VMWare has a (free) browser appliance you can download (250MB) and run on your desktop. The browser appliance is just a virtual machine that runs Ubuntu with Firefox, Gaim (messenger) and some other apps. The virtual disk is about 800MB.

To run the virtual machine you can use the free VMWare Player or run it in VMWare Workstation.

If you don’t like to use command line tools to mount or modify virtual disks, check out the following GUI front-ends:

VMware Tools Homepage

A new feature of VMWare Workstation 5.5 is support for 32 and 64-bit guests. These guests can run simultaneously on the same machine provided that you run VMWare Workstation on 64-bit hardware. You do not need to run a 64-bit host os to have 64-bit guest os's.

If you think that any 64-bit capable CPU will be ok, think again. Only specific CPUs (revisions) are supported:

- AMD Opteron Rev. E or later (full support)
- Athlon64 Rev. D or later (full support)
- Intel VT enabled processor (experimental)

VMWare Workstation 5.5 will automatically check if your CPU supports 64-bit guests. Also check out http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/ws/ for more info.

If you work with OWA a lot, you will probably know most of them.

You Had Me At EHLO... : Top 11 Hidden Features in Outlook Web Access for Exchange 2003

This webcast provides good information about geographically dispersed clusters (GeoClusters). It also contains some of the enhancements for clusters in LongHorn such as:

- removal of "single subnet" restriction
- configurable heartbeats
- enhanced dependencies (OR instead of AND)
- new quorum model

It is now possible (and supported) to move Exchange 2003 virtual servers from a production cluster to a standby cluster. If the production cluster is a 2–node active/passive cluster, the standby cluster can be single node.

This is great and opens up some more scenarios for Exchange disaster recovery. For full details, follow the link below:

How to Move All Exchange Virtual Servers from a Production Exchange 2003 Cluster to a Standby Exchange 2003 Cluster

In Windows NT, 2000 and 2003 (without service pack), unicast nlb hosts cannot communicate with eachother. It seems that this can be solved in Windows 2003 SP1.

Unicast NLB nodes cannot communicate over an NLB-enabled network adaptor in Windows Server 2003

I blogged already about using the old Windows briefcase, but SyncToy is also a good solution. For more info, see: Chris Johnson : Take WSS folders offline (& in sync) without purchasing anything.

It is possible to add web parts to default pages that show document libraries and lists. For example, when you are in a SharePoint site, and you go to Documents and Lists and you then click a list or document library, you can add web parts to that page.

Just put the following line in the address bar of Internet Explorer followed by <ENTER>:

javascript:MSOTlPn_ShowToolPane('2');

This opens the toolpane to add web parts to the page. Replace two by 5 to open the import web part tool pane.

More info here: Open List Items in a new window. In the article, Todd Bleeker explains how to use this technique to add a content editor web part with extra javascript to open documents in a new window. Amazing stuff really!

If you are familiar with IIS, you probably know it was not possible to combine SSL with host headers. You could not have two or more web sites on the same IP address and port 443 and differentiate between them with host headers. For Sharepoint, that is a problem because it is not supported to bind a Sharepoint extended web site to an IP address explicitly.

Well, it seems there is a solution in IIS 6 on Windows 2003 SP1. There is a catch though: you will have to use wildcard certificates. A wildcard certificate is a certificate for a name like *.baeke.info. Not all CA’s issue this kind of certificate.

More info: SSL Relief for SharePoint