up file shares and print queues and long for the day I was allowed to configure something with CISCO written on it.

I wonder how many potentially great desktop solutions engineers we lost along the way...

Digging up an old rant from the past

2009-02-25T19:52:00.001Z

James O’Neill led me to a post from Steve Lamb about end users’ experience of IT:

I continue to be amazed how poor the corporate computing experience is for many people due to the provision of machines that are not fit for purpose - not due to lack of money being spent but simply due to poor configuration/management/consideration of what's required.

…

If you are an IT Professional then work with those around you to view your corporate infrastructure from the perspective of your users. Whatever your level of seniority I strongly suggest you make a few minutes to watch how end-users get on with their corporate PCs - chances are there are improvements that could be made simply by better understanding where the frustration lies.

While Steve’s coming from a slightly different direction, this echoes something I've been saying since I was a wet-behind-the-ears floor-walker supporting Windows 3.1: It doesn't matter how great your infrastructure is behind the scenes, if your desktop sucks, your users' experience of IT sucks.

I used to go on about this a lot, back when the prevailing belief was that if you worked with desktop technologies for more than a couple of years, it was because you weren’t smart enough to get ‘promoted’ to working with servers. (Bitter? Me? Never.) Even though you don’t hear that so much now, the majority of IT departments still recognise and reward someone working with a server product significantly more than someone with the equivalent level of expertise and responsibility working with the desktop.

So 15 years after I started ranting about the desktop being under-prioritised, have we moved forward? I do hear more these days about focus on the end-user experience, so maybe we are finally starting to get through. But I think there are still a lot of senior IT managers who would still find this revolutionary, and for Steve to be blogging on the topic I wonder how many underinvested desktop environments he’s seen. I hope it doesn't take another decade and a half for the value of the desktop (and the missed opportunity if you don’t sort it out) to be so obvious we can stop talking about it.

Windows 7 Diary: My Bluetooth Heaven

2009-02-25T19:13:00.001Z

My Bluetooth headset is working with Skype! Yes, I have managed to get Windows to understand that a headset can do stereo and have a mic for making calls. Incredible.

This is something I’d tried on a few occasions with Vista, and never got to any useful level of reliability. The awful Toshiba Bluetooth stack that’s supposed to work on my Vaio was less than useless in this regard, but unfortunately I couldn’t get it working at all without, so I was more or less stuck with them.

Anyway, I started out with the same problems with Win7 but in a cavalier moment I decided to uninstall the Toshiba rubbish (I did an in-place upgrade so I still had everything installed from my Vista config) and, incredibly, it worked!

It’s the little ways like this where Win7 just seems that little bit more capable than its predecessor that impress me the most.

Tomorrow I’m going to try out my HSDPA stick, so I might even be blogging from the train…

Sony Vaio/Internet Explorer typing problem fixed!

2009-02-12T22:41:00.003Z

Hahahahahahahahaaaaa!

Right now I’m grinning like a maniac because this problem has been driving me to distraction for ages. It’s weird how a thing like having random keystrokes ignored when you’re typing can drive a person disproportionately loopy, but there you are.

So, if you don’t have the same problem then there’s no point in reading the rest of this post. Nothing for you here. If you are looking to fix keyboard/typing weirdness in Internet Explorer on a Vaio laptop then read on…

You’ll know you have the problem if you type in a text box on a web page and, unless you type v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y and carefully the text looks something like this:

The uick bron foxjumps ver the laz dog.

(Because, as you might have gathered, some of your keystrokes get ignored.)

This has happened to me on two different Vaio laptops now (and when I googled for it, other Vaio users were having the same problem so I had a pretty strong feeling it was something specific to them) and I’ve seen it in IE6, IE7 and even IE8.

Anyway I read a post by some other poor soul frustrated to the point of madness, who just happened to mention that one good thing about the Vaio is the fingerprint sensor for logging on.

Ping! Lightbulb moment!

It suddenly occurred to me that I don’t get the same problem with FireFox or Google Chrome on the same machine. And also that Firefox 3 and Google Chrome aren’t supported for web sites authentication by my fingerprint reader!

So after a little digging around, I found the setting in Protector Suite QL (the utility that provides the fingerprint security functionality) to disable integration with Internet Explorer. If you have the same version as me, here are the steps:

Open the Protector Suite QL Control Centre (you can do this by right-clicking the fingerprint icon in the notification area if you have one, or from the Start Menu)
Under Settings select User Settings
Swipe your finger to let it know who you are
Go to the Password Bank tab in the User Settings dialog
Under Web Browser support, un-check the box for Internet Explorer
Close down all your Internet Explorer windows

Next time you open Internet Explorer you should be able to type without being left wanting to headbutt things. Incredible!

Apologies that my normal, moderate tone has vanished and I’ve gone a bit deranged but if you’ve had the same problem then you already know how annoying it is.

Of course it does mean I’ve lost the fingerprint authentication feature for websites, but for me that’s a small price to pay for my sanity. Which will, I’m sure, be restored when this brief euphoria wears off.

And since this laptop is now running Windows 7 Beta that means I can now try out all the added goodness of IE8 which I’d been missing out on. Manic grins and too many exclamation marks all round!!!!

Windows 7 diary: first impressions

2009-02-07T12:39:00.001Z

So to tie up the loose ends from my cliff-hanger ending:

Yes, the laptop woke up from hibernation – the process seemed a bit quicker than before, but I could be imagining that bit.

Yes, I’m creating this post from my Windows 7 machine, so if you’re reading it then I reckon it’s working well enough to be productive.

And what do I think now I’ve had a chance to begin to get to know Windows 7… well so far I’m kind of ambivalent, but let me explain why…

First, let me say I read an article few weeks ago about the cool new features to look forward to in Windows 7. And like most information I don’t use immediately, I promptly forgot just about everything in it. So I’m pootling about discovering bits and pieces for myself, and to be honest I’m probably missing the WOW-factor features. I plan to go back and re-read about what I should be looking out for later, for now I’m content just to go with the immediate impact of a new OS on the things I already do.

So, the thing I’ve been most impressed with was the upgrade from Vista. That went smoother than I ever could have imagined, and not having to reinstall most of my software is a wonderful thing.

When I woke my machine up from hibernation today I had a notification alert that my CA Antivirus wasn’t enabled. Letting Windows try to fix it for me didn’t seem to do very much after the UAC prompts, so I tried opening up the Antivirus console. From there I took the option to enable real-time protection and that was it – I had to reboot Windows, but even that seemed quicker than before. And I now have virus protection.

I thought this would be a long shot but, incredibly, BBC iPlayer downloader worked first time! That was a surprise because it used to be finicky on XP and Vista. I guess iPlayer has come a long way since those days, but I was still expecting trouble. I downloaded a programme and set the options to play in my default media player (Windows Media Player in my case). First time I tried to play I got an error message from a WMP addin that wanted updating, and even after installing the latest version from the vendor, the error didn’t go away. Having said that, I hadn’t even tried loading Media Player on its own at any point to give it a chance to initialise itself, so I wasn’t being entirely fair. Sure enough, just starting Windows Media Player and letting it settle down fixed the problem and now my iPlayer works just fine. I haven’t done anything else in the new Windows Media Player yet, so I’ll have to save my opinion on the improvements for another time.

My Windows Home Server connector couldn’t find my server on the first attempt, so it had to do a re-discovery but that sorted itself out quickly and wasn’t any real trouble.

So next was Internet Explorer 8. This was my first experience with IE8 and unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be using it as my primary browser. The reason for this is an annoying bug with Vaio laptops that causes the keyboard to skip characters when typing in Internet Explorer. It’s definitely not Windows 7’s fault (I had the same problem with Vista and XP) and I’m not blaming it on IE because I haven’t seen it on any other machines… but FireFox doesn’t give me any trouble so I’ll be using that for most of my browsing.

I did briefly check out the new Accelerators in IE which look pretty useful. The only one I can really see myself using for now is mapping with Google Maps, although as more become available it will be nice to replace bookmarklets (e.g. for Delicious) and toolbars (e.g. for StumbleUpon) with something I can use from a right-click.

Web Slices sound like a very cool feature (allowing you to tag content on a web page and have IE notify you of any updates) but I couldn’t find a site with them enabled. Maybe I’m doing it wrong – I’ll need to investigate that one some more another time.

As for the new UI… well I never liked the sidebar so it’s definitely good being able to drag desktop gadgets about the place, but this is an ultra-portable laptop with 1024x768 screen resolution, so I don’t generally see much of the desktop. The one use I can think of for the moveable gadgets though is that I have a 7” digital photo frame will work as a small extra monitor when connected by USB. Assuming I can get that working in Windows 7 then I might find myself putting gadgets over there.

I’m undecided on the new taskbar. Again, on such a small screen I’m slightly begrudging of the extra real estate required for the taller icons. Aesthetically I think it looks kind of clunky, although I understand that the ergonomic reasoning is sound. (See this post about how Fitts’ law influenced the ribbon design in Office 2007.) I was never one for hiding the taskbar in previous incarnations of Windows, so not having it visible feels a bit weird, but I’m giving that a go as a compromise. I found the option to use small icons – so basically have it look more like Vista – but I don’t think there’s much point in testing a new OS and making it look like the old one without at least giving the new UI a try first. (Plenty of other features have grown on me in the past that I haven’t warmed to straight away, so I’m being open-minded about this one.)

So… I’m hardly leaping for joy, but then Windows 7 seems stable enough, the upgrade was surprisingly smooth, and my apps pretty much just work. So maybe I was expecting too much after the real WOW that was seeing the Vista UI for the first time.

Next post I’ll do some poking around in the dark corners to see what I can find that’s less obvious, and at some stage I’ll re-do my research and find out what features I’m supposed to be loving and whether they live up to the hype.

Windows 7 diary: the install

2009-02-06T20:00:00.000Z

Inspired partly by this post and partly by the news that I had until 10th February to get my backside in gear, last night I took the plunge and installed Windows 7 on my laptop.

Yes, you read that right, my laptop. As in my only laptop. I have a desktop PC I use most of the time, so it's not my most critical machine, but still, it's a leap. So while I was waiting for the DVD image to download I took a manual backup (I just love my WHS so much for this kind of thing).

I also decided to take an unprecedented step and run it as an upgrade from Vista instead of a fresh install. I don't think I've tried a version upgrade to Windows like this since a very bad experience going from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 all those years ago. Even though the underlying architecture is supposed to be near as dammit the same as Vista, I know my reaction would be “you did what?!"” if one of my techie friends did the same and it all went horribly wrong. But the convenience of not having to reinstall all my apps to make the machine usable enough for a real-life test was just too much of an incentive to resist.

So... download completed, DVD burned, I put it in the drive and kicked off the setup. After a few clicks and quite a bit of waiting around - this laptop is an ultra-portable so not exactly built for speed - the setup program told me I needed to reboot to update some system files before it would allow me to continue. It was a bit frustrating that after the reboot the setup had to go through the same routine again (same set of clicks, 'checking compatibility' for quite a few minutes) before eventually allowing me to continue. It would be nice if it could store what it learnt the first time round and not have to go through all that again - but maybe the reboot scenario is a glitch they're hoping to be rid of before Windows 7 goes RTM.

By this time it was getting pretty late so I left the install running and went to bed, so I can't tell you how long the whole process took.

This morning I was greeted by a prompt to select my time zone, a couple more clicks and next thing I knew I was ready to log in! The biggest surprise of all was that the login screen had the option for me to use my fingerprint reader to authenticate - as it uses a utility that hooks into the Windows Login screen it seemed like a long shot that it might work straight away, but there it was, working just like it did in Vista!

My desktop took a few moments to build, but it's only thinking back I realise what an incredible thing happened next. Windows just loaded. And sat there, waiting for me to do something. No error messages! No unknown device driver install prompts! No hung (or processor-greedy) processes for me to kill!

I did have one slightly worrying moment when the notification about syncing my offline files came up. I have my Documents folder located in a share on my server, so both my desktop and laptop can use the same files. Windows 7 picked up the setting (in theory a good thing) and started syncing files. You can call me a scaredy-cat, but I'm not sure I like the idea of a beta OS syncing with my server copy of my important files. The server does have an off-site (i.e. online) backup but the pain of getting all my data back from there isn't something I want to go through for anything less than a real unavoidable data-recovery emergency. So I stopped the sync and took away the *Always available offline* setting from my synced shares just to be on the safe side. As time goes on I may relent on that one, but this was my first minute in a new beta OS so I hadn't had time to get any kind of comfort that it works well enough to be allowed near my files.

So, sync stopped and panic over, I only had a couple of minutes to spare before my early morning conference call. I launched Firefox 3 just to see how it would behave, and it seems to play nicely. After my call I had to head straight into the office so I closed the lid on my laptop and it began to Hibernate, so it seems to have remembered that setting. The hibernation process seemed pretty quick, but I've never sat with a stopwatch and timed it under Vista so I can't say whether it's better or not.

So that was my first day with Vista and I leave you with a cliff-hanger ending...

Will the laptop wake up from hibernation?

Will I be able to create my next post in Windows Live Writer from my upgraded machine?

What will I think when I've had a chance to get to know Windows 7 a little better?

We'll find out soon.

Great little app for mounting ISO files as CD/DVD drives

2009-02-02T19:00:00.000Z

Every now and again I need to use an ISO image of a CD or DVD. I’ve tried various approaches (burning to a physical disk, mounting on a Virtual PC when I’ve had one available, using the Microsoft’s Virtual CD Control Panel) in the past but to be honest they’ve all been a bit of a pain.

So I was really pleased when I found this free app, which seems to just work without any fuss. I’ve used it on both my Vista machines (desktop and laptop) and it does exactly what it’s supposed to, quicker and easier than I expected.

This is especially useful if you have a laptop or netbook without an optical drive, or if you prefer not to use the optical drive to save battery power. You can create ISO images of your discs (plenty of software is available to do that part), store them on your hard drive, and never need to carry a CD or DVD with you again. Provided, of course, you have enough free disk space!

Clonedrive by Elby

PowerShell script to unzip many files

2009-01-15T21:00:00.000Z

Yeah, I know, I keep saying I’ll post more and all I do is post less. Well the back half of 2008 kind of got derailed by unavoidable ‘life’ stuff and to be quite honest I haven’t yet decided if blogging will be one of my priorities in 2009. Rest assured that if it is, I’ll be doing it properly and a redesign will be part of that commitment. For now though, I’m back to using this as a holding space. If I don’t want to lose something, and it might come in handy for someone else, it’ll end up in the blog. Otherwise... well, we’ll see.

So here it is. Say you have a folder full of zip files at j:\stuff. Running this script (with j:\stuff as the current location) will unzip the contents of those zip files to j:\stuff.

$shell=new-object -com shell.application

$CurrentLocation=get-location

$CurrentPath=$CurrentLocation.path

$Location=$shell.namespace($CurrentPath)

$ZipFiles = get-childitem *.zip

$ZipFiles.count | out-default

foreach ($ZipFile in $ZipFiles)

{

$ZipFile.fullname | out-default

$ZipFolder = $shell.namespace($ZipFile.fullname)

$Location.Copyhere($ZipFolder.items())

}

If you also want to delete the source zip files, you can add remove-item $ZipFile after the line beginning $Location.Copyhere. The reason I didn’t include that in the sample above is I strongly advise you (see my usual disclaimer) to run the script and make sure you’re satisfied the zip files unzipped properly before you go letting it delete anything!

Enjoy.

Word 2007 Thesaurus "information" Bug

2008-11-11T21:00:00.000Z

A fun little bug I stumbled across yesterday...

In Word 2007, type the word information anywhere in a document
Hit Shift+F7 to fire up the thesaurus

The results you get are synonyms for in formation (like in order, etc.). To see the correct results, try using info instead.

I tried this in both US and UK English and both seem to behave the same.

Three things I wish I'd done when I moved house

2008-10-23T21:36:00.001+01:00

Yes, I've been moving house. As if my life wasn't hectic enough, put myself - by choice - through stress, physical punishment and extreme expense for the sake of a new address. (Actually there are some big, tangible benefits that made it worthwhile, or at least will if I ever get to a point where I can find things again, but I digress.)

So here are the three things I should have done before I moved:

1. Signed up to cashback sites

I've discovered the joys of www.quidco.com among others. Unfortunately for me, I discovered them about two days after I signed up to new contracts for broadband, telephone, insurance, and about a dozen other things that could have got me some serious cashback. I'm not talking about enough money to really put a dent in the cost of moving, but every little helps.

2. Diverted my email as well as my post

I used to get my broadband from my cable TV supplier, who I'd been with for many years, using my ISP-based email addresses for some things. For dull and complicated reasons I chose to go with satellite TV at the new place and get my broadband from my telephone supplier. That means I lost those email addresses overnight, and wasn't organised enough to give myself the opportunity to do anything about it.

Fortunately I'd been using my gMail for lots of things already, so it could have been a lot worse. I also had two of my ISP mail addresses forwarding to gMail, which still seems to be in place even though my account has shut down (shhh, don't tell them) buying me some extra time on some of my mail. But it's a major pain having to change registration details on sites where you can't remember the password, when they can't mail you a new password.

3. Kept an 'essentials' box on the day of the move - and kept it away from the removals guys!

Yep, I followed the advice about keeping the important things (knife for opening boxes, screwdriver and allen keys for emergency disassembling and assembling of furniture that won't fit through doors, notepad and pen, mobile phone charger, snacks) in a separate box to be last on and first off of the removals van.

Unfortunately an over-zealous remover decided to load it with a pile of other stuff, so I couldn't get to it for a couple of hours. As it happens, there was nothing in there I couldn't live without or find a replacement for, but the stress from not feeling in control when I thought I'd done the right things to prepare nearly drove me over the edge on an already stressful day!

Anyway, I've been here two weeks now and I have no clue where I'm going to store all my things, but I have a desk to work from and I have broadband, so things are getting back to normal. My movers were a great bunch of guys, and so far I haven't found a single thing broken from the move, so all in all it was pretty successful.

Sudoku solver in Excel without a line of code

2008-10-02T20:30:00.000+01:00

I wrote a simple Sudoku solver in Excel about a year ago, and was pretty pleased with myself but gave up on the more advanced solving techniques which were beyond my meagre coding skills and (more to the point) my patience. But that was in VBA... it never occurred to me that it might be possible to achieve the same just using Excel formulas and without writing a line of code.

So I'm loving Charlie Ellis' post walking us through doing just that, which made me look at familiar functions in completely new ways.

Up until today I thought I was a pretty advanced Excel user, but I now I've realised that all this time I've been missing out on defined names for formulas. Which probably makes me a complete Excel dunce in the eyes of anyone who really knows what they're doing, but hey, I'm happy that I know now.

Now I just have to get my head around array formulas...

One hour a year to do your paperwork housekeeping

2008-09-25T17:00:00.001+01:00

This is the third and final part of my series explaining how I've adapted David Allen's Getting Things Done principles to deal with my household paperwork. (If you're starting out, see this post to find out how it took me just one day to get to a state where it only takes a minute a day plus an hour a year to maintain.)

Because my system works in whole years, it makes sense to do my housekeeping tasks sometime in January. I find a couple of weeks after New Year works for me, but if you want to be super-diligent and get it out of the way on January 1^st then good for you!

The steps for moving the filing and archiving system on each year are pretty simple:

1. Bin the oldest year’s paperwork

2. Demote the oldest ‘single year’ archive to the “---- and older” archive

3. Remove anything older than last year from the ‘current’ filing into the folder we just freed up

I like to start with what feels like the most meaningful part of this job which is to thin out my ‘current’ filing system, even though that’s really part of step 3. All I do is go through each of the file folders in my filing box and take out anything dated earlier than last year, abbreviated to Y-2. (So when I next do this in January 2009, I’ll be removing all the 2007 content.) If something still has day-to-day relevance now then it stays in the file e.g. an appliance warranty that doesn’t expire until next year. I also take the opportunity to get rid of some newer items I’ve since realised don’t need to be kept, like the quote for the decorating work I decided not to go ahead with anyway. Anything I know I’ll never need again gets shredded or binned immediately, and whatever is left becomes the Y-2 pile, so in this case the 2007 pile.

All my examples here are based on my seven-year retention with my oldest archive housing three years, so you’ll need to adjust for the configuration you’re working with.

Now I need a place to put the 2007 pile – but because I’m demoting my oldest ‘single year’ archive that means I don’t need an extra box file. Here’s what would happen to my archive box files in 2009:

	Old label	New Label
	2003 and before	2004 and before
	2004	2007
	2005	2005
	2006	2006

I highlighted the 2004 to 2007 change because this is where the new 2007 pile goes. So the 2004 contents go on the floor (yep, they get temporarily relegated to a ‘pile’), out comes the labelling machine, and voilà, we have a 2007 archive.

The only thing left to do now is update the oldest archiving, so the “2003 and before” box gets a new name, and the 2003 content goes in the bin (after a very quick scan to make sure I’m not throwing away something I do need to keep after all). I then have a sift through the 2004 pile and get rid of anything obsolete before I add what’s left to the box file. I don’t need to touch the 2005 and 2006 boxes this year.

And that’s it – if you follow the same system you get to enjoy the warm glow of being organised for the rest of the day, and don’t have to worry about housekeeping your archives for another year!

HP LaserJet 1010 on Windows Vista

2008-09-06T19:28:00.001+01:00

Half of the reason for writing this post is in case I ever have to do this again and forget how I did it!

If you've come here from a search engine then chances are you have:

a HP LaserJet 1010
Windows Vista

...and probably some amount of frustration trying to get the two working together. According to Microsoft and HP it can't be done. Pah!

After some digging around and some trial and error, here's how I got mine working with Vista SP1:

Dug out the install CD that came with my printer. (If you don't have a copy of this I really don't have an answer for you because the method I used needed one. Maybe if you can find an ISO image somewhere to rip the disk then you can try that.)
Found this post which led me to http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c00067783&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN
Downloaded EZInstall.exe
Faffed about a bit trying various combinations of things (which you can skip if the next bit works for you first time)
Copied EZInstall.exe to my desktop, right-clicked it, and from the Properties dialog set the compatibility to Windows XP SP2 and ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software3/COL6438/lj-19937-4/EZInstall.exe. (I have UAC switched on, so I had to click the All Users option first.)
Put the CD in the drive and ran EZInstall.exe, and followed the instructions (namely to switch off the printer at one point, then switch it back on a bit later)
Windows reported that EZInstall.exe had errored, but it was in the Complete phase and it didn't seem to make any difference
Windows was already trying to detect the printer and install the driver by this time which, after quite a while, it did.
Printed a test page (from the Printer's Properties dialog in Control Panel/Printers), which worked just fine.

You don't get the utilities you'd have if you installed normally on XP, but the basic printing functions seem to work just fine.

Don't let anyone tell you the LaserJet 1010 doesn't work with Vista!

One minute a day to keep your household paperwork in order

2008-09-05T20:10:00.000+01:00

OK, let's get one thing straight. If your household paperwork is already a disaster zone, one minute a day isn't going to help much. If that's you, first you need to see my earlier post One day (yes, really) to clear your home paperwork backlog forever. When you've invested that one day, one minute a day is really all you need to keep things in order.

Because we're only talking about a minute's worth of work here, this is going to be a somewhat shorter post.

Ideally you already have the best possible conditions for success:

Hopefully your day-to-day filing system is within arm's reach of the place where you deal with your post.
Even better is if you can keep your paper recycling bin, box or tray also within arms reach to deal with envelopes, junk mail and other rubbish. The security-conscious might also have a shredding tray, or even keep the shredder close by to deal with unwanted confidential items as they appear.
Spare square-cut folders and your labelling machine should be not too far away for those occasional days when you realise you have a new filing category. Never put off filing because you don't have the right file! In fact, never put off filing, full stop. Unless maybe the house is on fire, or a family member is choking on a pretzel or something.
Any 'projects' filing, or folders for categories big enough that they don't fit in the day-to-day filing box also need to be at your fingertips. (Tucked behind the filing box works for me.)

And here's how you spend your one minute a day:

If something is obviously junk mail, bin it (or put it in the shredding tray) straight away
Open the rest of your mail - I keep a nice letter opening knife near my filing box for this - and work out which items need to be dealt with, and which are just for reference to file away
Put your 'to-do' items in your 'to-do' place - for me this is my desk at the weekends, or on weekdays a folder I carry to work so I can deal with things on the train
File everything else in your day-to-day filing box

That's it!

For this to become a habit, it's best if you can get into dealing with the post at the same time each day, or in response to a certain daily trigger, for instance at breakfast, or after you've taken the dog for a walk. Apparently our brains are good at forming new habits when they're anchored to existing ones.

As for how to deal with the 'to-do' items, this is where I'll refer you back to Getting Things Done by David Allen who has plenty of excellent, detailed and practical advice on the topic.

My next post will be on how you can do your paperwork housekeeping in just one hour a year.

One day (yes, really) to clear your home paperwork backlog forever

2008-09-04T20:00:00.003+01:00

I've been offline for a while dealing with some 'life' stuff - I don't wish to burden you with the details, but it's caused me to remember how I got to the point I'm at today where I'm pretty much on top of my home paperwork. So now I'm back, here's a marathon post for you! This is inspired by several productivity blogs I've been reading, including www.lifehack.org, and a recent experience involving a mountain of paper dating back to the 1970s.

Most people I know fall into two categories with domestic paperwork:

They have tons of stuff dating back to who-knows-when, piled up or hidden away in various places around the house, and want to get organised but it's just too much of a mammoth task to file everything
They don't have tons of paperwork but still can't find anything in a hurry

This post is aimed at the people who fit case 1, although some of it is probably useful if you're case 2. Until a couple of years ago I was a bad case of case 1. I had probably 10-15 years worth of paper, some of it was in boxes, some in carrier bags, some was meticulously filed (where I'd had brief bouts of trying to 'get organised' over the years). I couldn't find things when I needed them, and worse, I knew I didn't need half this stuff but it was too big a task to file everything from such a huge backlog, and I figured it wasn't worth going through it at all if I wasn't going to apply my 'system'. I also thought my day-to-day filing system would be at least a couple of drawers of a filing cabinet. See the photo below if you want to know what it really looks like!

The first thing that changed my mindset was reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. It was recommended to me by a work colleague, but really I should say evangelised, because if you know anyone who's read this book and applied what they learnt you'll probably find they talk like someone who's undergone a religious conversion. It really does change lives, not just at work but at home too. I don't even use everything from the book, and it's made a huge difference to me.

Anyway, I last read GTD (as it's known) a long time ago and I can't remember which of these things I've lifted straight from the GTD method and which were home-baked, but this was what worked for me. You could probably put this into practice today without reading the book, but I'd encourage you to read it anyway because it covers much more than just getting your paperwork in order.

Step 1 - before Day 0

Prepare. This needs to happen before Day Zero, the day you set aside to get your paperwork in order. Like they told you about taking exams in school, read everything before you do anything. Figure out which things here you can do on Day Zero and which require some thought beforehand.

One thing you definitely need to do as part of your planning is decide on a cut-off date before which none of your paperwork could possibly be useful. For me it was 7 years because I heard somewhere there's some kind of time limit on historical queries for taxation purposes, and I used to run my own business so I'm a bit paranoid about these things. Maybe I could have gone for less, but better to be safe than sorry. Whatever date you choose, make your cutoff date the beginning of that year. Whole years are much easier to work with.

You'll also need to consider things like how much shredding and recycling you'll generate as part of the process, but more on that later.

Step 2 - Day 0 or before

You need to go shopping for some supplies. If you're doing this on Day 0 then get up early - you've got a lot to get through today! I'm not an 'early' person so I went to Staples (open until 8pm!) the night before and missed the traffic.

There are a few supplies David Allen strongly recommends for GTD, and I have a bit of a thing about nice stationery, so the opportunity to buy office supplies, strangely, was an incentive for me to get started. If shopping for stationery doesn't float your boat then just grit your teeth and get through it, and promise yourself a nice piece of cake/cold beer/whatever as a reward when you're done.

Here's what I bought:

A dymo (or similar) labelling machine. This is recommended in GTD, and I'm glad I went along with the advice. I think mine cost about £20 and came with enough tape to see me through the first year of filing. Your mileage may vary, but my point is that you don't have to spend much on this.
Some cardboard square-cut file folders (also a GTD recommendation), like you can just see in my filing box in the photo above. I bought a pack of about 100 dirt-cheap ones when I started and I haven't used half of them yet. I couldn't find these on the high-street, so if you don't have an office supplies superstore within striking distance, you might want to shop online a few days ahead. I prefer them to suspension files because they're far less fiddly, but if you just love suspension files then go ahead and buy those.
A filing box (the last thing from the GTD list) which is just a box with an open top that the file folders fit in for easy access for your day-to-day stuff. Mine is in the photo attached to this post, and it's plenty for one person's worth of 'current' paperwork. Really, it is. You'll be surprised how little space you need. Get something that looks nice enough that you'll want to keep it out on your desk, or your kitchen counter, or in my case the storage unit in the living room. The idea is that this should go wherever you usually sort through your post. It seems crazy, but just having a lid to open is an extra step that makes you put that piece of paper in your hand somewhere other than the folder it should go in, so try to get one without. (You might think only the laziest, least self-disciplined person could fall into that trap, but I know I fell into the trap of not dealing with my post many hundreds of times to end up with a house full of paper in the first place.)
Box files - how many depends on how many years you decided to archive in Step 1. Here's how I worked out what I needed:

This year (Year 0) and last year (Year -1)- I consider 'current' so it goes in the filing box that stays in my living room, so no box file required
Year-2 gets its own box file
Year -3 gets its own box file
Y-4 to Y-7 I decided should all go in one box, but I bought a spare just in case one wasn't enough.
In my case I also had some stuff from my old business which I wanted to keep separate, so I bought a couple more box files

I should say at this point that if you run a business (mine was already shut down when I started this) then you'll probably need two 'current' filing boxes for your day-to-day stuff to keep everything nicely separated. Similarly, if you're doing this for a couple or a family, you could each have your own filing box and one for things relating to all of you, although it would probably be more practical to just colour code your cardboard file folders so everyone can easily file and find their own stuff.

You might be wondering why you couldn't just buy one of those concertina files made for home use, or one of those file boxes with suspension files in. David Allen recommends square-cut files just because they're quick and easy and it's no hassle to grab a new one when you need to create a new category in your filing. This is another place I'm glad I followed his advice because they're not what I would have chosen but they work perfectly. But if concertina files or suspension files are your thing then go with those. (Just remember to get a concertina file with enough pockets - see step 4.4 and add some extra for the things you'll discover along the way.)

Step 3

Gather everything together! If you're as bad as I was, you might want to commandeer a room for this task, move all the furniture back, and just chuck everything on the floor in the middle of the room. There are two good reasons to do this: 1. you don't waste time trying to sort things during the 'gathering' phase. 2. If you deliberately pick a room you use every day (so not the spare room) then you'll have to deal with everything to get the room back!

Look in all the places you've hidden paperwork, dig out every last thing you can. If there are piles of paper in the loft or garage you feel like you need to deal with then get those too (although there's a good argument that if it's been there for more than a couple of years, you really don't need it and it should probably go straight in the recycling bin).

Step 4

This is the daunting bit, because now you've got this massive mountain of paper in front of you, and you need to clear it today. But chances are the mountain isn't as bad as you thought, and anyway you don't have to do meticulous filing to get to the next phase. You will need some space to put things as you sort through (empty floor space is fine) and some kind of receptacle for recycling. (If your heap includes magazines and other junk mail still in polythene bags like mine did you may need a bin for non-recyclable rubbish as well.)

However... when I did this, I knew at the start I'd have more shredding than my poor little domestic shredder could handle. I ended up getting a quote for a secure document disposal company to take everything away and shred it at their plant. This had the advantage of not requiring me to separate anything - their minimum charge covered way more paper than I was going to generate even including non-confidential stuff, and the nice people I used had a machine smart enough to separate out things like paperclips, notebook bindings, and even plastic file pockets, so less work for me. It wasn't cheap, but in my case it was well worth it. But organising a company to collect your paper is something you should do when you're preparing, not while you have all your stuff piled up on the living room floor!

Step 4.1

Just getting started is such a huge step, I've put it on its own. Well done for getting this far without chickening out.

Grab that first pile of paper. Start with whatever is nearest and take as much as you can hold in your hands to work with and no more.

Step 4.2

Look at your first document or piece of paper. Apply the following decision tree:

Is this of any use or might it be needed e.g. for tax purposes? If it is, go to 3.
If not, does it have any sentimental value that makes it worth keeping? If yes, put it aside in the 'sentimental' pile. If you're not sure, add it to the pile anyway.
Is it dated more recently than your cutoff period, or if not, is it something you need to keep longer e.g. a birth certificate, a manual for a cooker you still use, or the six-year corrosion warranty for your car? If it is, go to 5.
If not, put it with the recycling.
For everything else you keep, it needs to go into one of three piles:

Current (anything dated this year or last year - we only work in whole years here!)

Long-term items - anything which has a 'current' life of more than a year, e.g. the 3-year warranty for your car - also go in the Current pile

Archive - anything between your cutoff date and 31 December Y-2 (the year before last)
Reference - e.g. manuals for appliances, birth certificates

Step 4.3

Grab another handful of stuff and repeat step 4.2. Keep doing that until the paper mountain you started with is gone, and you have three small paper islands and (probably) a huge pile of paper for recycling.

Step 4.4

Pat yourself on the back, you've done the worst bit. And look how much you can throw away and never worry about again!

You're now going to create your day-to-day filing system, or your 'current' box. So get your filing box, a handful of file folders and your labelling machine. First, make up some folders which you already know you're going to need. Mine were:

Bank statements
Bank - Other
Utilities (water, gas and electric bills go here)
Phone (for phone bills and other worthwhile correspondence from the phone company)
Mobile (mobile phone bills and correspondence)
Cable TV (you get the idea...)
Health (anything to do with doctor, dentist, gym membership, etc.)
Home (home insurance goes here, bills from household repairs, that kind of thing)
Work (payslips, letters from my employer)
Shopping (warranties, receipts, returns slips for mail-order items I might want to send back)
Travel (travel insurance documents, correspondence about my season ticket)
A-D
E-K
L-R
S-Z - these last four are my 'catch-all' folders for anything which doesn't generate enough paper to have its own file. I used these groupings because they're how the London phone books used to be organised when I was a kid, but go with whatever works for you. Unless you get a really insanely huge volume of mail you want to file, having one for each letter of the alphabet is usually excessive.

The important thing at this stage is not to think too hard about creating a folder for everything you could possibly need. Just do the obvious ones for now, and keep the labeller and blank folders handy to create new ones as you need them.

Now go through your 'current' pile and file everything in your folders!

You'll probably find one particular category has a lot of paper associated with it and starts to take over the filing box, like if you have a hobby that generates a lot of correspondence, or if you have a domestic project going on like building a new extension. In this case it makes sense to create extra storage of whatever kind you need, but it's best if you can keep it with the filing box (i.e wherever you go through your post each day) and make it no more difficult to access than dropping a piece of paper in the cardboard files. Just as an example, I keep everything related to my car in its own plastic A4 box (which is a bit fiddly, but I don't have to add to it often), and when I changed jobs I had a document wallet for all the paperwork that generated.

Remember: rules are for fools to obey, but for the guidance of the wise. If something in this approach isn't practical for you, just think of how you can bend the rules without compromising on your main goal: creating a system that's easy to maintain.

Step 4.5

This bit is dead easy.

Grab some box files and label them up with the appropriate years for archiving. If I were doing my system starting today, I'd have 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003-and-before, so four boxes. Now you just have to split out the Archive pile into each of those years. The big revelation for a lot of people comes at this part... you don't need to categorise or sort any of this stuff beyond grouping it by year. Categorising is for stuff you might realistically need to get your hands on quickly. For how often I need to refer back to something that happened three years ago, I realised it isn't a huge burden to go through that small pile of paper. And I was surprised by how little paper there was for each year. This is the difference between getting from "oh my god how am I ever going to file this mountain of paper?" to a workable system.

When you're done, find a place to store your archive files. You want somewhere you can get to them when you need to, but they don't have to be right at your fingertips. So if you have a bookcase in a study, or a high-up shelf somewhere, that would be ideal.

Step 4.6

This bit will take all of two minutes. Divide up your reference pile however you want. I've split my manuals into 'kitchen' (so cooking and washing appliances) and 'lounge' (everything else) and keep each box in the appropriate room. You figure out what works for you. You probably don't need to access this stuff often, the most important consideration is that it's somewhere convenient enough that when you buy a new appliance or whatever, you'll file the manual in the right place and not let it drift out of your filing system and end up falling down the back of the refrigerator weeks later. You might have a 'family' box for birth certificates, passports, other important documents that you need access to from time to time. Decide on your own storage place for these, just make sure you keep it separate from other stuff and in a place where you can find it.

Step 4.7

Remember those 'sentimental' things you put to one side?

Now go back through those and decide what to keep and what to lose. It should be much easier to do that now, with the whole lot in front of you. Maybe you don't need to keep every school report you ever had, perhaps there are just one or two worth keeping. If you're into scrapbooking, maybe some of this pile will find its way to wherever you store your craft things. If you're like me they'll just end up in a keepsake box that you dig out very occasionally. Like everything, how easy this stuff is to get at should correlate to how often you'll want to add to it or look at it.

Step 4.8

Well done! You should now have an organised, easy-to-maintain system for day-to-day paperwork, an archive for anything you need less often, and a big pile of rubbish to take to the recycling plant. If you have any energy left you could do a small lap of honour before you put the furniture back.

If the stationery shopping way back at the beginning wasn't enough reward for you, it's time to have that piece of cake or cold beer you promised yourself.

Step 5

This is the part where you commit to maintaining your system for the rest of your life. Actually I'm kidding. The fact you just spent a day working your backside off getting things straight, and basking in the smug glow of being organised should be enough for now. My next post will tell you how you can keep this up forever in just one minute a day, plus an hour a year for housekeeping. That's not about commitment, it's just about forming new habits.

Stability and performance with Windows Vista

2008-07-27T18:00:00.000+01:00

Eileen's and James' posts got me thinking about my experiences so far with Windows Vista.

I'll say straight away this is based on a very limited sample of machines so is far from scientific. I don't know whether what I've seen will reflect many people's experience, so let me know through the comments if you agree or disagree, I'm interested to know.

I have a Sony Vaio laptop. It came with Vista installed, and I've since upgraded to SP1. It's infuriatingly slow. It's a lightweight laptop, so it wasn't bought for performance, but the spec isn't that bad and in theory it's more than capable of handling Vista and even Aero. Most of what I do on this machine is through a web browser or at most some very light applications, so I'm hardly pushing it. But it's been slow to start, slow to hibernate, slow to come back from hibernation, and sometimes the CPU goes to 100% utilisation for seemingly ages and I just have to walk away for ten minutes and let it calm down before I can even begin to get anything done. I expect the average person who bought this laptop might tell their friends not to get one with Vista because it's rubbish. I've heard people say similar things about machines they've bought for home with Vista pre-installed, laptop and desktop, and how they're thinking of getting their brother/friend/local IT shop to install XP instead.

On the flip side, one of my machines at work was running Vista until recently. (We've decided as an organisation we're going to skip Vista and roll out the next version of Windows, so I couldn't really justify keeping it, and I've had to go back to our standard XP build.) This one I'd been running since a Release Candidate version, but never got as far as installing SP1. Performance-wise it was fine - in fact quicker to start up than my XP box (of the same spec), not noticeably different running my usual assortment of applications, and a few of the features (the new Explorer with Group By is just one example) were saving me time. My experience of Vista in this instance was excellent.

Having worked with PCs for most of my working life, I can look a bit more objectively at the situation with my slow laptop. These are the key differences between my Vista installations at work and at home:

	Home	Work
Operating System	OEM build, including all of Sony's 'value add' software, e.g. rubbish that makes me go to their website more often so they can try to sell me their products, trial versions of things I probably never want to buy, and customisations I hate, e.g. they hijacked my google search page to their branded one	Standardised company build, where every component has been tested, performance benchmarked, optimised and locked-down so we can't break the hard work of the team who engineered it
Applications	Mostly web and browser-based tools, e.g. Firefox 3 (which I love, incidentally) with various add-ons, and other web tools like Flickr uploader, streaming media (Audible downloader, BBC iPlayer, Channel 4 On Demand), lots of which insist on launching at startup	Standard office applications. Internally developed (and extensively tested) add-ons and tools. I can't install additional applications without approval, so this makes me install only what's absolutely necessary.
Hardware	Optimised for weight, designed for consumer market. Plus all the various junk I might want to attach at home - maybe only once in a while, but the driver still stays installed, with all the little 'added extras' the device manufacturer packaged with it.	Optimised for enterprise purchasing, i.e. consistency and stability. Components don't change much from one model to the next to allow more consistent driver model and simpler longer-term product roadmap.

So you see where I'm going with this?

There's an old adage about builders' houses, mechanics' cars and plumbers' bathrooms... I guess it's true of IT people's PCs, at least it is of mine. If anybody complains to me at work about not being able to install their favourite widget in our locked-down environment, I can evangelise to them until the cows come home about why it's best that way. And what do I do at home? Fill my PC up with crap, and complain when it runs like a dog.

On the plus side, I've learnt an important lesson. I wanted to reinstall Vista on the laptop from a Vanilla install disk the day I got it, but I really needed to be up and running quickly and didn't have the time. Big mistake. The more time that passes, the more stuff I install on it, the longer it would take me to start again. The next PC I buy will get a clean build on day one. I've spent so much time on this machine over the months, done the usual msconfig thing, even gone through Task Scheduler to get some of the sneaky Sony system update stuff to back off to running just once a week rather than on every damn startup, and still it just doesn't run like it should. I reckon it would take me a solid weekend to do a search-and-destroy on every bit of bloatware it shipped with.

I know I'm going to have to bite the bullet one day soon though and install from scratch... as long as there's all this OEM rubbish on here using my CPU without my permission it doesn't feel like it's mine. And I want my laptop back.

Microsoft Office User Group for IT Pros?

2008-07-24T20:00:00.004+01:00

Are you looking for an online community for IT Professionals who support and deploy Microsoft Office and related desktop technologies? I'm thinking of starting one, so please leave me a comment if this is something that interests you!

I've been in IT over 14 years now and I must have spent about twelve of them bitching about how little focus and recognition we get in the desktop space. No matter how extensive our expertise or what benefits we can deliver for our businesses, the plaudits mostly go to the folks who spend their lives in front of server consoles.

Since the Excel 5.0 and Word 6.0 Resource Kits (so the early-to-mid '90s) Microsoft haven't had a technical manual or training course aimed at supporting Microsoft Office. The more recent Resource Kits are mostly aimed at deployment, and while this is all necessary stuff, we're supposed to learn how each product fits together well enough to support it from whatever we can glean from the mostly sketchy information in KB articles. (The recent and mostly excellent blogs from the Office product teams are a rare exception to this, but hardly comprehensive.) As for proving our expertise... well we can get certified as an expert user, trainer or developer, but there are no certification paths for being the best-of-the-best at supporting the Office suite. No wonder most people in desktop support don't hang around long enough to become real experts.

Anyway, anyone who knows me will tell you how I hate people who moan about their lot in life but won't make an effort to try to change it, so this post is about doing something to fix the situation.

I'm thinking of setting up a user group. ('User' is already a misleading name, but that seems to be the accepted term for technical communities loosely affiliated to Microsoft and their products.) I know this isn't going to suddenly change perceptions that have been around for at least as long as I've been in IT, but joining together as a community of experts and getting back on Microsoft's radar has to be a good place to start. I haven't entirely decided on its scope but I expect it will broadly cover support and deployment of the Microsoft Office desktop products, with some related Windows and server technologies but from a desktop perspective. Supporting and deploying to large organisations is an area of particular interest to me so I hope we'll have some focus there.

If this is something you'd find useful, or better still would want to join or contribute to, please let me know through the comments.

Dark Knight on Imax

2008-07-22T20:00:00.000+01:00

After reading this article in Wired, I decided that I had to wait to see Dark Knight until I could get to the Imax. Tickets are selling fast (the BFI’s site for the London Imax was giving Server Busy errors all yesterday morning), and the soonest I could get was in a couple of weeks, but it’ll be worth the wait.

If you’ve never been to an Imax and you can feasibly get to one, the diagram on page 4 of that article might help convince you to go.

Useful site of the day: Index of RSS feeds for Microsoft KB updates

2008-07-21T20:00:00.002+01:00

I tried to find this today and it isn’t easy to track down, so there’s a good chance not everyone knows about it.

http://support.microsoft.com/selectindex/?target=rss contains a list of RSS feeds for new KB articles by product. So if you want the latest hotfixes and ‘known issues’ delivered to your reader, this is the place to get them.

Default font changes not saving in Outlook 2007

2008-07-19T19:00:00.000+01:00

I'm getting a problem on one of my PCs where changes I make to the default Word template used by Outlook (yes, Outlook 2007 uses Word as its mail editor) aren't always properly saved.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953924 contains a fix for a problem something like this. The exact details of the problem that's been fixed aren't clear from the article, but I'm going to give the hotfix a try.

I'll report back and let you know if it works!

TechieBird Twitters!

2008-07-18T20:00:00.000+01:00

Since my blog posts tend to be pretty lengthy (and infrequent – sorry!) I thought microblogging might be a good idea as well.

If you’re reading this through Blogger then you’ll see my ‘tweets’ at the top of the page. Otherwise, find me at http://www.twitter.com/TechieBird. I’ll try to post updates a bit more often than I do here, and if you have a Twitter account then you’ll be able to send me replies and let me know what you think.

More keyboard shortcuts

2008-06-16T21:20:00.000+01:00

I might have mentioned before that I'm a bit of a collector of obscure Microsoft Office shorctuts.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA102750211033.aspx has some really great tips, #3 and #8 had managed to pass me by until now, so I'll be using them today!

PowerPoint macro to rename drawing objects

2008-06-15T12:30:00.000+01:00

This week I created a slide to show a process flow. I decided the best way to explain how our process works was with lots of animation, showing how incident tickets pass from one group to another. When all the drawing objects on the slide have un-helpful names like Group 53 or Callout 12 it can be pretty confusing working out the custom animation sequence. I've known for a while it's possible to rename drawing objects pretty easily with VBA, but it strikes me as a glaring omission from the User Interface that we have to drop into code to achieve it.

Anyway, I was getting into enough of a mess with this particular animation sequence that it was worth spending the time writing the following bit of VBA and using it to give my drawing objects more meaningful names like Stickman 1 and Flying ticket 1.

This works for me in PowerPoint 2007. As usual, I didn't do much testing, and I have no idea if/how it will work on other versions. I'd suggest trying this out on a copy of your slides rather than risk wrecking the real thing if the code doesn't behave as expected (which I realised would have been a good idea just after I told it to rename a series of about 15 objects on my insanely complicated slide... but this time I got away with it).

Sub RenameShape()

Dim n As Integer, NewName As String

With ActiveWindow.Selection

    If .Type = ppSelectionShapes Then



        NewName = InputBox("New name for shape:", "Rename Shape", .ShapeRange(1).Name)



        With .ShapeRange

            If .Count > 1 Then

                For n = 1 To .Count

                    .Item(n).Name = NewName & " " & n

                Next n

            Else

                    .Name = NewName

            End If

        End With



    Else

        MsgBox "Selection is not a Shape", vbOKOnly, "Rename Shape"

    End If

End With

End Sub

If you have one or more drawing objects selected, you'll get a popup dialog asking for the new name for the shape(s). If you only have one object selected, it will be renamed with that name. If you have more than one object selected, they'll be renamed NewName 1, NewName 2, etc. in the order you selected them. (If your selection isn't drawing objects you'll just get an error.)

In case you're wondering, renaming the objects doesn't require you to recreate the custom animations. You'll see the new names appear in the Custom Animation pane as soon as you've renamed the objects. When I tried it, my animations (including entrance, exit and motion path) all carried on working just as before.

Enjoy!

gMail, IMAP and Vista (Windows Mail)

2008-06-11T18:55:00.002+01:00

I've finally got round to setting up my gMail to sync with Windows Mail over IMAP. I had some problems at first, kept getting this error message:

Your IMAP command could not be sent to the server due to non-network errors.

(There was also an error code of 0x800cccdf which apparently translates to IMAP_AUTH_NOT_POSSIBLE, which isn't hugely helpful.)

After reading a few posts on the Microsoft forums I thought it might be my Antivirus so wasted a load of time messing about with that, but then I found this:

Permanent Link- Setting up Gmail IMAP Support for Windows Vista Mail

The settings in there are identical to what I had, but it seems that the order you do things is very important because starting from scratch and following their step-by-step instructions worked first time for me!

This is also the same place I found this excellent article:

Permanent Link- Prevent Outlook with Gmail IMAP from Showing Duplicate Tasks in the To-Do Bar.

Thanks folks!

Cool PowerPoint shortcuts

2008-06-10T19:35:00.000+01:00

I'm playing catch-up on the PowerPoint team blog. I'm a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts and keyboard-mouse combinations (CTRL+Scroll wheel to zoom in/out, that kind of thing), so this post from way back in December (I've no idea how it dropped off my feed reader for so long) about views shortcuts is right up my street. I've known for a long time that there's similar undocumented goodness in Word, but had only got as far as double-clicking screen elements. (Try double-clicking around the edges of the ruler and see what you get...) I might have to have a play later and see what I can uncover with keyboard modifiers like CTRL and SHIFT.

How presentations should be

2008-06-09T19:30:00.001+01:00

So from the PowerPoint team blog, I found a link to Nancy Duarte. Her company worked with Al Gore on the slides for An Inconvenient Truth, so her keynote presentation to an audience of people who write presentations for a living had to be worth looking at. Where I work the usual style for slide decks is to cram as much information onto the screen at once as possible. I believe in a much more minimalist approach, and it was great to see a presentation from a design professional that gives me and idea of just how far that can be taken! Even if you only have time to check out the first couple of minutes, it's worth it. This is how presentations should be.

At long last! Producer for PowerPoint 2007 in beta...

2008-06-09T19:00:00.000+01:00

I was reading Mike Tholfsen's new OneNote and Education blog, and he included a link to this post from Nick MacKechnie. PowerPoint Producer (for 2003) was a great product and it's something I've missed since upgrading, so I'm looking forward to getting time to have a play!

Three tips for Windows desktop support...

2008-05-15T22:00:00.002+01:00

Basic: When you need to take a screendump, you can get just the active window by pressing ALT+PRTSCN

Intermediate: For a quick way to get to the System Properties dialog, hold down the Windows key and press Pause

Advanced: Need to figure out which branch of HKEY_USERS belongs to which user? Right-click it and check the permissions for a clue!

Vista 100% CPU in svchost.exe

2008-05-14T18:40:00.005+01:00

Yeah, that old chestnut... yawn. Last night my laptop became completely unusable for at least two hours. It took me that long to figure out that the service causing the problem was Windows Update. By then I was tired and irritable so I went to bed bitching about how Microsoft must have wrecked my machine with some flaky update.

Anyway, I did some more digging today and noticed that this guy had the same problem and was using the same AntiVirus as me.

Another quick google later and I found this post... turns out the problem is with CA Antivirus and they should have a fix ready for us soon. And there's a workaround for us in the meantime which has brought my laptop back to normal.

New Thing I Learnt Today: Calculated fields in Pivot tables

2008-05-09T08:00:00.000+01:00

I think of myself as a dab hand with Excel and do a lot of pivot tables, so it was great to see this post from Joseph Chirilov about a feature I’d never even heard of until now! http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2008/05/08/pivottables-calculated-items.aspx

My new bookmark of the day: quick way to search microsoft.com

2008-04-11T20:00:00.000+01:00

Quite a few times I’ve been thwarted by microsoft.com’s search engine. My usual workaround was to go to Google and do a domain-specific search e.g. “outlook 2007 calendar hotfix site:microsoft.com”. (Don’t worry about remembering the syntax of the site: bit, you can do the same from the Advanced Search page by filling in some boxes.)

I guess this must be a pretty common thing to do, because Google have a page that does the same thing with less typing: www.google.com/microsoft. I’ve just added it to my shortcuts.

There’s a list of ‘special’ searches here: http://www.googleguide.com/special_searches.html.

Excel hangs for 5 mins opening file over HTTP

2008-04-09T19:00:00.001+01:00

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/838028 is an eye-wateringly detailed KB article, but it helped me resolve an interesting problem the other day. At least, with a lot of help from some smart people who know about proxies and a network packet sniffer.

We had reports of Excel files on a particular host opening straight away from Internet Explorer, but opening them from Excel was causing a five minute hang before the prompt for username and password would appear.

Anyway, after a lot of head-scratching, we figured it out. When Excel tries to open a file over HTTP it sends an extra OPTIONS request (that meant nothing to me when I first read it, but I saw it on the network trace so I know it's true) to figure out if the host is capable of read-write access. Only after it gets back the response does it then ask for permissions on the file itself. (Internet Explorer skips the first part and just goes straight in for the file permissions.)

In our case it turned out that the host was in fact sending back an incomplete response to this first OPTIONS request. Some of our proxies were just ignoring the fact the response was incomplete and forwarding it back anyway for Excel to sort out. The proxies which were actually handling it correctly were the ones where we had the problem; they'd see an incomplete response and sit there waiting for the rest of it. After five minutes they'd time out, Excel would decide the host wasn't capable of read-write access so it would just go ahead and request read-only permissions for the file, then we'd get our prompt for credentials.

Networking isn't usually my strongest subject, so it was good to be able to follow this one through to conclusion and actually understand what the trace was showing us. It was also nice to see a detailed description of how something works in an Office product. There aren't enough of those about!

Excel and statistics

2008-04-07T20:00:00.000+01:00

A very long time ago (no, I’m not saying how long, and it’d be rude of you to ask) I managed to just about scrape a pass-mark at A Level Maths & Statistics. Since then I’ve managed to remember nothing but a few pieces of terminology (“poisson distribution” was my favourite) without remembering what any of it was actually for.

I vaguely recall that we spent a lot of time getting our heads round binomial distribution, which I kind of remember as being important but I couldn’t remember how or why.

Anyway, it seems I needn’t have bothered because after reading Gabhan Berry’s post on the Excel blog I now understand it better than I did when I took the exam. And without having to sit in a warm, stuffy room listening to our lecturer, Mr Monotone. Marvellous :o)

HTC Touch Dual: Return to Sender

2008-03-12T21:00:00.000Z

I've been like a child waiting for Christmas the last few months waiting for my upgrade date to tick round on my phone contract so I could get my HTC Touch Dual without having to pay for it (yeah, I know I pay indirectly but it still feels like I'm getting a free toy). And on Saturday I took delivery of a sleek black box containing a gorgeous shiny new phone! Wooo!

It looks nice, feels well made without being too bulky, and most important for me it has a real keypad as well as a touchscreen. (That was what had me sold from the minute I first read about the thing - I have no desire at all for an iPhone simply because I don't want to have to look at the thing to be able to do stuff I can do with buttons without looking. And anyway, it has no high speed data.) When I got my sim activated I browsed a few pages over HSDPA which was impressively quick, synced up my contacts from my PC, installed OneNote mobile (the other thing I'd been missing since I last had a Windows SmartPhone a couple of years ago), synced again, played about a bit with some settings, and generally admired its sleek loveliness and its cute little fabric bag. There were a few things I was a bit disappointed by, mostly things I used to do on my C600 (a much older HTC, I think, rebadged as 'Orange') and assumed I'd be able to do with this. But I was cautiously optimistic we'd work out our minor differences.

Four days on I absolutely loathe the thing. I've just rung up my provider to send it back. (Thankfully I did my upgrade online so I'm covered by a return policy - phew!) Just a few of my gripes with it are:

Having a touchscreen on a phone is a bad idea unless it's smart enough to lock itself during calls. See this appendage on the side of my head that I use for listening? My ear? Guess what happens when I'm on a call? Yes, it touches my phone. And usually activates the SpeakerPhone option. AGH!
Going through touch-menus to send a text message is not my idea of convenient, and texting is what I use my phone for most. To my mind, I should be able to do that without getting the stylus out or making ham-fisted attempts to pick out some tiny menu option with my fingernail.
After four days I still haven't found a foolproof way of locking and unlocking the touchscreen/keypad so I can carry it in my bag without accidentally creating a dozen tasks called £*^$%"%%"!. (Which, coincidentally, is exactly what I said while I was deleting said tasks.) I'm not some doddery grandma who can't program my PVR, locking and unlocking should be intuitive; if there's a knack to it, it shouldn't take me four days to get it.
It's useful to have some kind of 'new event' indicator (other than an amber flashing light that has to be configured by an option buried deep in the menus of the thing) so I know if I missed a call or a text with just a glance. Even now I have the amber light configured, I still have to look for two seconds before it flashes. That is not a glance. I could have done something with those two seconds. My C600 was slightly annoying in that regard as well, but you can probably tell I've already lost my rag with the Touch Dual. It's got to the point where the green light - the one you get when you have no new events to trigger an amber light - seems to be mocking me for my lack of calls or texts. (Now do you see why I have to send it back?)

Those might seem like pretty minor annoyances but I guess the essence of it is that everything I could do on my previous handset (Sony Ericsson W850i) just seems to be so much less 'at my fingertips'. I used to be able to pick up a text and reply to it and walk down the road at the same time. Today I actually had to stop in the street to read a text message. Oh, the humiliation.

Don't get me wrong, if you want a touchscreen PDA with phone features and think the addition of a numeric/T9 keypad will be useful then there's a good chance you'll love this thing, it really is quite attractive after all. But I wanted a phone with some touchscreen PDA features, which this isn't. At its heart is a touchscreen OS and the keypad is just an afterthought. It's a shame. I'm off now to console myself by window shopping for its replacement...

Writing in plain English

2008-03-07T20:00:00.000Z

I've been creating quite a bit of documentation lately. I try very hard to write good, clear documents without unnecessary detail. (So that means not describing in detail, with screenshots, every input box on a straightforward authentication dialog in a document aimed at desktop support people. If your support teams need that level of help, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you have problems that no amount of documentation will fix. But I digress...)

Recently I was asked to translate a fairly technical description of a problem into something a less technically-minded person could understand. In fact the brief was "translate it into something your granny would understand" (a pretty tall order as neither of my grandmothers are alive, but I knew what he meant).

Thankfully this is something I've done several times before - usually the instructions are "translate it into something my MD will understand" but unless the MD in question has a technical background that usually equates to about the same.

Anyhow, had I found the task at all difficult, this excellent document from the Plain English Campaign would have given me some great pointers:

How to write in plain English

I recommend having a look around the whole site because it's entertaining as well as informative. Us techies are infamous for being poor communicators so it does no harm to a) try to learn to do better or b) console ourselves that at least there are worse offenders and have a good laugh at their expense.

In fact I'm starting to think the document above should be compulsory reading for anyone who ever went to university. I've no idea how it happens (I left school at 18 so I'm in the clear), but somewhere between school and the workplace people stop writing "we did the experiment and wrote down the results" and start coming up with strange constructions like "a manual recording and collation methodology was employed in order to compile a dataset for utilisation in analysis of the observations resulting from the application of the prescribed experimentation procedures". (I made that one up, but if you look around on the Plain English Campaign site you'll see it isn't that far-fetched.)

I plan to follow up with a handful of posts about writing technical and user documentation... if I ever break off from writing actual documents long enough to write the posts, that is!

My First PowerShell Script

2008-02-28T19:00:00.006Z

I thought I'd start with something simple.

I have a Scratch folder on my Windows desktop where I tend to chuck things I only need for a short while - like if someone sends me a file they're having problems with and they want me to figure out what's wrong with it.

Every now and again I notice my Scrach folder is getting cluttered with stuff I don't need, and at that point I sort it by Last Access Date and delete everything I haven't looked at for a month or so.

I'm no good at learning scripting from a book, every scripting and macro language so far I've learnt through necessity - I had a job that needed doing and I didn't know any other way to do it, so I taught myself. I've been waiting for an opportunity to try to get to grips with PowerShell and I thought this would be a great project to start with.

Note that there's no safety net here - running this script deletes all files and subfolders that meet its criteria and once they're gone they're gone! As there's every chance I've made an error here or this may behave differently when you run it, see my disclaimer before you even think about running it!

$userprofile=$env:UserProfile

set-location "$userprofile\desktop\Scratch"

$d=[DateTime]::Now.AddDays(-30)

Get-childitem -recurse | where-object {$_.lastaccesstime -lt $d} | remove-item -recurse -force

Get-ChildItem -recurse | where-object {$_.psiscontainer -and ($_.getfiles().length -eq 0)} | Remove-Item –recurse -force

Notes for those even less PowerShelly than me:

AddDays(-30) subtracts 30 days. (There isn't a separate SubtractDays method.)

The first Get-Childitem line finds all the files and subfolders that haven't been accessed for 30 days and deletes them.

The next Get-ChildItem line finds all the empty subfolders (getfiles().length will be 0 if there are no files in the subfolder) and deletes them. (This took me a while to figure out but I was pretty pleased when I managed it - I'd been looking around couldn't find any examples of a one-liner to delete empty folders.)

Update 29-Feb: For reasons unknown the formatting of the above script had all gone strange when I came back to it today. Hopefully it looks good now.

And we wonder why Vista costs twice as much here...

2008-02-27T22:00:00.000Z

Microsoft must pay $1.4bn to EU

VBA Script to create many calendar appointments in Outlook

2008-02-27T19:00:00.000Z

A while back I was asked to create a few thousand Calendar appointments to help with some testing. I figured the script might be useful in case anyone ever has to do a similar task. I wrote it in Outlook 2003 and for me it works as intended, but it was meant to be quick and cheap (the script was only needed once so I gave it minimal testing and I've included no error handling at all) so you should see my disclaimer before you even think about using it!

Note that I put the items in a Calendar in a PST. This is because I needed to be able to easily share what I'd created, and also because I created the script on my live system (so if I'd written a few thousand Calendar items to the Exchange server I might not have been terribly popular if it had caused problems for other users).

The CreateLotsOfApptsInPST needs to be called with the following parameters:

PSTName - the name of the PST; this is the name it shows with in your folder tree (e.g. "Personal Folders") and not the file path. The PST has to be loaded. I didn't test what happens if there's more than one PST loaded with the same name.
Occurences - How many appointments you want to create
Start - The date and time of the first appointment you want to create
Interval - How far apart, in minutes, you want the start times of each appointment, e.g. if you make the Duration 45 mins and the Interval 60 mins, there will be a 15 mins gap between each appointment.
Duration - The duration of each appointment in minutes.
Subject - The subject you want for each appointment. As it is, the script will append a sequential number to each ("Test Appt 1", "Test Appt 2" etc.) but you could easily amend that.

The second sub is called by the first, but you should be able to see what it's doing.

Sub CreateLotsOfApptsInPST(PSTName As String, Occurrences As Long, _
Start As Date, Interval As Integer, Duration As Integer, _
Subject As String)

Dim count As Integer

For count = 1 To Occurrences
CreateApptInPST PSTName, Subject & " " & count, _
Start + ((count - 1) * (Interval * (1 / 24 / 60))), Duration
Next count

End Sub

Sub CreateApptInPST(PSTName As String, Subject As String, _
DateTime As Date, Duration As Integer)

Dim olApp As Outlook.Application, objName As NameSpace
Dim PST As MAPIFolder, PSTcal As MAPIFolder

Set olApp = Outlook.Application
Set objName = olApp.GetNamespace("MAPI")
Set PST = objName.Folders(PSTName)
Set PSTcal = PST.Folders("Calendar")

Dim i As AppointmentItem
Set i = PSTcal.Items.Add
i.Subject = Subject
i.Start = DateTime
i.Duration = Duration
i.Save

End Sub

More seasoned coders will give me zero points for style, but it did the job for me!

WHS, Vista, Startup Profiles and Task Scheduler

2008-02-19T21:00:00.002Z

...well sort of anyway. This is going to be a bit of a rambling post but if you aren't already using Vista's Task Scheduler as a kind of startup profile manager then you might need to read on...

I've had a Windows Home Server set up since the days of the beta programme, and I have to say I'm pretty happy with it. One of its most important jobs is to back up my laptop, so naturally the laptop has the WHS connector (client software) installed. My laptop, however, gets used outside of my home. If I'm at a friend's house I might connect to their wireless network, I may use a 3G card or wireless hotspot when I'm out and about, or I might work offline. Any of which leave the WHS connector doing nothing useful.

My laptop is a lovely lightweight skinny little thing. The downside of that is it doesn't run too quickly. I also have the power-saving options set to get the most time out of a single charge which slows things down even further. It's mostly bearable once it's up and running, but the startup time and the time to recover from hibernation were pretty unacceptable.

The thing that bothered me most was waiting for apps that ran on startup that required the network. If I was off the network (or on a different network to the thing that app wanted to connect to - which is why WHS is in the title of this post) I'd be sitting waiting not only for the damn things to load, but to figure out they couldn't contact the server they wanted to, in some cases complain about it (I KNOW!), then sit there using CPU and memory anyway. Irritating in the extreme when I need to get to some file on my laptop in a hurry. I considered downloading a startup profile manager utility, but couldn't find anything that quite met my needs. On my old XP laptop I made do with a script to start and stop various services depending on where I was, but that was far from perfect.

Anyway, today I finally got so fed up with all the OEM crap taking forever to start on my Vista laptop that I took some time out to fix things. (Shame on you Sony, nobody needs all this junk to run all the time.) In the process I found out that under Vista more and more Startup apps have been added to the Task Scheduler instead of the Run keys in the registry or our old friend the Startup group. I should probably be ashamed to admit I only found that out today, but hey... I got there in the end. But this was where my revelation occurred - I already kind of knew that Task Scheduler was a lot more sophisticated than old-style Scheduled Tasks, but it hadn't really occurred to me how I could use it at home to make my life easier.

The long and the short of it is that I'm now using Scheduled Tasks as a kind of Startup Profile Manager. The WHS Connector has come out of the Startup group and now runs as a Task to run on startup with a condition that it only runs if I'm connected to my home network. My two apps for downloading TV content only run if I'm connected to a network and only if I'm plugged in to mains power and idle for 2 minutes first. I killed some of the OEM ballast and now have things like driver update checks run once a month rather than every time I start up.

My startup time is now pretty reasonable for a slow little machine, and it's improved my temper no end. And all thanks to Task Scheduler.

How item count in Outlook folders affects performance

2008-02-07T22:00:00.000Z

Where I work we see a lot of Outlook performance issues where the user's Inbox is over 10,000 items. (I think the record was about 150,000 - you can probably guess we don't use email quotas!)

Anyway this article covers some of the reasons a huge number of items in any folder will cause poor performance:

KB905803: Outlook users experience poor performance when they work with a folder that contains many items on a server that is running Exchange Server

In particular the paragraph about how recurring items are populated into the Calendar was something that had never even occurred to me before.

The one thing it doesn't touch on is how Cached Exchange Mode affects the performance. Our experience is that accessing larger mailboxes from desktop or laptop machines with slow hard disks (think not just older machines, but laptops running on battery power), Cached Exchange Mode can slow things down considerably. It's working out of the OST file (the cached copy of your mailbox on your hard disk), so if your hard disk is slow and your folders have many items, building the indexes required each time you switch views or folders will take some time.

I am generally a fan of Cached Exchange Mode (just for starters it can sheild the Exchange server from so much traffic things like Google Desktop can generate) but there are times it requires a little thought. So if your big cheese needs to keep his huge amount of mail and doesn't want his Outlook running like a dog, he's gonna need to fork out for a half-decent machine for his desk. And even then his frequently used folders should ideally stay below 5000 items.

Meeting on, meeting off, meeting on again...?!

2007-12-13T19:00:00.000Z

A while back I posted about common ways meetings can go missing, one of which is when a distribution list is invited to a meeting.

Today I saw an interesting 'feature' of how inviting a distribution list (DL) then trying to make changes later can really confuse things. Our team got two invites and a cancellation to the same meeting, and the organiser couldn't work out how it had happened.

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=222388 covers the basics of what the organiser and invitees see, but it doesn't really explain how that occurs. So for the record, here's a worked example (you know how I love those):

I've been asked to create the invite for my team's offsite team-building exercise (read: we're going to the pub)
My team are all members of a DL called BigTeam, so I send the invite to them (ignoring the great advice I usually encourage everyone else to follow that says never invite a DL without expanding it, especially one you're a member of)
I realise later that the BigTeam DL also includes some guys who work at a remote location to us - remote enough that they probably don't want to know the details of some drink-up they won't be able to get to. So I go back into the meeting and remove them.
Here's the critical bit: because they were invited as part of the BigTeam DL, to un-invite them I have to expand out the DL, then remove them from the expanded list.
Here's the bit they don't explain in the KB article: Outlook just sees addresses in the invitee list. It doesn't much care if they're DLs or individuals. It sees that the BigTeam DL has gone from the invitee list, and a whole load of individuals have suddenly appeared. (It just sees the difference between how the invitee list looked before and how it looks now, so isn't 'aware' that a DL was expanded to get to where we are now.)
Outlook does what it always does in these situations: it sends a cancellation to all the addresses that were in the invitee list but aren't any more (i.e. the BigTeam DL) and sends an invitation to all the addresses that are in the invitee list that weren't before (i.e. the people whose names are left after I removed our far-flung colleagues).
Everyone gets a cancellation (because a cancellation was sent to the BigTeam DL), and those lucky enough to still be invited get a new meeting request. It doesn't appear to make sense, but this is Outlook behaving as it was designed.

The up-side if you're using Outlook 2007 is that at least it doesn't allow you to process meeting invites/updates/cancellations in the wrong order, which would probably confuse things even further. But the basic behaviour is still the same.

I hope this helps explain things if this has been causing you the same kind of confusion it caused in our office today!

Cool Excel VLOOKUP tip

2007-12-12T23:00:00.000Z

I'm a fairly advanced user of Excel so generally I find hints and tips fall into two categories: either I already know them, or they relate to features I never use (like functions way beyond my meagre grasp of maths or finance). But today I read a really cool tip that 1) I'd definitely use and 2) it never occurred to me to try before.

This is from David Gainer's blog, I hope he doesn't mind me reproducing it here...

Here’s a trick to using VLOOKUP with tables. VLOOKUP isn’t table-aware, so the third argument, col_index_num, is still a number and not, say, a column name when used with Tables. Next time you use VLOOKUP on a table, use the following formula for the third argument instead of an index number:
MATCH( TableName[[#Headers], [ColumnName]], TableName[#Headers], 0)
Substitute ‘TableName’ with the name of the table you are looking up, and ‘ColumnName’ for the name of the table column you want to index into. This, in effect, gives you a tight pointer to the column that does not break if the column name changes or if the column is re-arranged in the table, thereby providing a more robust alternative to using a numerical index.

Office 2007 SP1 is available

2007-12-12T22:00:00.000Z

See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936982 for details.

Invariably there are a few new hiccups discovered in the early days of a major Service Pack, so if your PC is critical to what you do then it's usually a good idea to hold back a few days. Let other more intrepid (or more foolhardy, depends on your view) folks try it out and see how much shouting there is on the blogs and newsgroups before you install it for yourself.

Of course, if SP1 contains a fix for a problem that's been bothering you then you may want to go ahead now anyway.

Meanwhile, I'll be one of the intrepid/foolhardy people installing mine tonight. (But then I've already been running the Beta on a test machine for a while.)

Information gathering

2007-11-12T19:00:00.000Z

A story of when the humble traffic reporter scooped the newsdesks:

Around lunchtime today a massive cloud of smoke appeared over East London, clearly visible from the building where I work. Immediately people were asking each other: Was London under terrorist attack again? Were toxic fumes being released into the air? Would we be able to get home tonight? The story was too new for any of the usual news websites to have any information, so I dug out my headphones and tuned in to the local radio station to find out what was going on.

After about five minutes of an interview with some minor celebrity, the presenter cut in with a 'breaking news on-the-spot report' by phone from a local cab driver. He was a couple of miles away but estimated where he thought the fire was to within a mile or so and gave a description of what he could see, which was basically a lot of black smoke in the sky. The radio presenter commented on the pictures he'd just found on the TV news, but said the information was sketchy and they'd keep us updated with whatever they found out in the unfolding drama. Then he cut to the traffic report.

The traffic and travel reporter told us calmly and confidently that it was a fire, where it was, what roads were closed, where the worst of the congestion was, then got on with telling us what was going on with the roads and public transport across the rest of London. The news room had just been scooped by the traffic desk.

Our immediate questions weren't about what kind of traffic jam had been caused by the fire, but in gathering that information the traffic desk also knew a lot of basics we did want to know, and from the fact there weren't reports of the whole area being evacuated we could assume there wasn't a major leak of hazardous substances.

I guess the moral of that story is that sometimes the best place to go for information isn't necessarily the most obvious. It helps to think about who has the best ability for (and often the technology most suited to) gathering the information in the first place.

Long time no blog

2007-11-08T18:46:00.001Z

Over a month in fact. I could pretend I was so busy saving the world from moving DST dates that I didn't have time to write, but the truth of it is I've just got out of the habit. Most of my best work (cough) was written on my train journey home, but my routine has changed a bit so now I need to find a new place/time that I automatically think about sitting down with the laptop to write a post. Right now it's the kitchen table, which is a lot more comfortable for typing than the train ever used to be.

If anyone was waiting eagerly for my wrap-up of miscellaneous Outlook/DST factoids, my apologies. I promise they weren't that interesting anyway, and were unlikely to impact your ability to deal with the last few weekends. Please get in touch through the comments if there was something I missed though and I'll answer any questions I can.

Big Excel 2007 bug

2007-09-26T08:00:00.000+01:00

If you use Excel 2007 in any serious capacity, you really should know about this issue David Gainer blogged about in the early hours (my time, at least) this morning:

Calculation Issue Update

The short version of the story is that if you have any calculations with a result of around 65535, they may show an incorrect result of 100000.

I expect a few people on the product team at Microsoft will have a very uncomfortable few days. Hopefully David will keep us updated through his blog.

Why I like PCs

2007-09-25T20:13:00.001+01:00

I hate to jump on a bandwagon, but Stephen Fry's epic post about iPhones, SmartPhones, and technology in general got me thinking. (Everyone and their dog has referred to his blog recently, it seems, including me now. And worse, I've shamelessly referenced it and I'm not even going to talk about mobile devices.) The age-old rivalry between PC and Mac fans, Fry being a proud Mac devotee, is something that's always baffled me. And when I say rivalry, I really mean hatred for each other's choice of product. If I knew people who drove Ford Focuses (Focii?) who absolutely detested Volkswagen Golfs then maybe I could understand it, but I don't.

I've always liked PCs for the same reason I like the English Language. I learned to use each of them before their alternatives and they're familiar to me; we go back a long way. I’ve had a lot of practise so I can now use both reasonably competently, and they serve me more than adequately. I believe there are parallels in the way the PC and the English Language arrived at where they are today. They've grown, absorbing components from anywhere and everywhere, evolving as they needed to because no one organisation had control – at least in recent times. Standards have appeared, but mostly because conventions were adopted and became widespread, then were documented and made official - not the reverse. I would argue that both are better for being products of chaos and evolution, not control and design.

There's little doubt that a bog-standard Mac is more aesthetically pleasing than a bog-standard PC or laptop. But if I could have an upgrade to ‘pretty’ for my PC for £50 I don't think I'd bother. It sits under my desk, for practical reasons, so it would be a waste of some designer's efforts, not to mention my cash, for a pretty PC not to be seen. As long as it isn't conspicuously ugly, I'm quite happy. Nondescript suits me just fine. To borrow Stephen's analogy about concrete buildings, they don’t bother me if they’re the most practical solution to a practical problem. Unless they’re truly hideous, they usually only become offensive when placed next to a thing of beauty, which is why my PC doesn’t sit next to a vase of lilies.

In fact, I just wrote that last paragraph completely forgetting the small and (to my mind) attractive glossy black AOpen machine I recently built as a server. It sits on a bookcase in my lounge. I did pay a bit extra for the case, but mostly because it was small and had quiet, integrated cooling. There probably were some butt-ugly alternatives which I didn't even consider - so perhaps there are times when design is important. But I still chose the nicest case available for the technology I wanted, not the other way round. It's just a bonus that I didn't have to find a place to hide it.

Then there’s the idea that choosing a Mac or PC, Windows or Linux, says something about who I am, as if my laptop is somehow a symbol that other commuters on the train may use to judge me. If my choice of computer makes some kind of image statement, then I hope the statement is just that I don't care enough about my image for it to dictate my choice of computer.

As for the aesthetics of the desktop operating system, I quite like Windows Vista. Is that controversial? The whole Glass thing is easy on the eye, and it’s very useable. (I say that, but I frequently use a remote connection to my main machine which immediately disables all the flashy graphics to conserve bandwidth. I barely even notice a difference.) I even remember being impressed by Windows XP when I first saw it, at least after I switched off the Teletubby Hill desktop image and the Fisher-Price inspired Start Menu. I expect the Vista ‘look’ will get tired quicker than any MacOS just like XP did but mainly because of its ubiquity. And even then it won't bother me - it doesn't have to be a work of art or even visually pleasing, it just has to be reasonably intuitive to use without being downright ugly. Windows 95 looked sleek and sophisticated compared to Windows 3.1 - it just shows how our expectations change.

As with the English language, another reason Windows feels natural to me is because its history and culture don't need to be explained - I know that CTRL+Insert does the same thing as CTRL+C because it's a legacy from DOS days. (I choose that example because I'm a leftie-mouser and those keys are convenient for my right hand, so I’m happy that trick has been preserved.) I expect I could learn to like a Linux or MacOS desktop, but it would take a long time for them to stop feeling somehow foreign. My TiVo is a Linux box and I love it dearly as a PVR, but if I need to telnet to it to perform some housekeeping (yes, of course it's hacked and networked), I need step-by-step instructions for all but the most basic tasks. It’s like trying to speak Russian from a phrase book when the only words I’ve committed to memory are “hello”, “goodbye”, “two beers, please” and “thank you”.

Ultimately, I guess my point is that technology isn't religion. Nobody has to choose one computer or OS and forsake all others. We don't have to engage in some holy war over who is right or wrong. If your circumstances require you to use a piece of technology you hate, I’ve been there. It sucks, and I sympathise, even if the very thing you hate is the one I would choose.

Daylight Saving 3: When 'summer' moves

2007-09-10T19:04:00.001+01:00

In my part of the world we've hardly had anything resembling a summer... I'd love to know where ours got moved to.

Seriously though... in my previous post I showed how Outlook appointments appear to move when people in different regions 'do Daylight Saving Time (DST) differently. Now we get onto the really fun stuff... when legislature keeps us on our toes by moving DST about.

In 2005, the US Government passed a bill to make DST last longer starting from spring 2007. Various other countries followed suit, and in total 33 time zones changed. Software vendors had to issue patches to all their systems that were DST-aware, Microsoft included. Patches for Windows were released to cope with the change so everyone's system clock should automatically update on the correct weekend.

Because of what we already know about how Outlook stores appointments, this caused meetings to appear to move about. An appointment would have been affected if all the following were true:

The appointment was scheduled from one of the affected time zones (i.e. one whose DST rules changed)
The appointment was created on a machine with the unpatched version of the time zone information (i.e. one where the meeting was created before the Windows Updates were applied or possibly before they existed)
The meeting occurred in one of the 'delta' periods, i.e. the dates between when the clocks would change under the old and new rules (so the spring delta ran from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in April)

Here's an example of how an appointment would appear to move just by applying the Windows DST patch to a user's machine:

Appointment time is stored in UTC when the appointment is first created, i.e. before the update was applied to the user's machine:		Appointment time is displayed in Local Time, calculated at the time it is viewed. So this is how it will appear after the update is applied to the user's machine:
Local time in NY	13:00	UTC	18:00
Adjust for Daylight Saving	0:00	Adjust for Daylight Saving	+1:00
Adjust for GMT-5 time zone	+5:00	Adjust for GMT+5.5 time zone	-5:00
UTC	18:00	Local time in NY	14:00
*according to unpatched settings, 15th March is not within Daylight Saving Time		*according to patched settings, 15th March is within Daylight Saving Time

(If those tables don't make any sense, check out this post for an explanation.)

Microsoft released some 'rebasing' tools to help users 'fix' the appointments that appeared to have moved. These were mostly sufficient for the average home user, but for large organizations they had the following drawbacks:

The tool could only reliably tell if a recurring appointment had the incorrect DST information and needed fixing. (This is because single-instance appointments don't store time zone data at all.)
The user-side tool wasn't easy to automate because of the risk of 'fixing' a single-instance appointment that was already correct.
The first iteration of the server-side tool aimed at network administrators was slow, unstable, and required constant monitoring. For an environment of more than a few thousand users it just wasn't a realistic prospect.
The next iteration of the server-side tool was released very late - only about a week before the first delta period began, if I recall correctly. Many network administrators felt there wasn't sufficient time to test it, and in any case had already been forced to make alternative arrangements for their users.

Which left a lot of folks looking after large enterprise environments in a bit of a mess.

The organization I was working with at the time has a huge number of users, many of whom collaborate with colleagues across continents on a daily basis. These people are very dependent on their Outlook calendars and take it very personally if someone messes around with their data. Stability was their highest priority, so with the timescales involved we decided the safest thing we could do was provide recommendations to our users of how they could manually fix their own appointments. Our IT support teams out at the sharp end were armed with the client-side rebasing tools to use for coordinators and other people who schedule a massive amount of appointments. We decided it was best for those folks to have some personal help to be on the safe side. Maybe we were too cautious, who knows... without splitting the organisation in two and trying a different approach on the rest of them, it's impossible to say.

Next time I'll share some assorted DST facts that didn't make it into the first three posts.

Daylight Saving 2: Appointments that jump without moving

2007-08-08T00:00:00.000+01:00

In my previous post I talked about how Outlook stores appointment times in UTC (time-zone neutral) and converts them from/to your local time zone when you create or view an appointment.

I briefly hinted, right at the end, at the fact that some countries like India (and most of Asia and the Far East, amongst others) don't put their clocks forward and back each spring and autumn. This can cause confusion when scheduling conference calls across regions and continents, when some participants observe daylight saving and others don't.

Today I'll take this further with a worked example:

Imagine Bilal works in Mumbai, and books a regular weekly meeting for his call each Monday with Zoe in London. Mumbai is 5½ hours ahead of GMT, and does not do daylight saving. London, like most of Europe, does observe daylight saving. Through the winter months, the meeting is at 4:00pm for Bilal and 10:30am for Zoe. In the Spring, because London goes to Daylight Saving Time (but Mumbai does not), the meeting 'moves' to 9:30am for Zoe, but stays at 4:00pm for Bilal.

Winter (booked from Mumbai, viewed in London)

Local time in Mumbai	16:00	UTC	10:30
Remove GMT+5.5 time zone	-5:30	Same as GMT time zone	+0:00
No daylight saving	-0:00	No daylight saving	+0:00
UTC	10:30	Local time in London	10:30

Summer (booked from Mumbai, viewed in London)

Local time in Mumbai	16:00	UTC	10:30
Remove GMT+5.5 time zone	-5:30	Same as GMT time zone	+0:00
No daylight saving	-0:00	Add daylight saving	+1:00
UTC	10:30	Local time in London	11:30

This causes a problem for Zoe because she has another meeting at 9:30am on Mondays. Thankfully, Bilal's calendar is less congested on a Monday afternoon, so the solution is simple; they agree that the meeting should be scheduled from Zoe's time zone. Bilal cancels the appointment and Zoe sets up a new one for 10:30am London time. Now the appointment appears at 5:00pm for Bilal, but in the autumn it will 'move' to 4:00pm, while staying at 10:30am for Zoe.

Winter (booked from London, viewed in Mumbai)

Local time in London	10:30	UTC	10:30
Already in GMT time zone	+0:00	Adjust to GMT+5.5 time zone	+5:30
No daylight saving	-0:00	No daylight saving	+0:00
UTC	10:30	Local time in Mumbai	16:00

Summer (booked from London, viewed in Mumbai)

Local time in London	10:30	UTC	09:30
Already in GMT time zone	+0:00	Adjust to GMT+5.5 time zone	+5:30
Remove daylight saving hour	-1:00	No daylight saving	+0:00
UTC	09:30	Local time in Mumbai	15:00

This has taken a lot more words than I thought it would, so I'll save the story of how this changed this year for next time...

Daylight Saving 1: A primer on appointment times

2007-07-20T19:41:00.001+01:00

In my previous post I promised an explanation of how changes to Daylight Saving Time affect Outlook. But before we can even look at Daylight Saving, we need to understand how Outlook stores appointment times and copes with time zones.

Outlook stores each appointment with a start time and duration. (The end time isn't stored; Outlook works it out on-the-fly.) The start time is stored as UTC, calculated relative to the time zone of the machine the appointment is created on.

UTC stands for Universal Time Coordination – actually the same as GMT, but we refer to it as UTC to avoid confusion with "London Time" which is an hour off from 'real' GMT for half the year.

The easiest way to get to grips with this is through an example. Imagine Alice is in New York. She creates an appointment to remind her about her dentist appointment at 10am on a Wednesday in December. Outlook does this simple calculation based on the time zone of the computer Alice creates the appointment from:

Local time	10:00
Remove GMT-5 time zone	+5:00
UTC	15:00

So Alice's 10am appointment is actually stored at 15:00 UTC.

Two things to note: first, I deliberately chose December because daylight saving won't apply, and second, I'm using 24-hour clock times for simplicity.

When an appointment is viewed, Outlook converts the start time from UTC back to Local Time based on the time zone settings of the local computer.

So Alice views the appointment at her computer in New York, she'll see it as happening at 10am and never needs to know this calculation back and forth took place. But what if Alice were to view her calendar from another time zone?

Let's say Alice travels to Mumbai, and uses a local machine in the Mumbai office to view her Calendar, which she can do because it's stored on the Exchange server. India's Time Zone is GMT+5.5 so her dentist appointment will appear at the following time:

UTC (which we worked out already)	15:00
Adjust to GMT+5.5 time zone	+5.30
Local time in Mumbai	20:30

Nothing has changed in the way the meeting is stored, just the machine it's being viewed from has a different time zone so it appears with a different start time.

So now we'll add DST into the mix. Here's how the calculations would work if the appointment had been in June:

Local time in New York	10:00
Remove GMT-5 time zone	+5:00
Remove daylight saving hour	-1:00
UTC	14:00

so the appointment would be stored at 14:00 UTC

and the display time would be:

UTC (from above)	14:00
Adjust to GMT+5.5 time zone	+5.30
No adjustment for DST	0:00
Local time in Mumbai	19:30

(Some places don't do daylight saving at all. India is one of them.)

Next time I'll cover some of the things we see working across time zones which do DST differently.

Coming soon: 2007 Daylight Saving changes - The Sequel

2007-07-12T22:00:00.000+01:00

I bought my quarterly train ticket just the other day. It expires in October. (I know that should be obvious, but we haven't had much sunshine here yet so it doesn't seem fair that autumn is so close.) That's depressing enough in itself, but I also just realised that the next round of Daylight Savings fun and games will soon be upon us.

For anyone who wasn't supporting Outlook a few months ago (or was in a country unaffected by the changes or just crawled under a rock and stayed there throughout March), the US government passed a piece of legislation in 2005 changing the dates the clocks "spring forward" and "fall back", starting from spring 2007. This gave three weeks more Daylight Saving time, and was calculated to save money and energy by people needing to use less heating and lighting.

Unfortunately, Windows only knows how to cope with one set of Daylight Saving Time (DST) rules per time zone. So, for instance, in London it knows we go into DST on the last Sunday in March, and we go back to GMT (Standard Time) on the last Sunday in October.

This might not sound like a problem, except that every time you schedule a recurring appointment in Outlook, it bases all future occurrences on what it knows about your time zone and DST settings now. So if those settings change, the meeting will appear to change. Which (as a lot of people found out) was exactly what happened.

This is a pretty complicated topic to explain. I spent the best part of three months this year talking about little else, and I still managed to get confused mid-presentation on more than one occasion! So for my own sanity and yours I'm going to stop now and leave the explanation of how Outlook saves appointments in UTC and displays them in local time for my next post.

How to Delete Outlook Temporary Files 2

2007-07-03T00:00:00.000+01:00

In an earlier post, I gave instructions for clearing Outlook temporary files. Of course I forgot that the location of Temporary Internet Files in Windows Vista is different to XP/2000/NT, so different instructions are required. (Thanks to Oriolus for reminding me.) I also found that this is a lot less of a pain in Outlook 2007 than before.

(This procedure involves deleting files. The ones in the folder we're looking at are temporary files whose 'master' copy is held in the mailbox, so it doesn't result in loss of data. However, just in case someone should manage to mistype one of the commands and end up in the wrong folder, the usual disclaimer applies.)

For Outlook 2003 or earlier in Windows Vista:

Start > Run > Type "cmd" (without the quotes) > Click OK

In the command line, type the commands in bold (excluding my numbering and hitting return after each line)
cd "%localappdata%\microsoft\windows\temporary internet files"
dir /ad

You should now see a list of folder names - one or more will begin with OLK.
cd olk*

This should make the first OLK folder the current directory - type the full folder name instead of OLK* to select a different one)
explorer .
Note the space before the "."

This will bring up a Windows Explorer window showing the contents of the folder which you can then delete, but only after you've checked the address bar to make sure you're in the right folder!
If there was more than one OLK folder you can get to it by typing "cd.." at the command prompt then repeating steps 3 and 4 to select the OLK folder with the next folder name.
Type exit in your command window to close it, or just click on the x when you're done.

Maybe someone in the Outlook product group felt our pain, because in Outlook 2007 this has suddenly got a lot easier!

For Outlook 2007 in Windows XP:

Click Start > Run > Type "%userprofile%\local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\content.outlook" and click OK
In the Explorer window that appears, double-check you have the correct folder selected and delete its contents.

For Outlook 2007 in Windows Vista:

Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > Run* > Type "%localappdata%\microsoft\windows\Temporary Internet Files\content.outlook" and click OK *unless, like me, you've already added the Run command to your Start menu.
In the Explorer window that appears, double-check you have the correct folder selected and delete its contents.

Missing Appointments 2 - organizer was an invitee

2007-06-25T01:00:00.000+01:00

In my earlier post I talked about the most important piece of information to remember when troubleshooting missing Calendar appointments:

Deleting a meeting invitation or update will delete the associated appointment.

Sometimes we see a special case of this: a meeting invitation was sent out, and now everyone seems to have the meeting in their Calendar except, perplexingly, the person who organized it.

This usually occurs when a meeting organizer invited a Distribution Group (DG) of which they are a member. Typically what happens is something like this:

George is in the Sales department and wants to set up the weekly department meeting
So he doesn't forget anyone, George invites the SalesDept DG in his address book
Because George is a member of the SalesDept DG, he also receives an invite to the meeting
George knows he already has the meeting in his calendar because he only created it a moment ago, so he deletes the invite from his Inbox
Outlook removes the meeting from George's calendar

The 'solution' to this problem is for George to always remember to expand out any DG he invites to a meeting before sending. But George wants to know how he can fix this meeting where the mistake was already made.

If George is lucky enough to be running in an Exchange environment where Deleted Item Recovery (aka The Dumpster) is enabled, he should go to his Calendar, select Tools > Recover Deleted Items, search for the meeting by subject, then restore it to his Calendar. He can then Cancel the meeting and re-book it with the SalesDept DG 'expanded' so that all the invitees appear individually.

If Deleted Item Recovery isn't available (or all this happened a long time ago and was only just noticed, so the item has already been purged from the Dumpster), the only option for George is to ask his colleagues to each delete their copy of the meeting from the Calendar and to re-book it.

A variation on the symptoms I described is where the Organizer has the meeting in their Calendar, but they are no longer able to make changes to it; the options available are the ones they would have if they were an attendee, i.e. Accept, Decline, etc. This usually occurs as a result of the problem above, but where further attempts have been made to get the item back either by having it forwarded from an attendee, or by recovering the original invite from the Deleted Items Folder. The root cause and solution are, however, the same.

Missing Appointments 1 - invite or update was deleted

2007-06-22T01:00:00.000+01:00

Many of the issues I have to troubleshoot concern appointments missing from someone's calendar.

Before I start re-inventing the wheel, How to troubleshoot missing and duplicate appointments in Outlook already covers some of the background on how appointments go missing. However, by far the vast majority of missing appointment problems I see are caused by one not-so-obvious feature of mail based Calendaring in Outlook:

Deleting a meeting invitation or update will delete the associated appointment*

(*This was changed in Outlook 2007 - I guess someone finally realised how much trouble it causes.)

Today I'll cover some fairly straightforward ways this can trip up the unwary, then post soon with a special case that adds another layer of confusion.

Here's what happens - for versions of Outlook up to 2003, that is:

Anne invites Bob to a meeting
Bob accepts the invitation from his Calendar instead of from his Inbox
This leaves the invite in the Inbox (where accepting from the Inbox would have removed it)
Bob sees the invite in his Inbox and thinks "I already accepted that, I don't need it" so deletes the invite
Outlook removes the meeting from the Calendar

The solution to this is for Bob to remember to always Accept or Decline invites from the Inbox.

Another way confusion can occur is in a manager/delegate relationship. Say Claire has a delegate, Dan, who looks after her diary. Dan receives a copy of all Claire's meeting invitations and updates but, critically, so does Claire:

Dan sees an invitation in the Inbox to a meeting he knows Claire will want to attend, so he Accepts it on her behalf
Claire also has the invite in her Inbox
Claire knows Dan has Accepted the invitation on her behalf, so she decides she doesn't need it in her Inbox and deletes it
Outlook removes the meeting from the Calendar

The solution in this case is to change the Delegate options on Claire's mailbox so that only her delegates receive meeting items. If she really feels that she needs to see them, she'll have to remember not to delete them!

Deleting an Updates to a meeting has much the same effect, like this:

Evan invites Fiona to a meeting
Fiona accepts the invitation
Later, Evan sends out an updated version of the meeting including travel information for out-of-town attendees
Fiona doesn't need the travel information, so deletes the update from her Inbox
Outlook removes the meeting from the Calendar

The solution here is for Fiona to make sure she never deletes a meeting update - she should always Accept if she plans to attend or Decline if she doesn't.

A lot of troubleshooting I get involved in, the user is absolutely adamant that nothing they're doing could cause their meetings to disappear, that there must be some gremlin in the system. They've heard it's a problem with BlackBerry/our CRM application/Cached mode/the moon in Taurus/whatever, they've had this problem for months, they're sick of it and they want us to fix it for them. That's when I use my secret weapon - this article from Microsoft:

Outlook meeting requests: Essential do’s and don’ts.

It can take some persuasion to get them to read it (sometimes I say "just so you can give some pointers to the newer team members" or "so you know what to look for when your manager is doing something wrong") but I don't think it's an exaggeration to say 99% of those ongoing problems don't come back when people follow the advice in there.

Next time I'll cover how a meeting organizer can become an attendee and get into an even deeper mess...

How to delete Outlook temporary files

2007-06-15T01:00:00.000+01:00

Outlook* caches file attachments to %userprofile%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLKnnn (where nnn is a random number). If you're a system administrator and you can connect to the user's c$ share then it's no problem to empty this folder, e.g. in the fairly common scenario where a user cannot view embedded attachments (a.k.a. Red-X syndrome).

* 2003 and earlier - for instructions for Outlook 2007 see my new post here. Outlook 2000 before SR1 kept temporary files in %temp%.

But what do you do if you can't get a connection to the user's machine? Direct the user to their Temporary Internet Files folder and most likely they won't be able to see the folders underneath due to Windows' clever (?) obfuscation. (The slightly off-topic article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/301057 has an explanation of this in the introduction.)

Short of writing a script and somehow getting that across to the user, I haven't found a better way of doing this than through the command prompt. Here are my preferred instructions, but let me know if you can suggest improvements!

[Update 4-Jul-2007: I forgot when I wrote this that the file locations changed for Windows Vista - for updated instructions, see my new post here]

Start > Run > Type "cmd" (without the quotes) > Click OK
In the command line, type the commands in bold (excluding my numbering and hitting return after each line)
cd "%userprofile%\local settings\temporary internet files"
dir /ad
You should now see a list of folder names - one or more will begin with OLK.
cd olk*
This should make the first OLK folder the current directory - type the full folder name instead of OLK* to select a different one)
explorer .

Note the space before the "."

This will bring up a Windows Explorer window showing the contents of the folder which you can then delete, but only after you've checked the address bar to make sure you're in the right folder!

If there was more than one OLK folder you can get to it by typing "cd.." at the command prompt then repeating steps 3 and 4 to select the OLK folder with the next folder name.

Type exit in your command window to close it, or just click on the x when you're done.

Forms and Outlook item types

2007-06-14T08:00:00.000+01:00

Regardless of whether your Outlook data is stored on an Exchange Server or in a PST file, all of your Mail, Calendar, Task, Contact and other items are stored in messages.

The fact we can see different types of item (appointments, tasks, etc.) seems to contradict this, but the messaging system that underlies Outlook deals in messages and nothing else. We see messages with different properties, being displayed in different forms.

If you use a tool such as MFCMAPI or MDBVU (the usual disclaimer applies) to look at an item's properties, you will see the PR_MESSAGE_CLASS property for a mail item is set to ipm.note, where a calendar item would be ipm.appointment. Outlook opens the correct form (a form is a defined layout for displaying an item) depending on the PR_MESSAGE_CLASS which is how your calendar appointments get scheduling information displayed and your mail items don't.

Outlook has a form associated with each folder - whether it's one of the default folders (Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, etc.) or one you created. Each folder is associated with a message type, and also with a form to go along with it. So if you wanted to create a custom form to show different information for the contacts in your Mobile Contacts folder, you could do that.

A common scenario to troubleshoot in a large corporate environment is where a user is unable to open items of a certain type, or where items of a certain type don't behave as they should (e.g. a button on the form doesn't work). Outlook caches custom forms to save loading them each time they are used, and sometimes this cache can become corrupt, so clearing the forms cache is a logical early step when dealing with this type of issue.

For more information on the forms cache and how to troubleshoot it see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/839804/en-us

The Outlook Inbox Sniffer

2007-06-12T02:00:00.000+01:00

There's not much information around on the web about the Sniffer, but I was lucky enough to get hold of some pretty good documentation last year that covers how it works. Outlook's Inbox Sniffer is a piece of built-in code that keeps an eye on your Inbox for items of a certain type, and performs certain actions for you. The complete list is as follows:

Meeting invites (adding tentative meetings to your calendar)
Meeting updates (updating details in your calendar)
Task updates
Message recall (when someone recalls a message you've received)
Responses to voting buttons (when you sent a mail with voting buttons, this adds the voting responses back to the original item)

This applies to Outlook versions from 2000 onwards. The results are slightly different in Outlook 2007 (e.g. the way meeting updates are processed) but - as far as I know - the mechanism is the same.

The Sniffer runs as a MAPI idle process. This means it starts processing when the messaging system that underlies Outlook isn't otherwise busy. This doesn't necessarily correspond to whether the Outlook application is busy though. You could be typing an email message and the Sniffer would still fire, whereas it won't fire if mail is downloading from a server, even though you're not 'using' Outlook at the time. This is why sometimes invites appear to show up as tentative Calendar entries almost straight away, and sometimes they take a little longer.

So far so good... but what do you do if the Sniffer isn't working?

(This bit bit contains technical advice, so my usual disclaimer applies.)

First, is the actionable item actually in the Inbox? If, say, a meeting invite got moved to a folder by a rule then it may have left the Inbox before the Sniffer got to it. If the rule is client-side then you could get a Rule vs. Sniffer race occurring.
Next, have you told Outlook not to process some item types? The settings Process requests and responses on arrival and Process receipts on arrival need to be selected (Tools > Options > Email options > Tracking Options) for those actions to take place.
Is this machine able to run the Sniffer against this mailbox? To deal with users running Outlook on more than one machine with the same mailbox, a mechanism was put in place where only one can be the Sniffer at a time (the Sniff Owner). Run Outlook with the /sniff switch to set it as the Sniff Owner, or /cleansniff to delete and recreate the Sniff Owner information.
Is there any idle time? An add-in or another application calling Outlook could be keeping MAPI busy (or making it think it's busy). Try closing down any applications that may interact with Outlook, e.g. synchronisation tools, and waiting at least five minutes before checking if items have been processed. If that didn't isolate the problem, try disabling any add-ins you have loaded in Outlook, wait five minutes and check again.
Is thre a long idle time specified in the registry? Under the key HKEY_Current_User/Software/Microsoft/Office/11.0/Outlook/Options/General check for these values

AutoProcessIdleTime - this is how much idle time is required before the Sniffer will act
AutoProcessIdleTimeMax - this is how long the Sniffer waits before trying again if MAPI was not idle on the previous attempt

Both the values are specified in milliseconds (so a value of 10000 is 10 seconds). If these don't exist in the registry then the defaults are used, 30 seconds and 600 seconds respectively. Setting a lower value for both would cause the Sniffer to run more frequently, but there would be an associated performance hit on the rest of Outlook. Setting the value very low would cause the Sniffer to run almost continuously, taking up system resources that could be used for other tasks.
Is another application or add-in marking the items as 'sniffed'? This is the least likely scenario but theoretically could happen. To test for this you would need to look at the message properties of the Inbox item using a tool such as MDBVU or MFCMAPI. If the PR_PROCESSED property is set to TRUE then the Sniffer will not act on this item again because it thinks it has already done so. (If the property doesn't exist or is set to FALSE then the message has not been marked as sniffed.)

That covers just about everything I know about the Sniffer - I hope this post has been useful to someone out there!

Disclaimer

2007-06-12T01:00:00.000+01:00

One of the main reasons I started this blog was as a place to post technical troubleshooting tips. In an ideal world I wouldn't need to post a list of DON'Ts (and in the real world the people who most need them are least likely to read them) but this seems like the responsible thing to do. So here's a list of things you should bear in mind before following any advice I might post, to safeguard your data, your job and my conscience:

Most of my technical posts are aimed at IT Professionals who already have a good understanding of Windows and the products I'm talking about. If you're not comfortable working at that level then get individual help from someone who is.
Don't edit the Windows Registry unless you're pretty sure you know what you're doing.
Don't make any changes through MFCMAPI, MDBVU or similar tools unless you're certain you know what you're doing - they give you access to things in your mailbox that you're not supposed to see, and those things are hidden for good reason.
Your boss will not come looking for me if you screw something up because of some 'good idea' I post in my blog. Everything I say here is in good faith, but I make mistakes just the same as everyone else. Treat every bit of information here with healthy scepticism and don't do anything on a production system unless you understand the consequences and (ideally) have tested in a non-production environment first. That goes for anyone else's blog too, and even perfectly trustworthy vendor information has been known to cause problems if used slightly differently to how it was intended so it's good advice regardless of the source.

Sorted. Now we can get back to talking like grown-ups.

Face search in Google

2007-06-11T16:48:00.001+01:00

Here's a very cool trick to return just photos of faces using Google's image search... http://shinymedia.headshift.com/cgi-bin/mtshiny/mt-tb.cgi/36297 (I'm still working on the promised post about how Outlook's Inbox Sniffer works)

Appointments, meetings, invites, updates and responses

2007-06-07T01:00:00.000+01:00

And so for my first proper (read: useful) post. This post was going to be about how Outlook's Sniffer works on calendar-related mail items - largely because this feature is pretty much undocumented and I find myself explaining it quite often. However, I realised there's some background information to cover first. I hear the terms appointment, meeting and invite used interchangably, which doesn't matter too much at a user level but can cause confusion when you try to troubleshoot calendar problems. In fact the three things are different, and it's useful to understand the distinction.

An appointment is an Outlook Calendar item
A meeting is an appointment with invitees
An invite is a mail item that tells Outlook to create a Calendar item (also known as a meeting request)

...and while I'm writing a mini-glossary of calendar terms...

An update is a mail item that tells Outlook to change a Calendar item
A response is a mail item that tells the user that someone accepted or declined their meeting, and tells Outlook to update the meeting's Tracking information

In fact, at the mailbox level, all of these (along with Tasks, Notes and pretty much anything else you can store in a mailbox) are messages regardless of their type or whether they live in your Calendar, Inbox or wherever. One day I'll write a post about different message types and how Outlook knows what to do with each, but it isn't important for the purpose of understanding how calendaring works.

Anyway, a typical calendar scenario might go like this...

I decide to book a meeting with my colleagues Anne and Bob. I create a meeting item, and add them as invitees.
When I've finished entering all the details, I hit Send. At this point, my meeting item is saved in the Calendar, and Outlook creates a meeting request (a type of mail item) containing the relevant details of the meeting, which it sends to Anne and Bob.
Anne receives the invite in her Inbox. (Bob does too, but we're just looking at Anne's mailbox right now. Thankfully neither of them have delegates because this post is getting long enough without covering delegate behaviour - again, another post for another day.)
On Anne's machine, Outlook's Inbox Sniffer - that's our undocumented friend that acts on certain types of message in your Inbox - sees a new invite has arrived so uses the details from it to create a new meeting item in her calendar, which it marks as Tentative.
A few minutes later Anne sees the invite herself, opens it and clicks on Accept then chooses to send the response without editing it. At this point, Outlook creates a response (a type of mail item) which it sends back to me, and marks the meeting in Anne's calendar as Accepted.
I receive the response item in my Inbox. The Sniffer sees it and marks Anne's Tracking status for the meeting as Accepted. Because I have the option selected to delete blank meeting responses after processing, it also deletes the response from my Inbox.

So far we've created two calendar entries (one in each of our calendars) and two message items (an invite and a response). This is the crux of mail-based calendaring, every action on one calendar has to be communicated to the other calendar(s) by messages. A point of note is that mail items arrive in the Inbox, meetings and appointments live in the Calendar. They're connected (Outlook has an identifier property on the original Calendar item which all the other items reference so it should always know which response or update refers to which meeting) but very much separate - knowing this is useful when trying to troubleshoot missing appointments, which at my place of work is something we spend a lot of time doing!

If I later decide to change the time of the meeting, I can change the meeting item in my Calendar, and send an update (another mail item) to Anne and Bob, which their Inbox Sniffer will process much the same as before. And again, they can send a response which my Inbox Sniffer will process.

There are pitfalls around this mail-based structure, especially if you bring a delegate into the mix (one meeting, one Calendar, but potentially two copies of the invites/updates and two sniffers... it's a recipe for confusion) and I guess that's something else to add to my ever-growing Topics For Future Posts list.

I said at the start of this post it would be useful. I'm not sure if it actually is directly useful but it should give an idea of how calendaring works in Outlook, which will be relevant when I post on more practical topics in future.

That's all for now

Welcome!

2007-06-06T14:28:00.000+01:00

Hello and welcome to my BWAINdump. (BWAIN = Blog Without An Interesting Name.) I expect this will be a kind of public notepad for me to jot down observations, hints and tips on whatever technology I'm working with most at the time - right now it's Microsoft Office. Instead of emailing people technical articles and explanations for problems I get involved in troubleshooting, I can post them here and just email links. That way I get to repeat myself less, and the rest of the world gets to share any nuggets of wisdom I accidentally stumble across. Oh, and this is my first venture into the blogosphere, so if I screw up please tell me what I need to put right and don't be too hard on me. TTFN TechieBird