You’ve got a PC out there running Windows XP or a 2003 Server. You want to do a remote desktop session to it and mess with a users computer. The “allow users to connect remotely to this computer” is not enabled. You don’t want to get up and go to the users computer. Open regedit, goto file/connect remote registry. Enter the name of the computer you want to enable the remote desktop on. Navigate to the following registry key:

HKLM\System\CCS\Control\Terminal Server\fDenyTSConnection

Change the value data to 0. Wait a minute or two and you should be able to connect to the remote computer.

I recently exchanged my Motorola Razr for a Treo 650 with a data plan through Alltel. So far I really like it. There are a couple of things that annoy me about the Palm OS, but there are just as many things about the Pocket PC OS that annoy me too.

So, I setup the Palm Hotsync to sync my Outlook calendar, contacts and such with the Treo 650. After messing with installing applications and playing around a bit the sync began to take a really long time.

A normal sync only takes at most 30 seconds and the sync began to take as long as 4 to 5 minutes. After these sync’s I figured there would be some sort of error message or something but there wasn’t. The log didn’t show anything out of the ordinary. I began uninstalling applications even to the point of nuking the thing and starting over. This worked once, but the long pauses returned.

I messed with the Palm desktop software a bit and tried renaming my Hotsync user, this seemed to work and then the pauses returned and this time renaming the user didn’t work.

What on earth is going on? I have the latest firmware and the latest Palm Desktop. Finally a moment of brilliance hits me and I wonder if it has anything to do with Outlook itself. I open Outlook, which I have setup to connect to an exchange server through cached mode. In cached mode you don’t have to be connected to the exchange server to open outlook and see your current data, you just don’t have the most current data that’s on the exchange server.

Then I connected to my VPN and allowed Outlook to connect to the server and this time the Hotsync returned to normal. Close Outlook, disconnect from the VPN and try Hotsync…long pause returns.

So it looks like if you are syncing with Outlook setup to communicate directly with an exchange server (not through Pop3 or SMTP) and are using cached mode you need to have a live connection to the exchange server, which in my case is done using a VPN connection when I’m not in the office. Live and learn huh?

If you use Microsoft Exchange for your email you should take some time to run the Exchange Best Practices Tool. I ran it on our Exchange server and luckily didn’t find any major flaws in our configuration, but the tool did point out several things that we could be doing differently.

One thing that we didn’t have configured was the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter which we were not utilizing. I recently found out about this filter because of a Microsoft Exchange class I am taking. Any added tools to combat and reduce the amount of spam entering our organization is certainly welcome. This best practice tool told me I didn’t have it enabled and how to turn it on. Just since turning it on I’ve already seen a handful of emails it has blocked that were truly spam and hadn’t been stopped by our third party spam filter Open Relay Filter by Vamsoft (which does do a great job of stopping most spam.)

The tool also pointed out several services that were running on my exchange box that were un-necessary. I was a bit nervous when I went to run it thinking I’d find a bunch of big bad things we had with our Exchange. The tool is available for download for free and is a great tool in securing and maintaining the health of Exchange email systems.