Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition released!

Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition, is an incremental update to Entourage 2008 which jettisons dependance upon WebDAV in favor of Exchange Web Services.  I know from using the beta that this fixes the generational suffix bug and several other bugs related to name resolution. This version also adds client-side logging capabilities.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.2.1 is required for installing this update. It is available from the Downloads section of http://www.microsoft.com/mac.

UPDATE: Note that there is a flaw in the implementation of AutoConfigure. I had pointed out the flaw to Microsoft during beta testing, and they claimed to have fixed it, but have apparently not done so.  AutoConfigure fills in the LDAP server field in the account configuration with the name of a domain controller (randomly selected from the pool of available DCs). There are two problems with this in our environment: 1) Our DC’s are not accessible from off-campus, so directory lookups will fail for off-campus Entourage users. 2) The DC’s use self-signed certificates for the SSL encryption of the LDAP connection, which Entourage will not trust.

In our environment, the workaround for this is to manually configure the LDAP server setting with  directory.austin.utexas.edu (the publicly-reachable Netscaler alias for our DCs, protected with a Verisign cert), and tell AutoConfigure to stop trying to configure the settings. (Other settings pulled by the process should work fine.)

Strictly speaking, this is a design flaw on the server side of the AutoConfigure process, as there is no way to configure it to return a specific address for the LDAP server such as our Netscaler alias, despite the ability to configure URLs for other services.

Using EMS to enumerate the e-mail addresses of Distribution Group members

The magic mojo for listing the SMTP addresses of all members of a Distribution Group is as follows:

Get-DistributionGroupMember “My Distribution Group Name” | ForEach {$_.PrimarySMTPAddress.ToSTring()}

Invocation of the ToString() method is necessary since the PrimarySMTPAddress property contains objects with separate properties for the address length, the portion of the address before the @, the domain, and a Boolean specifying whether or not the address is valid.