Apple - Please figure out Calendaring. Everyone else, update to 6.1.2

by Ed Sparks

It's becoming almost a ridiculous sad joke.  Each new iOS release seems to bring a new round of calendaring bugs that cause havoc with Exchange and Activesync, and create no end of headaches for users and admins.

The latest example - the iOS 6.1, 6.1.1 fiasco - has taken it to a new extreme.

Apple needs to stop dripping with hubris about this stuff, and actually test their products consistently and properly.  The post-Steve Jobs downward trend is sad, and concerning.  One product after another is increasingly flawed.

Anyway </rant mode>

In the mean time - read about the iOS 6.1 mess here, then immediately go and update all your i-Devices to 6.1.2.  Then wait for 6.1.3 or 6.2 or whatever is going to fix the lock screen bug.  

Rapid growth in transaction logs, CPU use, and memory consumption in Exchange Server 2010 when a user syncs a mailbox by using an iOS 6.1 or 6.1.1-based device

iOS 6.1: Excess Exchange activity after accepting an exception to recurring calendar event

An Open Letter to Tim Cook

iPhone lockscreen can be bypassed with new iOS 6.1 trick

Goodbye imageX, hello DISM for Windows 8 Imaging and Deployment

by Ed Sparks
This article seems to be getting a tremendous amount of traffic!
Leave a comment with any suggestions or questions you might have about Windows 8 deployment.  Contact us for help with your project too!

A quick note for those starting to work with Windows 8 deployment, or just playing around with images.

ImageX has been flagged by Microsoft as a deprecated utility, and has been replaced with DISM - Deployment Image Servicing and Management.  Catchy.  There's no Metro/Windows-8/Store-style/Technologywithoutaname version, though.

The good news is that DISM is an excellent replacement and has matured quite a bit since ImageX, while still keeping most of the same command structure.

In our testing it has proven much quicker and more reliable, and is built into Windows 8, Server 2012 and PE 4.

There's even PowerShell commandlets to do all sorts of useful things.

Find out more by running from an Administrative command prompt:

dism /?

Our one-liner quick and dirty capture/deploy commands for a standard Windows install is as follows:

1. Plug in a large USB drive 

2. Boot into Windows PE 4 (here's how)

3. At the command prompt find out the drive letter of your USB drive (e: in the example below) then execute:

dism /Capture-Image /ImageFile:d:\my-windows-partition.wim /CaptureDir:e:\ /Name:"My Windows Partition"

To then place this image on a new drive or rebuild, do the opposite,  again while booted into PE 4

dism /Apply-Image /ImageFile:d:\my-windows-partition.wim /index:1 /ApplyDir:C:\

 

Further reading:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh825251.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2012/09/27/use-the-powershell-dism-cmdlets-to-manage-windows-8.aspx

iPhone, Android, Windows Phone high data usage due to "Exception message: Maximum request length exceeded"

by Ed Sparks

A significant flaw exists in the design of Exchange ActiveSync, in our opinion, ​in that most mobile devices - particularly the iPhone - will leave a large message stuck in the outbox and continuously try to resend the message over and over without limit until the user deletes the message.

This issue is most commonly caused by the default IIS configuration on Exchange CAS servers ​that limits incoming messages to about 4-10MB in size (depending on version) - regardless of the limits set elsewhere in the Exchange organizational or user configurations.  You will know this is the problem if you see the following event frequently in your Exchange CAS Application event logs:

EVENT LOG Application
EVENT TYPE Warning
SOURCE    MSExchange ActiveSync
EVENT ID  1008

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