Philip Storry's Website

I was browsing randomly at lunch today, and somehow ended up on the BBC Domesday Site.

So, I figured I'd have a look at what was happening in 1986 near where I live.

I soon found a link for "Adult Recreation", which turned out to be a lot less interesting than you'd think, so I've not linked to it.

Instead, I draw your attention to the marvel that is Children's Recreation.

It's drawn up from a local school, which I am now very glad I did not attend. But I would have been the right age to go to that school, if I wasn't already at one nearer to me. That's one of the reasons I'm sharing it with you.

I've reformatted and sorted the table for you, so that you can see it in a more elegant light.

The Shard is something I see almost every working day, as it's being built right next to a station on my commute.

This photo is atypical of most photos I've taken of it, or seen - it shows a cloud eclipsing the top of the building on an otherwise fine day.

I did consider making The Shard a longer term photo project, but in the end I realised I had too many other projects on the go. A pity, as it's been interesting to see this appear over time.

When lit up on a dark winter's evening, the final building will probably look very nice. Expect photos of that sometime next year!

A braindump of each day of the course is nice, but I'd like to tie it all up with a nice summary, so that I can move on and use this website for something more interesting than work...

From a Domino Administrator's point of view, Exchange 2010 is the best version of Exchange yet.

 
It has to be looked at from a viewpoint of "just mail", of course.

But from that viewpoint, it has solved many problems. Its high availability features are excellent. It takes great pains to make it very difficult to lose data. Its general architecture, whilst heavy on Windows licenses, is sound.

Nothing is perfect. But Exchange is, at its core, at least as good for email as Domino is - maybe better. It depends on your exact needs.

A smorgasbord of topics on the final day...

(Apologies for the delayed write-up - I had a busy social weekend.)

Journaling
We need an Enterprise CAL to journal individuals? Really?
Otherwise, it seems OK if basic - you simply get a copy sent to another mailbox as well. No hassle for the user at all...

Multi-mailbox Search
Nice.
Easy to enable, easy to do searches - although dependent on the web-based Exchange Control Panel, so via the web only.
Remind me to hide this from the Compliance/Security/HR, as they'll no doubt bring servers to their knees with this feature!

Retention Tags and Policies
A rather nice way of tagging content to say both how long and why you're keeping something, as well as what should happen once the retention period is reached.

A good day, in which we covered high availability, backup/restore and security.

Topics which have been a major part of my career, so I have more to say today. (Sorry!)

High Availability - Databases
It isn't using Windows Clustering.
Do you have any idea how good that is? Windows Clustering is awful. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen it fail to work properly. Why anyone uses it is beyond me.
Instead, Exchange 2010 uses multiple Client Access Servers at the front end to keep things highly available to clients, and multiple database locations to keep the data available to those clients. It's pretty slick. In the lab, failover was instant and seamless.

You don't have to install with this high availability - it's there by default for the Client Access Server role, and when you make a Database Availability Group the relevant components are installed and activated seamlessly. So you can move up to it very easily.