The Office Maven had now released a completely new version of Windows Home Server Outlook add-in with full support for Microsoft’s new Outlook 2010. WHS Outlook is a Windows Home Server add-in that integrates the Microsoft Outlook software with the Windows Home Server Console application – but wait, there’s actually alot more to it.

WHS Outlook allows a single installation of Microsoft Outlook to be shared by up to 10 different client PC’s via the Windows Home Server Console (remember user CALs to stay legal etc). Using the Remote Access features of Windows Home Server, you can even gain full access to all of your Microsoft Outlook e-mail, contacts, calendar, etc. from anywhere in the world.

Features & Changes:

• Added Outlook 2010 support
• Added Internet Calendar via WebDAV support
• Added SharePoint site integration and SharePoint list support
• Added “Sounds” command to the settings menu
• Improved: “Send Attachment (to client)” feature
• Improved: WHS Outlook Graphical User Interface re-sizes to fill entire console
• Improved: WHS Outlook Connector now gives tray notification messages for reminders
• Improved: WHS Outlook initialization and architecture
• Fixed: “Switch Profile” functionality
• Fixed: Problem with opening URLS on the client that contained a pipe “|” character
• Fixed: Many other fixes, enhancements, and miscellaneous code improvements

Screenshots

WHS Outlook - WHS Console access	WHS Outlook - Single-Sign-On	WHS Outlook - remote access home page
WHS Outlook - Web Site access - Settings	WHS Outlook - Web Site access - Open Items	WHS Outlook Settings - Advanced Settings
WHS Outlook Settings - Remote Desktop Connectivity	WHS Outlook Settings

Share Calendars

WHS Outlook can automatically setup your Windows Home Server as a WebDAV server allowing you to publish and consume Outlook calendars as Internet Calendars directly on your very own Windows Home Server. Second, WHS Outlook now supports SharePoint site integration allowing you to use SharePoint's "Connect to Outlook" feature from within WHS Outlook so that you can access all of your SharePoint Lists (i.e. shared calendars, contacts, tasks, etc.) from within Outlook. WHS Outlook takes care of all the dirty details for you behind-the-scenes allowing you to focus on getting your work done instead of having to spend time configuring your home server.

For more information: Calendar Sharing in WHS Outlook - Part 1: WebDAV Publishing & Internet Calendars

"Send Attachment (to client)"

This feature of WHS Outlook has been completely rewritten to provide better integration with Outlook 2007 and 2010 (it works with Outlook 2002 and 2003 as well). When accessing the "Send Attachment (to client)" command from any e-mail message that contains attachments, you are now presented with a dialog box that lists out all of the e-mail message's attachments allowing you to select which of the attachments you would like to send over to your client computer:

"Sounds"

The "Sounds" command brings up the standard "Sounds and Audio Device Properties" Control Panel applet (opened up to its Sounds tab) allowing you to add, remove, or change the sounds being used by WHS Outlook.

Improved Console Exerience

When running WHS Outlook via the WHS Console it now re-sizes to fill the entire size of the Condole window giving you even more room to work in Outlook within the limited confines of the Console.

A Quantum Leap Forward

To date, most Windows Home Server add-ins fit into the administrative and media-centric user-interaction space. WHS Outlook differs that it actively provides a productivity platform.  WHS Outlook offers a wealth of new and improved functionality but the first thing you’ll notice about WHS Outlook (when used with Microsoft’s new Outlook 2010 software) is the new and much smoother user interface and overall seamless integration.

The new version of WHS Outlook works with Outlook 2010, 2007, 2003, and 2002. However, the new calendar sharing features will only work with the newer Outlook 2010 and 2007 versions.

It can be downloaded here

When you go to BingTweets, you’ll see two separate sections on the site – a larger window on the right for Bing searches and a thinner sidebar on the left where Twitter search results appear. To begin a search, you simply type your query in the Bing search box just as you would when performing a typical search. Once your results appear, you’ll notice that the Tweets column is updated too with Twitter search results containing your keyword or search terms.

Even better, the Twitter search results update in real-time! The tweets in the sidebar are constantly in motion as new results are posted to the service, so you don’t have to refresh the page or column to see the latest. That’s already a notch above Twitter’s own engine at search.twitter.com where you’re forced to click the “refresh” link when new tweets are available.

BingTweets manages to top Twitter’s “trending topics” section, too. Twitter’s trends section features a handful of the top words, phrases, and hashtags being posted on Twitter – often getting diluted with spammy marketing hashtags and other silly tags a group of folks thought it would be fun to promote. BingTweets does trends a little differently…and arguably better, if you ask me.

They’ve divided the trends into different categories like People, Places, and Products as well as a “Popular Now” category, which is more like Twitter’s own trends. Also, the topics within each section are presented in a tag cloud style so hotter topics with more tweets are larger and fading topics with less tweets are smaller. This is useful for knowing exactly which topics are trending up and down.

It’s interesting to compare BingTweets with Twitter trends, too, since they don’t feature quite the same info. For example, the hashtag #iranelection is still showing as a trending topic on Twitter but it wasn’t on BingTweets. Alternately, BingTweets featured two variations of “All Star Game” (last night’s big Major League Baseball event) but Twitter does not.

Finally, a box at the top of the BingTweets page lets you share your search results either through tweeting a link to that BingTweets page or on other social media services via a “Share This” button.

As with everything Bing, the best experience is currently US based (just set your Bing location prefences to United States) however a Europe wide rollout is planned to arrive "shortly" 

 Watch this space for updates..

A fantastic new way in Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 to gather information on how your server is performing with your storage…

We recently compared the performance of the Exchange 2010 Client Access role supporting Outlook Anywhere users on both Windows 2008 SP2 and Windows 2008 R2, and found that the improvements the Windows Team has made in R2 more than doubles the number of concurrent users a given server can support, assuming CPU is the limiting resource.

Our Client Access Server was an 8-core Xeon server (2L5335 Xeon 4-core processors @2 GHz, a 2007 chip design) running on Windows 2008 R2 with 16 GB of RAM. It was supported by: two servers running the Mailbox role, with 16 databases per server; a Hub Transport server; and an Active Directory server.

Users were simulated from 10 client machines, running Exchange Load Generator 2010, using the Outlook 2007 Cached module and the OutlookAnywhere_100 profile (formerly known as the 'Heavy Profile' - 20 sends and 80 receives per day).

We found the CPU consumed per user (MHz/user) increased linearly on both Windows 2008 SP2 and Windows 2008 R2. However, as shown on the graph below, the slope is 10 times smaller on Windows 2008 R2. The cost of the Exchange processes, dominated by the Microsoft.Exchange.RPCClientAccess.Service process, was independent of operating system.

The Windows RPC/HTTP team has made many performance fixes in R2, so the dramatic improvement compared to Windows 2008 SP2 is expected. Since the improvements are in the operating system, we expect the same improvement with Exchange 2007 SP3.

Since we have an increasing cost/user, to make predictions about the total CAS CPU consumed we fit the data with a parabola. We consider the server 'full' when it runs at 75% total CPU, or in this case when 12 GHz is consumed. From these fits we estimate that on Windows 2008 R2 this server could support about 14,000 Outlook Anywhere Users, compared to about 6,500 on Windows 2008 SP2. Note that this assumes that CPU is the limiting resource on the Client Access Server, and as there is uncertainty in any projection we strongly advise you to run your own tests before putting servers into production.

This operating system comparison was done using Basic Auth. A comparison between Basic and NTLM authentication on Windows 2008 R2 results in a very small 2% reduction in Outlook Anywhere users supported.

The cost per user of the other roles, all running Window2008 SP2, was basically flat above 3,000 users (only data from the CAS R2 Basic Auth runs are included here) so sizing those roles is straightforward.

Similar runs targeting other protocols (Outlook, Outlook Web Access, Internet Mail Access Protocol 4 (IMAP4), Exchange Web Services (Entourage simulation), Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) and Exchange ActiveSync) showed no differences between the two operating systems. However, if you are supporting Outlook Anywhere users, Windows 2008 R2 is definitely the operating system to use.

These results will be included in an upcoming TechNet whitepaper on Exchange 2010 CAS Guidance.

Take a look at the Updates Tracking page to see what is changed and  download the revised version. 

The main article has also been updated.

When you add a new entity to the permissions window, PFDAVAdmin looks up all objects with that SID to make sure it is unique. However, in some cases it’s actually normal to have more than one object with an ObjectSid that matches the Everyone or Anonymous SID. You should always have one in the configuration context under CN=WellKnown Security Principals, but many environments will also have one in the domain context under CN=Foreign Security Principals. This is when PFDAVAdmin finds two matches for these SIDs, and it chokes.

If you’re getting this error with something other than Everyone or Anonymous, then you can use the following Powershell script to figure out which objects match the SID in question.

# Find-Sid.ps1
#
# The purpose of this script is to find all objects that have a
# given SID in objectSid, sidHistory, or msExchMasterAccountSid.
#
# Syntax:
#
# .\Find-Sid <sid>
#
# Example:
#
# .\Find-Sid S-1-1-0

param([string]$sidString)

$gcRootDSE = [ADSI]"GC://RootDSE"
$gcRoot = [ADSI]("GC://" + $gcRootDSE.dnsHostName)

$sid = new-object System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier($sidString)
[byte[]]$sidBytes = ,0 * $sid.BinaryLength
$sid.GetBinaryForm($sidBytes, 0)

$byteString = ""
for ($x = 0; $x -lt $sidBytes.Length; $x++)
{
    $byteString = $byteString + "\" + $sidBytes[$x].ToString("X2")
}

$filter = "(|(objectSid=" + $byteString + ")(sidHistory=" + $byteString + ")(msExchMasterAccountSid=" + $byteString + "))"
$searcher = new-object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($gcRoot, $filter, @("distinguishedName"), [System.DirectoryServices.SearchScope]::Subtree)
$results = $searcher.FindAll()

"Matching objects:"
foreach ($result in $results)
{
    $result.Properties["distinguishedname"]
}