Cloudy with a chance of Licensing
Latest news on Microsoft licensing, Cloud, and AI
This category is for anything Microsoft related-so you’ll probably find that msot posts end up in here!
Here’s a new advert for IE8 and I freaking love it! I love “weird” adverts that aren’t all “salesy” and this is perfectly offbeat, not only does it feature Lolcatz it also features SUPERMAN!!! It’s nice to see Good Ol’ Dean Cain back on the scene 🙂
Seriously I think this is a great style of advert and style that MS should use for everything…I’d love to see Sharepoint advertised like this for example 😉
HyperVoria have got a post which gives access to free Microsoft e-learning on Hyper-V.
The courses within the collection include the following topics:
They’ve just updated the promo code and access works, I’ve logged in and added it to My Learning. So if you’re just getting started with Hyper-V or are looking for a refresher-head over to HyperVoria on teh link below and go get it 🙂
http://hypervoria.com/hyper-v/hyper-v-free-training.aspx
The ebook that’s available is pretty good too!
Windows 7 will ship without Internet Explorer 8 in EU, and we’ll have to download it if we want to use it.
I’m a fan of IE & MS in general, and am pretty fed up with how much meddling the EU have done with their products…first Vista N (with Media Player) and now Windows 7 E (without IE). I don’t know anyone who has pro-actively purchased the Vista N product, either in the consumer or business world. There is one company I know who, for whatever reason, got the “N” version and then spent a fair amount of time getting Media Player back on to users pcs!
My thoughts are this:
The people who want to change browsers for whatever reason (better ACID test scores, better extensions, faster loading etc) will have no trouble in downloading a new browser and setting that as their default.
The people that don’t know how to do that (Mum’s, Dad’s,OAP’s etc) are also the people who don’t care what brwoser they use. As long as they can access the web they’re happy-they don’t mind if some things are rendered in a non-standards compliant way or if it takes 4/5ths of a second longer to load up…they just want to check their email etc and be done with it.
So who benefits from the un-bundling of IE 8 with Windows 7? That is a question I’m not sure there is an answer to…other than no-one, and maybe the EU getting their power fix.
I see this as at best going almost completely un-noticed as people just download IE 8 anyway or at best, causing extra confusion for users.
Opera are annoying me as they are now saying:
“However, we do not believe that Microsoft’s move will restore competition for desktop browsers. Most users get their operating systems from the OEM channel and Microsoft will recommend that OEMs pre-install IE8. As such, users are unlikely to be given a genuine choice of browsers.”
The way I look at it is:
If Opera is that brilliant and Opera did a proper job marketing it etc, then it’s market share would be bigger…the same goes for the other browsers guys.
I’m a big fan of Microsoft but I wouldn’t refuse to use a better product just because it was made by a competitor. I’ve got an iPod, I always used Google instead of Live Search (although I now Bing), I use VMWare Workstation instead of Virtual PC and there are other examples too. For a number of reasons I prefer Internet Explorer as my default browser but, if I need to, I will use another browser alongside it…I’ve got Firefox on this machine next to IE 8…but I’ve only used it once this year.
Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine has been with us for about 1.5 weeks and is still getting the great reviews it was receiving initially. This article over on The Register contains proof that Bing is actually better than Google…at least when it comes to adverts.
While we, as users, need search engines to give us relevant results easily and quickly; they, as businesses, need them to make money…and when it comes to search engines, that’s all about the adverts baby! A research specialist company called User Centric have been conducting tests based on where users of Bing and Google look when online:
It seems the “vertical search and Bing-optimized categories, combined with the way Bing presents the search results on the screen” are the key here. Microsoft are sure to be happy that their latest venture is proving successful in pretty much every possible way 🙂
On a personla note-I think Bing is awesone 😉
If you’re looking for info on pretty much any part of Windows 7, John Westworth from MS has got what you need over on his blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/john_westworth/archive/2009/06/08/windows-7-training-and-documentation.aspx
It includes posts on:
and much more-go check it out 🙂
Today we had new pricefiles issued by our Microsoft distributor which include new items and details on the Windows 7 Upgrade offer, which will commence 19th of June. Bear in mind we are a Business to Business VAR, so the offer/pricing may well be different for consumers in high street stores/online etc.
There is a new set of part numbers for Vista OEM licences that come with a “Windows 7 Upgrade Form”-which when completed and returned, will entitle the customer to a “free” upgrade to Windows 7. I say “free” but these new part numbers are a little more expensive than their non-upgrade offering brethren; however the difference is only around £20 🙂
The upgrade offer is available on:
While this doesn’t directly apply to consumer PCs you can buy from PC World, Dixons, ASDA etc-there must be something very similar in place; as all those machines will ship with OEM licences on. I would expect that from 19/06/09, any new PC’s that ship out from manufacturing will all come with a “Windows 7 Upgrade” form 🙂
I don’t usually post about things directly involving sales and prices and info I get from work etc so I want to make it extra clear that posts on this blog aren’t representative of the company and any mention of price is subject to change, isn’t set in stone etc!
**Update** Final pricing and confirmation of how the EU decision will affect European upgrades has been released-see this post.**
Windows 7 is excellent on it’s own, full of great new features, but when combined with Windows Server 2008 R2-it really comes in to it’s own. Things such as Direct Access, Branch Cache and Network Access Protection help make things easier, faster, more secure and better than ever before!
Direct Access:
Direct Access is Microsoft’s answer to the pain that is VPN’s. They are often tricky to set up, tricky to use with failed connections etc and can waste a lot of time and money in helpdesk calls and lost productivity; so this is where Direct Access comes in. Once PC’s have connected to the corporate network once, they’ll be able to do it anytime, from anywhere:
This means users will receive the latest updates wherever they log on…home, the airport, a hotel-anywhere! Making mobile working a more secure propostion for users and admins…
For more details, see my dedicated post here and there is a great Solution Design Technet article here.
Branch Cache:
This new feature is designed for remote office and works by caching information on local servers rather than retrieving it from HQ each time. I’ve just seen that the information can be cached on client computers and this is knows as “distributed cache mode”.This decreases network traffic and, at the same time, helps increase users productivity.
Branch cache retention policies can be set by IT be it based on cache size, length of time cached etc. Technet has a great Early Adopters guide that’s full of information and can be found here.
To benefit from all these features, you need to run both Windows 7 AND Windows Server 2008 R2:
With Windows 7, Microsoft have made a clear effort to include the netbook market with the OS’s smaller footprint, reduced hardware utilization and the recent removal of the 3 application limit. However, one area of the market that doesn’t look to be included is ARM-based netbooks, according to Microsoft’s announcement at this week’s Computex trade show.
ARM (Acorn/Advanced RISC Machines) is a type of CPU first made in the 1980’s. These small processors are developed for low power consumption and so are found in most portable devices including mobile phones, PDAs & iPods as well as hard drives and routers.
It is believed that Microsoft’s long standing relationships with Intel & AMD are behind their decision not to support ARM with Windows 7, although they have also been working with ARM for 12 years on Windows CE & Windows Mobile-both of which sit on ARM processors.
Microsoft’s official statement was:
At this time, Windows 7 does not support any ARM architecture. Currently, Windows works on both x86 and x64 platforms, which, thanks to the pervasive PC hardware standard, power the vast majority of the world’s laptops and desktops. In the specialized devices space, where ARM is well suited, we offer the Windows Embedded CE platform
The first three words, “at this time”, could be significant; does that mean that an ARM compatible version is in the works? Perhaps it will make a surprise appearance before the General Availability date of October 22nd or possibly the early part of 2010; it would certainly be a mistake for Redmond to dismiss this growing section of the market-particularly with Google Android’s arrival on 6 new ARM netbooks!
This is a Windows 7 feature I had forgotten about-Location Aware printing. Ever get it where you take your laptop into the office after a few days of working from home, hit print…then wonder when on earth it’s going to appear on the printer…then after a little while you realise you’ve printed it at home (or vice versa) and feel all daft?! Windows 7 Location Aware printing will stop all that 🙂
You can set default printers for certain networks I.e Epson “whatever” at home, HP “thingamajig” at work etc and Windows 7 will know where it is and print accordingly…nice!
Windows 7 just keeps surprising me with it’s great new features; I’ve just seen Presentation Mode which I think is great. It really shows that MS have been listening to feedback and putting a lot of thought into how their OS is used.
Presentation Mode is found in the Mobility Centre (Windows Key + X) and lets you control your machine’s behaviour while you are giving presentations. You can:
A lot of us have wallpaper of our kids, wives/girlfriends/husbands/boyfriends etc but maybe don’t want to have everyone in the meeting/seminar room to see it for whatever reason, and this is a simple, easy way to do it.
As I say, a great example of Microsoft listening to it’s users 🙂
*Update* As Frederic points out in the comments-this isn’t actually a new feature of Windows 7…it’s there in Vista too! I’ve been using Vista pretty much since it came out and I’ve never come across Presentation Mode and I’ve never heard anyone talk about it; and I think that is a result of the differences between the two Operating Systems. People are just more excited about Windows 7 and that is definitely helping get word of these features out and about 🙂
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 
