RTFM

First, let me state that I hate meetings. Add to that a meeting that has no point/value and I am already starting to show the small bubbles. You know, the ones right before a pot goes into full boil.

For instance, I received a meeting invite today from a colleague that has blocked out one hour of my schedule this week to discuss Exchange 2007 'remote' servers with me and a few others in our group. Reviewing the meeting request, I see that the total attendee count is seven. So seven hours of man-time carved out to discuss:

…to determine how to handle Remote Exchange 2007 Sites especially as it pertains to Remote Access and Server Roles.

What About Client Access Role? Should we use the DFW CAS servers to support them?

I have multiple layers of frustration on this. The person calling the meeting was the first on our team to tackle an Exchange 2007 migration and was instructed to document his process through this migration. As a result we would all have base documentation to customize and continue building out over the next few months. So far I don't believe there has been one document produced as part of this effort. So now as I sit working on an Exchange 2007 deployment, I am being required to generate documents from scratch that I should have been able to just customize from stock documents.

But back to the real point here… Instead of wasting time in a meeting, lets read paragraph 3 from the Microsoft online documentation for Exchange 2007. That paragraph states:

You must have the Client Access server role installed in every Active Directory site within your organization that contains an Exchange 2007 server that has the Mailbox server role installed.

Sounds like "RTFM" is definitely in order for this one. Reading (and comprehending) that line could be worth seven man-hours this week.

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Update: I sent an e-mail copying and pasting verbiage from Microsoft documentation showing that this was a question specifically answered in readily available product documentation.

This morning I received the following response:

That is the kind of input I wanted

Ugh! you mean you wanted someone to copy and paste documentation and send it to you? And the meeting still hasn't been cancelled.