As an IT admin it will happen to all of us at some point; there will be that problem that seems like you are 10 minutes away from fixing that quickly turns into 10 hours and then 2, 3, even 5+ days.  Before you know it, you have spent a week with nearly zero sleep and a lot of caffeine and then you finally realize that you are not any further along than when you started.  I spent the last week banging my head up against a wall trying to get a clients new Windows Server 2008 and Exchange 2007 SP1 environment up and running, only to find out that Microsoft has a crippling bug in Windows Server 2008 that won’t allow Outlook Anywhere (a.k.a. RPC over HTTP) to run in its default configuration.

The most unfortunate part about this is that Microsoft is still yet to release any information publicly about this problem, which is really sad because they generally do such a great job of at least posting limitations of their products on many of their wonderful blogs.  I had to search the Internet and eventually found articles that led me in the right direction but I was never able to find a blog/article that outlined the exact steps that I used to fix/diagnose Outlook Anywhere which is why I really felt the need to write this post.

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Well, I’ve been swamped with work for the last 10 months and haven’t even come close to having a chance to sit down and write any well thought out blog entries.  I was compelled though a couple weeks ago to write a new entry about the coolest new feature that I stumbled across in Apple’s still relatively new OS X 10.5.2 Server.

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All the videos from Steve Jobs and Bill Gates interview by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the WSJ D5 conference.

“To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different, it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.” –Microsoft founder Bill Gates, 1984

“If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth–and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.” –Steve Jobs, 1996

I’ve been running Windows Vista for over 6 months now, and I have to report that overall I think it is a great product. Microsoft has already sold over 20 million copies of Vista in just a couple months and it is looking like sales are going to keep moving forward at a steady pace.

With Apple’s anti-Vista campaign and much of the negative media about Vista, it can be hard for most people to make a decision as to how they feel about Microsoft’s latest OS. The only way to make this decision though is to just test it for yourself. Vista brings with it a whole host of new features that increase end-user satisfaction and ease IT administration, and Microsoft is going to make sure this time around that people realize this as quickly as possible.

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Fortunately for Microsoft there was a lot of excitement around the prereleases of Exchange 2007 Beta 2, and many of us liked it so much more than Exchange 2003 or our previous solutions that we upgraded to it early.  Luckily for all of us who did this, Microsoft left a way for us to get our Beta 2 configuration up to RTM.

On December 24, when I wanted to move my test machine over from Beta 2 to RTM I had to make a decision. The choices were that I could format the hard drive and reinstall Windows 2003 R2 x64 and Exchange 2007 RTM, or I could just upgrade to the RTM version.  Upgrade’s are always less desirable and in this case completely unsupported by Microsoft for a production environment.  In my case though, this was just for a testing environment and I was in a hurry to get to RTM since I was tired of some of the bugs in my Beta 2 configuration.  This was the process that I used which worked well for me:

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