Going for a walk in the country

Posted on January 2, 2010 by ewand

I know it’s been a bit quiet in recent weeks here, but I figured I could chip in the now traditional New Year random post, which might of interest outside of the working day. Here’s last year’s post on how to wash you car.

During the Christmas and New Year holidays, I’ve been doing a bit of walking – going out for a few hours in the countryside, occasionally taking in the odd pub en route, that kind of thing. Over the last few months, I’ve come across several invaluable aids to finding and navigating some great walks.

If you search online for “walking in <name of area>”, you’ll probably find plenty of links to ramblers associations or other groups wanting to tell you about or sell you access to maps and documented walks. Ditto, there are thousands of books with details of walking in the UK . and very good I’m sure they are too.

I discovered the AA’s web site to be a particularly great source of free info, though – the walks are usually very well documented . though they make no sense when you’re reading them at the PC, they make perfect sense when on the walk itself (instructions like “walk along the edge of the field to a style, then cross the next field and two styles to a metal gate, turn left and cross a bridge to another field” don’t make for easy imagining, but when you’re at the edge of the field looking at the styles, it’s just right).

The AA “Walks and Bike Rides” site

Have a look on this site and see what there is in your neck of the woods. It’s been a brilliant source of inspiration for us. What I normally do, though, is to take the text from the AA site and copy/paste into a Word document – set the margins nice and tight, paste the text in with giant font size and copy/paste any maps they show from the AA page. and it’s easy to print out double-sided on a sheet of paper or two and take it with you on the walk.

What’s really got me out of trouble a couple of times, though, is Bing Maps. The most recent revamp includes the ability to display Ordnance Survey maps data (in the UK) as an alternative to Road & Satellite maps. Simply go to your favourite destination and from the “Road” drop-down, you should be able to view OS Landranger and OS Explorer maps (depending on your zoom level – if the OS option is grayed out, try zooming in or out to see what happens).

Ordnance Survey Explorer maps are great, listing all manner of bridleways, byways, rights of way etc. But manhandling an A2 sized bit of folded paper when out and about is a bit cumbersome. these Bing Maps let you copy just the bit you’re interested in, and if you paste into your Word document, you could even have the OS version of the map on the back of the AA map & directions. Perfect.

I’ve also got a Windows Phone device which has the Bing for mobile available – and since the device has a GPS, it can show aerial views of where we are currently. Manually cross referenced with the OS maps, it’s got me out of trouble on more than a few occasions – knowing we’d missed some turning on a designated path, but been confident enough of making it back to the path just a few hundred meters ahead. I hope some future version allows the showing of real OS maps on the mobile screen . now that would be sweet.

Have a play with the OS features on Bing Maps – it’s truly brilliant, and might teach you a load of stuff about your own manor.

Exchange in the cloud or on the ground?

Posted on November 18, 2009 by ewand

Following the price cut on the desperately-in-need-of-renaming BPOS services recently, I’ve been talking with a few people about the where the tipping point might be for running Exchange in house vs using some form of hosted provision.

There are plenty of reasons why a hosted offering makes sense. More and more end-users are away from the office (using web access, mobile devices or VPN-less connectivity such as “Outlook Anywhere” that’s been part of Outlook for the last 6 years), and as the user end-point is increasingly mobile, it starts to matter a lot less where the server end is.

In the first 3 versions of Exchange (4.0, 5.0 and 5.5, released in 1997 and 1998), the accepted rule was that servers would be placed in the same location as clumps of users (say, if you have more than 30 users in a remote office and anything other than a great WAN connection, you’d drop an Exchange server on-site).

Since the client and server maintained a constant connection with each other (using MAPI over RPC, if you’re interested), and since wide area networks for most companies were in the few hundred kilobits between sites, the default was pretty much that servers tended to be in the same physical location as the users.

As network capacity improved (and costs fell), combined with server capability improvements (and price reductions, and technology like Outlook cached mode and the shift to using web access as an alternative), it became more feasible for organisations to centralise and consolidate Exchange into one or a few physical locations – such as Microsoft famously did, by moving from many locations in Exchange 2000 to just 3 in Exchange 2003.

So, the position we’re now at is, it pretty much doesn’t matter to an end user whether they’re connecting over a company wide-area network to a remote Exchange server, or if they’re connecting over the internet to one that sits in someone else’s datacenter.

If you’re an organisation with a few hundred users, then you probably don’t have a dedicated Exchange administrator who does nothing but feed and water the email system. Moving to an online hosted model such as Microsoft Online or one of the many “Hosted Exchange” partners who offer a more tailored service, could mean a significantly lower cost of operations when measured over the next few years.

Since Hosted Exchange providers and Microsoft Online will both move towards Exchange 2010 in the near future, it’s something that every current Exchange user should consider – is it time to consider moving some or all of your estate to a hosted environment, or you do have specific requirements around backup retention or data control, that you absolutely need to have your own servers on your own soil? If the latter, then maybe “cloud” based email isn’t for you, but Exchange 2010 “on-premise” would be the right choice.

As part of this discussion, of course, there’s the question of whether all of one or all of the other is the correct approach – a blended model could be the ideal, where some users are on-premise and others (maybe the less demanding) are hosted in the cloud.

Microsoft Online Services prices cut

Posted on November 6, 2009 by ewand

The snappily-titled Microsoft Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) offering, announced some price cuts the other day…

I heard from someone internally that the price cuts were driven by increased economy of scale – ie. as more customers signed up for BPOS, the cost per customer of providing the services has fallen, and the saving is being passed on.

There’s an online pricing calculator to get an estimate of what it would cost to adopt, but if we took an example of 250 seats of Exchange Online (ie not the full BPOS suite), it would be around £805 per month, or just under £10,000 per annum.

Now that might sound like a lot for only 250 seats, but if you compare with the license costs to buy a server or two, 250 Client Access Licenses and the Enterprise CAL for email protection, you’d be looking at around £15k for software licenses, plus hardware costs (let’s say another £5-10k) and the staff costs to maintain the Exchange environment. It might start to look pretty attractive to outsource the whole “keeping email running” task, and just pay for it to be online.

Some customers like the online services model since it is an operational expense (OPEX) rather than having capital expenses for servers & storage hardware, which is depreciated over a number of years.

Finally, an example of where Online Services might suit particularly well… one fairly well known company (who shall remain nameless for the moment), were still muddling along on an old Exchange 5.5 environment. On Wednesday, the server shuffled off this mortal coil to join the choir invisible, causing a good deal of consternation in the business, who were now completely without email.

I’ve said for a long time, that Exchange is the only mission critical system in most businesses, which affects everyone immediately. If the CRM or billing or the payroll systems fell over, sure, it would be important – but most people wouldn’t know right away that it had happened. Email goes down, and most businesses will feel pain right away.

Back to example company. As fire rained from the sky, they took the decision at 4:30pm to buy 110 BPOS accounts, which were provisioned in 15 minutes and the business was fully back up with email up and running, later that evening.

XP Mode in Windows 7 saved me money

Posted on October 11, 2009 by ewand

I’ve been running Windows 7 at home for a while now, and have been very pleased with it – on a decent spec machine (Quad core, 4Gb RAM, lots of SATA-II disk etc), it absolutely flies. As did Vista before it, if truth be told.

When I got this machine, I had it set up to dual boot between Windows Vista x64 and XP Media Center, partly because I had some software that didn’t like Vista. One of the problem software/hardware combos was an oldish Canon 5000F scanner that gets used once every few months or so, but didn’t have 64-bit drivers available. It wasn’t enough hassle to make me want to go & buy a new scanner.

On moving to Windows 7, I’ve just used the Virtual Windows XP, or “XP Mode” (which has now RTMed – available soon), function, which lets me run an XP virtual machine that has access to local resources like hard disks etc.

After firing up the Virtual XP instance, the scanner is listed under USB devices – the software was easy to install since the hard disks of the host machine are visible to the VM, and it was a snap to configure the Canon scanner software to save its output back into the Documents library of the host.

So all in all, a bit more trouble than if it just worked natively – but the XP Mode offers a solution to the gnarly problem of old hardware that isn’t being supported any more by its manufacturer. It certainly saved me the £50 or whatever it would take to buy a new scanner!

Outlook 2010 beta and E.164 number format updater

Posted on October 6, 2009 by ewand

Well hello again; it’s been a while.
Normal service should now infrequently resume.

I thought I’d update the instructions of a previous post, after I was showing someone how to use my old “Contacts updater” application to make all their Outlook contact phone numbers be E.164 compliant.

(see blogs passim. eg here, here, or here.)

Now the little app I reference is an Outlook custom form, meaning it gets installed into the Exchange mailbox folder, rather than some client-side Add-in to Outlook. Custom Forms have been available since the days of the Exchange 4.0 client and later Outlook, as the installed forms show up an item on the “Action” menu within the view of the folder.

Now that Outlook 2010 has adopted the Fluent UI (aka the “Ribbon”), things have moved somewhat…

Just like the early days of Office 2007, the initial response from some users might be to get annoyed that things are in a different place, but in most cases, it’s a great improvement.

Since custom forms in Outlook have largely faded into the sunset, this particular one gets a bit more obscure… it’s a question of going to “New Items” within the folder, then selecting the “Custom Forms” pop-out (only available when you actually have some custom forms installed in that folder), and any forms installed will be presented there.

Ferrari powered by Sharepoint

Posted on August 18, 2009 by ewand

I noticed that the Sharepoint case study for Ferrari today, posted at the end of July – link here. The case study includes a cool video hosted in a nice Silverlight player – looks really slick and well worth a look, especially if you’re one of the Tifosi or just like Ferrari road cars.

On a related note, if you’re a fan, check out one of the best car-related ads I think I’ve ever seen – Shell host a high-quality streaming version of it on their site:

The noise of the flat-12 F312B driving through Hong Kong makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up every time I’ve watched it…

Pinpoint a Microsoft Partner

Posted on August 14, 2009 by ewand

This site has had something of a quiet launch – I first saw it a couple of weeks ago and was really impressed – it’s called Pinpoint and is a new take on the question, “How do I find a good Microsoft partner?”

Simply enter a search (a name of a known partner, or any element of the technology or solution you’re interested in), and a location, and you’ll see results shown on a map, with a list of matches below.

What’s interesting is the ability to review partners or solutions – so if and when this site gets a bit more use, we should see not just a linear list of partners who have the skills, but the ability to see who gets the best reviews (a bit like on Tripadvisor or Amazon). If you’ve had a good (or bad!) experience with any Microsoft partner, please add a review – it might help someone else to choose the right solution partner for them.

If you work for a Microsoft partner, make sure you’re listed on here with some sensible detail – one of the guys in my team, Matt aka virtualboy, was showing this site to a partner only the other day. Top of the list of results came their main competitor… You have to be in it, to win it, as they say… Make sure you have your products & services listed!

Pinpoint is now linked from the Microsoft UK homepage, via the “Experts” page at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/experts/, which also has more detail about the different types of partner and why you may need their services and help.

Mapping with Bing

Posted on August 8, 2009 by ewand

As a follow on to the Bing post from the other day, I was talking with a guy who’d spent some years working in the Microsoft mapping team in Redmond – he’d talked about the progress the company had made in online mapping technology and the challenges associated with it.

One of the latter was the brand – maps.live.com didn’t drip off the tongue quite as well as, say, Google Maps or Multimap etc. Well, the Bing team has registered a whole bunch of domains which could make it easier to jump straight to the content you want – eg bingmaps.com, bingtravel, bingnews, bingimages, bingvideos etc etc.

TIP: If you use Internet Explorer, just type the name (eg bingmaps) into the address bar, and press CTRL & Enter. IE automatically inserts the http://www. and the .com/ bits for you, and takes you there. No more clicking on the “Go” button …

I Bing; do u Bing 2?

Posted on August 6, 2009 by ewand

It might take a while before you “bing” someone before going out on a date with them, or you “bing” a question out onto the internet… stranger things have happened though. I hear stories of people visiting bing.com every day, just to see what the picture of the day is. IMHO, that’s so much cooler than a plan white page and 10pt Arial.

When Microsoft first announced “Bing” a few weeks ago, it was the first step in delivering a relatively fresh take on how people want to use search online. Dr Qi Lu, brain-the-size-of-a-planet president of the MS Online Services group and a recent hire from Yahoo, talks about “user intent” as being the key to unlocking a great online experience – in other words, not simply answering the question but trying to understand what the user actually wanted to say.

I’ve seen some people use search online and since they don’t really understand how query languages work (or can’t easily express themselves in accurate yet concise terms), they don’t get the best out of the current crop of search engines. By trying out really simple searches, Bing seems to be a lot better than Google, which might appeal to the less sophisticated user. IT people probably know how to search the web properly, and therefore will get similar results sets. As an example, try these randomly picked terms:

GOOGLE	BING
BBC News	BBC News
U2 concert	U2 concert
Weather tomorrow	Weather tomorrow
Kate Bush	Kate Bush
Pizza recipe	Pizza recipe

Hands up – the results I used on Bing were from the US version… Bing in the UK hasn’t yet got all the functionality that’s in the US site, though further improvements are coming – check out Bing’s US English site, or look at the Tour for an idea. As for the table above – I honestly spent a while thinking up the kinds of things people might search for, and none of what I came up with looked like it was any better in Google than Bing. Sometimes it was notably better the other way round.

Try yourself: look at the top search terms from Google or from Bing, and try the same search in both. You might even try BlackDog to do the search side by side.

When I was in Atlanta the other week, I went into an Apple store for a sniff around and was amused to see a Macbook Air showing a Bing search results page… was that just because 12,000 Microsoft people were in town, or are the general public starting to question the default search provider in Safari?

Safari on the Mac has, like IE on a PC, a search box in the top right. Unlike IE, you can’t choose your search provider however – Google is hard-coded in there, unless you download the Glims plugin. See GrinGod’s blog article for more details.

Office Web Apps complement, not replace, Office

Posted on August 4, 2009 by ewand

The Office 2010 announcement a couple of weeks ago, (publicly) lifted the lid on the Office Web Applications, either as a set of web-based Office apps that a customer could host on their own metal (and expose to the outside world, perhaps), or as something that you’d be able to get online from others. Microsoft’s own “Office Live” workspaces will use Office WebApps, for example.

It’s easy to think that moving to an online-based set of productivity applications would be an either/or decision – like today, you could choose to do either Office (as a client side set of apps) OR Google docs (as an online variant).

Maybe Office WebApps will blur that distinction a good bit. As an illustration, I was in an interesting talk last week, where the speaker asked:

Who in here uses Outlook Web Access?

(everyone’s hand goes up – well it was a Microsoft audience, so no surprises there)

OK, who now uses Outlook *less* because they also use OWA?

Literally, not a single hand went up.

So, for business use, you could think of Office WebApps as a way of interacting with the same documents, the same data, that you would if you were inside your company and using Office applications on a PC, but instead you’re at home or you’re at someone else’s machine, or maybe you just want to share your document with someone from outside the company. WebApps are promised with every version of Office, too, as is OneNote – finally making OneNote available to everyone, not just Professional or Student users.

More info on the Office Web Applications blog.