Here’s the environment that I’ve tested this on;

• Windows Server 2003 R2 with all service packs
• Exchange Server 2003 SP2 with all service packs
• BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.1.6.10

Other items you’ll need;

• 1 spare Exchange CAL per user
• 1 spare BES CAL per user
• Spare BlackBerry handset – I’ve used 8310, 8320 and 9000
• Spare BES actived SIM

How it works

1. Create a new user in Active Directory (I used firstname2@domain.com for the email address)
2. Create a new user on your BES Server and select firstname2@domain.com for that user
3. Activate the spare BlackBerry with the SIM for firstname2@domain.com
4. Finally enable email forwarding from the first account to the 2nd account

New email will start flowing to the 2nd BlackBerry as Exchange forwards it from the primary account to the secondary account.  Personal Address Book synchronisation can be achieved through a manual export and import, and the same with calendars.

Pitfalls

• 2 mobile phone numbers, although one can be put on permanent divert to the other
• 2 SMS locations – SMS messages cannot be routed from one SIM to another at the network level
• Calendars – you’ll need to invite two users (firstname and firstame2) to the same meetings so the the entry appears on both handsets
• 2 BlackBerry Messenger clients – this has caused confusion, with some people deleting the primary contact once the second handset added them
• Handset rebuild – if you need to rebuild the primary or secondary handset, you MUST DISABLE email forwarding, otherwise the activation process on the handset doesn’t complete

Conclusions

This is by  no means an easy solution.  However if your users demand a 2nd handset for emergency email, it is possible.  Set the expectations right, and this just might save your bacon.

The launch of the iPhone 3G S has meant that execs are starting to compare it with the iconic BlackBerry Bold, and in some cases, switch to the iPhone completely since it negates the need for an iPod and a BlackBerry.  This in itself means that there will be more iPhone related support requests, and the need to perform hands on support with the device.

If LogMeIn Rescue+Mobile could remote control the iPhone, it would be an easy justification to buy the software.

The bad news is that it can’t.

After speaking with a LogMeIn tech based in the Netherlands, it was made clear that LogMeIn have approached Apple to do this, but Apple have refused.  I commented that it would be interesting to know if LogMeIn had submitted an app through the App Store and if Apple had refused it, and on what grounds.  I further stated that if LogMeIn users knew that the app would  work and iPhone remote control was technically feasible, there would be uproar from LogMeIn users.

The tech very eloquently replied that there might be litigation issues with comments from LogMeIn about this.

I’ve been using LogMeIn Ignition on the iPhone to control other computers for about a month now, and I have to say it’s a great product.  Knowing that I can get to any machine on my account from the iPhone is a real time saver, and users see the benefits immediately.  I don’t think it takes a great leap of imagination to think that LogMeIn haven’t developed an iPhone remote client app, and I feel that it would allow large organisations the opportunity to roll-out en-masse the iPhone handset knowing that hands-on support is just a phone call away.

I hope that Apple and LogMeIn can come to some sort of agreement in the future for this, as right now, it’s the only thing keeping me from buying LogMeIn Rescue+Mobile.

There’s been a couple of interesting articles about an Apple tablet device to be ready for Christmas 09 from the Financial Times and PC World.  On the surface, this looks like a device that will offer extra media content with enhanced sleeve-notes from artists, and extras that are found on DVD and Blu-ray disks today.

Looking solely at the device, the iPhone already has many of the technologies required to make this product a reality.  The touch-screen is currently the best for any mobile device, and porting this to a device with a 10″ screen wouldn’t be a technological problem.

The larger screen would however need more battery power, but with Apple’s experience in delivering built-in batteries with a 7 hour capacity for the MacBook Air and the new 13″ MacBook Pro, again this isn’t a problem.

Solid-state hard drives have been around for a while and again are an option across the MacBook range.

OSX has scaled from Mac Pro through Apple TV to the iPhone, so creating a derivative for this new device is also feasible.

From an engineering perspective, the creation of the device and the operating system are possible.  The question I’ve been discussing with people is ‘why would I want one?‘

At the moment I don’t think the Amazon Kindle or the Sony Reader are enough to make me want to give up the feel of paper, and I don’t think Apple’s offering will do much to change that if eBooks are their primary goal.

What about music and video?  My iPhone handles everything I need it to, and I’m happy watching movies on the 3.5″ screen while travelling.

What about the touch-screen tablet being better than all the rest?  Tablets have always suffered from input problems.  Apple clearly have an advantage in the wealth of experience gleaned through the iPhone development process, but touch tablets appear more a commercial device (for stock control or medical notes), than a consumer device.

On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be many compelling reasons to build this device.  But Apple has a pedigree of creating revolutionary technology, and it’s underneath the surface that the interesting possibilities lie.

As reported by AppleInsider, in 2004 Apple filed a patent for the ‘integrated sensing display‘  which is basically a way of capturing images using a technology hidden behind the screen.  Remember all those iPhone 3G rumours about a forward-facing camera and iChat on the iPhone?  Well this patent was the trigger.

When the iPhone 3G S launched in July there were many disappointed people as the changes were evolutionary and not revolutionary.  However I think that the integrated sensing display technology was probably too big to fit in the hardware footprint of the iPhone shell.  No Apple exec will stand up and announce they’ve made a thicker iPhone, no matter what it can do.

Hence, a new device.  A touch screen computer combining the best of OSX, with the best of  iPhone hardware, wifi connectivity, potential Bluetooth tethering to an iPhone for 3G connectivity, and a webcam hidden behind the screen so that iChat video conferences feel like you’re looking eachother in the eye.

What we’re talking about isn’t just a tablet PC rival, it’s Apple.  Could portable, easy, video conferencing for the masses be Steve Jobs’ crowning glory?

The iPhone has much to answer for. It wasn’t long ago that I took pride in getting my laptop out on the train and watching a DVD either to or from work. But that’s so passé these days – if I can’t do it on my iPhone then it can’t be done.

However, the iPhone and other smartphone handsets wouldn’t be as attractive without the network behind it. The mere fact that I can sit on a train, use a touch-screen device to write a blog post and know that once I click ‘publish’ the network will just take care of it is incredible.

O2, Vodafone, and all carriers advancing their networks should be commended since they bring the connectivity we desire to the handsets we love.

The first guy I spoke to completely dismissed the idea; ‘rumour is part of Apple culture’ and quite right too. It’s clear that he didn’t want to say anything and I’m sure there’s some kind of non-disclosure that they sign up to.

For the 2nd guy I thought I’d try a different tac; ‘have you cleared much space in your warehouse for all the new iPhone handsets you’ll be receiving for the June launch?’ He looked a little stunned, possibly that I’d landed on the truth… in any case he neither confirmed or denied the existence of a new handset, but we danced around the reports of hackers finding links to video conferencing software in the 3.0 iPhone firmware beta.

After Twittering about a screenside webcam for the iPhone a couple of days ago, I got feedback that rumours abound that a new handset with a screenside camera exists.

Roll on June 09.

 My son loves his nano but yesterday the click-wheel stopped working. This evening I stopped by the Regent St store and managed to get a slot at the genius bar. It was diagnosed and as it was still in warranty, I was offered a replacement. However, they didn’t have any in stock, so I’m waiting for a call back (which I should receive by Friday 1st May).

In any case, I just wanted to say that it’s a great level of service, that the fault has been recognised and will be sorted essentially in store.

Top marks

I was comparing IPSwitch WhatsUp Gold with SolarWinds ipMonitor and found this little widget on the SolarWinds site.  The great thing is that it uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to monitor Exchange Server 2000 and 2003, although not Exchange Server 2008.  In real time you can see the status of the Exchange server services, mail queue sizes, and host server health indicators.

It sits in the taskbar with a green dot showing everything is normal, and changes accordingly to yellow and red as the real time status changes.

This is a great tool, but you’re kind of stuck if you have more than one Exchange server to monitor.  Still it’s worth a mention and could prove very useful to the SME sector where costs of management software is quite prohibitive.

SolarWinds provide other free tools, but again these are clearly openers to get users to become familiar with the interface and step up to the priced product offerings.

I have to say I’m impressed with the way the information is displayed, but ultimately am a WhatsUp Gold fan.  After experimenting with Spiceworks, and using HP Systems Insight Manager from the Compaq days, I have to say that I believe WhatsUp Gold to be a superb tool.

I’ll be covering WhatsUp Gold in more detail in a forthcoming post.

I had a look at Kingston for memory upgrades, and I’d need 2 x 2Gb  DIMMS to max out the momeory since there are 2 x 1Gb DIMMS installed, and the cost with delivery rolled in around £75.00

I’d seen the Windows ReadyBoost tab when I’d plugged in a couple of USB drives, but none of them were fast enough to be used as extra RAM.  I did some more research and found that the HP Pavilion supported SSD and Lexar had a ReadyBoost compatible SSD card.  In the interest of science I ordered a 16Gb card through Insight thinking that 16Gb would make a massive difference to the performance.

In all honesty it has, though I didn’t use the full 16Gb as Vista limits the amount it uses to 2 or 3 times the amount of physical RAM installed.  In my case, I have a 4Gb ReadyBoost cache file on the drive.  However, 12Gb is a great amount of storage for shuffling data between machines.  Last year I was backing up some user profiles but the network was too slow.  So I used the SSD card and the transfer times were quick.

There are 3 capacities for these particular SSD cards; 4Gb, 8Gb & 16Gb

I mentioned earlier that the 4Gb RAM upgrade was £75.00, well the 16Gb SSD card was £133.92 with all taxes and delivery.  While it’s almost double, there is built in scalability – when I eventually upgrade the laptop to 4Gb physical RAM, I can have an 8Gb cache file.

There are loads of devices out there that have the potential to use the ReadyBoost feature.  As a starting point you should consider Grant Gibson’s ReadyBoost Compatibility List.  The site has a list of over 1100 devices and lets you know if it’s compatible or not.

On the 10th July I decided that I wouldn’t be getting up early on the 11th July and queueing with the crazies.  However, I did go out to a Carphone Warehouse store at noon on Friday, only to be told that there were no 16Gb models left.  However, if I sighned up there and then I could have it couriered to me for Monday 14th july.  This seemed reasonable to me; I didn’t want to queue, andI already had a first generation iPhone so knew that I could upload the 2.0 firmware to that and have a look at the new features.

Only the iPhone 3G wasn’t delivered on Monday the 14th, I didn’t even get a phone call to let me know.  When I chased this on Tuesday, I was told to call central distribution.  On speaking to them, I was told that my iPhone would be with me by Friday 18th.  On Thursday 17th I received a phone call that it wouldn’t be with me until Friday the 25th, and would I like to opt for an 8Gb model instead since they had loads of those.  I contemplated this for an hour or so, and then said no, I’d wait for the 16Gb model.

In the end, it arrived on Monday 21st July.  It’s incredible that Apple didn’t foresee this demand and build more units.  Even if they delayed the worldwide rollout until 1st July, I’m sure they would have sold a lot more than the reported 1 million units in the first weekend.  There could be fiscal reasons for getting these sales into the 2nd quarter of 2008, or there could be the free international marketing from the frenzy outside the various Apple and carrier stores worldwide.

There are loads of reviews of the iPhone on the web, so I’m not going to do one here.  If you’ve never seen one, go and see one.  They’re great.  The Apps Store is a real addition to the iTunes Store, with loads of applications ready to download.  My favourites here are Bloomberg, WordPress for iPhone, Super Monkey Ball and PacMan.

I’ve renewed my £35 per month contract and paid £99 for the new iPhone.  At that price, I think they may well achieve serious market penetration.  I’ve been a long time fan of BlackBerry and Sony-Ericsson, but unless these devices morph into something similar to the iPhone, their market share will definitely fall.

  While there have been teething troubles getting this complete, I’m beginning to sense that  the various technologies are starting to gather together, to interoperate better, proving that you can get the best tools from each organisation and tie it all together.

For example, when I started my first blog with Blogger, you had to have the .blogspot.com domain name.  Now there’s no harm in that for people looking to create a blog or web presence for free, but once they offered forwarding through registered domain names, I purchased one immediately.  Not long after that, Google announced Google Apps, offering mail, calendar, webspace, docs and more – all for free, and a premier option if you need 99.99% guarantee of email availability.  Again, I signed up immediately for this, nad used Google to purchase my business domain name through GoDaddy.

  This is the first relationship I want to discuss – with Google using GoDaddy for domain names, they essentially took the confusion out of getting a domain and linking it to Google Apps.  Even if you only go for the free Google Apps account, GoDaddy get a domain name sale, and Google still has the opportunity to advertise at you.

Over the past few years, WordPress has gone from strength to strength with lots of serious websites using the software for the own webservers.  The creation of wordpress.com gave everyone without their own webserver the opportunity to create websites with professional tools.

Google has teamed up with WordPress creating a calendar widget.  And more recently there’s been developments for domains using WordPress nameservers to create MX records and have email directed to Google Apps Mail.

This is great news for the man on the street, and more importantly it’s great for these organisations.  Rather than diluting their skillsets with product diversification, they are building relationships giving them access to eachothers leading edge developments.

I’m really pleased with WordPress, and I’m disappointed that Blogger hasn’t developed as rapidly.