My Digital Life » MS

Got a Mac? What to try Photosynth?

Tom Basham — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:38:18 +0000

Good news! Following on from the weekends release of an iPhone application for SeaDragon MS has released an experimental silverlight viewer for Photosynth. So if you have a Mac, just install the Silverlight plugin and try it here.

It doesn't seem to have all of the functionality of the full client, and clearly won't benefit from DirectX acceleration but it does a pretty good job I reckon. I've been trying it on work's Macbook and it's nice and speedy. Try it out and see what you think.

Seadragon makes it to iPhone

Tom Basham — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:29:58 +0000

I'm probably a bit late with this news but I noticed at the weekend that Microsoft have released an iPhone application for their Seadragon technology. I've posted about Seadragon and it's partner in crime Photosynth quite a lot in the past so I won't go into detail about the technology itself (try here and here for that), but the iPhone application does go some way to showing the potential Seadragon has. At the moment the app is able to access content from the Photosynth site, any Seadragon RSS feed (though I'm yet to work out what these are...) and any DeepZoom composer files. It also comes with access to some example content such as maps - which interestingly also use the iPhones location awareness to show your position on them. Whilst the app does a good job, I'd hope and suspect that it's very much our first view of things to come. At the moment for example although the app can open images from PhotoSynth 'synths', it doesn't present them in their full 3D glory. Hopefully in future this functionality will be added as it would seem to suit the Smartphone/iPhone form factor and interface perfectly. I'm also interested to see what the Seadragon RSS feeds are. I've not had a good look into it yet, but I can't see anything about them on Seadragon.com. I'd imaging they are similar to the RSS feeds you can import into PhotoZoom. Hopefully I'll be able to point it into my flickr account and it'll Seadragon up my pictures!

iPhone and Exchange Calendar Problems

Tom Basham — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:50:21 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I posted about some problems I'd been seeing with my iPhone not quite syncing all of the changes to my mailbox. At work we've been doing a bit more investigation around this after we found that a few of the guys out in the business with iPhones were having similar problems. So far we've been able to identify and replicate some pretty significant issues with how the iPhone deals with calendars and mailboxes that have recurring meetings and delegates - i.e. someone like a personal assistant who also has access to a calendar and mailbox. The end result is that people can end up with:

- Missing calendar entries on their phone (even though they exist in Outlook)
- Calendar entries on their phone for deleted/cancelled meetings
- Multiple calendar entries for the same meeting

Having seen this happen it can be pretty frustrating for the end users. These particular problems will only effect a fairly limited number of people - how many people have PA's and deligates? But those that do tend to be relatively senior. There are some known issues with how the Activesync protocol deals with delegates in Exchange 2003, but the iPhone seems to have more problems with it than other Exchange Activesync clients. There is some mention of this problem on the Apple support forums, but no information about a fix. Hopefully now that we have some repeatable scenarios we can help resolve the problem. (Cheers to the guys at work who did the testing!)

So… Windows 7 is fast then

Tom Basham — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:35:06 +0000

Over the last few days I've been playing with Windows 7. There's plenty of information out there about the new features and interface tweaks etc, so I won't before repeating all of that, but one thing that has impressed me is the shear speed and responsiveness is has. Not wanting to rebuilt my main laptop I decided to install 7 on my old HP TC1100 tablet PC. It's a good few years old now and only has a 1GHz Pentium M processor, though I have got 1.5 gigs of ram in there. I've always loved the 'slate' form factor of the old HP tablets. It's no bigger than a normal A4 pad of paper so it light and easy to use. Windows XP tablet edition probably wasn't advanced enough to cope without a full-time keyboard though so the form factor never really took off. That's a shame as I found that the handwriting recognition in Vista was more than good enough that the slate form factor really worked. The only problem was that Vista ran like a dog on the old TC1100 hardware. It took an age to boot and struggled to run any chunky applications. So with this in mind I wasn't expecting too much from Windows 7, I just figured it was a handy spare machine to try it on. Having had 7 on there for a few days I'm genuinely surprised by just how good the experience is. It's much quicker than Vista, probably as quick as Windows XP on the same hardware I reckon. Great work from the 7 product team. It'll be interesting to see if things improve further as the product nears completion and release. As an added bonus for other TC1100 users out there, Windows update found all the drivers for the old hardware - something Vista failed to do on the TC' - and installed them all without fuss. The only missing component is the driver for the extra buttons and jog-dial. Though the old HP drivers install in compatibility mode and enable these buttons they also stop the pen working... but I can do without those to be honest.

Things I need to think about…

Tom Basham — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:19:57 +0000

Apologies for this post, I'm writing it to collect together my own thoughts so it'll probably be even more disjointed than usual!

So... we're more or less a Microsoft shop here. We run a standardised Windows XP desktop supported by Active Directory, Systems Management Server (SMS) and a host of Windows based application services. This is all managed by a pretty skilled operations team and support by a decent service desk and desktop support organisation. In summary pretty much all the technology and skill is Windows/PC focused.

We're now seeing an increasing demand for Mac desktops and laptops, especially from the design community. I need to work out what the impact of adopting a multi-platform desktop fleet will be both technically and from a service management perspective.

I no particular order I reckon I'll need to consider the following to some degree or another. It's probably worth noting here that some of this may have obvious solutions, but I've no really experience of Macs - looking forward to learning though!

Software Delivery
Any computer is pretty much useless unless you have applications to run on it, so this is a fairly important point. At the moment we have fairly robust software delivery and asset management. End users request an application through a web 'shop' and the software gets delivered through SMS onto their computer.

How will this work with Mac's? We don't really want to go back to a word where we're handing out CD's - the asset management of that is too hard. So from a technology perspective we'll need some way delivering the applications.

That will include amendments to our shop front so that people can select between PC and Mac versions of Applications, and also the actual delivery solution. Given that for now the Mac user base is likely to be much smaller than the PC base, it would seem to make sense to try and use SMS rather than adopt a new system - we already know and use SMS. it looks like there are a few solutions out there to achieve this.

Applying Policy
There are certain company policies and configuration that we have to apply to our corporate desktops - proxy server settings for example. Within the Windows world we use AD Group Policy to achieve this. How do I go about doing this with Mac's? Again, there appear to be tools out there which help.

Patching
This is where my ignorance of Mac's starts to show... :) Now I understand that Apple runs a Software Update service, and that from the client you can select which updates to install, which to hide etc. What I'm not sure about at the moment is whether there is a WSUS equivalent that will allow an organisation to administratively select and schedule updates from a central point. It's possible the software delivery solution will deal with this, but for now I'm not sure.

Desktop Support
Speaking to friends at other companies that support Mac's it would seem that although Mac's require less overall support than a PC, the hardware does tend to fail more regularly. Whether this is true I'll wait and see (flame suite on none the less...).

In either case there's a skills gap here as we don't currently have any Mac support skills in-house. Potentially this might mean we could bring someone in to help, at least in the short-medium term to get us over the initial learning curve. It's something we would need to address fairly early on in order to provide a decent level of service.

With hardware support the likes of HP and Lenovo have hoards of guys just waiting to warranty repair faulty kit. The impression I get so far is that the same isn't likely to be true with Apple. Potentially that means we'll have to have Mac's in stock and on-site to replace faulty units quickly whilst repairs are organised out of band.

SharePoint Compatibility
We use SharePoint to deliver our intranet and provide the usual team and project workspaces, so compatibility with this and the workflow and applications built on it is pretty important. This will probably drive which browsers we provide, but may also have lower level implications.

Exchange Compatibility
As with the SharePoint item above, corporate email is provided through Exchange so compatibility is critical. I've not looked into this yet, but I'm guessing there will be some fairly well established solutions available.

Remote Access
Within our PC platform, remote access is provided though a Cisco based VPN solution. Although some services are also available of web based interfaces, compatibility with this VPN solution will be important for mobile and remote users.

Looking through the Cisco site it looks like there is a client available so hopefully this shouldn't be a problem.

Authentication
All authentication is provided though Active Directory. All users have accounts within AD, and where ever possible applications use Windows integrated authentication for sign-on. To provide an integrated service to the Mac users i think its important that this can be maintained as far as possible - nothing worse than log on prompts interrupting your work!

There's lots of decent information on this on the Apple site, so pending me reading through it all I'm not too worried about getting this working.

Old vs. New

Tom Basham — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:46:40 +0000

Just spotted an interesting link on Twitter (I can't remember who mentioned it - sorry!) that kinda follows on from my Selling Microsoft post a few weeks ago.

Sam Lawrence has written about his experience at the SharePoint conference that was going on at the same time as Mix. From what he's said, and from what I've read elsewhere, it seems like the old vs. new camps in MS are alive and well over in the US as well as the UK.

No related posts.

Feeding geeks with XBox Live

Tom Basham — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:10:31 +0000

I couldn't make it to Mix this year, which is a real shame as from what I've heard it was a great conference. To try and catch up I've spent a good few hours this week watching videos of the sessions over on the Mix site. Now I think the Mix site is great, having these sessions online and freely available is fantastic resource for anyone who couldn't make the conference. Whether they're professional geeks like me, students or people who were there and missed a particular session. So last night I found myself sat on my sofa with my laptop and headphones watching the Steve B interview. As good as the Mix site and videos are, I realised it would be much nicer to be watching these things on my TV. I did briefly consider how I could hook up my laptop, but I figured it would be much easier if I could just watch them through Xbox Live. There's some pretty good content on Live these days, especially in the US (the UK seems to have a lot less for some reason). To my mind the more content that's available. and the more choice available the better it is for the customer (user?) and therefore for MS. Content like the sessions from Mix are like gold dust for geeks and IT pros, and making this stuff available on XBox Live would seem to be a quick win. At the very least it says good things about MS's openness and willingness to share MS resources with the wider world. (Though Steve B might want to beep out his email address!)

Selling Microsoft

Tom Basham — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:13:02 +0000

Yesterday I was doing my daily trawl through Google Reader and came across an interesting post over on Liveside.net about Re-branding Microsoft. I commented on it at the time but was thinking about it a bit more while I was driving to work this morning. For the most part I still disagree with the post about blogging at MS, but I do agree that the Microsoft brand and image is a bit on an enigma. I'm quite fortunate that my job within a large enterprise customer gives me pretty good access to resources and people at MS and the other big software and hardware companies. When you're working closely with MS the lasting impression (in my case at least) is one of a company built on smart (very smart), enthusiastic and interesting people. I like being around those guys and working with them - things get done, and usually get done quickly and well. Taking a step back and talking to friends in other positions and other companies, some of their views couldn't be further from mine. They've been conditioned by OS release after Office release after patch release into the view of a bland, arrogant monopoly. I guess this is partly what the Blue Monster is all about, trying to get that internal MS out to the wider world. I think the MS blogs really help here, there are some amazing resources out there that do more for MS than any campaign ever has. (For example although he doesn't know it, and has never met me, I for one owe Joel Olson a beer someday for all the help his SharePoint blog gave me a few years ago!) So where am I going with this...? Well I'm not in marketing, I'm an IT guy. But despite this I can see a glaring opportunity, a case in point: Last Friday I was at the Insight customer event in London. It was a good day with interesting seminars and good range of vendors there to talk to. The company that left a lasting impression on me was SanDisk. A strange choice really considering there were huge stands from the likes of HP and Sony and people dishing out free gadgets for attention. But SanDisk did something different. On their stand they had a magician. This guy was good. He was using card tricks and slight of hand to tell stories about encryption and removable storage. The cards went blank to show they were encrypted and came back when you said the magic password. Now that description doesn't do him justice, but rest assured he was funny, talented and left the people spoke to with a smile on their faces. Whether he sold many encrypted USB drives or not I don't know, but he did a damn good job selling SanDisk. In contrast, the MS stand was your average bunch of Vista desktops and sales guys. There were a few bits about OCS and other cool stuff, but it was... well... just an average stand. You didn't walk away thinking better or worse about MS. It was indifferent. If it was me I'd have gone there with two or three PC's and some big screens. I'd have had Photosynth on one, SeaDragon on another and maybe someone with Popfly on the third. I'd have got a big projector and beamed Photosynth or SeadDragon onto a wall or the ceiling or anywhere people would see it. I'd bet money the stand would have got more attention and that most people would walk away with the wow they were missing. Sure those aren't products you can buy, and they won't directly make MS a penny, but they do impress. They do inspire. They do show MS doing something different, something interesting that will, as Hugh says, change the world. Sell Microsoft not the products.

IPTV

Tom Basham — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:08:18 +0000

I've just been catching up on a few days worth of Tweets and Blog posts. One of the articles I've been reading was a piece on c|net about the MS Mediaroom IPTV solution. It sounds like there are 1 million or so people on the system now which is great. My guess is a fair chunk of those are from BT here in the UK through their BT Vision product. The article talks about how IPTV will merge into Media Center, and find it's way into homes through that route, but to be honest I think they've missed a huge piece of the story. Xbox. The announcement last month of MS IPTV integration into the Xbox 360 gives the platform 10 million potential users in one go. At an Architecture Forum seminar on Tuesday it was mentioned that roughly 75% (IIRC) of Xbox's are online using Xbox Live. So that could be 7.5 million IPTV consumers. Not a bad number really. To my mind the key will be how well the services are integrated into the Xbox console, and how the services are provided and billed. From what I've read it sounds like the new Xbox IPTV services are being launched though the existing telecoms partners, BT in the UK, AT&T in the states etc. From what I understand, in the UK at least it'll only be available to BT broadband customers. If it was me, once I knew it was all working I'd try to open this up wider. Give it free to BT broadband customers (god knows we need something to chear us up...) but charge a small subscription for everyone else. Use the MS Points model for billing so you can order it straight through the XBox console. Easy. (Of course there there would be problems around bandwidth etc. Here you need at least 2MB/s to even get the BT Vision installed... but those are problems that will ease with time) Bundling content and features into games consoles is a great way of making technology mainstream. It worked for Sony and Blueray, why not for IPTV?

Michael Dell on Social Media

Tom Basham — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 13:34:26 +0000

Shel Israel posted up a pretty good interview with Michael Dell about Social Media in Dell. Dell seem to do a really good job at this, the various blogs and sites they use to connect to customers work well. They're certainly far ahead of most hardware vendors I've spoken to recently. It's good to see another big corporate really embracing the new way of doing things.

Mark Andreesen on MS/Yahoo

Tom Basham — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:21:04 +0000

There's good post on Marc's blog about what the potential MS/Yahoo deal might mean for small start ups. http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/02/silicon-valley.html

I guess that’ll mean less usernames and passwords to remember…

Tom Basham — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:20:26 +0000

MS makes a bid for Yahoo - $45 billion. Sounds like good news to me as a consumer... It's sad to see one of the original web pioneers absorbed (I still remember when the IMDB was still hosted at Cardiff University), but Yahoo has kinda lost it's way and MS and Yahoo combined would pose pretty strong opposition for Google. Putting aside the advertising side of things, Yahoo could be a great addition to the 'Live' side of MS, for example the prospect of Flickr and Photosynth coming together would be incredibly exciting.

Microsoft, Virtualisation and S+S

Tom Basham — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:32:30 +0000

There's a good post over at Vertigo discussing the future of virtualisation in MS. I started my career doing desktop deployment projects, so the idea of virtual desktops is something I've kept an eye on over the years. It one of those things that has been promising lots for a long time but never really delivered. I know there are some organisations using virtual desktops successfully, but from what I've seen it tends to be for very specific requirements, and as deployment of traditional OS's has got easier uptake seems to have been quite limited. The Calista deal is interesting because the technology has the potential to remove one of the big obstacles to wide scale adoption, the user experience. Alongside the other technologies in it's portfolio MS should now be quite well placed to deliver true virtual and streamed desktops. How about a world where your PC boot's off the network, a Hyper-V hypervisor is streamed into RAM and then connects to a VM desktop running on a server in an (MS Hosted?) data centre? Sounds kinda cool to me.

Windows 7 next year?

Tom Basham — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 11:42:43 +0000

An article on Techmeme is suggesting that Windows 7 might have moved forward a year and arrive sometime late in 09. Whether this is true or not who knows, but from my perspective as an enterprise customer it would make some sense - and probably make my life easier in the long run! Selling a Vista migration to the people who will pay the bills is proving to be quite a task. The business isn't overly interested in what OS we choose to run, only that they have the applications they need, can use them where they are and that they're nice and speedy. This makes Vista rather a hard sell, especially considering the work needed to assess and fix Vista compatibility for application portfolio of some 1600 apps. That's not to say Vista isn't a great product - I'd have migrated six months ago if it was up to me. Bringing Windows 7 forwards would provide businesses with a renewed incentive to move away from XP. It'd assume it'll include a whole bunch of new functionality to further improve on Vista (mobile working, deployment etc), and I'd guess will also provide improved support for some MS's S+S initiatives - something we'll be looking at in a lot of detail this year. The problem for MS is that a quicker release would be effectively writing off Vista for any big corporate's who haven't already started their Vista migration. Certainly if the move is true I would doubt we would do much work towards a vista, we'd delay those projects by six months to include Windows 7. Having said that, those same large corporates are going to have enterprise licensing so they'll probably be paying for a 'desktop' not the version of windows that's on it. Interesting stuff...

Clouds everywhere

Tom Basham — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:19:19 +0000

I had an interesting conversation with a buddy of mine yesterday about his PC. It started out as one of those 'hey Tom, you know about computers, what should I...' chats. He's basically filled up his hard disk at home and wanted to know how he should upgrade. We were looking at the prices of hard drives, and then at new PC's so he could turn his current one into a server, then I mentioned Windows Home Server, and so on... We came to the conclusion that it didn't really make sense for him to buy local disks any more. He's got a wireless router, so there's network infrastructure. He's not doing anything that needs disk performance so speed isn't an issue. And the cost difference between him buying a couple of big disks to RAID and a Home Server was small enough that he'd rather go the Home Server route. I've done network storage at home for years, but that's because I'm a geek and used those servers and an MSDN account to learn stuff. With Home Servers and things like Skydrive now making networked/cloud storage a realistic option for people at home, thinner computers like the Macbook Air make more sense.