Kerio Outlook connector

It is not often that I find 3rd party providers to Outlook. But the Kerio connector is an exception.

Kerio Connect is a full blown mail server running on both Windows and Linux. Read my review here.

The Outlook connector ships in two variants. One offline edition and one online edition. I have not tried the online version as I need my email offline. To set up the new account just add a new service, and you will find Kerio Connect as an option.

I have now tried this connector for about three weeks, not with heavy load though.

It seems to be a little buggy, it has crashed Outlook one time (my guess, as I got a Kerio error message just before it crashed) and seems to be a little bit out of sync – at least when I update my mail from serveral places (IMAP, HTTP) at the same time. But over time everything seems to be in sync.

I have a setup with three mail accounts in my Outlook profile (remember, Outlook can only run one profile at a given time!), one is the Exchange connector (default), one is a POP3 account and the third one is the Kerio connector. During setup, the Kerio connector complained about not being the default account – but that did not bother me. The only “error” I see is that when I send emails now the sent items are stored on the default account (Exchange) insted of the accounts sent items folder.

Some special features of Kerio Connect is present in the Outlook connector. They are mark messages as spam and the Out of office feature.

By default only the inbox is synchronized to the local computer, this can be set individually on each account. Probably to save bandwidth.

If you have created public folders on your mail server you can access them as well from Outlook. Contacts also seems to be supported, but I have not tried them out yet.

In all, I find this to be a very good and handy connector that seems to work fairly well.

Technorati Tags: Kerio Connect,Kerio

Sysadmin day

Today is the international System Administrators day. Enjoy.

ProfiMail for Nokia

For about a year ago I purchased myself a new mobile phone, a Nokia e75. Using Dataviz Roadsync allowed me to connect to my work and sync my emails and my contacts. But I also wanted something to handle my personal mail, currently running on Kerio Connect.

ProfiMail, from Lonely Cat Games, is a very good email client that has been stable for me during my evaluation of both ProfiMail and Kerio Connect. It shows HTML emails, and renders them fairly well from what I can tell. It is fast and easy to work with.

The only drawback I have found is that it does not work well with wireless connections – it seems to work better if I first open the wireless connection with a web page before syncing mails. IMAP syncing works fine, also when using changing mails using the web client.

Technorati Tags: Nokia,S60,ProfiMail

Kerio Connect

The other day I came across Kerio Connect, a full blown email system. There are not many e-mail systems that match this system in terms of features. Highlights from their web pages are:

• Full SMTP Server.
• IMAP Server.
• POP3 server.
• NNTP server – for public folders or perhaps your mail folders.
• Public folders – share information between users. Public folders can be email integrated as well.
• LDAP Server support.
• Mobile phone support; can connect from a variety of mobile phones, including Windows Mobile (ActiveSync), Palm, BlackBerry, Symbian and Android. the iPod/iPhone is not listed but seems to be supported using either IMAP or ActiveSync.
• Webmail access – for both full blown and lightweight clients.
• Integrated backup.
• Integrated archiving.
• Cross platform collaboration.
• Spam filtering.

In all –this is an impressive list of features. All in one package. I got very interested about the ActiveSync support, as today I only rely on my POP3 server. Is it about time to give my email system an upgrade?

The installation is straight forward, at least on Windows. I just had to tell where to install the application and where to store the data. All configuration is done from within the application. You can configure it through a web page or trough an application – both clients has the same appearance.

I do not plan to go through all options here, but I will cover some in detail if I have the time. See all my posts labeled as Kerio.

Kerio Connect is not free, it cost money. You have to decide if it is worth it for you.

In my opinion Kerio Connect has great value and something I will look more into.

Technorati Tags: Kerio Connect

Color temperatures

When you take photos it can be very useful to know about the different color temperatures and their defaults. Have you ever been curious about why your camera has an option for setting different lightning levels. The temperature color unit is Kalvin.

Setting	Color temperature
A sunny day outside	5200K
A cloudy day outside	6500K
Fluorescent	4200K

For more information is found on Wikipedia.

An example

To give an example of how this can be applied to practical photography look at the images below. The first image is a Canon 20D RAW image only converted into a suitable format for you. The next image is postprocessed with Zoner Photo Studio and the color temperature is changed from a default of 4250K (set by the camera) to a cloudy day (6500) and in the end to a daylight image (5200K).

In most cases the camara will proably do a good guess and set the color temperature (almost) correctly. But sometimes it will not, at least not my camera.

First picture, original:

Second picture, changed to 6500K:

Last picture, set to 5200K:

The last image is much more realistic and colorful than the other images.

iPhone 3G and non working Wi-Fi

Apparently there are many iPhone users that has several problems with their Wi-Fi connection not working. It seems to be several symptoms of this flaw. Many experience variying signal strengths and others cannot connect at all. In my case the Wi-Fi appears to be gone. No Wi-Fi found.

The best attemt to explain the fault that I found was heating related.

however from primary analysis I've done with a thermal imaging camera (one of the perks of working in a job such as mine), it seems the extra processing power used by the 3.0 software heats the WiFi chipset to the point where functionality begins to be lost and the effectiveness of the chipset starts to go down. This also affects the cell (3G, EDGE, GPRS) effectiveness.

Apple has a solution for my problem, but it does not work for me. Out of service warranty, priced at US$199 seems to be the only viable option unless they will accept this error on an extended warranty of some kind here in Norway.

Technorati Tags: iPhone,Apple

0x80042013 with Kerio Outlook connector

I ran across this error message when configuring the Outlook connector to my server. There are not many possible causes of this error so here is what I found.

Verify that the certificate is placed in the correct store on your computer. If you switch to unencrypted connection you will see that it works right away.

Review of The Complete Genealogy Builder

I have used the The Complete Genealogy Reporter for a while for making reports from my GEDCOM files. I decided to give the Builder a try as well. Just to see what it is and how it works.

This builder is a very straight forward and simple builder. I spent about 10 minutes trying to familiarize myself with this product and how to use it. If you have used a genealogy program before and know how they works this should be easy for you as well.

The Builder has very few user friendly features (no online matching, does not store external files inside the database), and many steps to type in common data.

What seems to be the most troublesome is that the Builder crashes a lot, even on small test databases. This seems to be happen mostly when creating reports, but still very annoying.

All in all – this is an easy appliaction, easy to use and not many features. But I prefer to continue with FTB even though its slower.

What is the difference between ISA Server and UAG?

For several years Microsoft sold the ISA Server that provided many network related features. Most used was probably the feature to publish web pages on to the Internet, as SPSS, MOSS and OWA whitepapers recommended you to put an ISA Server in front of the web server.

Microsoft now released a new version, and divided the ISA Server into two ForeFront products; Unified Access Gateway(UAG) and the Threat Management Gateway(TMG). In short the UAG is now used for inbound security and the TMG is used for outbound security. More details can be found here.

How to find an Active Directory forest?

I have not found any good ways to determine what forest a domain is part of. By default the first domain you created becomes the root of the forest, but often you need to know for sure wha the forest is, even if the name is not often used.

On Windows 2008 R2 I can open the Active Directory Domains and Trusts application and right-click the top node – there I can choose to change forest. And then display the name of the forest I am part of.

But if you do not have a Windows 2008 R2 server, you need to so some scripting. Save the lines below to a file called getroot.vbs and execute the file.

Set o = CreateObject("ADSystemInfo")
Wscript.Echo "Forest DNS Name: " & o.ForestDNSName

Source: http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/domains2/how-can-i-determine-which-domain-is-the-forest-root-domain-.aspx

Technorati Tags: Active Directory

Google in a box

The other day I got my hand on a package that, at least all my colleagues was curious about the content of this box.

Inside the box was a Google Search Appliance, a very cool appliance that crawls all your internal web pages, file shares and databases and makes them searchable for you.

The setup was straight forward and Google proves with this that appliances can be easy to configure.

Technorati Tags: Google,GSA