Andy Kemp

I recently came across an add on for Internet Explorer called IE7 Pro v2.4.4. To be honest I haven't really played around with plugin's and add-on's for IE as most of the time I do that with Firefox.

However this one caught my eye as it has a spell checker for IE, which is one of the features I use the most on Firefox! I fin them a life saver some times!

After installing it and finding the spell checker works the same way as the one in Firefox I was pretty happy with that.

I then discovered that you can assign URL Alias's so all you need to do is in the address bar type the alias, ie just put in kemponline and hit enter and I am immediately take to www.kemponline.co.uk. As that was an address already in my recently visited sites I thought that I would try one that was not in there, so I put in johnlewis as an Alias and assigned that to www.johnlewis.co.uk and it worked.

I haven't got round to looking at all the features yet but so far I think that is is very good

It can be downloaded from www.ie7pro.com

Happy New Year

I recently deployed my first live Windows 2008 Server. I say live it is a production server but it is for IT and for management tools such as HP System Insight Manager and Dell Open Manage.

After installing it I decided to enable the desktop Experience and it all worked fine, logging on to the console of the server and setting the Theme to Vista worked a treat. However when I logged on Via RDP it didn't seem to like it and I when I tried to set it back to Vista Basic I got an error message and the Theme Service not running, but it was!

After looking around and seeing what I could find it turns out that just over a remote desktop you cannot use this feature. If you want to use it then you need to configure it as a full blown Terminal Server. It is something to do with the DWM (Desktop Windows Manager) This will only work on the physical console of the server or over TS not RDP, Shame as you can RDP from a vista PC to a Vista PC and it works fine. I guess that this is one of Microsoft's Many features.

We have finally got all our problems sorted with the Mimecast Connector. For some reason we were getting an error when closing outlook:

The Error message I thought was referring to a third party plug-in in Outlook and in this case that plug-in was the Mimecast connector for Outlook. When I started Outlook with the Mimecast Connector disabled and then closed Outlook down it closed with no errors.

After spending lots of time on the phone with Mimecast and what seemed endless investigation into our Group Policies and Profiles it turned out that the error was actually being caused by a macro in Outlook that was used to call up a custom form.

So now we have finally got this sorted we are finally ready to push the connector to the rest of our Pilot users.

The latest version of the connector has the VC++ Runtime Libraries included with in the MSI file so it makes the push out a lot easier, all we need to do is assign a new package through GPO and push it down that way.

With the earlier versions of the deployment I pushed the user configuration details using the DeployMimecast.exe. This would allow me to specify the services we use, the user name and it then prompted the users to input their email address. so once they opened up outlook the Mimecast connector prompted the user for their AD Password.

However with the new version of the connector I noticed that just through opening up outlook once you had installed the Connector you were prompted for your email address, username and password. It automatically populates the services dependant on your domain, and that's it the user is now configured for the outlook connector, all he/she needs to do is restart outlook for the new account to take affect and then they are sorted.