Posts Tagged ‘microsoft’

Sharepoint 2010, Now We’re Getting Somewhere…….

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

So today I went along to one of the Microsoft UK Techdays (I missed Mondays presentation on Virtulisation due to illness). Todays subject was Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2010, and I have to say that I am now starting to see the case for Sharepoint in the organisation.

The day was a large helping of death by PowerPoint (I’m sorry, but even using PowerPoint 2010 with it’s lovely new slide transitions is still death by PowerPoint which ever way you turn it) and after an extended period of being talked at I felt my concentration wavering a little. Some points did make it through though.

One was that SharePoint 2010 now supports true cross-platform, cross-browser fidelity. It was seamless, the guy opened MS Office 2010 docs inside FireFox, Opera, Chrome and Safari, and they looked *identical*. The inline rich web editor was also the same experience across the board, no so much as a pixel out of place.

Even more impressive was that using the inline rich web editors, you could collaborate in real time on the same document without even having the Office application installed. True thin client web app and no more cumbersome checking-in/checking-out.

The demo showed Microsoft making a real effort to adhere to open standards for file and data formats to make this cross browser experience possible. Proprietary activex controls have all but been abandoned which hopefully mitigates that particular attack surface vector for the future.

Speaking of which, there was an interesting slide showing statistics that attacks against the operating system were on the decline against a rise in attacks being made against applications. To help protect against this new wave of attacks Microsoft now scans all legacy Office files being opened and compares them against a know signatures database, if they don’t match you are warned and the file is opened in a sandboxed safe mode in the background and an alert is shown to make the user aware. Sweet.

But my favourite part of the entire day was the explicit mention that IE6 was no longer supported for SharePoint and it’s associated web apps :oD

The only barrier I can now see to deploying SharePoint is that it’s still a very large product with a not insignificant pre-requisite list, both in terms of hardware and software.

You’re going to need a server up to running the latest version of Windows, along with enough RAM to make it happy. The cost of the license for Windows, the cost of the SharePoint server application. Then more hardware to run the SQL server backend (with another Windows license plus an SQL license of some flavour).

I’m not sure of the total cost to deploy SharePoint today (no pricing details as of yet for the RTM versions) but I’m pretty certain this is out of reach of most smaller companies, especially when you consider that my current workplace does the whole thing on an old Dell 2850 with 8GB RAM running Ubuntu linux, MySQL and MediaWiki server, all for free.

Really looking forward to tomorrow, Chris Jackson of the SWAT team is presenting a section of the ‘Deploying Windows 7′ day. Maybe I’ll find out how to automate that 5% of my current desktop deployment process that still eludes me ? Here’s hoping ;oD

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Posted in microsoft, office 2010, sharepoint 2010 | No Comments »

Microsoft UK TechDays……yipee !!

Friday, February 26th, 2010

I just signed up for a couple of the Microsoft UK tech.days events being held in London during April.

Am really hoping to get to see Chris Jackson live as I have only previously seen him online on Channel 9 and on the 2008 TechEd recordings (2nd page, first row, far right video). He really seems to know his stuff and have a sense of humour and presentation charisma.

Is quite a big deal for me as I don’t think I will ever work in the sort of company who send their staff out to the big official MS TechEd events held globally (at least I haven’t been sent to any so far, and never having been to one, have not been able to ask the attendees what sort of company they are working for that send them to MS Tech events).

In fact, I think the last formal IT training I was sent on was over 10 years ago when I was sent on a course to learn Exchange server 5.5 administration.

Admittedly I seem to have done ok without any training, getting by using books, online examples and demos and so on. But some systems (ones from Microsoft in particular) are getting so large and so complex with so many features and capabilities built right into them that I wonder if I am doing some things inefficiently or even incorrectly.

Take desktop deployment. My current employer are using Windows Vista. One of the earlier tasks I did (after the massive mail migration I wrote about on here previously) was to replace the mix of XP and Vista will a few standardised builds of Vista using WDS. The learning process was pretty steep, and very confusing.

I could not get the answer files to work correctly for unattended installs, I gave up on trying to figure the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT). In the end I simply installed a box *eaxctly* how I wanted it to be, and then sysprep’d it with an answer file. I then used ImageX to capture the system to a .WIM file and this is what I used to deploy to new systems. Even though it works pretty well (the only bits I could not automate were the machine naming, joining the domain and Windows activation) I am still not sure I am doing it the way Microsoft intended.

Now in 2010, the office here are looking to replace Vista with Windows 7 (not just to be fashionable you understand, but there do seem to be too many issues with Vista for our liking). I downloaded with Windows Automated Installer Kit (WAIK) for Windows 7 to have a look, and it bigger and even more complex that the one for Vista was.

So I have high hopes that some bright Microsoft chappie (maybe even Chris Jackson himself) will take to the stage and say “here’s how you do it” and show me the bits I’m missing, and the bits I’m doing wrong. I am taking my laptop and will be furiously trying to record everything they say and do :oO

p.s. If you work for a company that sends you to tech events (not just the MS ones) please let me know who you are and what you do, cause I really wanna go to them too :o/

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/techdays/dayitp.aspx

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Posted in microsoft, windows, windows 7 | No Comments »

Reluctant MCSE……

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

Yep…..guess it probably about time to get my Microsoft certifications in order. My current ones are either :

a) Valid but horribly out of date
b) Lapsed completely

Well, the last MS exam I sat was back when NT4 was considered all the range !

So I’ll be procuring a box set of the core essentials books from MS press and spending a lot more nights at home.

Would also be cool to find a study group based in London (if such a thing exists, a quick skim of the first few pages of Google yielded nothing).

Will probably post progress and notes here as I go along (in the hope that it could help others).

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Posted in mcse, microsoft | No Comments »

Change Of h’E'art……

Friday, August 7th, 2009

Further to my recent post regarding the RTM version of Windows 7 in Europe being suffixed with the letter ‘E’ and having no browser installed by default, it would seem MS have had a change of heart.

The European version will now ship with IE installed just like the rest of the world. But in order  to keep the European Commission happy, shortly after the end user setup has completed, Microsoft will push a ballot software application onto the machine allowing the user to chose a different browser to be installed and configured as the default if they wish.

I can’t imagine MS are too happy using their platform to promote software from competitors, but it seems to be the best way to satisfy the EU that everyone is being given a fair choice.

e

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Posted in microsoft, windows 7 | No Comments »

But I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For……

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

Kind of old news now, but the Microsoft new search engine went live on June 1st slightly ahead of schdule. Viral Tapara brought it up during the vista squad meeting on 27th May, and to be honest he made it seem so incidental to all the other stuff he was showing us (web accelerators in windows 7 for one thing) I kinda forgot all about it.

Initial impressions. It seems well though out and  a lot easier on the eye (and the background processes of the brain) from their previous seach effort.  It also seems to have some of the web browser accelerator features built into it, such as expanded preview information when you hover over links (this works in firefox as well, so it would seem to be the site not the browser doing this !).

binga1

One thing of note, all the predictive suggestions are displayed in lowercase, even if you are using uppercase or even block caps for the search string.  I personally am ok with this as being in tech for a career I tend to use lowercase all the time anyway, except for people names. The site also has a mapping feature which unfortunately seems to be partnered with multimap, who I just am unable to read :o(

Given the richness of the interface there are not that many configurable options just yet. Number of results to display per page, language settings, moderator filter and the ability to turn predictive text on/off are about all right now.

bingb1

I guess wether it suceeds or not will come down to them being able to offer something the others don’t. It is going to be a very hard habbit for me to break personally not to just open google for all my searches, but should bing sunddenly offer that “can’t be without” feature or functionality, I may have to force myself to make a concious switch.

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Posted in microsoft, search | No Comments »

Viral steps up to the plate

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Last night I went along to what has supposed to be a user group presentation type thing on Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 and why we should consider upgrading to them.

Unfortunately, the pe[rson|ople] who were supposed to present we unable to at the last moment, but thankfully Viral Tarpara stepped up to the plate and gave us his spin on these operating platforms, many thanks to Viral :oD

By his own admission, Viral is not a server person, and he did not have a pre-fabricated deck to present from, so the server side was a little light on detail. however his sections on Windows 7 client were very complete indeed.

While Windows 7 has clearly had a lot of work done on it (millions of lines of code removed I’m told…..no wonder it runs quicker !), I am still not yet convinced that I should move to it. most of the features seem to shave a click or two off here and there, which, while is progress, is not going to generate vast amounts of additional time in my working day.

My reason not to upgrade may also be something to do with the fact I am still only mid-way through the migration to Vista on the desktop here…..and I don’t fancy going through it all so soon again just yet.

For anyone who wanted more information on the application compatibility toolkit and shims, Chris Jacksons blog has a lot of useful information, and there is a very cool live demo video of Chris fixing an application at Teched 2008 in Barcelona (the video is on the second page, upper right hand corner).

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Posted in microsoft | No Comments »