I Bing; do u Bing 2?

Posted on 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.


image


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 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.


logo_microsoft_office2010[1]


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.

Playing with Microsoft Tag

Posted on by ewand

I know it’s been around in some form for a little while now, but I’ve only started looking at Tag – a way of essentially representing URLs in a camera-phone friendly way, such that merely pointing the phone at the “tag” takes you there.

P1010615

Head over to http://tag.microsoft.com and sign in with a Live ID, P1010616to create your own tags – you can generate them in colour or black & white, in several formats and sizes. I’m thinking of putting a tag on the back of my next set of business cards, pointing to a vCard – then anyone with Tag software on their phone could add my contact details in an instant.

 

Ewan_Dalton's_Blog_2009728173249[1] (this tag takes you to the blog’s URL)

Point your mobile at http://gettag.mobi to install the software – available for a whole host of platforms, including iPhone, Symbian, Android and, of course, Windows Mobile 😉

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Posted on by ewand

Firstly, apologies for the silence in recent weeks – it’s been a busy time and, well, y’know. Once you’re a week or two behind blog posting, you might as well be a month or two behind…

Anyway. Lots has happened IT-wise in the last few months. Windows 7 press seems to be going well (shock, even some Mac users think it’s not awful, though maybe it’s too Mac like…), and the RTM last week [from our annual sales conference held this year in Atlanta, in past years the source of the various Ballmer videos that can be found online] has the potential to kick-start a new wave of PC innovation in both hardware and software.

The iPhone 3GS has launched to near universal acclaim, even if it costs £1700 to upgrade for existing fans. Hats off to Apple on another great product release – Windows Mobile is now so far behind it’s almost an also-ran: despite some great devices like the HTC Snap, which I had a play with the other day … that, for me, is the ideal device: I’ve never got on that well with ‘touch’, and a slim, 3G device with a decent keyboard is hard to beat.

The Emperors New Clothes The buzz in the press a few weeks ago (and inspiration for the title of this post) concerned Google’s Chrome OS. Essentially, a Linux kernel fused to a Chrome browser, with enough drivers to make it work on various bits of hardware (principally Intel based netbooks), at least as far as I can tell. Maybe I’m missing the point, but I don’t see it as being all that revolutionary, or even all that functional… and others appear to be saying the same thing.

Things get more complicated, though, when trying to understand Google’s plan for where this OS/browser fusion is going – especially when thinking about the Native Client project, which aims to provide a way of executing rich client code natively on the host PC rather than going through JavaScript or similar.

It seems that Google is putting a lot of effort into reinventing the Operating System, even though there are plenty of good ones out there already… but to what end? Is the end result going to be more “open”? More secure (than Windows, or Mac, or any of the major Linux distros)? Or is it just that Google wants to control everything the end users do, and what data they do it with?

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) wrote about a previously hyped revolution in the way we’ll all work, the Network Computer. 10 years ago, the story was that all our apps would move to a new paradigm, be written in Java, and delivered to the Network Computer – NC – on demand. The PC model was dead.

Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) was a driving force behind that initiative, at Sun. Maybe he thinks it’s time to try again?

I had to laugh at the brilliant Fake Steve Jobs’ “Dear Eric” post, highlighting something of the impending conflict of interest between erstwhile partners, GOOG and AAPL, as the anti-trust investigators start circling and looking for transgressions. With Google and Apple competing on mobile device OSs, potentially on desktop OSs and on browsers (although Chrome currently does use the same heart as Safari), how long before they start putting clear air between themselves in other areas? Maybe we’ll see Apple putting their arms around other search engines, and not hard-coding Google as the provider in Safari?

Last year, Wired magazine mocked the “Don’t be Evil” motto, by featuring an “Evil Meter” – maybe it’s time for an update?

Windows 7 Release Candidate available now

Posted on by ewand

I’ve now upgraded 4 different PCs to Win7 Release Candidate (build 7100) and each one has gone swimmingly – you too can share in the fun by downloading the release candidate for yourself.

The Windows development team are looking to test the upgrade process from Vista to Windows 7, so are asking customers who upgraded from Vista to Windows 7 beta, to regress first to Vista then upgrade to RC from there. Out of the box, the RC won’t do an in-place upgrade from previous versions of Windows 7, before build 7077. [The beta was 7000].

Since I did a clean install of the beta on a few machines, I’ve used the cheeky workaround here to allow the setup to be tricked into allowing it to go ahead. The only problem I’ve had – and this happened on going between interim builds of W7 too – is that the Lenovo thinkpad keyboard & tablet buttons driver doesn’t work until I go into Device Manager and force a driver update… so initial login needs to be from a Remote Desktop connection or via a plugged-in USB keyboard.

Office 2007 SP2 now available

Posted on by ewand

I’ve been beta testing Office 2007 SP2 since the beginning of the year, and it’s been great – the single biggest reason to use it is the myriad improvements made to Outlook, in terms of stability & performance (particularly relating to search and to startup & closedown).

Download Office 2007 SP2 here

From the summary of what’s new, check out:

Microsoft Office Outlook

  • Performance improvements that apply to the following general responsiveness areas:
    • Startup
      Removes lengthy operations from initial startup.
    • Shutdown
      Makes Outlook exit predictably despite pending activities.
    • Folder View and Switch
      Improves view rendering and folder switching.
  • Calendar improvements
    Improves underlying data structures and the general reliability of calendar updates.
  • Data file checks
    Greatly reduces the number of scenarios in which you receive the following error message when you start Outlook:

    The data file ‘file name‘ was not closed properly. This file is being checked for problems.

  • Search reliability
    Improves search reliability when you use SP2 with Windows Desktop Search 4
  • Improvements to Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
    There are now fewer duplicated items.
  • Object Model improvements
    Now contains many customer-driven fixes.

For more information about these improvements and details about other Outlook fixes, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

968774 Outlook 2007 improvements in the 2007 Microsoft Office suite Service Pack 2

Exchange 2010 beta & high availability strategies

Posted on by ewand

Today, the Exchange team released details of Exchange 14, now to be known as Exchange Server 2010. [download here]. There’s plenty of new stuff in the box, but I’m just going to look at one: high availability & data replication.


[My previous missives on Exchange 2007 HA are here, here and here]


There are some interesting differences between 2007 and 2010, particularly in the way databases are handled and what that means for clustering.


THERE IS NO SINGLE COPY CLUSTER ANY MORE.


Single Copy Clusters, or the traditional way of deploying Exchange onto a Windows Cluster with several nodes sharing a copy of the data held in a central SAN, have quite a few downsides … like there being that Single Copy, or the fact that the storage hardware is typically complex and expensive.


There are other pretty major changes, like storage groups going away (it’s just a database now, a move that Exchange 2007 previewed by the advice that you should only have a single DB per SG), or the fact that databases are now the unit of failover (rather than the whole server…), or the ability now to install multiple roles on servers providing high availability – so you could deploy highly available, clustered/replicated environment to a small number of users, without having lots of boxes or VMs.


Oh, Local Continuous Replication goes away too…


Well, reading the documentation explains a bit more about how Exchange 2010 will change the way that high availability can be achieved – no more the need for a MSCS cluster to be set up first should make it simpler, for one. From that site:



Changes to High Availability from Previous Versions of Exchange



Exchange 2010 includes many changes to its core architecture. Two prominent features from Exchange 2007, namely CCR and SCR, have been combined and evolved into a single framework called a database availability group (DAG). The DAG handles both on-site data replication and off-site data replication, and forms a platform that makes operating a highly available Exchange environment easier than ever before. Other new high availability concepts are introduced in Exchange 2010, such as database mobility, and incremental deployment. The concepts of a backup-less and RAID-less organization are also being introduced in Exchange 2010.


In a nutshell, the key aspects to data and service availability for the Mailbox server role and mailbox databases are:



  • Exchange 2010 uses an enhanced version of the same continuous replication technology introduced in Exchange 2007. See the section below entitled “Changes to Continuous Replication from Exchange Server 2007” for more information.

  • Storage groups no longer exist in Exchange 2010. Instead, there are simply mailbox databases and mailbox database copies, and public folder databases. The primary management interfaces for Exchange databases has moved within the Exchange Management Console from the Mailbox node under Server Configuration to the Mailbox node under Organization Configuration.

  • Some Windows Failover Clustering technology is used by Exchange 2010, but it is now completely managed under-the-hood by Exchange. Administrators do not need to install, build or configure any aspects of failover clustering when deploying highly available Mailbox servers.

  • Each Mailbox server can host as many as 100 databases. In this Beta release of Exchange 2010, each Mailbox server can host a maximum of 50 databases. The total number of databases equals the combined number of active and passive databases on a server.

  • Each mailbox database can have as many as 16 copies.

  • In addition to the transport dumpster feature, a new Hub Transport server feature named shadow redundancy has been added. Shadow redundancy provides redundancy for messages for the entire time they are in transit. The solution involves a technique similar to the transport dumpster. With shadow redundancy, the deletion of a message from the transport database is delayed until the transport server verifies that all of the next hops for that message have completed delivery. If any of the next hops fail before reporting back successful delivery, the message is resubmitted for delivery to that next hop. For more information about shadow redundancy, see Understanding Shadow Redundancy.

Outlook Thread Compressor download now available

Posted on by ewand

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about Thread Compressor on here – it’s an add-in to Outlook which removes unnecessary emails, on the assumption that most people reply to mail and leave the original intact, so you could keep the last mail in each branch of a thread, and remove all the others.


TC[1]


Way back when I was still developing TC, I tried to get it included on the Office Downloads section of Microsoft.com, but our legal department was (with some justification) very nervous about us offering a download which would go through the end user’s mailbox like a dose of salts, deleting stuff. So it stayed (more or less) an internal tool: I even started developing a “version 5” with a much groovier UI and some extra features.



Included in the v5 beta (which is a real pain to install nowadays – the previous v4.2.030 version has nearly the same feature set and is a lot more self contained), was a piece of logic which captured stats on TC usage and emailed them back to me.


Since many people at MS are still running that beta (it’s a long story, but the source code went south so it’ll never get out of “beta” state), I still get maybe 20-30 statistics mails a day…


Since August 2003 when the first statistics email arrived – from me, kind-of naturally – until 24th April 2007 (when I last did an analysis of the stats), TC v5 beta had scanned over 400m email messsages and had compressed over 30m, worth nearly half a terabyte of email data.


To the reader, the spoils


Well, I finally decided – in an “ask forgiveness rather than permission” move – to make the last complete and stable version available for download.


TC4[1]


It’s not particularly elegant looking by modern standards (given that most of it was written 7 years ago in VB6) but it does work, even on Windows 7 (x86 and x64) and Office 2007. Basically, anything post-Office 2000/Windows 2000 should be OK.


A reader called Mark Ruggles emailed me the other day and said:



“It is fantastic and it works like a champ in Outlook 2007. I turned it loose on my Inbox and my archive and I deleted 103Mb of redundant data. I sent it out to some of my colleagues and my manager used it cutting his archives down by 2Gb.
…
This is the coolest utility I’ve found in a long time.”


So, thanks to Mark’s comment, I’ve now registered www.threadcompressor.co.uk and posted install instructions and a download file up there.

Microsoft Roundtable transitions to Polycom

Posted on by ewand

Microsoft & Polycom announced yesterday that the Microsoft Roundtable conferencing device (used with Live Meeting or OCS 2007 to present a 360° view of the room to participants joining from elsewhere), will be replaced.

Polycom are taking over the manufacturing and distribution of Roundtable and renaming it to the somewhat-less-natty “CX5000 Unified Conference Station”.

In many ways, this is good news since it fits within Polycom’s core strength rather than being something of an adjunct product (which is there to support something else, which is pretty much how the Roundtable fitted into the Microsoft world), and it should be available from a lot more places than before.

If you haven’t seen the Roundtable/CX5000 before, check out Forrester Research’s Erica Driver, on her own blog, comparing the experience of using Roundtable to An IMAX Movie after listening to FM radio.

SMSE – a System Center light hidden under a bushel

Posted on by ewand

SMSE – pronounced (in the UK at least) as ‘Smuzzy’, short for Server Management Suite Enterprise – is a licensing package from Microsoft, which can be an amazingly effective way to buy systems management software for your Windows server estate.

Home

If you’re planning to virtualise your Windows server world, then SMSE is something of a no-brainer, since buying a single SMSE license for the host machine allows you to use System Center to manage not just the host but any number of guest (or child) VMs running on it.

Combine that with the license for Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition, which allows unlimited licensing for Windows Server running as guests, and you’ve got a platform for running & managing as many Windows-based applications servers as you can squeeze onto the box, running on any virtualisation platform.

System Center is the umbrella name given to systems management technologies, broadly encompassing:

  • Configuration Manager (as-was SMS, though totally re-engineered), which can be used for software distribution and “desired configuration state” management … so in a server example, you might want to know if someone has “tweaked” the configuration of a server, and either be alerted to the fact or maybe even reverse the change.
  • Operations Manager (or MOM, as it was known before this version), performs systems monitoring and reporting, so can monitor the health and performance of a whole array of systems, combined with “management packs” (or "knowledge modules” as some would think of them) which tell Ops Mgr how a given application should behave. Ops Mgr can tell an administrator of an impending problem with their server application, before it becomes a problem.
  • Data Protection Manager – a new application, now in 2nd release, which can be used either on its own or in conjunction with some other enterprise backup solution, to perform point in time snap shots of running applications and keep the data available. DPM lets the administrator deliver a nearer RTO and more up to date RPO, at very low cost.
  • Virtual Machine Manager – a new server, also in 2nd release, which manages the nuts & bolts of a virtual infrastructure, either based on Microsoft’s Hyper-V or VMWare’s ESX with Virtual Center. If you have a mixture of Hyper-V and VMWare, using VMM lets you manage the whole thing from a single console.

It’s easy to overlook managing of guests in a virtualised environment – the effort in doing such a project typically goes into moving the physical machines into the virtual world, but it’s equally important to make sure that you’re managing the operations of what happens inside the guest VMs, as much as you’re managing the mechanics of the virtual environment.

I’ve used a line which I think sums up the proposition nicely, and I’ve seen others quote the same logic:

If you have a mess of physical servers and you virtualise them, all you’re left with is a virtual mess.

Applying the idea of SMSE to a virtual environment, for one cost (at US estimated retail price, $1500), you get management licenses for Ops Manager, Config Manager, VMM and DPM, for the host machine and all of its guests.

Think of a virtualised Exchange environment, for example – that $1500 would cover Ops Manager telling you that Exchange was working well, Config Manager keeping the servers up to date and patched properly (even offline VMs), VMM managing the operation of the virtual infrastructure, and DPM keeping backups of the data within the Exchange servers (and maybe even the running VMs).

Isn’t that a bargain?

See the FAQ for SMSE for more information.