Black Mountain

In a given environment there can be many short term solutions that over time grow into long term headaches. We have a situation where we need to provide access to RDP sessions through Citrix. The original solution by previous admins was to create a custom RDP icon configured to the server in question and publish it in Citrix. This resulted in a rather 'busy' screen in Citrix and intermittant update issue.

A co-worker asked about PowerShell doing this and I said something off handed about Windows Forms to generate a menu selection should be do-able. He found a nice Windows.Forms example and then did a hard coded elseif menu (which seemed as bad as all the links to me). I came up with an improvement where we pulled the server/ip list from a file and used Select and Eric Woodford added a nicer $choice option with the added bonus of turning the line for launching RDP into a variable. This is good because we have a similar issue with putty links. This should wipe out 80 some odd custom published Citirx apps.

Came across this link on Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support. This shows as a visual the reality of what happens in the Android eco-system. The iPhone has the advantage of being owned as a vertical platform across it's hardware and software (I rather dislike iTunes so it's not really an option for me).

While the Windows Phone is not on the chart, as a contrast we have this post Updates: Windows Phone 7.5 now available more broadly. This shows how much effort it is to have a diversity of hardware platforms yet a consistency of versions in a global market yet they are doing it. Add in things like the integrated hubs and that everything just flows together more seemlessly for me, it ends being the obvious choice.

Microsoft continues to travel a path of having all it's users have a consistent core experience, yet still maintain a diversity of hardware choice.

Found via Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support

We are beginning to transition to Windows 7 across the Enterprise, which is nice and change is often a time to revisit some basic tools and short comings.

Our support center currently fields basic calls from users on mailbox issues. Currently they are using the Exchange 2007 Admin tools which after about 6 clicks gets them most of the information they need, usually. It does miss mailbox size limits as generally that is set on a store level and on the account screen says merely 'default' and we have different sizes depending on job function.

We also run into the occasional issue of multiple accounts found based on our naming policy those then have to be filtered out based on looking closer at account infomration. I hacked together this quick function to provide basic information with one command and no need for the GUI.

Here's the output

PS:\> Check-MailBox jdoe
 
        Display Name:  John Doe
      Mailbox Server:  mailserver01
 
       Issue Warning:  219 MB
       Prohibit Send:  244 MB
Storage Limit Status:  BelowLimit
 
Current Mailbox Size:  220 MB