My Digital Life

In between some meetings today I did some reading around Windows Desktop Search and Vista Search.  Although its not something we currently ‘officially’ supply, we’re seeing more people using WDS and Google Desktop.  Not really a problem but when people start indexing the network shares our file servers and network don’t like it much…

So anyway I was reading up on how best to manage WDS, and it turns out its nice and simple as MS have provided an .adm file for Group Policy.  During my reading though I found this good article on the search syntax supported by WDS and Vista. 

The syntax is quite intuitive, and there are a surprising number of filters there, so you can do some pretty complex searches quite easily.

Here’s a few examples, but check out the full list here.

I’ve just been reading over on Johann Kruse’s blog that Messenger for Mac 7 has been released.  I guess for most people the big news for most people will be the usual Live Messenger support, but if you’re an Enterprise IT guy like me its the Office Communication Server (OCS)support that’s interesting.

One of the challenges I’ve got at work at the moment is how best to integrate Macs into our (mostly) Windows environment.  Before we tackle the big problems we’re focusing on providing access to our basic services - email, file and IM. 

At the the moment we’re using Live Communication Server rather than OCS, but hopefully we’ll be moving to OCS over the next year or so.  One of the big drivers for that migration is OCS’s multi-party audio and video conferencing.  Having a Mac client that supports this is a huge bonus.

Maybe it’s time I got myself a Mac of my own.

A few people have been tweeting about twistory today and I really love it, what a great idea!  It pulls data from summize to scroll through tweets with the words Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Feel and Wish.  One of those things you have to see to appreciate, full fantastic none the less.

Another thank you to Steve Clayton for pointing out that the Office Labs site has gone live.  It looks like there are some great tools to try out there.

I’m a big fan of Tablet PC’s and having just installed InkSeine, I have to say it’s very cool.  I use OneNote quite a bit to take notes in meetings, so apps like this always catch my eye.  The GIU is easy to use and I like access to search results.  I can easily see myself missing some of the functionality when I use the full blown OneNote app - if you’re using a pen why would you ever need drop down menus?  There are a few things missing at the moment, but hopefully they’ll get added over time.

If only HP would make an up to date version of their old TC1100 slate tablet!

The other stand-out thing for me was SharePointPedia.   I know there was talk some time back about making Sharepoint the way MS presented communities for products.  The idea being each product team  would have a Sharepoint site under sharepoint.microsoft.com with forums etc.  I’m not sure how far that initiative got, the only other site I’ve seen there is for Sharepoint itself, but the ‘pedia site has always had pretty good content. 

With this sort of site I guess a lot depends on how many people find it and use it.  Having worked with SharePoint in the past and seeing how quickly best practice evolves and changes, any resource MS can use to speak directly to customers has to be good. 

It’s good to see this sort of ‘labs’ stuff out there in the open.  Hopefully there’s more to come.

As you might have spotted, due to the work I’m doing at the moment I keep a pretty close eye on Microsoft and what its doing.  Over the past week or so I think thing they’ve had a fairly good week, news about the Live Mesh platform has started to arrive and it looks great, most of the comment I’ve read about it has been very positive.

So why go and do this?  ‘Microsoft to nuke MSN Music DRM keys‘. It looks like MS are decommissioning the infrastructure that support the DRM used for music bought on the old MSN Music site.  What genius made that decision?  How expensive can it be to keep those servers running?  Surely they’re never going to get busier or require scaling now MSN Music is gone.  Given all the free storage and hosting MS is throwing about chopping off this service can’t really improve the bottom line can it?  All this will do is generate bad press and piss people off… it seems crazy.  Oh well.

Yesterday I had an interesting training session on the British Computer Societies Skills Framework for the Information Age.  For those not aware of it, SFIA (pronounced Sophia) is a standardised framework for identifying IT relates skills and expertise. 

The idea is that once you have standardised way if identifying skills and then measuring levels of competence in those skills (with evidence), it’s far easier to target career development, identify skills gaps and benchmark what skill you might have, or need in the future.  There’s plenty of info online, so I won’t go into the details here, but overall I think it’s a great idea - despite the slightly awkward web interface.

As an individual your record within the system would hold a complete history of you’re skills and competencies as measured and agreed by yourself and your managers, the objectives you’ve been set over the years, and all kinds of other useful info.  Assuming you’re good at whatever it is you do, this stuff could be gold dust.  I can think of tonnes of uses…

- Imagine if you could walk into an interview, not just with your CV but with a record of all your skills and performance measured by your previous employers.  Ok, that could be a slightly scary prospect… but conceptually it works for me.

- As an individual, it would be great to be able to search for jobs that matched my current skills and aspirations.

- As an employer I’d love to target opportunities at people who can demonstrate their ability to deliver the skills I’m looking for.

- I’d like to be able to network with other people who either have the same skills as me or who are working in an area I’d like to do in future.

Although the SFIA foundation and BCS are selling a toolset, surely it’s the data that has value.  Maybe the course didn’t cover everything, but certainly this sort of thing seemed to be missing.  I did ask a few questions about this, but it seems like the information doesn’t follow individual identities within the system, so if I moved jobs my history would not follow.  Of course there are all kinds of Data Protection issues here, but these could be worked out. 

If nothing else it would seem like a great way of driving BCS memberships - signup and receive an identity that’s yours and not just a table in a corporate system.  Provide an API for people to access these subsets of this information and all of a sudden you’ve got what imagine would be a hugely valuable tool.  Maybe this isn’t something that interests the BCS, I don’t know.  Seems like a good idea to me though.

Like quite a few people I tend to keep my personal and work identities slightly separate, and part of that has been maintaining a domain for email - and more recently this blog. 

Back when I had a bit more time (and spare cash!) for geekery I used to maintain an Exchange server at home, mainly so I could learn about exchange but also to make use of webmail.  These days I don’t bother and have just been using the POP mailboxes provided by my hosting company and Outlook.  The problem is now I’m spending more of my time mobile I really miss having a decent webmail service.  Especially since I’ve been messing around with Exchange 2007 at work, the freebie ones the host provides just don’t cut it.

Having done a bit of digging around the web this morning I found the Windows Live Admin Centre, or what used to be called Custom Domains.  Now perhaps this is something everyone knows about, but its new to me and I’m pretty impressed.  I’ve not tried it out yet, but according to this wiki article once I sign up it’ll let me point my domains MX records at the Hotmail mail servers and have my email delivered to Hotmail accounts for my domain.  Sounds like a great solution to me, I can still use Outlook at home and get a decent webmail interface for when I’m mobile somewhere.  I’ll be trying it out over the next few days to see how well it works.

Working for a company that does significant amounts of design work, being a ‘Microsoft house’ can cause our users some headaches.  Although the design guys all love their mac’s, as an IT group traditionally it’s been hard for us support them and integrate them into the rest of our environment.  There are plenty of aspects to this problem and it’s something I’ll be writing about more over the coming months.  For now though, lets just say its an area that we know we can do better in.

It was with great interest then that I read this post over on RoughlyDrafted about IBM’s own testing and pilot project for Mac’s.  I imagine that IBM’s drivers are much the same our own, end user demand being weighed against a business driver for IT cheaper IT services - and hence an standardised environment.  Not something you’d currently want - or be able - to do with Apple, multi-platform has to be the way forward.

The article is perhaps a little over-zealous, there are huge challenges in providing multi-platform IS services and still being cost effective, but I’ll be watching this with interest.  I think I’ll be calling in my IBM account guys for a chat soon.

Anyone else out there do similar work or running both platform in a big way?

There’s a good post over on the MS Digital Memories Experience blog about how you can use the various Windows Live tools to add Geotags to photos without the need for GPS.   It’s then followed with another post about linking your photos to a tour within Live Search Maps.

It got me thinking… That’s pretty cool stuff, and well done to those guys for putting it all together, but something that does all of that in a more integrated way would be so much nicer.  I’m a fan of Live Photo Gallery and given there are so many other Geotagging tools out there it would seem like a great thing to add to this ’software’ part of the Live ’service’.  Given MS’s other mapping and virtual earth tools this shouldn’t be a too hard to integrate (can you tell I don’t do development?!).

What I’d really like to see though are the things like Photosynth and Deepzoom.  Photosynth still impresses the hell out me, and I can’t wait to see it working in a product form.  I’ve used it in some demos at work as an example of what sort of technology we can look forward to and it always seems to capture peoples imaginations.  Everyone can think up a use for it.  Hopefully something will appear before too long. 

Having played with the PhotoZoom site a little I reckon that would be another good addition to Live Photo Gallery.  It’d certainly be a good example of Software + Services - click a button on your desktop and MS processes your photos in the background.  Quite what format they’d be delivered in I’m not sure, perhaps similar to what’s on the site now, an object you can paste into an email or website.  Sounds good to me.

Anyway… enough rambling from me. 

Here at work we’ve just setup Public IM Connectivity (PIC) on our Live Communications Server setup.  Although it’s not my project I’ve been slightly involved as I designed the original setup here a few years ago.

The good news is that it all seems to work quite well, you can’t quite do everything you could if you had a full MSN client but its ok.  One problem we did notice was that we couldn’t add external MSN contacts that were using EASI passport domains - i.e. a personal domain ‘xyz.com’ rather than the default ‘msn.com’, ‘hotmail.com’ etc.

Doing some digging showed that these weren’t originally supported, but then I turned up this KB article that shows you can do it, you just need to use a specific address format. 

So if you want to add ‘joe@xyz.com’ to your PIC enabled Communicator contacts, you’ll need to add him as:

‘joe(xyz.com)@msn.com

An easy fix to find, but I thought I’d post it up in case anyone has the same problem.