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Windows 8 is here

Tom Basham — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 21:33:59 +0000

At work I have a set of floppy disks in my desk draw, three or four of them are MSDOS 6.22 and the rest are Windows 3.11. It’s been a while since I installed them on anything, but the last time I did a couple of years ago it was enough to demonstrate that a) Windows 3.11 was blindingly fast on a modern PC and b) the user experience wasn’t really all that different from today. Sure Explorer has replaced the old File Manager, and Windows 7’s Aero is whole lot nicer than Program Manager, but you don’t feel completely out of sync, the metaphors are still the same. Windows 8 is looking to change all of that:

It’s quite a change, and one that’s long overdue. Desktop operating systems, whether Windows, OSX or the various flavours of Unix shell all use the same basic metaphors, its incredibly refreshing to see Windows 8 try something new. It’s clearly borrowed much from Windows Phone 7’s UI and it’s Metro design language. As someone who’s IT background is in enterprise desktop deployment and management, what’s most interesting for me is the complete separation of the traditional Windows UI from the new Metro interface. As the video above shows ‘Legacy’ Windows apps (I can barely believe I’m say that given the effort I’ve put into those apps over the years!) launch in what looks like a traditional Win7 Aero interface, but this doesn’t seem to be part of the Windows 8 experience – in fact I’d bet that part of the OS has barely changed from 7. It’s easy to speculate about all of this, but the separation of these user experiences may be more than just visual. Windows 8 will be delivered on both on the x86 platform that PC’s have used for years, and the ARM platform. These are completely different architectures and this would almost certainly introduce application compatibility issues. One way around this however may be some form of virtualisation. This in itself this would be tricky, but perhaps the traditional Windows desktop is able to runs within a virtual machine which is surfaced though the new Win8 interface – much like parallels is able to surface Windows applications within OSX on a Mac. The enterprise IT people among you might also have thought of another interesting idea… what if that traditional desktop could be redirected off to a centralised Virtual Desktop (VDI) infrastructure. Low cost ARM devices all of a sudden look very tempting as thin client devices. No matter how it’s delivered, that old Windows desktop will be a welcome site for enterprise IT departments. Many of organisations are spending a lot of time and money migrating to Windows 7, and by far the hardest part of that is application compatibility. Microsoft would do well to minimise the application compatibility differences in the new OS, if Win8 breaks apps that work in 7 – on x86 at least – then it would be difficult for organisations who have invested in Win7 to adopt Win8. Just look back to Vista. It looks that may not be a problem for Win8, which is a good thing. With MS keen to adopt ARM as a way of competing in the tablet space, where x86’s power consumption destroys battery life, the new interface also gives them some interesting options to make a ‘clean break’ away from their legacy. If they have found a way to run the old interface virtually upon other hardware platforms, that could well spell the end for the old Windows. One of MS’s traditional strengths, the backward compatibility of apps (ok, that’s always true…), has also been a shackle around it’s legs stopping Windows developing into something new. Abstracting the old from the new would allow MS to move Windows on while still retaining its legacy apps. The big assumption there of course is that developers adopt the new interface and development environment. Of course at the moment we don’t really know whether the new Win8 interface is able to present the heavy duty apps that PC’s run day in day out. I guess that Office 15 will be the first real test of this. Will it surface through the new interface in Win8 or revert back to the old Windows. I really hope its the former – the Office apps on WP7 are slick and fast, it would be fantastic to have the full fidelity apps presented though the Metro front end. How long it would take the big third party apps like AutoCAD to follow is another matter of course, but if Win8 upgrades are made easy and cost effective it might happen sooner rather than later. I’m also very pleased to see MS asserting some control over Windows 8’s hardware. Whilst it’s nice to have choice, I’m no longer convinced that the vast PC ecosystem is a positive thing. It’s a volume market so margins are low and its too easy for poor quality hardware and software to slip though. Problematic driver software and the sheer amount of ‘crapware’ that litters new computers does nothing to help the end user in the long run, and is one of the main reasons for the PC’s poor reputation for performance and reliability. If by asserting control MS can improve the quality of the overall end product, I have to say that I’m not all that concerned by a restriction of choice – though I know some manufacturers are crying fowl. In the past I’ve spent too much time dealing with problems caused by crappy hardware and software, and I can still see those same problems today if I talk to the people doing those jobs now. So all in all I’m quite impressed with what MS have shown us today. Added to the other information that’s leaked out Windows 8 it’s looking like a very positive move. The only concern I have it timescales… late 2012 is too late. In my view they need to RTM this in the new year.

Windows 8 Application Delivery – AppX and App Stores

Tom Basham — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:31:09 +0000

As information about Windows 8 starts to become more common, a few sites are starting to discover details about the new application delivery model Microsoft are adopting called AppX. In a world where applications have become ‘apps’, and app stores look set to become the dominant distribution method for software, MS seem to have targeted AppX as a delivery model that will support as many types of application and distribution models as possible. In it’s structure AppX looks very similar to Silverlight’s XAP format, the distributable file is essentially a zip archive that contains the source media and an XML manifest file that describe:

- The applications identity – it’s publisher, the applications name, version etc.
- The target architecture for the application – the required processor architecture (presumably important for an OS that will soon once again span more than just x86), OS pre-requisites, any application frameworks required (.net, Silverlight etc.)
- Application pre-requisites – other applications which are required on the system, for example if the AppX package contains a plug-in for an application, this section might list the name, publisher and minimum version of the pre-requisite app.
- Required Capabilities – any capabilities which the application will request such as file system or networking. It will be interesting to see whether it will be possible for an app to check for specific system performance through the Windows Experience Index. This would help developers ensure applications always ran on systems capable of running them as designed.
- OS Extensions – such as file type associations
- Tile customization – This an interesting one, as AppX is similar to the formats used in Windows Phone 7 this could be a carry over from there so that the format is reusable, or it could be a hint towards new interfaces within Win8. It covers properties such as logo, name, and colours.
(Info from the excellent I Started Something)

One of the interesting questions that AppX raises is what this new format will mean for business and enterprise customers. Many will currently be investing small fortunes in readying their applications for Windows 7, either in traditional Windows Installer (msi) format or through application virtualisation technologies such as Microsoft’s own AppV. Adding a third format into that mix will, and does complicate matters. It could be that AppX can act as a wrapper for more traditional deployment tools, or it could be an addition – perhaps for surfacing apps though the App Store interface for example. Or it could be that newly developed apps will need to be in that format to make use of Win8’s new features. We also don’t really know whether the format will be limited only to MS’s forthcoming application store or whether it will be more commonly used for traditional download or CD installs. With many large organisations having made big investments in internal application delivery tools such as System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), let alone then checking and fixing apps for Vista/Win7 compatibility, it will be interesting to watch how the interaction between the new App Store and these internal systems will develop. If the Apple app store is anything to go by people will want to make use of the tools and utilities on offer even in a business context. Company IT organisations will come under pressure to make these apps available alongside the apps they typically provide. It could be that the Windows app store will have a mechanism to publish existing applications though the App Store interface, or alternatively App Store applications could be made available though internal mechanisms such as SCCM (much like Windows Update apps are now). Personally I would rather be able to surface internal application portfolios through the MS store, perhaps though a ‘My Company Store’ section or something of that nature. I think that’s a neater solution and will make it easier for end users – if you want an app on any Windows systems you happen to use, there’s just one place to go. Even if the App Store interface is then going off an using SCCM (or equivalent) for the actual installation tasks. There are a number of pitfalls to that approach however. Businesses use different purchasing process to consumers – at least for now. People aren’t going to be keen to buy AutoCAD on their own credit card for example! The App Store would therefore need to have some form of approval workflow so people can request an app, their manager can approve the request and some sort of internal billing/purchase mechanism kicked off. It’s all achievable though, even through technology MS already sell and have at their disposal. The AppX format could work well for surfacing these internal apps. If internal SCCM host apps could be wrapped with an AppX manifest to inform the app store how to publish them, there’s no reason why internally packaged apps couldn’t be included.

Continuous Services | Connected Devices

Tom Basham — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 17:46:00 +0000

Those of you who know me will know I’m a bit of a geek. I guess to work in IT you have to be to some extent or another. Back when I was at uni I'd think nothing of spending hours tweaking the voltages of my poor over-clocked Celeron 300a processor to get the last drop of performance out of it. The fact it spent most of it’s time idle didn’t really come into it! When I got a real job and all of a sudden I had to work out ways of deploying and managing thousands of PC's. Suddenly all that detail started to become less important, indeed it got in the way, simplicity was the key. Despite all the changes that have happened in the 10 years since then, that same basic rule still stands, and to be honest it always will. Simplicity is always the goal. There’s a great quote from Ray Ozzie about this:

“Complexity kills. Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT. Complexity makes products difficult to plan, build, test and use. Complexity introduces security challenges. Complexity causes administrator frustration.”

I think he’s perfectly articulated the problem. My challenge was that deploying IT out to a company of 18,000 odd people who are scattered all over the world just isn’t a simple thing, there is inevitable complexity there. We just have to abstract it from the end users as best we can, and organise ourselves in a way that manages that residual complexity as efficiently as possible. Wouldn’t it be great though if the solutions we use helped us, if they were designed to remove some of that headache? To an extent that’s some of the appeal of cloud services. We identify a capability that we want to provide Atkins, but then get someone else to deal with the complexity. In theory all we would need to do it work out a way of consuming that capability. Generally that’s going to be a lot easier than starting from scratch ourselves. In a way that’s been the focus of the industry for the past 5 years, working out how to deliver complex services over the internet. We’re now seeing truly viable cloud services emerge from this. Salesforce.com is perhaps one of the most successful – and mainstream – business cloud services. Google’s Apps service is doing well, as is Microsoft’s BPOS equivalent (or Office 365 as it’ll soon be known). As well as these complete services there are also interesting cloud services that are designed to be the components of larger systems. MS’s SQL Azure platform can host SQL or Access databases, and Sunguard has an emerging cloud transaction processing offering. So ‘cloud’ is here, we can – and do – buy services this way. What’s next? This is where Ray Ozzie comes back in. If you don’t know of Ray, he’s the guy that came up with Lotus Notes. In the 90’s he then developed the Groove collaboration tool, it was way ahead of it’s time but when online collaboration started to feature in people minds MS bought the product and company. He then took over from Bill Gates as MS’s chief software architect. A clever guy then. Just after he joined MS he wrote a memo that basically turned MS’s strategy around and launched it headfirst into the cloud race, it’s worth a read. Anyway, the quote I mentioned earlier comes from a new memo he’s written. In it he talks about his view of what the next 5 years are going to focus on. Again, it’s an interesting read. He doesn’t say anything particularly revolutionary but he does articulate what we’re already starting to see here very well indeed. In essence he believes it’s all about Continuous Services and Connected Devices. Ray suggests that internet based services will continue to evolve and form the basis for how capabilities and applications will be delivered, whether that be to individuals or enterprises like ourselves. They’ll be ubiquitous, available to all, and will end up hosting all of our personal and business data. As such they’ll need to be continuously available – downtime would be disastrous. They’ll need to transparently address the security and privacy concerns of individuals, enterprises and governments alike. Sounds a bit like ‘cloud’, but of scale that we’ve yet to see emerge. With such a huge reliance on these service that we can’t see or touch, how we access them would become hugely important. Of course there will be local software of some sort, whether a browser in the Google model or specific applications as Apple and Microsoft would prefer (a rare area of agreement between them). Ray suggests the difference is that we’ll grow used to accessing these services on devices beyond the computers we use today. There may still be a place for desktop or laptop computers but in time people will adopt more appliance like devices that are cheap, and therefore simple (or dumb) and interchangeable and replaceable. These devices will be use to access and consume these online services, making use of the vast amount of processing and storage they make available. He also makes the point these devices aren’t necessary just for consuming information, they may also be used to feed information into these services – some connected devices may just feed telemetry or control information. Again we can see this trend emerging today with things like connected home energy monitors that feed information up to apps like Google Powermeter. IBM’s Smarter Planet ideas apply the same principle to instrumenting systems in buildings, the buildings themselves and the rolling up all this data into views of cities and countries. So in essence the Continuous Services | Connected Devices idea isn’t a million miles away from the world today. Microsoft themselves have long talked about ‘Software + Services’ and ‘Three Screens and a Cloud’ (i.e. Computer, Phone and TV all accessing the same cloud services), a model that is shared with the likes of Apple and their appliance like iPad, and in future by RIM and their PlayBook. What makes Ray’s memo interesting however is that as well as articulating all of this very well, his position at MS (at least for now) means that this is likely to form a good part of MS’s thinking over the next 5 years. This is a time when we’ll be seeing new versions of Windows and Office appear, and also a time when many organisations will be taking a close look at how they will deliver communication and collaboration. Whether you like MS or loath them, it’s important to understand their thinking as they’ll take a huge part of the IT industry with them, as well of course as some of your clients and customers who also use their software. For now they’re playing catch-up in this field to the likes of Google on the service side and Apple on the device side, it’ll be interesting to see how they fair over the next few years. I imagine we’ll be hearing more about these themes in future.

New version of iDialog iPhone OCS Client

Tom Basham — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:34:01 +0000

Just a quick post this one as I’m at work… but I thought it would be worth mentioning that a new version of the iDialog Office Communication Server client for the iPhone is out on the app store. There’s no news yet as to what has changed in the 1.2 version, but I’m sure there’ll be an update to the Modality Systems blog soon with an update. (Via Tony Cocks and Justin Morris)

MS LifeCam Call Button and Office Communicator

Tom Basham — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:44:42 +0000

If you have one of the Microsoft webcams or headsets you’ll no doubt be aware that the the Call Button (by default) opens up Windows Live Messenger. If you’re in a businesses that uses Office Communications Server however that’s probably not much use, you’ll actually want it to open up Office Communicator instead. The other day I stumbled across this article on the MS site that provides an administrative template (adm) that will allow a company using Active Directory to configure the Call Button to trigger Office Communicator. It’s a little thing I know, but it makes for a nicer user experience if you have MS hardware. Anyways… essentially you need to save the following code into a .adm file, import this into a Group Policy and use that policy to configure your computers/users (more information on AD and Group Policy can be found here). Obviously don't mess around with AD or Group Policy unless you know what you are doing, and test everything before applying settings to end users!

CLASS MACHINE

CATEGORY !!MSHW

POLICY !!EnableMOCIntegration
KEYNAME "Software\Policies\Microsoft\Hardware"
EXPLAIN !!EnableMOCIntegrationExplain
VALUENAME "EnableMOCIntegration"
 VALUEON  NUMERIC 1
 VALUEOFF NUMERIC 0
END POLICY

END CATEGORY

[strings]
MSHW="Microsoft Hardware"
EnableMOCIntegration="EnableMOCIntegration"
EnableMOCIntegrationExplain="Enables MOC Integration"

; Online Help Strings
ADM_TITLE="Group Policy settings for Microsoft Hardware"
COMPUTER="Computer Configuration"
COMPUTER_EXPLAIN="Contains computer settings only."
SUPPORTEDON="Requirements:"

View from the very top of the Burj Dubai

Tom Basham — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:00:52 +0000

Working for a company that designs some pretty impressive buildings (here or here) this video caught my eye when I saw it on Laughing Squid today. Whilst the Burj Dubai isn’t one of ours, it’s equally impressive and this video, shot from the top of the spire, shows just how tall the building is. I’m not sure how much I’d like being up there!

MeshMobile (as in ‘BatMobile’!)

Windows 7 Device Installation without Administrator Privileges

Tom Basham — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:31:56 +0000

Supporting mobile workers is always a little tricky. Whilst you need them to be able to work effectively, you don’t always want to grant them enough system access that they can break things whilst on the other side of the world where you can’t help them. One of the big requirements for administrative access to systems is the ability to install new devices such as printers. Windows has supported non-admin installation of drivers for years, but with the big caveat that the drivers are signed. If they’re not then it won’t work, and often the manufactures don’t bother going through the time and expense. Fortunately Windows 7 offers some help here by allowing you to point the system at Windows Update for driver installations. When a device is plugged in Windows will check for appropriate drivers on the local disk (these can of course be pre-populated) and then if it can’t find any search Windows Update. We’ve tested it with a few devices here, and whilst not everything is on Windows Update, it would seem that the majority of newer printers and devices are. At the very least it’s a huge expansion of the drivers included out-the-box. You can also search the Windows Update catalog so check whether certain devices are covered, and download those drivers manually. I’ve not tried it, but I suspect that might also be useful should only Vista drivers be available. Anyway, so how do you set this up? Well there are two Group Policies that you need to set:

Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > System > Device Installation > Specify search order for device driver installation source locations = Enabled: Search Windows Update Last

This tells Windows to search locally for drivers, then search Windows Update for a compatible driver if none are found

Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > System > Driver Installation > Turn off Windows Update device driver search prompt = Enabled

This removes the choice for an administrator to specify searching Windows Update and sets Windows to search Windows Update by default (given the search order specified above). If this isn’t set the user is prompted to enter administrative credentials before searching Windows Update

Direct Access Infrastructure Planning and Design

Tom Basham — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:59:34 +0000

To go along with the release of Windows 7 last week, Microsoft have today released the Infrastructure Planning and Design guide (IPD) for DirectAccess. I’ve covered DirectAccess a few times here as I think it’s a good solution for remote workers. The IPD covers the steps you’d need to consider in the design process including IPv4/IPv6 transition technologies, IPv4/IPv6 network address translation and the overall server and certificate topology. Though I still think my diagrams are better :) You can find the guide here: here

Integrating Enterprise Search into Windows 7

Tom Basham — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:03:01 +0000

One of the things I like about Vista and Windows 7 is the way search has been integrated into almost every part of the interface. Sure it’s not something you immediately start using, but for me at least it’s really grown into something that I use more than once a day to help find information and save me time. On top of the ability to search the local disk, one of the great things about the Vista/2008/7/R2 windows family is the ability to federate search across a number of sources. What does that mean? Search federation allows Windows to query against remote data stores without the need to index those locations itself. Imagine that you wanted to search your SharePoint sites for a document, and you wanted to do it from within Windows. One way to do this would be to get Windows to index all of the SharePoint content and keep its own index. That’s not very efficient though, if there is more than one computer each one would need a copy, so in an enterprise that’s a whole lot of duplication. With federated search you enter your search query in one place, in this case Windows, and that query is then forwarded on to the other systems which have indexed content. They then execute the query against their own index and send back the results. Those results are then displayed back in the original application as if they were searched and indexed locally. The benefit of this is that it’s much more efficient, each source can have it’s own index and search tool (provided it supports federation of searching) and only the query and results are passed over the network. So, how do we make use of this? Well Windows 7 supports search federation in the form of OpenSearch. Fortunately quite a few different search engines support this, but for the sake of this post I’ll use SharePoint as I’m guessing that one of the more common data sources people will want to search. What it looks like Before I get into how this can be setup and configured, here’s a screenshot of what it looks like in action: This is a screenshot from Windows Explorer on a Win7 a test machine I was using today. First you can see that there’s an addition to the Favourites for your new search. When you enter something into the search box, the results from the SharePoint location are returned directly into Explorer Window. If you select one of the files and have the preview pane turned on you get a live preview of the document (the preview pane is something else I really find useful!). In addition to the view above, you can pin your new search to the bottom of any other results… but more on that later. So how do you set this up? Well there’s the manual setup and an automated setup using Active Directory Group Policy. The Manual Way For manually setting up a new search location you can create a new OpenSearch Description file which you can then double click to install. An OpenSearch Description file (.osdx) is an XML document that tells Windows where to send the search terms and how the results should be formatted. These are fully document here, but I’ve included an example below:

"1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

"http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" xmlns:ms-ose="http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/">

SharePoint Search

Search SharePoint

"application/rss+xml" template="http://yoursharepointsite.com/searchcentre/_layouts/srchrss.aspx?k={searchTerms}&start={startIndex}&cnt={count}"/>

"text/html" template="http://yoursharepointsite.com/searchcentre/Pages/Results.aspx?k={searchTerms}&page={startPage}&cnt={count}"/>

"application/rss+xml">

-1





When you double click on this .osdx file, Windows uses the information it contains to create two new files. The first is a Search Connector (a .searchconnector-ms file) in the “%userprofile%/searches” directory, and the second is a shortcut to it in the “%userprofile%/links” directory. It’s this shortcut that appears in the ‘Favorites’ folder in to Screenshot above. The Automated Way The simplest way to deploy the new search settings out to a number of computers is though Group Policy. As the search config is stored within the Search Connector, all you need to do is deploy the .searchcconnector-ms file and shortcut out to your target computers. There are a few ways to do this, but personally I’d use Group Policy Preferences. This will give you a good level of control over the targeting of the files, and easily allow you to adjust the settings over time. You could also use things like logon scripts. You can configure Group Policy Preferences to deploy files with the User Configuration > Preferences > Windows Settings > Files area of a GPO. You’ll have to do this as a user based policy as the files must be copied into the User Profile, if you copied the files as a computer policy it would apply before a user was logged on so they would end up in the wrong place. Within the Files Preferences, you have to specify a source file location and a target location. For the source location I would tend to use the Netlogon share for your domain (//domain.com/netlogon/) as a copy will be on every domain controller and usually therefore local to the end users. The target locations should be the same as those described in the manual steps above: Search Connector: %userprofile%/searches/File.searchconnector-ms Shortcut: %userprofile%/links/SearchTitle.lnk As well as the source and target info, you also need to set a few of the other options. The first is ‘Run in logged on user’s security context (user policy option)’ as this will ensure that the file is copied in context of the user logging on. You may also wish to consider whether to set the ‘Remove this item when it is no longer applied’ options so that the files are removed if you decide to remove the policy. Adding Links to Your Search Connector Following the steps above will add your new search location into the Favourites folder and allow you to search against it. You can however also add your new Search Connector to both the ‘Search Again’ links that appear at the bottom of any search results, and to the Start Menu. This is done by configuring the ‘Pin Libraries or Search Connectors to the ‘Search Connectors’ to the ‘Search Again’ links and the Start Menu’ Group Policy that can be found within the User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Explorer area. I hope this has been useful!

Disk2VHD: Convert a live disk into a VHD

Tom Basham — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:37:30 +0000

A couple of guys at work pointed this out to me last week, so I’m a bit late posting about it, but I think it’s worth mentioning all the same. Disk2VHD is a great little tool from Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, two of the guys behind Sysinternals (now part of Microsoft). What it does is is pretty simple, copy a physical hard disk into a virtual hard disk (VHD). There are loads of tools to do this, but what makes Disk2VHD different is that it can run on a live, online disk. To do this is makes use of the Volume Snapshot capability that’s be in Windows since WinXP to create a point-in-time snapshots. Being able to create a VHD from an online disk opens up a couple of news possibilities, for example it would make a pretty good tool for creating bootable backups of machines. In fact when I get a chance I’ll be seeing if I can knock up an automated way of creating a VHD backup of an XP computer before it’s trashed and upgraded to Windows 7. If it works, combined with Windows 7’s native boot to VHD functionality it’ll be a pretty good way of providing an instant recovery back to a users old XP computer. Hopefully they’d never need it, but it may be worth the effort to add an extra level confidence. Check out Disk2VHD here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

3D Television… it’s actually quite good.

Tom Basham — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:36:44 +0000

Yesterday I spent the day at BT’s Adastral research centre talking about new and upcoming technology. BT do a lot beyond selling phones and broadband, and the day was focused on highlighting areas of technology that we could use in come form or another. They’ve got a huge range of stuff there, we covered everything from their 21st Century Network project though to a fascinating bit of kit that can pick up sound from fibre optic cameras. One of the less business focus demos though was a couple of 3D televisions. I’ve seen a couple of 3D movies recently and have been pretty impressed with the effect. Even so, I wasn’t so sure about the idea of 3D TV. Maybe it’s because most of the movies are animated, I wasn’t sure what live action would be like. Having seen it in the flesh though I’m really quite looking forward to the prospect. The 3D effect is just as real as at the cinema, but what surprised me was how well it seemed to work with normal real life scenes. Te demo had a couple of different scenes, from the predictable action movie type stuff through to rugby games and and an F1 car driving round Mugello. It works very very well for the sports sections, it’s no wonder Sky are so keen on launching a 3D channel next year. Ok, so you have to wear glasses, but they’re nowhere near as bad as the only red/green ones you used to get as a kid. You’d rather watch without I’m sure, but even though I only had a quick demo I reckon the glasses are worth the sacrifice. Oh, and for normal 2D programmes the TV works just like a normal HDTV. How does it work… well from what I can gather, glasses are circularly polarised, clockwise for the right eye and anti- clockwise for the left. The screen then alternately projects the frames for the right and left eyes, switching a filter for each. However it works I’m looking forward to seeing what the 3D Star Wars movies will be like, and what games developers do once they get their hands on it.

Configuring OCS connectivity to GMail and Jabber

Tom Basham — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:26:31 +0000

Following on from this weeks release of an XMPP connector for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (how do Microsoft come up with those catchy names eh?), the OCS team have posted some detailed information on the configuration needed to enable communications between OCS, Jabber and Gmail users. Information on configuring the gateway for Jabber can be found here. Info on the setup for connectivity to Google Gmail is here. (Topology images from the OCS Team Blog)

OCS connectivity for Google Talk and Jabber

Tom Basham — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:18:33 +0000

Earlier today Microsoft made some interesting announcements around their Office Communications Server (OCS) product. OCS and its predecessor Live Communication Server have always had the ability to communicate with some of the public instant messaging networks through MS’s Public IM Connectivity (PIC) service. This provided federation between your internal LCS or OCS system and the public Live Messenger, Yahoo and AOL networks. In exchange for a per user, per month subscription of course. Half the good news in today’s announcing is that from October 1st a PIC license will no longer be required for federation with AOL. Combined with a similar announcement about Live Messenger back in June this means that only federation between a companies internal IM and Yahoo requires additional PIC licenses. Though I’m guessing with MS’s moves towards Yahoo this may not last long either. The good news is that the cost of the PIC licenses has been reduced accordingly. Alongside this news MS has also announced a new XMPP gateway for OCS 2007 R2. This gateway will allow internal OCS users to add contacts from XMPP based IM systems, share presence with those contacts and hold 1-to-1 IM conversations. So what’s XMPP? Well its the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. This is the protocol that is used by both Google Talk and Cisco’s Jabber, both of which have been tested by MS. In theory this now means that OCS can communicate with pretty much all the other major IM networks and systems (IBM provide a gateway between Sametime and OCS). The XMPP gateway is fully supported by MS and a component of Office Communication Server 2007 R2 and is free to download. There’s a video on Channel9 that talks more about the gateway and the resulting architecture (embedded below). You can download the gateway from here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=141529

DirectAccess Planning Guide Beta Released

Tom Basham — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:41:46 +0000

I’ve written a few times about Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2’s DirectAccess technology. It’s something that whilst complex, has the potential to be extremely useful when providing services to remote workers. Microsoft have just released a beta of the Infrastructure Planning and Design guide for DirectAccess. Whilst I’ve not had a chance to read through in on detail, the IPD guides are usually very helpful, and certainly the information I’ve seen through the TAP programme has been pretty good. You’ll need to join the beta through the connect site, but information on how to do that can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee477347.aspx