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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Office 2010 line up revealed


Office 2010 is a little bit closer as today Microsoft announced the FPP (Full Packaged Product aka Box Copy) SKU lineup, along with US retail pricing.

The Tech Preview & Beta have been very well received with the current beta being downloaded over 2,000,000 times already! Now consumers & small businesses can see what versions are available and which Office products they will contain.

Office Home & Student:
This version has proved very popular on Office 2007, giving great flexibility for home users & students while also offering great value for money. The 2010 release includes:

Word 2010
Excel 2010
PowerPoint 2010
OneNote 2010
Office Web Apps

It will continue to allow installation on three PCs in one house; which is a huge draw for everyone 🙂

Office Home & Business:
This is aimed at small businesses and includes all the above plus Outlook 2010.

Office Professional:

This is the top level version of Office available outside of Volume Licensing, and is comprised of:

Word 2010
Excel 2010
PowerPoint 2010
OneNote 2010
Outlook 2010
Publisher 2010
Access 2010
Office Web Apps

You’ll notice that Sharepoint Workspace (the new name for Groove) isn’t included…that’s included in Office Pro Plus on Volume Licensing.

Office Professional Academic:

This contains the same products as the regular Office Pro but with Educational pricing, so around 1/5 the cost! The inclusion of Outlook et al make this a great offering for more advanced students such as those in Higher Education.

Although not mentioned in today’s announcement, Standard & Professional Plus will still be available in Volume Licensing with Office 2010. Don’t forget that we will also have Office 2010 Starter as the free, ad supported replacement for MS Works!

I’m excited for Office 2010 both as a user and a partner…how about you?

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Windows Azure MSDN Benefits


It was announced a little while ago that MSDN Premium subscribers would receive a number of free Windows Azure hours as part of their subscription:

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and these would be, as expected with MSDN, for test and dev only.

However, I saw over on Eric Nelson’s blog that this is no longer the case. Microsoft have:

“decided to lift this restriction so that you will be able to use your Azure benefits for normal (production) use, if needed”

From January 4th 2010 the introductory Azure offer gives a huge 750 compute hours per month!

As Eric points out, the above offer expires after 8 months so don’t rush to sign up if you’re not going to make use of it straight away…make sure you get your “money’s” worth 😉 After that time period, the level of free access drops down as per the below chart:

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This is a great way of making Azure easily available to the 1000’s of developers with MSDN subscriptions. It will allow them to test it as a solution, show the company how it will benefit them and then easily move to a production environment with reduced admin and cost.

See Eric’s post here.

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VStudio 2010 release date delayed


VStudio 2010, the latest version of Microsoft’s development product suite, was slated to be released March 22 2010; however, according to The Register, that’s no longer the case.

Sosa Somasegar’s (Senior VP of MS Developer Division) MSDN blog tells us that:

“we are going to extend the beta period by adding another interim checkpoint release, a Release Candidate with a broad “go live” license, which will be publicly available in the February 2010 timeframe.

Since the goal of the Release Candidate is to get more feedback from you, the team will need some time to react to that feedback before creating the final release build.  We are therefore moving the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 back a few weeks.” (bold mine)

So there will be a VStudio 2010 RC in February 2010 and the final release of Visual Studio 2010 can be expected probably around the beginning of May 2010.

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SQL Server 2008 R2: Licensing Changes


SQL Server 2008 R2 has got a whole host of new features and now it’s got some new licensing too 🙂

The big move is that SQL’s licensing will follow the same path as Windows Server, both in editions and also virtual licence allowances:

  • SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard = 1 VM per licence
  • SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise = 4 VM’s per licence
  • SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard = Unlimited VM’s per licence

Here’s a Microsoft diagram that shows many of the main differences between the now 3 editions:

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If you currently have SQL Server 2008 Enterprise and Software Assurance there is “a complete transition/migration path” but I don’t have any details yet…they will be available nearer launch on May 6th 2010.

For more info on SQL Server 2008 R2, see my other post here:

Read What’s New in SQL Server 2008 R2

Original post from MS here.

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Microsoft Licensing – Rental Rights


Blockbuster And Microsoft ...

Microsoft Rental Rights are aimed at customers who

“rent, lease, or outsource PCs to third parties with qualifying Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office software”

and are designed to make this previously tricky situation much easier by helping ensure all parties involved are compliant with MS licensing rules

“Rental Rights” are sold with, or on top of, existing volume licences and assigned per device. The rights exist for the life of the licensed device and cannot be re-assigned.

They have been available in a limited number of countries for a few months but, as of January 2010, they will be part of the Worldwide pricelist. The will be available on:

  • Open
  • Select
  • Select Plus

(so not available on Open Value, Enterprise Agreements or Campus/Schools)

for the following products:

  • Windows 7 Professional
  • Office Professional Plus 2007
  • Office Std 2007

Rules for Office

There are a couple of rules changes once Rental Rights are assigned.

Portable Copy:

“You may not use or permit use of additional copies of the qualifying software on a separate portable device or a network device. This prohibition overrides any right you have under the license terms that came with your qualifying software”

Office gives you “Portable Installation Rights” which allows users to install their copy of Office on both a desktop AND a laptop. This is very useful for business users but, as you can see above, it is NOT permitted with Rental Rights.

Rules for Windows

Downgrade Rights:

Always a hot topic when it comes to the desktop OS, the ability to use previous versions.

“You may use a prior version of the software in place of the qualifying software only if the qualifying software was licensed under your volume licensing agreement, except for Windows XP Professional licensed from an original equipment manufacturer”

So downgrade rights are available where the original software was purchased via Volume Licensing. The exception to that is OEM XP Pro (so that came pre-installed on the machine).

Rules for both:

Remote Access:

“You may not permit remote access to the qualifying software. This prohibition overrides any right for the primary user of the licensed device or any user of a separately licensed device to access that software under the license terms that came with the qualifying software.”

Virtual Machines:

Rental Rights don’t apply in virtual environments…

“In other words, the primary customer may not create and rent virtual machines.”

How Rental Rights Work:

Here are a couple of diagrams to illustrate the whole thing:

Acquiring Software Assurance:

Software Assurance (SA) gives users many benefits including version upgrades, e-learning, training vouchers and access to MDOP among others. It is becoming more and more useful to more and more organizations in more and more ways…and businesses that lease their machines can take advantage too.

SA isn’t available to the “Primary Customer” acquiring the Rental Rights (i.e. the leasing company) but it CAN be purchased by the end user. So an organization that leases it’s machines on a long term contract can purchase SA on their own Volume Licensing agreement.

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Office Web Apps on Sharepoint 2010


I’ve recently started building the demo server for our stand at the BETT show 2010 and it’s been a fantastic experience! Installing server 2008 R2 was a breeze and Sharepoint 2010 went on with just one (easily fixable) issue related to a missing hotfix. Once I’d got those up and running, I decided to get Office Web Apps installed…that too, was pretty easy…although I had the help of a great Technet article and a blog over on MSDN to guide me.

First of all, the technet article to installation is:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee695758(office.14).aspx#bkmk_install_standalone

As you can see, I was putting it on a standalone server – for ease of demonstration if nothing else 🙂

The initial steps are few and simple but nothing appeared to be working. However, if you scroll a little down the page, you’ll see a bunch of

Powershell

scripts like this one:

$machinesToActivate = @(“contosoapp1”,”contosoapp2”)
$serviceInstanceNames = @(“Word Viewing Service”, “PowerPoint Service”,
“Excel Calculation Services”)
foreach ($machine in $machinesToActivate) {
foreach ($serviceInstance in $serviceInstanceNames){
     $serviceID = $(Get-SPServiceInstance | where
         {$_.TypeName -match $serviceInstance} | where
         {$_.Server -match "SPServer Name="+$machine}).ID
     Start-SPServiceInstance -Identity $serviceID
}
        }

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As the note above shows, these Powershell scripts are only required in certain instances…and of course, I had that instance 🙂 Luckily, just copying the scripts from Technet and pasting into the Powershell window worked perfectly…which was good!

At this point I could see that everything was where it should be and services seemed to be running etc, so I headed over to the demo site I’d set up to test it. Unfortunately I kept getting an error message…so back to Bing, where I found this extremely helpful post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/officewebapps/archive/2009/11/18/9924525.aspx

I had a read through and quickly saw the problem. It was simple and obvious but had confounded me for about 45 minutes (don’t say it!)…it was:

“Activate “Office Web Apps,” listed under SharePoint’s Site Collection Features, on each site collection for which Office Web Apps should be available.”

So that was the missing step…activating it inside Sharepoint…D’oh! Homer Simpson

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VStudio 2010 Editions & Licensing


VStudio 2010 will be here March 22, 2010 and with it come many advancements. However, this post isn’t to look at the feature differences but rather changes to the editions and licensing.

VStudio 2008 has got quite a few different versions on licensing:

  • VStudio Pro with MSDN Pro
  • VStudio Pro with MSDN Premium
  • VStudio Team Edition Test
  • VStudio Team Edition Architect
  • VStudio Team Edition Database
  • VStudio Team Edition Development
  • VStudio Team Suite

This can make it quite confusing for customers to choose the right editions for their teams…”Geoff does testing AND Architecting-which should I get?” or sometimes companies don’t have such defined roles, they just have “developers”. Getting the Suite ensures you get all the features but it’s expensive; this confusion has been known to put people off investing in 2008.

Editions

There are now just 3 editions:

  • VStudio Pro with MSDN
  • VStudio Prem with MSDN
  • VStudio Ultimate with MSDN

This straight away makes it quicker and easier for users to identify the edition best suited to particular user. This will definitely please a number of our customers 🙂

Another change is that Team Foundation Server is now included with all 3 versions of VStudio, rather than being a separate additional licence adding more confusion (and cost) to the deal.

Production Software:

VStudio comes with MSDN which, as it’s name (MicroSoft Developers Network) suggests, is aimed at Developers…giving them access to most/all of Microsoft’s software for testing and development purposes (access level depends on version)…according to Microsoft MSDN gives access to 10,9 Terabytes 🙂

However it’s a little known fact that VStudio 2008 w/MSDN also entitles you to production licences of a bunch of software. This benefit continues with a few tweaks and the 2010 editions (Pro & Ultimate only) now include:

  • Expression Studio 3
  • Office Pro Plus  2010
  • Visio Premium 2010
  • Project Pro 2010

That’s a pretty great addition 🙂 It seems that Communicator has been removed…

Comparison:

One of the biggest problems with VStudio 2008 was how oddly difficult it was to find easily comparable information about the different versions. Seeing which versions did what often involved trawling multiple pages/sites, clicking many a link and a general air of uncertainty…but that’s all gone with 2010 YAY! Microsoft have created a great webpage:

image

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This is a brilliant, one stop shop to show end users (and partners) exactly what each version does, and doesn’t, do…something that will prove invaluable!

You can access the full version of the chart here:

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010/default.mspx#compare

Upgrades and renewals:

Another question I’ve been getting is around how the current 2008 versions will transition to 2010, so here’s what MS say:

image

So you can see that if you’ve currently got a Team Edition, you’ll get MSDN Ultimate thus giving you access to all features…bonus 😉

The chart can be found here.

Ultimate Offer:

Microsoft’s website mentions an “Ultimate Offer” around subscription renewals but, to be honest, doesn’t make it particularly clear…at least not to me 🙂

image

I think this means that if you’ve got VStudio with MSDN Pro you can renew it as MSDN Premium at no extra cost, but I’m going to get confirmation from MS ASAP.

Microsoft have certainly made an effort to simplify the world of Dev tools licensing which is definitely a good thing 🙂

Update on The Ultimate Offer:

I’ve uncovered some more information on the “Ultimate Offer! (in fact, some came from a customer!) that helps make it a little clearer.

It’s effectively a free “Step Up” promo so:

“Eligible MSDN Premium subscription customers (at the time of launch) will gain access to one higher stock‐keeping unit (SKU) level”

The chart below shows the transition path:

image

So if you purchase any of the following editions:

• Visual Studio Professional 2008 with MSDN Premium
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition with MSDN Premium
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Architecture Edition with MSDN Premium
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition with MSDN Premium
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition with MSDN Premium

on or before March 22nd 2010, you will move up a level free of charge…nice 🙂

There are a couple of questions I’ve thought of that I’m aiming to get answered and will post them up here once I do.

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Sharepoint 2010 Installation fix


Today I finally got a chance to install the beta of Sharepoint 2010 and, in short, it’s amazing! However that is for another, bigger post, this is just to tell you about a small problem I came across…and the fix for it 😉

The installation of Sharepoint went quickly and with no problems, which pleased me immensely as I’d had some major fails with 2007 a while back! The next step is running the configuration wizard and that’s where I hit a snag “Failed to create sample data”. I instantly thought this was going to be a huge issue that’d take loads of time and involve much fiddling and messing about…but thankfully I was wrong 🙂 A quick Bing search took me to the blog of Gilham Consulting and a post there pointed me to Jie Li’s blog over on MSDN, which features a quick and easy fix for this problem!

Simply head over to MS Connect, download this Hotfix and job is a good ‘un 🙂

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=23806&wa=wsignin1.0

It worked perfectly…ran the wizard again after applying the hotfix and everything was up and running.

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Microsoft BitLocker & Security


BitLocker is Microsoft’s drive encryption software that first appeared in Vista and now Windows 7, along with Bitlocker to Go for USB devices. Having Hard drive and USB drive encryption built into the desktop OS is a great idea, as it reduces the cost & complexity barriers for companies looking to adopt better security practices.

Recently, a story came out that Bitlocker had been “broken” and that a commercially available tool was now able to bypass the security (I saw this on Ars Technica but I’m sure many other places reported it too). When I saw the headline I thought “Oh sh*t…that’s a fly in the old ointment ain’t it?” (don’t ask me why I was thinking in that style of voice!) but then I read the article and saw this gem in the 1st paragraph:

“It scans a physical memory image file of the target computer and extracts all the encryption keys for a given BitLocker disk.”

So this requires the machine to be “hot” i.e. on…as soon as it’s turned off, the memory is dumped and it’s ok…not exactly crack of the century is it?! 🙂 Plus most, if not all encryption offerings from TrueCrypt, PGP etc are vulnerable to this…

The vast majority of comments on Ars Technica saw this for the ineffectual non-story that it was:

 

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although there were of course a few people who took this as a chance to point out that Linux was better that Microsoft and all proprietary software evil…but that’s nothing new!

Ars Technica have made an update to the article saying:

“this isn’t exactly a "crack" for BitLocker”

but it doesn’t really show, in my opinion at least, how pointless the story was and doesn’t re-assure that BitLocker is jsut as safe as people thought it was.

Paul Cooke of the Windows Blog team has a great post all about BitLocker and these recent claims here:

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowssecurity/archive/2009/12/07/windows-bitlocker-claims.aspx

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Google Goggles


Google Goggles is here. No, not the Google Labs project from 2008 that Gmail would check your sobriety levels using maths puzzles before letting you send an email (see Telegraph here)…but true Visual Search. That’s searching with pictures as in:

“What’s that a statue of?”

“Dunno mate”

“Tell you what, I’ll take a picture of it on my phone and Goggle it”

“*snap*…*upload*…*search"*…”

“Oh…it’s Winston Churchill”

“What, the dog off of the adverts bruv?”

”Dunno…seems a bit big innit?”

That conversation went a bit “chavvy” there…funny but probably not representative of the demographic that will mainly be using this 🙂

What is it?

If my awesome transcript above isn’t enough, Google have some examples over at:

http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#landmark

image

Does it work for everything?

Google are quite upfront that it “works better with certain types of queries”. They say that

“books & DVDs, landmarks, logos, contact info, artwork, businesses, products, barcodes, or text”

all work well while it’s not currently hot on “animals, plants, cars, furniture, or apparel”.

Can I haz Goggles?

Only if you’ve got an Android 1.6+ device 😦

C3PO from the film Star Wars

This might be the first time that users of Windows Mobile devices, Blackberries & iPhones have all come together in a show of solidarity usually reserved for invading aliens in hollywood movies 😉

Anymore Cool features?

Actually yes, yes there are!

Nearby Places Overlay:

This shows you local businesses such as restaurants, cinemas etc WITHOUT EVEN CONDUCTING A SEARCH! Point your camera forwards in Goggles mode, pan around and, once the GPS locks on and:

“you’ll see labels tagged to the nearby businesses, and a pin icon with a number in it at the bottom right corner of the screen. The number in the icon indicates the number of businesses nearby. You can either click the pin to see all places near you listed by proximity, or select a specific label to see more information about that particular business.”

Some nice augmented reality!

My thoughts:

I’ve never really been a fan of Google. I always used Google Search because, until Bing came along, it was the best but I was never interested in Google Mail or Google Apps. While things such as Google Earth and Streetview have come in very handy, I’ve never felt any connection with Google as a company; I don’t know them, they don’t know me and neither of us case about the other.

When they brought out Android, I was took a look but wasn’t bothered and the same goes for Chrome and Chrome OS. I’m a staunch Microsoft supporter, have been for many years and will continue to be so…BUT…

Google Goggles really could be awesome. For years I’ve said this should be the next evolution in search (ask anyone that sits near me at work!) and here it is…I feel a bit like the people in the Windows 7 adverts 😉

The number of times each day that people can see something but don’t know what it’s called:

“What kind of car is that?”

“Who’s that a statue of?”

“Which company has this logo?”

“What’s this building called?”

and there’s just no way to describe it to a text search engine, must be in the 100’s if not 1000’s.

It’s like Shazam for everything that isn’t music!

I’m a big fan of Windows Mobile (for all it’s faults) and I really believe that Windows Mobile 7 will be a HUGE leap forward. I’m due an upgrade to my phone very soon and have got my eye on the HTC HD2 with Windows Mobile 6.5…but this announcement has really made me consider jumping ship to Android…at least until WinMo 7 is released!

shocked.jpg

Having said all that though…my main thought is this:

”Will I ACTUALLY use it that much?”

As in, will I use it enough to make up for not having Office Mobile, for learning a new OS etc…and I’m not sure I will.

What I really want is for this to become available on normal, everyday desktop…no actually, what I REALLY is for this feature to come to Bing’s normal, everyday desktop search…that would be the best case scenario 🙂

I’m never sure how copyright/patents come into play with things like this…can Google patent this and stop Microsoft from developing essentially the same thing for Windows Mobile and Bing?

All in all, this is a great advance in the world of search and a good show from Google that they’re still in the game…but not enough to turn this user.

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