I’ve been involved with cloud IT for over 12 months and I am still impressed at how the services just run; no fuss, no hassle, they just run. Sure there has been one outage with the Nuage hosted email service (I guess that’s why service levels are at 99.9% rather than 100%), when the data centre lost power, but within 20 minutes, it was back up and running. The Nuage file server is similarly humming along. However the most gratifying service level is to do with Nuage’s voice over ip (VOIP) service. The VOIP service is, I think, the one that relates to people’s emotions more than the others. The reason for this is that the others are managing data, whereas with VOIP, you are speaking with another person in real time, possibly a customer, and the last thing you want is for the call to be poor quality, or to drop out mid-stream. That’s why we’re really pleased that the Nuage VOIP service has been running without any hitch or complaint so far, and hopefully will continue.
Twitter It!hosted exchange
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Service levels remain at 99.9%
Friday, March 12th, 2010Opening a delgated email account in Outlook 2007
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009Delegate email accounts are where someone has delegated access to their email to someone else. We use it as a way for people to have access to more than one exchange account in one Outlook profile. You also need to add a POP account for sending email – note that you must set the POP account to be used for “Sending only” otherwise duplicate emails start appearing! Further details below.
The instructions below are for Outlook 2007.
Delegate access
Go to “Tools -> Account settings” in Outlook:
Outlook 2007 Account Options
Double click on the Exchange account:
Outlook 2007 Change Account Settings
Click on “More settings”:
Outlook 2007 More Settings for Exchange account
Click on “Advanced”:
Outlook 2007 Advanced Exchange Settings
Click “Add” next to “Open these additional mailboxes”:
Outlook 2007 add additional exchange mailbox
Unfortunately Outlook does not give you a search facility for finding the mailbox. Type in part of the persons name which uniquely identifies them.
Once the name has been found, click ok, and the mailbox will appear in your email navigation pane.
Outlook 2007 delegate mailbox showing in navigation pane
Sending on behalf of
If you also want to send on behalf of the other person, then set up a new pop account in the usual way, however change the send and receive settings by going to:
Tools -> Send / Receive -> Send / Receive Settings -> Define Send / Receive Groups
Outlook 2007 Send / receive Settings
Click “Edit”:
Outlook 2007 Send / Receive Account Settings
Ensure that “Send mail items” is checked and “Receive mail items” is not checked.
Click “OK”.
Twitter It!Outlook 2007 prompting for old exchange account details
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009We recently switched a customer from 1and1 hosted exchange email to our services. The transition was smooth apart from one thing; Outlook for some reason kept prompting for the 1and1 account credentials. We tried the following:
- Calling the 1and1 helpdesk. All they said was that deleting the exchange account on 1and1 would break the link. I tried to reason that deleting the 1and1 account wouldn’t stop my computer trying to connect, however the conversation wasn’t going anywhere so I politely said thankyou.
- Creating a new profile.
- Disabling Outlook add-ins. This is a great page describing various Outlook command line switches.
- Deleting RSS feeds – we were concerned that RSS some caching of RSS may be connecting back to 1and1.
- Re-booting the computer.
- Re-installing Outlook.
No joy. Next step was to find out what Outlook was trying to connect to. We found fiddler which is a great utility that shows you all http traffic going in and out of your computer.
Installation was a snap. Below were the requests of interest:
Fiddler http requests
Notice that the first two requests are to autodiscover.centella.co.uk and then it tries to connect to exchange.1and1.co.uk.
Autodiscover is a new facility in Outlook 2007, that helps configure Outlook clients. It should just give up if there is no response – there is certainly no autodiscover credentials at autodiscover.centella.co.uk, so why does it try to go to exchange.1and1.co.uk?
John Savill wrote this article on how to force Microsoft Outlook to look at a particular autodiscovery server.
We checked the regsitry entry that John mentions in his post and in there was a link to an XML file which was redirecting requests to exchange.1and1.co.uk. Bingo! Removing the key solved the problem and we no longer get the password prompt. We can only assume that the XML file was created when the 1and1 hosted exchange account was setup.
Registry key pointing to file controlling auto discover
Regsitry Key value
Contents of XML file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Autodiscover xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/autodiscover/responseschema/2006">
<Response xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/autodiscover/outlook/responseschema/2006a">
<Account>
<AccountType>email</AccountType>
<Action>redirectUrl</Action>
<RedirectUrl>https://Exchange.1and1.co.uk/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml</RedirectUrl>
</Account>
</Response>
</Autodiscover>
Twitter It! Changing Exchange account settings on Windows Mobile / Activesync
Monday, June 22nd, 2009I was moving someone from a 1and1 exchange account to a hosted exchange account and thought I had left the easy bit which was to configure the Windows Mobile device (a BT HTC device). I went in to start->activesync -> menu -> configure server. Typed in the new server address, clicked next and was surprised to see that I could not edit the user name or domain.
This threw me for a while. I started hitting google. For some reason I always seem to accidentally click on an “Experts Exchange” link. I have not got an account with Experts Exchange and I don’t think I ever will. The idea of an account spoils the spirit of the Internet in my mind and I’ve been very dogmatic about avoiding creating an account. Luckily, there were various suggestions elsewhere on the Internet:
- Use activesync on the pc to change the settings. I couldn’t see where to do this.
- Hard reset the device. Seemed a bit brutal.
- Delete the account on the device and start again.
Option 3 seemed like a good one. However, how do you delete an Exchange account? Delete was greyed out.
What I did is this:
- Tell activesync on the device not to sync anything. Goto start-> activesync -> menu ->options. Uncheck all of the options. There will be warning messages saying that data will be deleted. This is ok as all the data is in Exchange.
- Now when you go to start -> messaging and highlight the exchange account, you will have the option to delete.
- Go back to activesync and enter your account details.
Nuage – Small Business IT services for the 21st Century
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009Quick announcement to say that our new venture now has a website – Nuage!!
Nuage - Business IT Services on demand in the cloud