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Creating a New User in Smarter Mail 9

Here are the steps to create a new user in Smarter Mail 9 Enterprise. Add New Email Address 1. Log into the webmail interface. webmail.domain.com as a mail administrator. 2. After Login, select the Settings Icon from the left hand menu. 3. Expand Domain Settings and Select Users. 4. From the Main Window, select New. 5. Fill in new user details with the following format. User Name:  firstname.lastname Pass: secure password Display Name: FirstName LastName Reply-To Email Address: firstname.lastname@domain.com Backup Email Address: Optional (Use Existing personal address of user if filled in) User Status: Enabled Mailbox Size Limit: 50 MB Enable Outgoing Mail Signing: Enabled 6. Click Save when complete.

Captivate SCORM reporting completed but not passed

Captivate SCORM Problems We have been playing in depth lately with some some of the Captivate SCORM outputs in an effort to better understand the SCORM Compliance and where Captivate falls down in this area. What we have found is very interesting and needs to be explained in detail to understand. The Problem Until recently, anyone who wanted to author SCORM-compliant content had few choices. Not many authoring programs existed and the technical knowledge to create compliant content was and, in fact, still is beyond the reach of most training developers. Now there are many affordable, easy to use content authoring programs to create SCORM-compliant content that can be deployed to learning management systems (LMS). Adobe, a leader in the multimedia authoring and programming industry, has recently thrown their hat into the ring and released Adobe Captivate – a SCORM-compliant authoring tool that includes screen capture, simulation, automated testing and… Read More »Captivate SCORM reporting completed but not passed

Remote Desktop mstsc.exe slow will not start windows 7

Had a painful problem today with the mstsc.exe application in Windows 7 64 Bit Ultimate today. An otherwise happy install suddenly failing to start, or if is started it would be very slow. Once started, it would not close from the task manager, even if I killed the process with the end process. Initially I suspected that it was possibly a virus etc. However I found that there are a lot of people on the net with this exact problem. I then set about a solution, and figured on out myself, that involves replacing some of the files use by the MSTSC.EXE application. Basically there are 4 files that I replaced with the same version from another computer that was functional and healthy. They are: c:\windows\system32\ MSTSCAX.dll MSTSC.exe c:\windows\system32\EN-US\ MSTSCAX.dll.mui MSTSC.exe.mui I would create a .zip copy for download except I fear giving out some stored connection settings in the… Read More »Remote Desktop mstsc.exe slow will not start windows 7

Disable SSL 2.0 IIS 7 Windows 2008 64bit with CRM 2011 for PCI Compliance

PCI Failure Today we received notification during a PCI compliance check that our Microsoft CRM 2011 server was not PCI Compliant. The cause of the lack of compliance was due to the server accepting connections via an SSL v 2.0 protocol. Synopsis : The remote service encrypts traffic using a protocol with known weaknesses . Description : The remote service accepts connections encrypted using S S L 2.0, which reportedly suffers from several cryptographic flaws and has been deprecated for several years . An attacker may be able to exploit these issues to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks or decrypt communications between the affected service and clients . See also : http://www.schneier.com/p Download File – ZipSource aper-ssl.pdf Solution: Consult the application’s documentation to dis able S S L 2.0 and us e S S L 3.0 or TLS 1.0 instead. Risk Factor: Medium / CVS S Bas e S core : 2… Read More »Disable SSL 2.0 IIS 7 Windows 2008 64bit with CRM 2011 for PCI Compliance

SMTP Authentication–I Can Only Send Email to My Domain

One of the most common problems experienced by users of hosted email services is that they find they can only send email messages to their own domain. For Example, if you have two hosted email addresses: ted@mybusiness.com john@mybusiness.com You find that you can successfully send an email message from one user to another, but when you try to send to any other domain: anything@hotmail.com You find that the email messages do not send. Solution You need to enable “Authentication” in your configured email account settings. There are many client email programs, probably the most common is Outlook. When you configure an new POP3 email account you normally end up with something that looks like this: If you click on More Settings / Outgoing Server and just tick the option to use the same settings as the incoming mail server. This is all that is needed to enable outbound SMTP authentication.… Read More »SMTP Authentication–I Can Only Send Email to My Domain

CRM 2011 XRM Performance Problem IIS Dynamic Compression

Microsoft CRM 2011 allows XRM services that use application/soap+xml content type. When you install Microsoft CRM 2011 in an IFD / hosted environment, it is smart enough to automatically configure IIS gzip compression on the website. What it does not do, is configure the C:\Windows\System32\Inetsrv\Config\applicationHost.config file to compress XRM calls out of the CRM database. In a test we were performing for an update to our Microsoft CRM 2011 Portal technology, we found that retrieving a list of around 20,000 items returned a 19 MB data package without gzip dynamic compression. Not huge but pretty big! What amazed us was that after enabling dynamic compression on the XRM data, this reduced from 19 MB to 890 KB, a huge performance improvement! We also noticed that the Microsoft Hosted CRM 2011 service already has this compression enabled, so we figured if it is good enough for them, then we should give… Read More »CRM 2011 XRM Performance Problem IIS Dynamic Compression

How to stop – Only secure content is displayed in IE9 message

If you use IE9, you must be familiar with this message: “Only secure content is displayed.” This kind of messages are implemented by Microsoft because they want to inform you that you are about to access some unsecured content on a website. This is actually a security purpose message. Unfortunately, this kind of messages are more often annoying or unnecessary than useful. Internet explorer show this message when the same website page contain both secured and unsecured content: in this way, some unsecured scripts may have access to secured data on that page. Same thing happens when you play a game (unsecured scripts) on Facebook and want to publish that game information on your wall (secured action). 1. Launch Internet Explorer. 2. Go to Tools -> Internet Options. Then, navigate to Security tab. 3. Click on “Custom level” button. 4. Search for “Display mixed content” under Miscellaneous section. Change it… Read More »How to stop – Only secure content is displayed in IE9 message

Microsoft CRM 2011 How to Configure IFD Hosted Setup

[gard]Like many, we have struggled to configure Microsoft CRM 2011 as an Internet Facing Deployment. There is quite a bit of disjointed and some what typical Microsoft “junk” on how to set this up.So after reading the White Papers, blogs and YouTube videos on the topic, I figured I would need notes for myself as much as anything. This is mostly because I am yet to find one single example that covered the setup I was after. That being:Single ServerOn an existing domainRunning true IFD ready for customer access.The last point it telling, as all the Microsoft examples give a self generated SSL cert, that really is an example of a DEV environment only. We want to test the “real deal”, and don’t mind spending a few $ on a real Certificate to see this in a true working environment.If you need support upgrading Microsoft CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011… Read More »Microsoft CRM 2011 How to Configure IFD Hosted Setup

Using a Hex (html) color code as a UIColor

We had a requirement to read from a plist a hex color code eg. #168240 and translate that to update a navigation controller’s navigation bar background color. Below are two ways that were presented.   First (not the best) was this method using a macro, but this wasn’t obvious to us how to use it with an NSString value for the color code (we couldn’t hard code it). //RGB color macro #define UIColorFromRGB(rgbValue) [UIColor \ colorWithRed:((float)((rgbValue & 0xFF0000) >> 16))/255.0 \ green:((float)((rgbValue & 0xFF00) >> 8))/255.0 \ blue:((float)(rgbValue & 0xFF))/255.0 alpha:1.0] and then use in code like this: tintColor = UIColorFromRGB(0x168240);   Second (preferred) was to create a method that returns a UIColor with parameters allowing for an NSString to be passed. -(UIColor *) colorForHex:(NSString *)hexColor { hexColor = [[hexColor stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet: [NSCharacterSetwhitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]                  ] uppercaseString];          // String should be 6 or 7 characters if it includes ‘#’     … Read More »Using a Hex (html) color code as a UIColor

Problems with Windows Closing Programs and Logging off

Microsoft Fail of the Week! – Where are they going with all this? I’m rather sick of Microsoft “fixing” things in version updates to Windows. Here is one I just love to hate. I’m RDP into a server. Doing some server work. I finish and click log off. (Windows 2008 R2) I get a confirmation about it. – YES I get another confirmation about it – YES and Force Then is just sits there forever. Now I remote check the server performance. Guess what. the server load is through the roof. And stays that way for a considerable amount of time. Remote shutdown is disabled, and failing. The machine is in some sort of Microsoft Hell. Now it may be me, but did programs not shutdown correctly for like the last 15 years of Microsoft Windows, when you logged off. As a server administrator, am I so daft that I… Read More »Problems with Windows Closing Programs and Logging off

Alternatives to SVN Subversion for xCode Development

Do you need SVN or is there another way to manage code? We use and manage an SVN server dedicated to our xCode development, but mostly because we can, not because we need to. We have the servers, knowledge and experience to do this so we did. I thought I would suggest another way to share code among multiple developers, and still keep thorough backups of all the things you need. There are a few exceptions and we will list them first. 1. Technically SVN allows for two people to work on the same code at the same time, and for those changes to be mashed together. Sort of. However this is not really the case. SVN does such a lame job of mashing when compared to some TFS systems we have used for years, that we would advise strongly against thinking it will solve this problem. For this reason,… Read More »Alternatives to SVN Subversion for xCode Development

xCode 4 and SVN subversion server IP address change

Recently we needed to change IP addresses on our SVN subversion server. We have blogged before about the SVN xCode Tips here. What we did now though was to change the IP address of the SVN subversion server after we had already configured the connection to the server on our Mac computers. The change process was surprising to us, and here is why. 1. We fully expected to have to much around with the entire connection thing. We were ready to refer to our above blog and re-establish connections. 2. When we fist established the new IP, and verified that it had propagated to the updated DNS listings etc, we found that xCode did not connect. By chance we were short of time. So we rebooted the computers, and tried again. Still verifying that the IP resolved correctly etc. No joy! With time constraints that day, we put it down… Read More »xCode 4 and SVN subversion server IP address change