Blogs

The Funboy ala Chris has published this step by step guide to using the Windows Mobile 5 emulator with SBS to learn the WM5 funky functionality. Perhaps the most annoying thing is that the reason I fly to Boston for the World Wide Partner Conference is to demostrate part of the new People Ready Business Demo DVD mobility demos, including the stuff Chris has painstakingly documented . There is a huge amount of learning in Chris's page, so don't be thinking you can skip it. One further piece of software I would load onto this demo is to load Mobile Admin toolkit. When loading this on SBS, it will create a 2nd default web site which you will basically not be able to access. I then went to IIS admin, gave it a host header of MobileAdmin and made it available on the internal network. To access the admin tools I then access http://mobileadmin/mobileadmin . There might have been a security issue with the folder - can't remember, but I am sure you are all capable of ensuring the folders have the right permissions for...

Chris is a great guy at making difficult things sound simple. Besides getting his 5 year award at Microsoft, he talks about how he got into BI and then how he likes to help others through the use of BI. His blog is also very worth having a read at http://blogs.msdn.com/bidirectional/ . One of the things he gets very excited about is business scorecard manager too :-) ttfn David

OK, so DevCon has been and gone, but hopefully some of you got to see the event. There is a quick little video with people talking about the highlights on a small video . This all links from Darren's blog . One thing that it highlights is that people really enjoy playing with the product after seeing things. Jo is on the video and are many others, but again, some blogs to follow are: Office Rocker! Office 12 Watch (Office 12 is Office 2007) UK Office Pioneer Jo Carpenter's Blog Adventure Girl ttfn David

I know this has been discussed before and while I am on Paternity I am not authoring much in the way of content (not enough time), so simply adding things I am finding elsewhere, but this little gem was interesting. A recent web survey that I think, but am not 100% sure about, was NOT commissioned by Microsoft found the following: http://www.itbusinessedge.com/item/?ci=11414 Small shops (with fewer than 100 employees) who identified themselves as aggressive when it comes to platform upgrades were among the most avid projected Vista adopters, with 76 percent saying they would roll out within the first year of Vista release. Of respondents who said they plan on delaying a Vista rollout, 69 percent said they would rely on their PC refresh cycle to drive the transition . Overall, 46 percent of respondents said that new security features would be a factor in causing them to undertake a Vista rollout; the next most popular response was end of support for legacy Windows systems, at 28 percent. Only three survey respondents...

SBS is a great, stable product, so why go and throw in a bunch of broken software into the mix? Untested - yes, Vista and Office 2007 are beta, so known to have bugs that have not be resolved in them. OK, so the 1st rule is never run beta software in production, unless you are doing so for known explicit reasons. Vlad has posted on this a few times already. I also saw that the SBS team have made a couple of statements about Office and Vista and the bottom line is that there are some known issues and Microsoft is addressing them. Also, looking on one of the forums, there are a few questions people are asking , so be warned. If you don't use the connect computer wizard, then joining a Vista PC to a domain is doable. You might have a few Group Policy problems, so I would check things like "My Documents" redirection and firewall settings. You will also get a few UAC prompts, but as Susan suggests , lead UAC on for your testing - the prompts should get less once the PC is set up and the latest builds of Vista should...

Working for Microsoft makes you a little used to seeing people slate your products whether they know what they are talking about or are just trying to make press. Someone associated with the press once told me that news rooms get a buzz when a negative Microsoft story comes in - oh joys! So, for all this, while all the noise has been about Office 2007 and Windows Vista recently, Windows codename Longhorn Beta 2 has quietly popped out. This is the server product, which will shop in 32-bit and 64-bit form, but only the x64 version will be used as the foundation for SBS Longhorn codename Cougar. While I can't tell you anything about Cougar - after all, we have not got SBS 2003 R2 out the door yet - you can start to see what the foundations will be. Longhorn Server, with more functionality, IPv6 based networking, huge security leaps and much more. To see the product, go to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/longhorn . Today, Longhorn is only available via TechNet or MSDN , but as I have mentioned before, buy Technet...

I see over at CNET that Microsoft has launched a new code sharing, shared sources initiative where people can work on joint code. This is called CodePlex . While browsing there, I saw a great looking Forum for WSS. To get to the forum, go to http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=SPFORUMS . Picture below ttfn David

There I was thinking I knew lots about Vista and then I started finding the Videos Product Demos http://geekindisguise.com/Documents/myVistaMC.wmv http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6018907.html http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6019862.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j-LwPM3L5Q http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/learning/training/conceptvid/default.aspx Adverts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ku2UbRyXg http://wms.meslchost.com/windowsvistapartner/seethedifference.wmv Other Devlopers - http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/Windows+Vista as always, http://uksbsguy.com/vista or http://ukvistaguy.com will get you my Vista related content. ttfn David

Short, simple, sweet, IE 7 beta 3 is available to download at http://www.microsoft.com/ie ttfn David

Having told everyone that Beta 3 is available for download , I was a little short on details. The IE team have blogged several things on beta 3 - 1st - It is available in multiple languages and also now for XP and Windows Server - so you could run this on your server - I would not do that just yet on a production machine. Of course, the thing you notice very quickly on IE7 is when accessing RWW if the certificate is not set up correctly for the machine (most often the interface name) then you get a huge shiny error! Also, as a direct quote ' I’m looking forward to reading the feedback - positive and negative - as it comes in. I also want to encourage developers, web developers, designers, and IT Pros to use Readiness Toolkit to help you deliver the best possible experience to your sites’ IE7 visitors. ' 2nd, the UI has change a little - the details are in the blog, but things to look out for include: new icons following feedback You can drag the tabs around to re-order them others such as ftp and image zoon features...

Ask the Experts: How Windows Vista Delivers IPv6 Prepare for the next generation in networking with this look at how Windows Vista will allow for more advanced applications and networks with Internet Protocol version 6. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/network/ipv6wv.mspx Enterprise Networking with Windows Vista This article provides a high-level overview of Windows Vista enterprise networking technologies. This article does not discuss consumer networking scenarios http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/network/entnet.mspx Joining a Windows Vista Wireless Client to a Domain http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/network/wifi/vista_bootstrap_wireless.mspx Active Directory Schema Extensions for Windows Vista Wireless and Wired Group Policy Enhancements http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/network/wifi/vista_ad_ext.mspx Windows Vista Step-by-Step Guides for IT Professionals http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=311f4be8-9983-4ab0-9685-f1bfec1e7d62&DisplayLang...

Using Built-in diagnostics in Windows Vista Monday, July 17, 2006 9:30AM - 10:30AM Pacific Time https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032301591&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US Windows Vista Deployment Overview (Level 200) Monday, July 17, 2006 1:00PM - 2:00PM Pacific Time https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032301597&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US Moving to 64-bit Computing with Windows Vista (Level 200) Tuesday, July 18, 2006 11:30AM - 12:30AM Pacific Time https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032299835&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US Security Features in Windows Vista (Level 200) Wednesday, July 19, 2006 11:00AM - 12:00PM Pacific Time https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032301585&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US Reliability Enhancements in Windows Vista (Level 200) Friday July 21, 2006...

New security features in Internet Explorer 7 (Beta 2) http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=4979991 Learn about the new security features in the browser's latest version that help better protect your PC and personal information Microsoft Threat Analysis and Modelling Tool, Version 2.0, RC1 http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5049706 The free Microsoft Threat Analysis and Modelling tool allows nonsecurity subject matter experts to enter already-known information, including business requirements and application architecture, to produce a feature-rich threat model. Along with automatically identifying threats, the tool can produce valuable security artefacts such as data control, component access control, and subject-object matrices as well as data flows and focused reports. Reduce Your Risk: 10 Security Rules to Live By http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5049703 When you manage security you must strive to reduce unacceptable risk while keeping the impact on workflow of the organization and total cost of ownership of the infrastructure...