For the last 9 months or more I have been using Exchange Defender (www.OwnWebNow.com) as a spam filter. When I first started using it, I felt very lonely. Nobody loved me any more, at least not the spammers. I noticed an immediate drop in spam, and I was already pretty well filtered with IMF and Trend Micro. Recently the owner, Vlad Mazek, Exchange MVP, sent me some stats. Seems i had been the victim of a spam attack. Vlad sent me a short note about it:
"Yesterday someone used your email address to SPAM the net. You received 29,009 messages in the past 24 hours. OF those, 22,942 went to SPAM, 7,879 went to SureSPAM and your server never saw any of it. Your server only got about 1,139 messages in the entire day, less than 3% of the float."
If hadn't told me, I never would have known. I never saw any of it here.
Exchange Defender not only filters incoming messages but outgoing as well. If you've got spam, check it out. But Vlad only sells it through resellers (computer guys like me). So, if your a normal business owner and not a computer guy, get your computer guy to check it out as well.
The SBS 2008 team would like some feedback and has posted a survey at https://connect.microsoft.com/SBSCommunity/Survey/Survey.aspx?SurveyID=6295&wa=wsignin1.0. I would encourage you to take it as it's pretty short. Shouldn't take more than about 5 minutes.
Today I took, and passed (!!!) the Extending CRM 3.0 certification exam (MB2-498). This was quite an accomplishment for me since I am not a developer (these days, but I used to be one heck of a programmer in the '80s! Maybe again...). I learned an awful lot working my way through the course. Granted I pretty much copied the code from the solutions to the exercises, but that still gave me great insight into what was going on.
One of the things I enjoyed learning about was Callouts (now called Plug-Ins in 4.0). These are extensions to the business logic in CRM (hang on). In the other courses and exam I've taken, Callouts were mentioned but never explained, at least not HOW to do them. But all the CRM Gurus (the other CRM MVPs and others) casually mention them with great familiarity. Well, the Extending course explained, finally, what they are and how to use them. Basically Callouts are configured in the Callout.config.xml file and can be configured to run before an event, like creating a new Account or other record, or after. These are called Pre and Post callouts.
The course also covered how to write web pages to access CRM data, use of web services to process and update CRM data, and a whole bunch of other stuff. All in all it was great to finally work my way through the material. You can find a bit more info on the test here. Even if you are not a developer, going through this course will give you a greater understanding of the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.