Author: rich_gibbons

Microsoft Licensing, products, Cloud, and more!
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Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference) 2008


This year’s PDC 2008 is going to bring with it a whole host of new things for the industry from Windows 7 advancements, cloud computing updates, new projects and more. I’m going to use this post as a central repository for the various different bits of information that we will see.

One of the new things that the PDC 2008 will reveal is “Project Velocity“, Microsoft’s main memory distributed caching framework which was “built to meet the performance, scale, latency, and availability requirements of large scale enterprise and web applications”.

“Oslo” is also present at the PDC 2008. There are 5 sessions around Oslo which is a family of new technologies to enable “data-driven development and execution of services and applications.” It “provides a language for creating schemas, queries, views, and values” and “uses schematized data stored in the “Oslo” repository to drive the development and execution of applications and services”.

A link that shows all the sessions is available here.

There’s a whole host of things being revealed at the PDC this year, here are links ot my other PDC 2008 related posts:

Silverlight for Mobile

Silverlight 2

What is a Bluehoo?

Microsoft Strata-Cloud OS?

Four Softies and a Pizza Guy

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Microsoft Windows 7-Parallel Processing


Windows 7 is Microsoft’s next hotly anticipated release and there is now information that changes will be made to help it support Parallel Processing.

Microsoft have already stated that deep-level changes between Vista & Windows 7 will be get to a minimum as a way to ensure driver and application compatibiity; and if they pull it off,  Windows 7 will have a much better start to life than poor old Vista 🙂

The downside to this is that they can’t play around with Win32 (Windows Core) too much, and that is going to limit what can be down with regards to Parallel Processing. However, at this year’s PDC (Professional Developers Conference), there is a session entitled “Parallel Symposium: Addressing the Hard Problems with Concurrency” and the session decription contains the phrase “Hear about the key architectural changes Microsoft is making to Windows to enable the efficient execution of parallel software.”, which shows the Redmond giant has clearly got something up it’s sleeve.

Many thanks to Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet for this info. She’s also got some words from Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer as to what’s on the drawing board.

Again, anyone attending the PDC please feel free to leave some comments if you hear anything blog worthy!

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Microsoft Viral Videos


Microsoft’s viral ad videos can be great fun..(and informative too) so I’m gonna try and collect as many as I can into this post…so we’ve all got a central place for them..

Let me know which is your favourite!

**New Video** for PDC 2008

Shoe Circus-Seinfeld Vista Ad 1

New Family-Seinfeld Vista Ad 2

I’m A PC 1

I’m A PC 2

I’m A PC – Steve Ballmer

Bill Gates-Last Day Video Diary – This one is truly brilliant! I think this is my fave video of the lot..

Microsoft UK did a set of 4 videos called “The Office Values” which featured Ricky Gervais as David Brent, here they are:

The Office Values 1

The Office Values 2

The Office Values 3

The Office Values 4

This video was taken 100% seriously by some people out there and used as another excuse to have a pop at Microsoft, but I’m pretty sure it’s tongue is very firmly in it’s cheek:

Vista SP1

This video is from the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2008, which was over in Houston.  I was there this year but I only thought to record this after it had happened (typical!) and this is the only clip I can find on Youtube:

Alison “A Fresh” Watson

Bit of trivia for you, I very nearly accidentally tripped up Alison Watson over in Houston at the expo! I wonder what I’d be doing now if that had happened?!

Thought I’d add the EBS Pimp My Infrastructure vid here too

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Microsoft EBS 2008-Big Pimpin’!


Microsoft Essential Business Server 2008 has got it’s own “cool” funny viral video, you can see it here.

This video is really good..funny, well made and gets the point across. Despite that, I think my favourite part is the completely serious (?) discalimer at the end!

There’s another great video about Office MLK’s that HP showed me, but I can’t get a copy of it or a link to it anywhere. I’ll keep trying but if there are any HP workers that can hook me up, drop a comment pleeaase!

Again, got this from Matt McSpirit

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Steve Ballmer is in love?


Steve Ballmer says “IT Pros, IT Pros IT Pros…..and I say I love IT Pros!”

In an attempt to show he isn’t just into Developers, The Ballmernator gave a rousing cry of the above at the London TechNet event yesterday. A video of his speech can be seen here. (Found via Curious George’s Blog).

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Microsoft Zune on Windows Mobile 7?!


Everyone’s favourite CEO Steve Ballmer yesterday confirmed that the Zune software will be available on Windows Mobile 🙂

This is the more likely conclusion to the “Zune Phone” rumours, so while we won’t be seeing a Microsoft branded handset, we will have the awesomeness of the Zune on our WinMo devices. Here in the UK, Zune’s are pretty much just a great sounding myth so this should give me a chance to leave the ipod at home once and for all!

Steve gave no word on timescale, but could this be the “new Media Player” expected in WinMo 7?!

I discovered this over at Engadget.

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Windows Mobile 6.1 HTC Diamond


Windows Mobile 6.1 and the HTC Diamond is a great combination. This post has a dual purpose, to discuss WinMo 6.1 and also the HTC Diamond..my favourite ever phone and I really believe it’s the best phone available (even including the iPhone!!!).

I went to the WPC (Worldwide Partner Conference) 2008 in Houston with an HTC WinMo 5 PPC (Pocket PC) that I was pretty happy with. I was thinking about an upgrade (but just because I wanted a new gadget..not for any specific usability reasons) and so decided there was no real point.

Then I went to one of the Breakout sessions hosted by Andy Lees, Senior Vice President of Mobile Communications Business at Microsoft, saw his demo of WinMo 6.1 and was blown away! The new home screen is much cooler/slicker and certain things I’d been wishing for (such as the ability to select multiple messages then mass move/delete) had been implemented…(maybe Bill can hear the thoughts of Gold Partners?!)

I did pop into the T-Mobile shop in Houston to see what WinMo 6.1 phones they had..that’s how excited I was 🙂

Some of the other features from a personal view that I like are the threaded SMS (so they’re like emails-makes things so much easier!) and IE full page zooming. From a corporate view, the big addition was “Domain Enroll” which allows WinMo devices to be managed via System Center Mobile Device Manager (MSM) 2008.

*Update* It’s been confirmed by Steve Ballmer (after a leak from Motorola) that we’re going to see Windows Mobile 6.5 first..as to which features will be in that and which will be saved for WinMo 7, I’ve not seen anything yet…

Windows Mobile 7-is expected in the 2nd half of 2009 and should feature a new, revamped UI, multi-touch and motion sensing features. There should also be a new version of IE, a new version of Office Mobile and a new version of Media Player-this could well be the Zune software (see here).

The HTC Diamond is awesome…and I mean that in it’s original sense, in that it did fill me with awe! That might seem a bit overboard but the Touch-Flo 3D UI makes using the phone a joy. The menu layout is easy to navigate, it’s quick and easy to get to the majority of things you need whether they’re apps, settings, downloads etc and the UI is very responsive. Another element I love which pits it against the iPhone, is the fact that you don’t really need to use the stylus. I can navigate menus, turn features on/off and even compose emails and text messages, all without the stylus 🙂

The HTC music player is full of features and easy to use…a good quick alternative to Media Player (although Media Player is far superior for connecting to Bluetooth Headphone devices) if you just need audio. The camera is 3 Mega Pixels so quite mid-range spec but the quality of picture is much higher than you’d expect…we’ve got a number of pictures framed on the wall that came from my Diamond…often replacing pictures taken with a “proper” digital camera.

Another feature of the Diamond that I’ve seen via a video over at Engadget is that the HTC Diamond has Multi Touch capabilities! The video only shows it bwing used for a de-bugging app but it could be the start of something prettty awesome..maybe some homebrew coders can get something great going there?! Even if nothing comes of it at the moment it certainly looks positive for when Windows Mobile 7 arrives!

If you’v got any questions about WinMo and/or the HTC Diamond, drop a comment and let me know!

Cheers

Rich

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Symantec and Citrix working together


Veritas Virtual Infrastructure (VxVI) is the new product forged from the combined fires of Symantec & Citrix as their entry into the world of virtual server management. This combination of Veritas Storage Foundation & Citrix XenServer is able to manage 1000’s of VM’s and all their associated storage from a single interface.

It will offer “direct control of block storage from a guest virtual server, block storage functionality, including mirroring across heterogeneous arrays, and SAN-based multi-pathing for data availability.” XenServer enables the sharing of common boot image across multiple virtual servers to help streamline the provisioning process.

“We worked with Citrix at the engineering level to make VxVI more than just a collection of bundled stand-alone products,” says Sean Derrington, Symantec’s director of storage management and high availability.

VxVI will allow users to manage servers and storage from one screen and perform advanced management tasks, including mirroring and striping LUNs, dynamic reconfiguration of layouts, or copying and moving volumes around from subsystem to subsystem.

Veritas Virtual Infrastructure should be available in Q4 2008 and is expected to cost $4595 for a dual processor server.

More info on this, and related subjects can be found at InfoStor

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Symantec (Veritas) NetBackup New Features


Symantec (Veritas) NetBackup 6.5.2 has new features. The higher end, enterprise big brother to Backup Exec has a new version to bring more benefits to your organization…and it’s been stealing from it’s smaller sibling!!

The new PureDisk DeDuplication Option enables data deduplication across Veritas NetBackup clients and allows you to backup only the unique data.

When it came to improving it’s recovery capabilities, NetBackup looked to Backup Exec and “borrowed” it’s Granular Recovery Technology (GTR) which allows for quick recovery of entire systems/individual files, e-mails, documents, and virtual machines from single-pass image backups of Windows Server 2008, Exchange Server 2007, SharePoint Server 2007, and VMware servers…nice! The Granular Recovery Technology also eliminates duplicate block-level backups, thus reducing storage requirements.

Similar to Backup Exec 12.5, NetBackup now supports VMware Consolidated Backups (VCB) and snap-shot client support in VM’s.

A number of datsheets on the different optiopns for NetBackup can be download here.

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Microsoft Windows Cloud


Microsoft Windows “Cloud” was mentioned by MS CEO Steve Ballmer at their S+S (Software Plus Services) seminar in London today.

“We need a new operating system designed for the cloud and we will introduce one in about four weeks, we’ll even have a name to give you by then. But let’s just call it for the purposes of today ‘Windows Cloud’,” said Ballmer.

More info will be revealed at the PDC, which takes place the end of this month in LA.

More info can be found at:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/01/steve_ballmer_windows_cloud/

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