MG

How can we get our logo on here?

Is what my boss’s boss asked me right after I installed Windows 7 on his machine. Being one of the first 5 people in the office with a Windows 7 workstation and a pioneer in my rollout, I quickly told him: of course! … then I got to work on the best way to accomplish that.

Prep work

The first thing I did was create a location on my network accessible by all authenticated users, this is where the custom artwork will live.

The user picture

Is a 128×128 pixel bitmap, which our logo happens to fit nicely into, so I grabbed the graphical part of our logo and shrunk it to fit into a square 128×128 pixel bitmap, saved it to its home on the network and moved on to the background images.

The background images

Windows 7 supports multiple files, a default file called backgroundDefault.jpg and 12 other files with the resolutions appended to the default name (ie. background1920x1200.jpg). The system will determine which file to use (if the file with your screen resolution exists) in %windir%\system32\oobe\info\backgrounds (can be created if it doesn’t exist). If you omit an explicitly sized file for a screen resolution, the default file will be stretched to fit your resolution. One final note, images must be less than 256kb in size. The list of supported resolutions is below:

Once I had the background images for the resolutions that we have in the office, I saved those files to a subfolder in the network location I created previously and launched the Group Policy Management console.

Group Policies

Now that we have our resource files on the network we just need to tell Group Policy what to do.

Create a new Group Policy Object in an OU that contains the computers you want to customize and make the following changes to the policy.

From the Computer Configuration –> Policies –> Administrative Templates: enable Apply the default user logon picture to all users (from Control Panel/User Accounts) and enable Always use custom logon background (from System/Logon).

From Computer Configuration –> Preferences –> Windows Settings –> Files: add a new File item with a target path of %programdata%\Microsoft\User Account Pictures\user.bmp, from General make the source the 128×128 user picture we saved on the network (use its UNC path), you can leave everything else with its default setting but make its Action Replace.

From Computer Configuration –> Preferences –> Windows Settings –> Files: add a new File item with a target path of %systemroot%\System32\oobe\info\backgrounds\ (make note of the trailing \, it is required to indicate the target is a directory, not a file), from General set the source file(s) to be the directory we saved (use its UNC path) but append \* to the filepath, to indicate that you want to copy all the files from this subdirectory to the target. As with the previous item, you can leave everything else with its default values but make its Action Replace.

From User Configuration, leave everything blank.

Once done, your output should look like the screenshots below (replacing \\domain.local with your own domain’s FQDN):

Further reading: Rafael Rivera’s Within Windows post was a valuable point of reference for this project.

Today I encountered a weird issue with a new machine I was setting up. The NIC on the machine worked to PXE boot and install Windows XP off the WDS server at work, however once I installed the drivers for the NIC on Windows XP and obtained an IP address from DHCP I couldn’t reach anything.

I couldn’t ping my default gateway, any DNS servers, couldn’t ARP an IP address, nothing. I tried to release and renew the IP address, ran diagnostics (which all passed except the connection diagnostic) and I was getting an IP address on the correct subnet and with correct values for the gateway and DNS servers. I was stumped!

I knew the NIC was working because I’d installed the OS through the network, but even though the NIC was sending packets out, none were being received (as reported by the OS). I called my boss and started throwing ideas back and forth, I’d already done most of what he was mentioning except one thing: Look at the MAC address that the NIC is reporting. It was 00-00-00-00-00-00.

I completely skipped over that the first time I ran an ipconfig /all on the machine, but as soon as I saw the MAC address contained all zeroes I quickly went to the properties page that installed with the NIC driver, went to the MAC masquerading tab and clicked on “Use default” – nothing changed. The MAC address field was empty and while I could have maybe retrieved the MAC address off the NIC itself or motherboard, in the interest of time my boss found the vendor ID for a company I’d never heard of (maybe he’d used them before, who knows, but we didn’t have any of those adapters in the office) and gave me the first 3 pairs belonging to that vendor for the MAC address. I set the last three pairs to random numbers and seconds later after an ipconfig/release && ipconfig/renew I was finally able to send and receive traffic on the network. Ideally you’d try to retrieve the MAC address that belongs to the NIC, however, we manage the environment and know what devices come into the network so it is very unlikely that we will encounter any conflicts. No excuse, I know, but that’s just the way things are right now.

Neither of us had seen something like this before, but the advice to take with you from this post is: remember to check the MAC address if you ever encounter a similar issue.

Remember to check the physical wireless switch

On a related note, this brought back memories of a colleague of mine who while working on one of my old employer’s help desks took a  call once, minutes before the end of his shift. The user was reporting that his wireless connection was not working and my colleague spent the next 45 minutes troubleshooting with the user only to find that the problem was resolved by toggling the physical wireless switch on the laptop to the On position. Yes, that simple.

Details matter, remember this.

I recently came across an issue where an administrative assistant needed to search her boss’s huge mailbox while it was attached in Online mode to her Outlook profile. Normally, Outlook search will work for certain folders (like Calendar and Contacts) because it caches those folders from attached mailboxes so that they can be indexed; however in this case the amount of items in each of those folders was either too large or something else was going on and search just wasn’t working.

After searching online, I was able to find out about the CacheOthersMail registry value which can be set in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Cached Mode and is looked for by Outlook after a post Office 2007 SP1 hot fix (which is included in Office 2007 SP2). This value will instruct Outlook to cache any attached mailboxes in the user’s OST file – this being useful because it increases the access speed of the mailbox significantly and I thought should allow the indexer to index the mailbox. Much to my chagrin, I found that the mailbox was still not indexed after creating this value in the proper registry key (but I could confirm that the mailbox was indeed cached); I had to continue looking.

It was then that I was pointed to the following (excellent) blog post by Mike Lagase: Windows Desktop Search Indexing in Outlook. This blog post detailed an interesting setting (which could be potentially dangerous when used improperly): Enable Indexing of Delegate Mailboxes. This setting, along with other useful Group Policy settings for Windows Desktop Search 4 when a user needs to index mailbox contents are discussed in Mike’s blog post.

Make sure to read the blog post for more details, however my fix was to set the CacheOthersMail  registry value along with enabling the Enable Indexing of Delegate Mailboxes policy. The end result of this was Windows Desktop Search 4 indexing the contents of the already cached attached mailbox.

The administrative assistant is now happy again that she can search her boss’s mail like she was able to in the past.

Outlook issue: duplicates everywhere

Once the Google Sync tool completes the first synchronization of the mailbox you will see a replica of your Google Mail inbox in the mail folders pane in Outlook. Aside from the built-in Outlook folders (of which Inbox, Sent Items, and Deleted Items are mapped to Inbox, Sent Mail, and Trash respectively in the cloud, there is also a new [Archived] folder created in Outlook mapping to All Mail online) you will see each of your Google Mail labels show up as a folder in the Outlook folder list. The Contacts and Calendar will also be synchronized with their counterparts in the cloud, all is well so far, until you start noticing duplicate messages.

Knowing that each label is equivalent to a folder is not a problem if you don’t use search folders (like Unread Mail) because you will see each message marked as unread in its folder at a time (read: a message with three labels will show as unread in three folders) and once you read the message it be marked read in every folder it belongs to automatically.

The problem for me is that I take advantage of search folders, specifically Unread Mail and For Follow Up to help me keep track of messages without having to switch from folder to folder. This is a problem because if, for example I sent myself an email and then marked it for follow up, it would show up twice in my For Follow Up search folder! Once for the message in the Sent Items folder and once for the message in the Inbox.

Another similar issue is when I send myself an email, before I mark the message as read it will show up as unread in the Sent Items folder as well as the Inbox. This too, was unacceptable because I am constantly sending myself reminders when I’m not near OneNote.

The final thing that bothered me was the task list in the To-Do Bar as it mimicked the For Follow Up search folder’s behavior showing multiple flags depending on where the messages were in the mailbox (ex. two flags for a message in Sent Items and the Inbox that was flagged for follow up.)

I tried to live with it for 5 minutes, then decided I needed to make some changes to mitigate this annoying side effect of the way Google decided Outlook should behave when dealing with labels. What I ended up doing was creating custom search folders to mimic the built-in Unread Mail and For Follow Up search folders and customized the Filter property of the task list view in the To-Do Bar.

Below are the criteria and display options I chose for the two search folders and the task list view.

Create your own custom search folders

I deleted the built-in Unread Mail search folder, for some reason the For Follow Up folder wasn’t created in the list of “Search Folders” when the Google Apps account was created, so that was one less search folder to delete.

I then proceeded to create my new custom search folders, starting with the Unread Mail search folder:

1. Right click on the “Search Folders” item in the mail pane and select “New Search Folder…”.
2. When presented with a dialog asking for the type of search folder you want to create, go all the way down to “Create a custom Search Folder” and click on “Choose…” to choose the criteria.
3. In the “Custom Search Folder” dialog name the new search folder “Unread Mail” (make sure to delete the built-in search folder to avoid a name conflict) and click on “Criteria…”.
4. When presented with the “Search Folder Criteria” dialog, click on the “More Choices” tab, then click on the “Only items that are:” checkbox, and make sure that the drop down reads “unread”.
5. Click on the “Advanced” tab, then click on the “Field” drop down, navigate to the “All Mail Items” sub menu and click on “In Folder” from the menu that opens up.
6. Set the condition to “doesn’t contain” and the value to “Sent Items” and click on “Add to List”.
7. Click on OK twice to go back to the main Outlook window. The search folder just created should be in the “Search Folders” section of the mail pane.
8. Right click the Unread Mail search folder and select “Add to Favorite Folders” to show the search folder in the “Favorite Folders” section of the mail pane (all the way at the top).
9. NOTE: This method will not remove any duplicates resulting from multiple label assignments in Google Mail, you will still see duplicate messages in the Unread Mail search folder if a message that is unread has been tagged with multiple labels in Google Mail.

The procedure to create the custom For Follow Up search folder is similar, see below:

1. Follow steps 1, 2 and 3 above, but name the search folder “For Follow Up” instead of “Unread Mail” and click on “Criteria…”
2. When presented with the “Search Folder Criteria” dialog, click on the “Advanced” tab.
3. Click on the “Field” drop down, navigate to the “All Mail Items” sub menu and click on “In Folder” from the menu that opens up. Set the condition to “doesn’t contain” and the value to “Sent Items” and click on “Add to List”.
4. Click on the “Field” drop down, navigate to the “All Mail Items” sub menu and click on “Flag Status” from the menu that opens up. Set the condition to “exists” and click on “Add to List”.
5. Click on the “Field” drop down, navigate to the “All Mail Items” sub menu and click on “Flag Completed Date” from the menu that opens up. Set the condition to “does not exist” and click on “Add to List”.
6. Follow steps 7 and 8 above, right clicking the For Follow Up search folder instead of Unread Mail to add to favorite folders.
7. One additional step to completely mimic the built in For Follow Up search folder is to right click on it (from the “Favorite Folders” section or under the “Search Folders” section in the mail pane) and click on “Properties”, then in the properties dialog for the search folder about halfway down the dialog make sure the “Show total number of items” radio button is selected as opposed to the default “Show number of unread items” and click OK.
8. NOTE: This method will not remove any duplicates resulting from multiple label assignments in Google Mail, you will still see duplicate messages in the For Follow Up search folder if a message that is flagged has been tagged with multiple labels in Google Mail.

One thing you should know about the search method above is that if you have messages which had been flagged for recipients or show with a flag status represented with that icon previously and they did not show up in the default For Follow Up search folder, they will show up now. The corrective action I took on these messages is to search for all flagged messages in “All Mail Items” (from Outlook 2007) and for each message that was flagged for recipient or had that icon I right clicked on them and from the “Follow Up” menu, clicked on “Clear Flag/Delete Task” (or similar, I don’t quite remember). This only kept the messages I had flagged for follow up myself (identifiable by the sole Flag icon) in my For Follow Up search folder.

Modify the view of the task list in the To-Do Bar

The final thing that was bothering me was that if there were any items (like messages I had sent to myself) that I had flagged, they would show up as duplicate items in the To-Do Bar’s task list. I had fixed the issues above by creating my own search folders, but this view wasn’t created using a search folder. Instead, it uses a filter, which can easily be modified by following the steps below:

1. Right click on any empty space in the task list and click on “Customize Current View…”.
2. In the “Customize View: To-Do List” dialog, click on the “Filter…” button.
3. In the “Filter” dialog, click on the “Advanced” tab.
4. This should look familiar, click on the “Field” drop down, navigate to the “All Task Fields” sub menu and click on “In Folder” from the menu that opens up. Set the condition to “doesn’t contain” and the value to “Sent Items” and click on “Add to List”.
5. Click OK twice to go back to the main Outlook window. You should no longer have duplicate task items for any messages that you have sent to yourself.
6. NOTE: This method will not remove any duplicates resulting from multiple label assignments in Google Mail, you will still see duplicate messages in the To-Do Bar task list if a message that is flagged has been tagged with multiple labels in Google Mail.

Additional considerations

It is important to remember that Outlook works with folders as while Google Mail works with labels, in my opinion labels are vastly superior to a traditional folder hierarchy, but you have to use what is there. With this knowledge, you should be tolerant and try to avoid assigning multiple labels to a message if you normally work in Outlook and rely on search folder functionality as you will often see duplicate messages in your views if you don’t, possibly throwing off your counts.

This following statement is my assumption based on my observations, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong: Google Sync takes care of making sure that each labeled message is physically located in each folder on the PST file that locally holds your mailbox, so the PST file will be larger than your mailbox size as reported by Google Mail due to this.

As a side effect of my statement above, whenever a message is unread, or when a message is flagged, if it has more than one label assigned to it the message will show up more than once in your search folders, and Outlook folder in general. A big problem with this is sent items. When you send a message to yourself using Outlook, the message will arrive as “read”. I have only seen this behavior when a message is sent through Outlook, sending yourself a message from the web or a mobile device keeps the message unread as you would come to expect. The reason for Outlook’s behavior in my opinion is that the Google Apps Sync tool discards messages that would traditionally be copied to the Sent Items folder is deleted and instead is replaced with a message with the Sent label (or the message itself is applied with a sent label) thus moving it to the Sent Items folder. Google goes out of its way to ensure that the state of messages is kept intact for everything that has a label in Google Mail. A sent message is tagged with the Sent label, and if it arrives in your inbox it is also tagged with the Inbox label. So any message you send yourself always has more than one label, and by Google’s reasoning has to be kept in sync. This is why my custom search folders above worked for the messages I had sent myself (as reminders to myself which were subsequently flagged), there were no duplicates because I effectively filtered out the Sent label within Outlook by excluding the Sent Items folder from the searches.

So far, I feel content with the migration on the desktop side. My next and final post in this series will detail the steps I had to take to get around a ridiculous Google mobile sync “feature” that annoys many iPhone (if not mobile) users, including myself.

Why I made the decision

Google Apps is Google’s response to Microsoft Exchange environments. Each have their pros and cons, and honestly, in the workplace Google Apps is still playing catch-up to Exchange but I was looking for something I could use for my personal email account. Having access to all your emails, calendars and contacts in the cloud is almost a necessity, especially since we are constantly on the move and are utilizing our mobile devices more than ever before. If you are daring enough you can keep your documents online as well. If you spring out the $50/yr per user for Google Apps Premier you are additionally provided with additional services like [SSO to] Google Chat, Google Video, Postini, Google Sites and mobile device access for your Blackberry in addition to the iPhone and a few other platforms that Google’s Sync software supports. There are also other perks like Single Sign-On (SSO), forced SSL (configurable), your mailbox size is bumped up to 25GB per user, and they claim “Blackberry Support” which I can only assume includes Push email support since Google Sync only provides Contact and Calendar sync at the time of writing.

Everything I’d heard before about Google Apps while impressive still wasn’t enough for me to make a change, I was dependent on Outlook. When I learned about the Google Apps Sync tool (only available to Google Apps Premier and Education editions) is when I started giving the possibility of using Google Apps some serious consideration. In the end, I did some final research into the features I would be giving up on Exchange in favor of Google Apps Premier and finding them acceptable I signed up. The Apps Sync tool provides the user with Exchange-like access to Mail/Contacts/Calendar – changes are pushed and faster than IMAP for mail, and the Contact/Calendar synchronization is not far behind that as well. Your data is stored in a PST file and it just works – there are a few kinks relating to the way Outlook handles Gmail labels [as folders] where it duplicates any message that has more than one label in its corresponding folder and the email/follow up flag duplication you are likely to see, but I cover how I overcame these hurdles in a later post.

Now that I knew I wouldn’t have to give up Outlook on my main PC (a requirement for me since I was perfectly fine with using the Gmail interface everywhere else) I felt ready to make the jump, I signed up.

The sign up process

The sign up process as I remember it was really straightforward, the main requirement is that you own a domain name. You will be asked for billing information, to create an administrative user, some other details and finally be asked to confirm that you own your domain (either by uploading a file there or creating a CNAME record that Google provides you with). Once you confirm that you own the domain you are brought to the dashboard for the domain you just signed up with:

Everything is currently activated, however, when you first sign up, you need to manually activate Email and Postini Services by modifying your MX records from your domain’s DNS control panel. The mobile sync service (bottom right) also needs to be enabled by opting into it.

Google makes the configuration process fairly painless by providing a setup guide the first time you sign into the control panel which you don’t have to follow but if you need guidance it is invaluable.

Activating Email and Postini can take up to an hour each so you need to be patient while this process completes, in the meantime feel free to go through all the options offered to you by every other component of the Google Apps suite and configure them to your liking.

Additional Considerations

If you opt not to go through all the pages in the Google Apps dashboard at least be aware of the following:

1. The Support tab provides you with a Customer PIN# and Support PIN# (not sure if it applies to Google Premier only) to contact support and bulk user creation.
2. The Advanced tools tab provides you with many useful options such as: authentication options, reporting options, email migration.
3. The Service settings dropdown (last link on the navigation menu) provides you with quick access to each of your service’s settings pages.
4. It is wise to customize the URLs of your services so that you can access them without having to type out the Google Apps URL. For example: http://webmail.example.com instead of http://mail.google.com/a/example.com or http://cal.example.com instead of http://calendar.google.com/a/example.com. All you need to accomplish this is create CNAME records on your domain’s DNS control panel and let the Google Apps application you are changing know its new URL (so that Google can update its servers). The services will then be reachable via your custom CNAME and the long URL format. The URL change can easily be accomplished through the settings page of each service.

NOTE: I have not covered all the options for a Google Apps migration from Exchange, only the options that I chose to go with because they met my needs, this article has additional information regarding integration with Outlook and Exchange.

All things considered, the creation process and dashboard was very painless, the pain began once I attempted to get all my data into my account. I will touch on that in the next post.