My Digital Life » Work

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)

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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:"

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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!

Architecture

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

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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

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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!

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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.

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Avatar and the future of 3D

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)

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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

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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

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Filtering Group Policy to Windows 7 Computers

Tom Basham — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:57:30 +0000

During the development work we’ve been doing with Windows 7, one of the items we’ve been looking at is how we can filter the group policy applied to User Accounts by the operating system they are using.

The reason for this is that for a phased migration to Windows 7, you will probably need to account for people roaming between different computers – which may or may not have been migrated. As the configuration applied to Windows 7 may be very different to that applied to older Windows XP computers we need a way of linking both sets of policy to the user accounts, but only applying the right one for the current OS.

If you have all of your user accounts in a single OU (or OU hierarchy) this is relatively straight forward. The simple answer is to use Group Policy WMI filters. These allow you to filter the application of Group Policy based on the results of WMI queries you make of the computer. For example another good use of these is to detect whether a computer is a laptop or desktop, by querying the battery status you can easily set different configurations for things like Offline Folders on laptops.

After a bit of testing I found the following queries work for filtering policy to different OS levels, and computer roles:

Select * from Win32_OperatingSystem Where Version like “6.1%” and ProductType = “1”

To further filter policies based on versions and roles the following properties can be used:

Version
To filter the by OS version, change the Version property to:

Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 = “6.1%”
Windows Vista or Server 2008 = “6.0%”
Windows XP = “5.2%”
Windows 2000 = “5.0%”

Product Type
To filter by the different roles the computer might have, change the ProductType property to:

Client = “1”
Server running a Domain Controller role = “2”
Member server (server that’s not a DC) = “3”

The % character in the above queries is a wildcard for any characters that follow, so you could therefore use Version Like “6%”to filter for OS’s which are Vista and later.

To apply the filters, you use the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC). In the WMI Filters section in the right hand pane, click right-click and select New. Then give a name and description, click Add then enter the filter into the Query box. Then click Ok and Save.

To apply the filter to a policy, select the policy in the right hand pane, then on the Scope tab under WMI Filtering select your filter.

There are a few limitations, like you can only apply one filter per Policy (but you can have more than one query per filter) and the Queries are a property of the policy not the link, but overall they’re a very powerful tool.

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iDialog Office Communication Server iPhone Client

Tom Basham — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:21:04 +0000

A few months ago I wrote a few articles about mobile clients for Office Communications Server, and particularly the options available for iPhone users.

It’s been a while coming, but it seems like there’s now a proper OCS client available in the App Store from Modalty Systems.

iDialog provides presence information on both your personal contacts, and across contacts within the corporate address list (which you can search from the client). You can then either launch an OCS Instant Messaging conversation, or use the iPhone to call any of the numbers listed in the contact info.

IM conversations can be multi-party, and the client can support many simultaneous conversations. They are displayed in the familiar threaded text message format from the iPhone.

In addition to IM, the client can make use of VoIP call control to manage voice calls to their OCS VoIP end-point. Incoming VoIP calls to can be forwarded on to either their listed mobile number (presumably the iPhone), voice mail or any other number. It isn’t however a VoIP endpoint in its own right however. Presumably it would not have made it through onto the app store if it had.

From a backend perspective it relies on OCS 2007 or 2007 R2, and make use of the Communicator Web Access server role. Unlike the solution from Web Messenger it doesn’t rely on separate, additional, server infrastructure.

The app is priced at £5.99, which is pricy for both individuals and corporate deployments. However the web site does mention that corporate licensing options are also available that would – I assume – reduce the per seat licensing.

Link to App Store

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Google Voice

Tom Basham — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:50:13 +0000

I just read a good article with some first impressions of Google’s Voice service. It’s worth a read and cover most of the good and bad points.

If you’ve not come across Google Voice (GV) before it provides you with a single phone number that you can link to multiple phones – for example your mobile, home and work phones. When someone calls your GV number all phones ring until you pick one up. GV will also forward text messages to mobile phones.

Through the web interface you can setup groups for your contacts and set behaviours for voicemail etc. on those groups. It also does things like transcribe voicemails.

It’ll be a few months before it’s available here in the UK, but I can’t wait as I have a couple of numbers that I use and consolidating down to one number will be fantastic.

Anyways, take a look at the post here:

http://paulstamatiou.com/first-impressions-google-voice

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My Digital Life » Work

New version of iDialog iPhone OCS Client

MS LifeCam Call Button and Office Communicator

View from the very top of the Burj Dubai

Windows 7 Device Installation without Administrator Privileges

Direct Access Infrastructure Planning and Design

Integrating Enterprise Search into Windows 7

Disk2VHD: Convert a live disk into a VHD

3D Television… it’s actually quite good.

Configuring OCS connectivity to GMail and Jabber

OCS connectivity for Google Talk and Jabber

Tags

DirectAccess Planning Guide Beta Released

Filtering Group Policy to Windows 7 Computers

iDialog Office Communication Server iPhone Client

Google Voice