Lessons Learned

One of the “features” that I absolutely abhor about Outlook 2003 is the Reading Pane, and the fact that whenever you create a new mail profile, the reading pane is turned on by default.

Having had to go through this again this weekend, I rediscovered an old trick and learned a new one. Here they are:

Permanently Turning Off the Reading Pane:

1. Open the properties of the shortcut used to open Outlook (I modify the shortcut in the QuickLaunch toolbar)

2. In the “Target” field, add “/nopreview” to the end of the string used to launch Outlook.
3. Click Apply, then click OK.

Whee! No more reading pane!

Permanently Turning Off Grouping
[WARNING: the following describes a modification to the registry. Improper editing in the Registry can lead to a dead machine. If you don't know what you're doing in the registry, stay out. You have been warned.]

1. From Start->Run, type “outlook /cleanviews” and press Enter (Outlook should not already be open first).

2. Quit Outlook as soon as it comes up.
3. Open regedit and navigate to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Setup.
4. Create a new DWORD named AutoArrangeViews and set it to 0 (zero).
5. Close regedit and launch Outlook. No more arranged in groups!

As listed in the official SBS Team Blog, the SBS product team at Microsoft is looking for feedback from the SBS community at large to get input for the future of the product. Whether you are an SBS user or you support SBS for other folks, please take a moment to complete the survey. Took me about five minutes to complete.

Any chance the SBS community at large has to communicate through official channels with the product team at Microsoft is something we should jump on. Especially when the feedback has been officially requested.

Details of the process follow (taken directly from the official blog post - you can link there directly and follow the instructions from there if you choose). Please note that even though a Passport is required to get into the survey, it is there simply to validate access to the survey. It is not used to track what your responses are. The survey is completely anonymous.

The Small Business Server Product Team would like to hear from the SBS User Community. This direct anonymous survey of the SBS User Community is brought to you by the SBS Product Team.

You are invited to participate in the Windows Small Business Server Community program on the Microsoft Connect Web site at http://connect.microsoft.com. This site has been set up to directly gather feedback anonymously from the SBS User Community.

Your role in the SBS Community is important to us. Microsoft Connect enables you to connect with Microsoft developers, product managers, and other development team members to help us make our products the best they can be.

To accept this invitation and become a member of this program, please follow these steps:

1) Use your Internet connection to visit our Web site at http://connect.microsoft.com.
2) Click on “Invitations” on the left-side menu.
3) You will need to sign in using a valid Passport and before you can continue to the “Invitations” page.
4) Enter your Invitation ID in the blank.
Your invitation ID is: COMM-GKXK-WJKV
5) Click “Go.”
6) If you have not previously registered with Microsoft Connect, you may be required to register before continuing with the invitation process. This a light registration and we will not use any information that you provide to contact you later unless you tell us otherwise.

Please follow the steps shown to you by that program to become an active participant. Once you complete the steps, you will be automatically approved. From that point forward you should be able to log into this site using your passport account and take any surveys that are available to you.

Here is the link to the survey: SBS Community Survey. You will find this link on the main page of the http://connect.microsoft.com site under Small Business Server Community Site.

I originally posted this on my business-focus blog, but though it would be of interest to readers of this blog as well. This is the first post in a series on the new Intel-based Macs.

I have to admit that when I heard Apple was releasing a new series of Macs based on the Intel chip, I was a little befuddled. For years, one of the claims to fame of the PPC and G-series CPUs is that they ran circles around the Intel equivalents in terms of performance. Soon enough, I started hearing about how Apple had, once again, done a fabulous job of porting their entire solution to a completely different hardware structure (ala Motorola 68000 CPU architecture to PPC architecture) in a way that was seamless to the end user. Then there were reports that you could actually install Windows XP and run it on one of the Intel-based Macs, some reports indicating that Windows even ran better on an Intel-based Mac than on your average name-brand Windows-only PC.

Then two announcements caught my attention. The first came from Apple, introducing a public beta of a software known as Boot Camp. The second came from a company I had previously not heard of called Parallels, announcing a solution that would allow you to run non-Mac operating systems in a virtual environment on Intel-based Macs.

Needless to say, my curiosity was piqued, and I started my research. That, combined with several queries from my mixed environment clients, prompted me to acquire an Intel-based Mac and do my own research. What follows are my initial observations of the solutions.
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