John C. Dvorak rants has request demand: “Stop Using AutoReply!!!” (via Lifehacker).

I’m not sure what people John’s been communicating with, but where I work - it’s used pretty darned effectively.

When you use Auto-Reply (aka “Out of Office Assistant” in Exchange - commonly just “OOO”):

• When you’re not available to answer emails.

…yeah, that’s it.

Where I work (a multinational company with tens of thousands of employees), we use OOO replies to let colleagues know not to expect a response any time soon.

No, it’s not perfect - and yes, when you’re replying to an email where every-man-and-their-dog is CC’ed in, you get an OOO notification for those who’re out. But, you only get it once (again, it’s a setting, which is defaulted to “on”) for that person. Even if you send that person another email while that same OOO reply is no, you won’t get it again.

The OOO notifications are only sent to those who’re on the corporate address book too, so spam bots don’t get an email confirmation. The one drawback from that is that vendors and customers don’t get a response, and need to be set up on a whitelisted AutoReply.

It’s very helpful for situations where people go on leave for months (and maternity leave for up to 12 months), and someone on the other side of the country is trying to find out who can deal with something.

(Before you say “You should have let them know before you went on leave” I can think of a dozen situations where that won’t work all the time. Getting someone else to manage your email isn’t always an option either)

Paul makes a good point that Microsoft is slow to adopt and use it’s own technology. As some Microsofters put it: “eating your own dog food”.

Unfortunately, this is very true, and isn’t an isolated incident.

At work, we have no direct Internet access, All machines are isolated, and can’t even resolve a DNS entry outside the corporate network, let alone connect to it.  Internet access is granted through the use of a corporate proxy - which requires you to authentication, and ensures only authorised users can access web sites outside the firewall. 

As it would happen, we’re mostly a Microsoft shop, and so of course - a lot of applications and services leverage the Single Signon (SSO) capability delivered by Windows Domains and Active Directory. The proxy server happens to be one of these services - if you try and request a site, it’ll ask you to authenticate. No big deal, both Internet Explorer, and Firefox support NTLM / Kerberos Authentication, so everything happens seamlessly. 

I decided I’d try using a ClickOnce application, which is a feature introduced in .NET 2.0 - so, it’s certainly not new technology. Proxy Servers requiring authentication are also nothing new - they’ve been around for years (decades?), so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that almost every application around that has proxy support, also has a username and password box. That is - unless they go to the effort of enabling SSO.

You can probably see where I’m going with this - so, to cut a long story short - it turns out that Microsoft has not enabled any form of Proxy Authentication support in ClickOnce for .NET 2.0. Yes, you can call up Microsoft and request the patch manually - but you need to hand over your card details first, and you might be let off without charge.

Microsoft - You need to start eating your own dogfood - a lot more often.

Well, my short break is over, and I’m back at work today. 

Nothing particularly new, everyone else around had the same time period off as I did.

Seriously - I see these things in dilbert and laugh. Then I stop, and remember that I’ve had this discussion dozens of times.

Argh.  (I compiled a list of at least six, but decided to stop since it was just too depressing)

Hey, Ian - this one’s for you. How goes the Xbox?

So, last week I mentioned that something… interesting had happened, which resulted in me ceasing to post on here for a little while.

Well, it wasn’t anything major - but it has made me reconsider just how private this blog really isn’t.  I suppose it shouldn’t be a suprise - there’s actually a suprising number of people (to me, anyway) hitting this site… Whether you’re actually reading or not - I’m not certain. But, anyway - apparently some of you do.

I’m a regular participant on Whirlpool’s Forums, for the most part in the Coding & Web section.  Mostly I’m helping (or trying to help) point people in the right direction - or putting up some sample code to solve a problem if appropriate.

Anyway, last week apparently someone from a recruiting company noticed me, and followed the links back through to this blog. From there, they decided to contact me and let me know about a certain position that was being advertised, through their employer. 

So, this is what got me re-thinking about what I was posting, what I was saying, and what kind of impact that could have upon future employment opportunities, etc. 

But, well… I’ve decided I’m not going to change my posting habits. If I find something I think is interesting, I’ll post a link to it. If I’ve got something which I want to rant about, I’m going to rant about it.  One thing I don’t do is post inappropriate comments about my employer.   Don’t like it? Well, tough.

PS: No, I didn’t apply for the position. (They needed experience with some software which I hadn’t touched before). Oh, and to “S”, if you read this - Thanks for the email, really - but it was a bit of a shock to the system to get your email, and read how you’d found me.

Saw this on one of the internal work message boards:

Project Baby has now gone from Build & Acquire, to Advanced Acceptance Testing. So far he hasn’t been returned to the manufacturer.

Still no word on if there’s a vendor patch for the Buffer Overflows - they have a manual work around, last I heard.

*ahem*

Well, after looking at all the working visa situation, it looks like I won’t be able to actually move to the UK to work.

I was looking at a Working Holiday Maker visa, and the Highly Skilled Migrants Programme - the problem is, the working holidaymaker visa only allows you to work for 12 months. Which, if I was going to the trouble of actually moving any of my stuff over there - probably isn’t long enough for it to pay off.  The HSMP is also out - since I’d need a degree as a minimum, before I would have enough points.

That’s really annoying, since I was looking forward to the Banana and Nutella Crepes in France.  (Add some chopped peanuts, and a drizzle of raspberry sauce… mmmm - chocolate banana split sundae crepe).

So, instead I’m going to see if I can complete my HSC (finally) and then finish all those half-completed TAFE courses. Then, I’ll look at Comp Sci or something like that at University.

 In light of the mini-review that Bunk.nu has given, I thought I’d give my own mini-review on it too.

I’ve been using Office 2007 at work for… about 3 weeks now.

There are some really great things - particularly with Outlook and MS Desktop Search.

Outlook 2007

This is the application I use the most out of any of the Office applications - it’s open on my desktop all the time.  It’s got all my contacts in it (sync’ed with my PDA) and I have all my meetings and major time allocations managed through the Outlook Calendar.

This is the default view in Outlook. On the left, we’ve got the typical folder view for Outlook Mail, followed by the current folder view, the selected email, and then the “To-Do Bar”.

This To-Do bar is, from what I can tell, a new feature in Outlook - it combines a mini calendar view where bold indicates meetings and things like that - followed by your upcoming meetings, and then any tasks you have allocated.   For me, this was the best single feature.   All that information, in one spot, is very very useful.

There’s a myriad of other little features - like in each email, there’s “Previous/Next” buttons that appear when you mouse over the headers on the forwarded/replied portions - this lets you scroll down faster.  Not a killer feature, kinda handy - but I haven’t had a chance to use it much yet.    It also formats (for display only, it doesn’t alter the content) the headers for the forwarded/replied emails - so you can easily distinguish each reply.

We also have Microsoft Office Communicator as one of the internal IM applications - under Outlook 2003, you got some status information, which was useful - but you had to hover over each person’s name to get it, AND they had to be on your contact list.  Under 2007, it automatically shows the Communicator status for people in the To/From/CC lines, even if they’re not on your contact list. 
You can then chat to them via Communicator, or call them (if you have a PBX Gateway enabled Office Communicator server) with 2 mouse clicks.

Word 2007

I don’t get much of a chance to use Word to create documents at the moment - I usually just read them. However, the new Ribbon interface is quite handy for most things.

If you need to use custom templates, which have unsigned code in them (as our corporate templates do - to automate initial document setup and use of the template) - then you might run into some difficulties.

Trying to find the “Tools” menu was a pain in the ass - So, where do they hide the Options button? In plain sight, actually - right next to “Exit Word”. That’s the first of 6 clicks you need to go through, to change the security setting from “Paranoid Mode”  err… “Disable all macros with notification” to “Enable all macros”. There’s no option to Prompt To Run Macros like previous versions of Office.

Unfortunately, hiding the Word Options button off to the side like that has  broken the other visual rules they have there - Close is a menu item, why isn’t Options? .

Excel 2007

 I use Excel a bit less at the moment - so I haven’t really had a chance to do much with it.  However the revamped charting controls, and much cleaner/fresher default colours are great. 

Apart from that, I don’t have much to say about excel.

Well, I think that’s it for me - I haven’t used any of the other Office applications yet. All in all though - the new Office is nice, although I’m glad I’m not paying for it.

I’m off to Brisbane for three days.

It turns out the Taxi company doesn’t want to cooperate though - 4:45AM comes and goes - No taxi. Call the Taxi Company: “Oh, it’s booked for 5:45…” Me: “Right, well… that’s not going to do it for me, I’ll have to get a lift.”

*rolls eyes*

Update, Thursday Morning: Well… The flight up was ok, just… noisy (De Hellier DCH-8 300 Series - i.e twin-prop). They have more legroom, which is great — My knees didn’t even touch the back of the other seat. *gasp* The hotel doesn’t have wifi, which sucks - so I’m down at McD’s using the Telstra wifi here. Also, Brisbane is too damn hot - it was 36-ish yesterday, and didn’t get anywhere close to being considered “ok” temperatures until 3-4AM. It’s overcast, muggy and still warm today - crazy place! Ohwell, off to work now…

Update, Friday Lunch time: Been busy as heck - just about to go back to the Airport to fly back home. It’ll be good to get back home.