From what I understand the reason people get offended is that M$ implies there is something evil about making $$$.

I just get offended by people saying 'M$' because it paints the Linux community as a bunch of pimply-faced teenage dorks that think that calling Microsoft 'M$' is like the greatest insult in the world. I use Linux at work. It's a great developer platform. I use it t home for my server. Great at that, too. Just have a windows box for games. So you can call me a Linux geek... but I hate two things about the linux community:
Those that insult proprietary companies like a kid would
Those that insult others trying to learn Linux (if someone was to say "RTFM" to a newbie in real life, I'd kick him in the nards)

Really? 401k is a retirement, long-term investment. The market goes up and down, so unless you plan on cashing out your 401k TODAY or next year, I say now is the time to put MORE into the 401k. It's the stock market! When it's low, put in more money, when it's high sell off!

Never ever ever react to a sudden change in the stock market on a long term investment, unless it's something like enron...

I'm in the iPhone camp and have both of these apps on my iPhone.

The only reason I'd flip to android is that I can write java apps to the android... if you want to write an app to your iPhone, its objective-C, which I know you probably prefer, Barbie, but I'm a java guy ;)
Another advantage of iPhone is maturity. The androids are still level 1.0. I like to wait for the next gen (which is why I have an iPhone 3G, and never had the original iPhone).

LOL! Love the subject, johndiii :D

As with everyone, I'm surprised you lasted this long. A threat to pay is a last resort, company will fall out from under you if you leave, kind of threat, or a threat to someone you want to quit so you don't have to go through any company policy severance...

If you are looking for a job in the states, let me know. My company always appreciates a good developer, and we do placement jobs if you don't want consulting.

Yup... spiders kill the bugs that can carry disease and stuff. As long as they are like up in the ceiling or out of the way areas making webs, I let'm go...

I'm all for reform, but national vote count is a lot easier to corrupt than a bunch of district votes. Checks and balances are in place to prevent corruption. Why are we getting rid of them?

... now that messages are on the front page (or I just found them), I'm late to the party, but allow me to also say "I'm here if you need anything."

I'm a big believer in marriage, and I hope you've tried counseling with both of you before you (will or already have) hung it up.

Best of luck. This is a time thing... it'll take time to get through it all, and you never may get through it entirely, but know there are others out there to help you through it.

Agreed, but the MAPI/CDO client package is available as a free download. It's generally listed as a prerequisite for any application that requires it.

Not that much of an inconvenience, really.

powershell uses UTC with an offset for the locale; however, you can remove the offeset if you wish and retrieve UTC only; you can even apply unix-style formatting if you want.

Powershell is pretty friggin awesome once you scratch the surface...

I think you've muddled the MAPI client and MAPI protocol together, so i'll clarify for you: MAPI as a client access method (ie the MAPI protocol) is built-in, and turned on by default. For Outlook clients who are on the same network as your Mailbox server(s), this is the default connection method. The MAPI client bits, however, are not included in Exchange server anymore. Really the only thing that i've found that this affects is the ability to export mail to a PST when working directly on a mailbox server. It's been replaced by a number of powershell commands (export-mailbox, import-mailbox), and can still be done on workstations with Outlook installed (because the MAPI client bits are part of Outlook).

Exchange isn't an applications platform, and isn't billed as such. It's Groupware, period, full stop.

That's not to say that Exchange 5.5 wasn't billed as an apps platform, but that was 10 years ago. Things change, and your anecdote from 1998 can't possibly be expected to reflect the current state of affairs.

For what it's worth, Exchange can interact with external applications through the use of the Exchange Web Services API, which is a little difficult to grasp at times, but it's well documented on MSDN. We've developed several custom applications around the calendar interface in very short periods of time.

You're both correct, sort of.

Evolution uses Exchange Web Services to gather calendar data, and IMAP for messages.

There is, however, a MAPI add-on available, but the last time i checked it only worked with Exchange 2003. The IMAP+EWS combination works well, and is implemented in other mail applications - for example, the Mail app that comes with OS X.

You really should read up on Exchange Powershell: export-mailbox -identity username -startdate MMDDYYYY -enddate MMDDYYYY -targetfolder foo -targetmailbox username (or if you're daring, you can specify a PST file). and for mailbox sizes:

get-mailboxstatistics -identity username | select identity,totalitemsize

You could even script the two together, to identify mailboxes larger than, say, 1 GB and then export items older than 180 days...

$enddate = (get-date).AddDays(-180)
get-mailboxstatistics -resultsize unlimited | where-object{$_.totalitemsize -gt 1GB} | export-mailbox $_.alias -enddate $enddate -targetmailbox foo -targetfolder bar

Seriously, RTFM.

To further address your concerns about client compatibility...

Instead of using MAPI, which is admittedly a flawed and convoluted protocol, many mail clients are being developed to take advantaged of Exchange Web Services. The Mail app that ships with most versions of OS X uses IMAP to fetch mail from Exchange, and Exchange Web Services to work with the calendar. I believe that Evolution does something similar.

In the future, you'll see these same clients start to use EWS for mail as well. The newest version of Entourage will use EWS exclusively when dealing with Exchange servers (until recently, it used a MAPI implementation).