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I am back to the conventional office environment after 3 days at home taking training via “remote classroom”. On a whole I found the remote classroom experience very enjoyable. I don’t feel like I missed out on anything by not physically sitting in the classroom plus I had the added bonus of taking it from the comfort of my home. My instructor was very knowledgeable on Exchange 2007 which was a pleasant change. Far too often I have attended training where the instructor knows very little besides what he is reading out of the book. He teaches full time instead of working in IT full time so his knowledge base is limited.
I got a good feel for Exchange 2007. There are some really cool things about it and some real dumb things. One of the coolest things is the new Outlook Web Access which is much more powerful than the Exchange 2003 version. You basically don’t need a conventional email client. There also are many features that are now built into Exchange that required you to utilize and pay for 3rd party software in the past.
There are some annoying things as well. Making it 64 bit only makes in place upgrades impossible, instead a migration is your only option. I don’t see why a 32 bit version could not be made available. The other big change is the extensive use of Powershell. Power shell is an expanded command line set that MSFT started pushing a couple years ago. It allows you to do pretty much anything you can do in the GUI from the command line, giving Windows the ability to be run much like a Linux or Unix server. To me power shell was largely an effort to take a bite out of *nix installations. “Look, look, we can do everything from command line too!” Linux guys take pride in typing out mile long command lines like it is some sort of badge of honor.
Well that is all and good, power shell is fine and in a large enterprise network it 
certainly could be a big time saver to perform certain administrative tasks. However with Exchange 2007 MSFT made the mistake of REQUIRING you to use it exclusively to perform certain tasks. In fact certain things you used to do in the GUI in Exchange 2003 you can no longer do in the GUI in 2007, you have to use power shell. Well that is ignorant in my opinion. Why would I want to type a command such as what is pictured as opposed to making a couple clicks with my mouse? Sure make it possible to do everything in power shell but don’t take away the GUI ability to perform the same task??!! That just sticks in my craw.
But anyway, overall the training was good. Next week I have another class that focuses on the migration process from Exchange 2003 to 2007. Hopefully it is just as informative.
My class next week turned out to me a thorn in the side of Ali. originally I thought it was next Monday thru Wednesday. It turns out it is actually next Wednesday thru Friday. This has annoyed her because she has her race in Orlando next weekend. We were supposed to leave early Friday so she could sign in and get her packet. Well now I will potentially be in training until 4pm on Friday so she is going to have to car pool with her girlfriend she is doing the race with and then I will have to drive up on my own with the dogs. Yea I understand it is inconvenient but there isn’t much I can do about it but hope the class moves along at a good pace.
Yesterday I went on another bike ride, 7.25 miles this time. I wore the GPS this time so I could get some speed info. My average speed was just over 15 mph with a top speed of 18 +. Not great but not horrible if you consider I spent a good chunk of the ride into a substantial head wind. I am enjoying biking more.
I brought the party van to work today so it could go to the dealer. Job numero uno is to get the fan working. No fan = no AC = no way I would drive out west in June. While it is there I am having a number of other things looked at/fixed. Yea some of them I may be able to fix myself but I’d rather just let the pros handle it since it is already there. Of course I’m under no illusion that the bill will be small either.