Get Evolution to work with Exchange 2010

I have been dying to have a fully functional email client for my linux machine that would work with our corporate Exchange 2010 environment.  Looks like its now possible with the evolution-mapi plugin.  I found these instructions and they worked flawlessly on my Mint 12 box! 

One less thing to rely on a windows machine!!!

Execute when any user logs in without Group Policies

Sometimes you just need to have something run for all users that log into a certain box but you don't want a GPO for it.  Local group policies don't work either if they log in with AD credentials.  It used to be that you could just put the .exe or .bat/.vbs into the startup directory. You still can but its a little harder with w2k8/w7.

The easiest way is to click start, all programs, then right click on startup and choose explore all users.  Then just drop a link or the file into that directory and you should be right as rain.  Here is the long UNC for it:

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

Putting a file on all users desktop in Win 7/Server 2008

Just put the file in c:\users\Public\Public Desktop and everyone on that box will get it on their desktop.  Only users with Admin level privileges can delete it!

How to create a .exe from a .bat file

I have known for a long time about iexpress.exe and had played around with it back when vista came out.  I could never really get it to work correctly though until I found this blog post.

So the long and the short of this are go through the wizard its pretty self explanatory but when you get to "Install program to launch" screen use this for the top input line of "install program".  In the field enter this cmd /c batch_file.bat.

Then just go through the rest of the wizard!  I have tested this on server 2008 R2 and it worked perfectly!  BTW just search for iexpress.exe if you need to find it.