Category: Microsoft

This category is for anything Microsoft related-so you’ll probably find that msot posts end up in here!

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Skype for WIndows Phone available


Microsoft’s 2011 $8.5 billion purchase of Skype has borne fruit in the guise of the beta “Skype for Windows Phone” app, with the final version expected to arrive in April.

Skype have tested and certified the app on the following devices:

• Nokia Lumia 710
• Nokia Lumia 800
• HTC Titan
• HTC Radar
• Samsung Focus S
• Samsung Focus Flash

From the Skype Blog:

“With Skype for Windows Phone Beta you can make free audio and video calls** to your Skype contacts over 3G and 4G or WiFi***, make affordable calls to landlines and mobiles using Skype Credit, create and hold one-to-one and group chats, and update your profile and account information, among others features.”

One thing to note is that the beta app will have only English language support.

Head over to http://blogs.skype.com/en/2012/02/skype_brings_voice_and_video_c.html to read more and to get the links to download the app…or hit this QR code using Bing Vision Smile

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System Center 2012 Licensing Changes


System Center 2012 is getting closer and today saw Microsoft release details of the new licensing models.

Currently the various System Center products (SCCM, SCOM, SCSM, DPM etc) can be purchased individually or as bundles, from 2012 however it’s bundles only. There will be 2 flavours:

  • Standard
  • DataCenter

with the difference being the number of OSEs (Operating System Environments) that can be managed:

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Following DPM 2010’s lead there will now be no more console server licences or SQL needed, simply Management Licences for the endpoints being managed.

Determining the number of licences needed will involve knowledge of the virtual environment & physical processors, similar to SQL:

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System Center 2012 has a much greater focus on “The Cloud” and as such:

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This enables organizations to move to a hybrid infrastructure much more easily.

What if I already have System Center?

If you have System Center with Software Assurance that is current at the time of 2012 General Availability you will receive the following grants:

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What about Client devices?

More changes abound here too, there are now 3 Client ML offerings:

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It’s important to note that, as with the Server MLs:

“Components included in the Client MLs are not available separately”

Opinion

Overall I think this is a good move. Again, Microsoft are modifying their licensing to make it more dynamic, more future proof and more accessible to companies going forwards.

Yes, there will be situations where it works out more expensive for some companies but for the vast majority this is a great move…they’ll have the ability to deploy a wider range of System Center products with streamlined licensing, which is good for everyone Smile

That said, I’m off to review a number of proposals to see how they map to the new models and what changes need to be made – good times! (Thing is, I actually mean that Winking smile)

Any questions, let me know.

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Microsoft takes action against Comet for Counterfeit Windows


I’ve just seen this and it’s quite surprising:

“Microsoft Corp. today issued proceedings against Comet Group PLC for allegedly creating and selling more than 94,000 sets of counterfeit Windows Vista and Windows XP recovery CDs. The alleged counterfeits were sold to customers who had purchased Windows-loaded PCs and laptops.”

That is a huge number of copies and also from a large, well established high street name.

Website “TheNextWeb” have a statement from Comet which reads:

“We note that proceedings have been issued by Microsoft Corporation against Comet relating to the creation of recovery discs by Comet on behalf of its customers.

“Comet has sought and received legal advice from leading counsel to support its view that the production of recovery discs did not infringe Microsoft’s intellectual property.

“Comet firmly believes that it acted in the very best interests of its customers. It believes its customers had been adversely affected by the decision to stop supplying recovery discs with each new Microsoft Operating System based computer. Accordingly Comet is satisfied that it has a good defence to the claim and will defend its position vigorously.”

Their argument that it was in the best interest of customers won’t hold much/any weight if it’s found to infringe upon Microsoft’s IP rights. Microsoft will of course be very certain that this is the case and won’t have launched this suit without proper forethought and fact checking.

I do find this quite encouraging in a way, as it shows that Microsoft are not just targeting the small, local retailers (who tend to be the ones involved in things like this) but also scrutinising the big, well established retailers too…which can only be better for the industry and customers in the long run.

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Nokia & Microsoft Office 365


I today received an email from Nokia telling me that the “1st Nokia Partner Network Event” is imminent on the 23rd November 2011 at The National Space Centre, Leicester

I’ve never been aware of Nokia particularly having partners of the sort that would have events like this…as their business isn’t really the same as Microsoft, Adobe, SAP, HP etc., so it surprised me a little.

There are 3 breakouts:

  • Retailers/Online
  • B2B Dealer
  • IT Reseller

and it’s the 3rd one that caught my eye due to the first 2 sessions:

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So not only are Nokia making a huge play in the consumer arena with Windows Phone 7, it seems they’re going to start introducing their devices into the corporate space, by playing on some of the enhancements found within the recent Mango update. That update brought full support for Microsoft’s Office 365, their cloud based Exchange/Lync/Sharepoint offering, allowing WP users full access to Sharepoint lists and document libraries.

I’m keen to see where Nokia’s involvement with Office 365 takes them, us as partners and Microsoft too. That said I don’t think I’ll be able to attend the event…anyone out there planning on going that can take notes for me? Smile

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Microsoft License Terms


Microsoft have a range of products with a variety of different rules & rights around what you can/can’t do with them such as downgrading to a previous version.

Even for partners, it can be difficult to know each & every license right for the different products and that’s where this site can come in very handy:

Microsoft License Terms

For any OEM or FPP product this site should tell you what you need to know.

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Making the selections as above gets you a pdf of the full license terms:

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This can be a great way to double check if you’re allowed to do something!

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Nokia Windows Phones – Marketing


Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 has been getting stronger recently with the awesome Mango (v7.5) update and it’s 500 new features, new adverts and now, what may well be it’s biggest shot in the arm…Nokia.

Much was made of the news earlier this year that Nokia were to start making Windows Phone devices, that Microsoft had given them 1 Billion dollars, this that and the other…and many wondered if it was really going to make any difference.

Well the answer seems to be a resounding…YES!

Following on from the Nokia World (Weds 26/10/11) announcements of the Lumia 710 & 800, there has been a flurry of activity. Nokia have given a Lumia 800 device to all the finalists on the X-Factor…while this isn’t my favourite show (far from it!) it is HUGELY popular with teenagers and young adults…I guess 13-30 overall…which clearly covers a big focus demographic for Microsoft. If Kitty, Johnny, Misha B (<—check me out Smile) et al are extolling the virtues of WP7 then surely that will translate into sales for Microsoft & Nokia.

Hand in hand with that though, is making sure that people can find the devices to test out and ultimately buy. This is something that many of the OEM’s have been quite poor at arranging…but not Nokia:

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Picture courtesy of Oliver Haslam (@theiBlog) via Twitter via Tom Warren (@tomwarren)

That’s a photo of the Nokia device already at Point of Sale in a Phones4U store here in the UK – good work Nokia!

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Microsoft unveil Xbox TV


Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console has been steadily increasing the various things it offers over the last couple of years adding things such as Twitter, Facebook, Last.FM, Sky in the UK, Netflix in the US. There have been rumours for a while now of “Xbox TV”, with Microsoft adding more TV stations, channels, providers to the console and making it more of a media hub and today is the day of reckoning.

Microsoft have announced a crazy awesome set of partnerships for Xbox media including:

UK

There are some awesome additions there…the one’s I’m most excited about are LOVEfilm & BlinkBox. Streaming movies online is something that I really like the idea of but just can’t quite be bothered to set up the necessary infrastructure to use my PC to get it to the TV! Smile LOVEfilm, for those that don’t know, is like an English version of Netflix (pre-Qwikster!) where you can rent physical DVD’s and games and also stream films online. However I haven’t really been able to make use of the streaming functionality so this will hugely increase my interaction with LOVEfilm and improve the ROI of my subscription!

There are a few sites there I haven’t heard of before, so it’s good to see Microsoft going for a broader range of services…things such as MUZU & VEVO which are centred around music videos for example.

Other services include HULU, but only for the US & Japan and YouTube is simply listed as “Available in 22 markets” so hopefully the UK will be one!

This is a huge leap forward for Microsoft and the Xbox, and with a number of the providers integrating Kinect into the menus etc. this will keep the Xbox as the leading console for a LONG time to come Smile

The list in it’s entirety is:

• ABC iView – Australia
• AlloCiné – France, Germany, Spain, U.K.
• Antena 3 – Spain
• Astral Media’s Disney XD – Canada
• AT&T** – U.S.
• BBC – U.K.
• blinkbox – U.K.
• Bravo – U.S.
• BSkyB** – U.K.
• Canal+* – France, Spain
• Channel 4 – U.K.
• Channel 5 – U.K.
• CinemaNow (Best Buy) – U.S.
• Comcast – U.S.
• Crackle – Australia, Canada, U.K., U.S.
• Dailymotion – Available in 32 markets
• EPIX – U.S.
• ESPN** – U.S.
• Facebook** – Available in all 35 Xbox LIVE markets
• FOXTEL** – Australia
• GolTV – Spain
• HBO GO – U.S.
• Hulu – Japan
• Hulu +**– U.S.
• iHeartRadio (Clear Channel) – U.S.
• Last.fm** – U.K., U.S.
• LOVEFiLM – Germany, U.K.
• Manga Entertainment – U.S.
• Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment/Real Sports – Canada
• MediaSet – Italy
• MSN with MSNBC.com – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, U.K.
• MUZU.TV – France, Germany, Italy, Spain, U.K.
• Netflix**– Canada, U.S.
• Rogers On Demand Online (RODO) – Canada
• RTVE – Spain
• SBS On Demand – Australia
• Syfy – U.S.
• Telefonica – Spain
• Televisa – Mexico
• “The Today Show” – U.S.
• TELUS** – Canada
• TMZ – U.S.
• Twitter** – Available in all 35 Xbox LIVE markets
• UFC – Canada, U.S.
• Verizon – U.S.
• VEVO – Canada, U.K., U.S.
• VimpelCom** – Russia
• Vodafone Portugal** – Portugal
• YouTube – Available in 22 markets
• ZDF – Germany
• Zune** – Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain

* Xbox LIVE Gold membership and/or other subscriptions/fees required. Kinect
functionality varies by feature, provider and region. ** Denotes existing
partners on Xbox LIVE available today

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Windows 8 New Features


Microsoft Windows 8 has been officially demoed and it looks pretty great, with it’s Windows Phone 7 inspired tile interface.

There are other new features being discovered by people who have the leaked pre beta builds and one of them is pretty great:

Built in ISO mounting

Windows 8 Center have got a screen shot which shows this:

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This would be a brilliant addition. All my main machines have got Magic Disc & Magic ISO on them simply so I can mount ISO’s as and when needed. However it’s really annoying when you get a new machine and/or you’re working on someone else’s machine…you go to mount an ISO..BOOM – no can do, so you’ve got to go and download/install them. This new addition will save quite a lot of time across the IT Industry I would imagine Smile

 

Built in PDF Reader

This will also be cool, again saving users from one extra download and extra bit of 3rd party software on their machine.

SkyDrive

On paper, SkyDrive is awesome. 25GB of storage that you can access pretty much wherever and use either for personal storage alone or also to share things such as datasheets, documents etc with friends, clients, partners and more.

In practice, it’s quite difficult to use…fiddly, hard to find, not quite as easy to get things into/out of as you thought.

Integrating it straight into Windows 8 will see a massive rise in the use of Microsoft’s online storage, and will make the tablet piece even more compelling as users will have a built in, free, easy to use way of sharing/syncing quite a lot of “stuff” available immediately.

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Microsoft Project Barcelona: Excel Hell will be no more


Microsoft’s Excel is THE de facto spread-sheet program, pretty much everyone turns to Excel if they need to do something with numbers.

Tax returns, finances, holiday charts, sales figures, bonus calculations, project progress and many  many more are all common uses for Excel sheets in 1000’s of businesses all over the world.  This means there is an almost incalculable amount of business data buried in .xls/x files, only a handful of people know the document exists and even fewer people know where the document is stored <—that’s usually how it goes!

This problem isn’t limited just to Excel files, there has been a huge proliferation in Word documents, project files, pdf’s, Sharepoint sites…even SQL Databases, all strewn across an organization’s estate with little discoverability. This makes it hard for users to properly act upon data and also makes it much more difficult administrators to update and change parts of their infrastructure. Microsoft have decided it’s time to do something about this and so was born:

Project Barcelona

There are 3 “buckets” of components to this project:

Crawlers:

Microsoft will provide crawlers for various Microsoft products including:

  • SQL Server
  • Excel
  • Sharepoint
  • Reporting Services
  • Analysis Services
  • SSIS

These will extract metadata & “Enterprise Dataflow” information which will be indexed in the Barcelona server. If the data source cannot be crawled then a “declarative way of describing the metadata and dataflow information” will be provided. A neat feature is that it will support auto discovery of new target sources which will reduce the amount of on-going user/admin interaction needed to make it a success.

Index Server:

This will be the cache for all the metadata & dataflow info collected. It will also allow querying, augmenting and annotating of the data via an exposed API.

Tools:

Initially there will be 2 tools:

An Admin experience to manage the crawlers & Index server.

A DBA experience for things such as renaming columns, retiring servers etc.

The overall architecture will look like this:

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This is a great idea, something that will be very useful to a huge number of companies across all sectors and in many different ways. I can definitely see this fitting into my discussions with customers very well. I have multiple conversations each week with companies hoping to discover:

  • What they have
  • Where it is
  • What it costs
  • How it’s used

when it comes to software licensing and also hardware. Being able to do the same thing for data is surely something that customers are already wishing to do?

There are some quotes from Andrew Conrad of the Project Barcelona team that show Microsoft’s thoughts and plans for this:

“although we are designing the first iteration of the product to be a DBA/ ETL developer solution, we believe that the long term value will grow significantly beyond this”

“developers can plug in their own crawlers or metadata providers.”

“we will support metadata augmentation and have rich annotation support (both crawler support and via server API) which will allow producers and consumers of the system to leverage the crawlers and Index server in ways we haven’t even thought about”

“One of our goals for Project Barcelona is customer driven innovation”

We “really want to work with the community on the design and feature prioritization”

“we strongly believe we will need significant feedback before landing on the right design and feature set. Hence, to accelerate the feedback loop, in addition to shipping a number of CTP releases, we plan on being very transparent on our design plans via this blog”

These give a great insight into how Project Barcelona will progress and it looks good to me. A clear focus on customer insights, ideas and requests is always positive.

To read more on this interesting and surely one day to be a product that gets RTM’d, head over to:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/project_barcelona_team_blog/archive/2011/04/11/introduction-to-project-barcelona.aspx

You can also follow them on Twitter @projbarcelona

One last thing, the team are jokingly calling this “Marauders Map”, a reference to the Harry Potter map that shows the location of each & every person! Smile

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