Feb
01
2007
Paull Thurrott looks at the ridiculous number of Windows Vista versions and how confusing they all are for end users.
When I first revealed that Microsoft would sell Windows Vista in an unprecedented number of product versions way back in September 2005, I questioned the reasoning behind this decision. Consumers, I felt, would be confused by the myriad of options available to them, and the diversification of the Windows product line would cause support headaches.
Clearly, I suffer from a lack of imagination because it’s way worse than I ever thought it could be now that Vista is widely available. Simply counting the number of Vista versions Microsoft is currently selling is an effort in futility. Sure, there’s Windows Vista Starter, Vista Home Basic, Vista Home Premium, Vista Business, Vista Enterprise, and Vista Ultimate. But there are also the so-called N versions of Vista Home Premium and Vista Business in the EU (where, I believe, “N” stands for “no one is interested”). There are separate Upgrade and Full versions of Vista Home Basic, Home Premium (and Home Premium N), Business (and Business N), and Ultimate. And though Vista Ultimate includes both 32-bit and 64-bit media in the retail box, Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, and Business all ship in separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions as well. Are there separate 32-bit and 64-bit Upgrade and Full versions of these products? You know, I’m not sure.
Jan
26
2007
There’s been a bit of discussion recently about the merits of Vista’s UAC; Jim Allchin wrote a long blog post detailing how they tried to balance the security with usability. My personal opinion is that UAC is too strict and becomes too annoying with too many prompts for seemingly innocent tasks. Installing iTunes, for example, causes 3 or 4 UAC prompts to appear during the installation. Also, editing/deleting files which your user account does not have explicit rights to, causes UAC prompts to appear too.
In my opinion, Microsoft have not got the balance right just yet – the security outweighs the usability.
I know a lot of people that are turning off UAC as soon as they can, and are also recommending to others to turn it off too. This of course is the worse scenario as I do believe that UAC is a good thing, but if it’s too hard to work with people will just switch it off and lose out on the protection that it offers.
To prove my point that this is going to be a big problem as Vista gets released to the general public, Lifehacker have just posted a very helpful article on how to completely disable UAC and the related security warnings that pop up after it has been turned off. This obviously leaves your system in a much less-secure state. Not much progress!
Jan
23
2007
Some more Exchange 2007 links to get through…
Get ready for Exchange 2007
Well, the IT’s Showtime team have products a “Get ready for Exchange 2007 roadshow” videos. You can watch your way through a set of videos discussion architecture, deployment, management and Unified Communications from the guys at corp. Here’s a list of sessions released recently…
http://blogs.technet.com/eileen_brown/archive/2007/01/22/get-ready-for-exchange-2007.aspx
Exchange Webcasts for February
http://blogs.technet.com/eileen_brown/archive/2007/01/22/exchange-webcasts-for-february.aspx
Tips for managing the Exchange Server 2007 Console views
In Exchange 2007, the Recipient Configuration node and its child nodes (Mailbox, Distribution Group, Mail Contact, Disconnected Mailbox) of the Exchange Management Console (console) are used for recipient management. By default, up to 1000 recipients in the current domain are displayed in the result pane of the Recipient Configuration node and its child nodes. For organizations with more than 1000 recipients, 1000 recipients have to be displayed by default while they may not be the specific set of recipients that you want to manage, and you may not want to wait until they are displayed. This article gives a few tips to manage and speed up the console view.
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/19/432275.aspx
RTM Exchange Server 2007 Setup GUI Walkthrough
Exchange 2007 introduces a completely rewritten Setup GUI experience, designed to match the Administrative experience you’ll get with Exchange 2007 Management Console once the installation is completed. Like the Exchange 2007 Management Console, the new Exchange Setup is written on top of the Windows PowerShell cmdlets and is therefore completely scriptable with one-liners!
In the rest of this blog post, I’ll show you the new GUI and talk about the various options available throughout the setup process.
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/18/432264.aspx
Jan
08
2007
Bill Gates presented the keynote at CES a short while ago and I’m just watching the streaming video now. Lots of Windows Vista features displayed, nothing which really excites me at all. Zune mp3 player gets a bit of a push too – number 2 mp3 player in it’s segment?? Windows Live……
Most exciting announcement so far has been the addition of a new server product targeted for homes called Windows Home Server. At first glance it doesn’t seem that interesting, and nothing that couldn’t be achieved with free, open-source software. However, dig a little deeper and you’ll find a bunch of really innovative features that you won’t find anywhere else yet. The most interesting of these is the storage management features: Windows Home Server doesn’t use drive letters, instead all storage is aggregated into one large storage group, and within that storage group data is replicated among the drives to provide redundancy so that drives can be added or removed without worrying about what data is stored on them. Windows Home Server will be available as a beta within the next couple of months with a release date aimed at the second half of the year. Paul Thurrott has a more in-depth review with some screenshots. Another compelling feature is the ability to access all of your files remotely using a Windows Live address that is configured for your Windows Home Server. This also allows you to upload photos to your server over the internet from wherever you are in the world.
The Xbox 360 also gets a lot of coverage, and rightly so – the Xbox 360 really is becoming the hub of entertainment in your living room that Microsoft have been aiming towards for the last few years. Along with the TV and movie downloads that are already available, Microsoft have now added IPTV access from the Xbox 360. This is not as compelling for those of us that live in IPTV-deprived countries but the potential that this opens is huge. I’m not too sure how Sony can compete with this – the integration into the rest of Microsoft’s products may win over consumers here.
Another interesting part of the keynote was the presentation between Ford and Microsoft about the new “Sync” device that will be fitted to certain Ford models starting with the current Focus model. Sync provides connectivity between your car and all of your portable devices such as mp3 players, phones, cameras, etc. You can listen to text messages from your phone read out to you by your car’s text-to-voice system. You can be talking on your phone while getting into your car and seamlessly switch to your car phone without hanging up. You can access your mp3 player through the car stereo and create playlists using the voice-recognition software.
Bill Gates finished the keynote presentation with a demo of a room of the future which I don’t think we’ll be seeing anytime soon. Overall it was an interesting presentation – I wasn’t overly impressed with the Wow factor of Windows Vista or Windows Live, but the Home Server product and the Xbox 360 definitely impressed me.
Jan
07
2007
I’m still not sure who will come out on top in the console wars, or whether the Blu-ray disc will prevail over HD-DVD – but if you visit this site and watch the videos, you may be convinced that the PS3 has it all!
Link to PLAYB3YOND.COM
Jan
07
2007
You can now download the full Exchange help file in CHM format. In previous versions there were a number of large Word documents that needed to be downloaded to get all the operations guides, so this compact help would be very convenient to anyone who will working with Exchange 2007 in the future.
Link here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/…
Dec
16
2006
Microsoft’s new homepage which was previously available through a beta link is now live – www.microsoft.com. It’s very impressive from a technological point-of-view, but I don’t think it’s actually that functional. More like a case of excessive ,unnecessary AJAX that doesn’t ease the use of the site. Still it’s quite nice to look at and I do like the thumbnails feature, but thankfully they haven’t rolled it out to the whole site though.
Dec
16
2006
I was told by Microsoft last week that the RTM version of Exchange would only be made available in 64bit versions – even for evaluation purposes. This came as a bit of a shock as I’ve always been under the impression that there would be a 32bit version of the software available for use in test labs and demos. Well it’s good to see that MS are actually releasing a 32bit version for evaluation purposes only, and you can download it now from this link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=444C259E-605F-4A82-96D5-A2F448C9D4FF&displaylang=en
So I guess the expected question is why there isn’t a 32bit version that’s available for production use too? Small businesses don’t need 64bit as they generally have less than 100 mailboxes. Also, why would you need to run the Edge Transport role on 64bit hardware when all it’s doing is acting as an SMTP relay? I don’t think the problem is the 64bit hardware as most recent servers support either AMD’s x64, or Intel’s EM64T platform – the problem is that you need to upgrade to 64bit Windows Server, and make sure that all software that will be running on the box is 64bit compatible. This would include backup agents, anti-virus software, management software, and anything else that needs to run on the box – don’t forget that SMBs usually don’t have dedicated Exchange boxes so there is often software running on the box too.
Dec
09
2006
Just picked this up via the TechNet blogs feed:
Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is now available for download on Microsoft Connect http://connect.microsoft.com . BDD 2007 provides end-to-end guidance and automation for large scale deployment of Windows Vista and the 2007 Office System.
BDD 2007 RC1 is feature complete and has been updated to support the released version of the User State Migration Toolkit (USMT) 3.0. BDD 2007 RC1 includes a new version of the standalone task sequencer derived from System Center Configuration Manager 2007. Documentation is now complete and has also released to web at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/desktopdeployment/bdd/2007/default.mspx.
This release supports Windows Vista and Windows XP imaging and deployment. For more information, please see the Release Notes included with BDD 2007 RC1.
Where to Find BDD 2007 : BDD 2007 RC1 is available as an open beta download, visit http://connect.microsoft.com and navigate to the Downloads page for the “Business Desktop Deployment 2007 (RC1) for Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system” program. Dependent tools such as the Windows AIK and USMT3 are downloaded from the Workbench.
Source: BDD 2007 Release Candidate 1 disponible
Originally published on Sat, 09 Dec 2006 07:53:00 GMT by fabricem