Nice One to Steve for this-become a mini-daft punk with your keyboard!
iDaft lets you make Daft Punk stylee tracks just by pressing buttons…I like YHIKOS…try it for yourself here.
MS Windows Mobile Ad
This new advert for Microsoft Windows Mobile phones is pretty good. Bright, fun, young, funky, girls, scooters, music but with benefits to business too-a good all rounder.
Having said all that, I’m not 100% sure it will bring over many new customers-more likely it will just make us existing customers feel a bit cooler 😉
IE 8 Video
This new video for Internet Explorer 8 was introduced at MIX 09 (the MS Web conference) and it’s pretty fantastic…the “Gentleman” is quality!
HTC Diamond Extra Features
I’ve had my HTC Diamond for about 8 months but have just discovered some extra features!
I was listening to some music (Happy Mondays I think) in Windows Media Player and the track started jumping all over the shop-backwards, forwards, back again and so on. It took me quite a while to figure out that I’d be absent-mindedly running my thumb around the circle in between the home, call etc buttons…and this was the cause. A circular motion similar to how one controls an iPod will move the track forwards or backward in 5 second blocks. I find this to be very handy…
I thought that was the end of these hidden extras but no. If you do the same thing while viewing photos, you can zoom in and out of them-this also works for pictures inserted in to OneNote Mobile…again pretty cool.
The final effect of this is that it can zoom in on text messages and make the text bigger, should you need it.
Perhaps these aren’t HUGE extras but they’re pretty neat and useful…and help show just how advanced the Diamond was/is 🙂
Microsoft BPOS Trials available
After Monday’s Cebit announcement, the customer trials of MS Online (BPOS) are now available here. You can also see the pricing too…
Here you can choose to trial Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online, Live Meeting Online or the complete BPOS suite (including Office Communications Server Online).
The trial is up to a maximum of 20 users and will run until General Availability (sometime in April) and then a further 30 days. If you choose to turn it live and purchase subscription, the systems will simply carry on working so you won’t have to reconfigure anything 🙂
At £10.04 per user per month for the entire suite, MS Online can really help business increase productivity and cut costs at the same time…go check it out!
Canvas for OneNote
Microsoft Office Labs have come up with another excellent prototype “Canvas for OneNote”.
This let’s you visualise the different pages in a workbook, or even your different workbooks, from a Bird’s Eye view. This Office Labs video explains it very well but I can’t embed SoapBox here so head over to the Geek in Disguise and watch it here.
The software can be downloaded here and is marked as Vista only…although I’m sire it will run on Windows 7 too (something I need to test soon)…
If you’re familiar with PPTplex (another Officelabs invention) then this is pretty similar in that it lets you see everything all at once, rather than sequentially.
Take screenshots on Windows Mobile
There have been quite a few occasions where I’ve wanted to screenshot something on my Windows Mobile device but I’ve always thought that to be impossible-how foolish I was it seems!
I found a great post from www.aboutonlinetips.com which lists 15 different free applications to do just that. You can find it here.
Comparison of Sharepoint Server & Sharepoint Online
While Sharepoint Online is an excellent product and fits the bill nicely for the vast majority of customers, there are certain features it lacks when compared to it’s regular on-premise brethren; this is mainly down to the multi-tenant environment of the standard datacenters.
Green = Sharepoint Online Blue = On Premise Server Only
As you can see, the Search & Business Intelligence sections are practically non-existent online which may put some people off. However if you need those features then you can utilise MS Online in it’s full Software PLUS Services mode and have an online AND an on-premise server together. It will be interesting to see if Sharepoint Online features more Search & BI functionality once “Wave 14” hits as Sharepoint On-Premise will have a whole raft of new features in these areas…
Microsoft state:
In the current release of the services, the following actions are not supported:
· Use inline code, build coded workflows, or develop Office InfoPath forms with coded business logic.
· Deploy features, solutions, pluggable authentication providers, Web Parts, site definitions, or other modifications that require deployment and configuration on the server.
· Modify built-in SharePoint files, web.config settings, security policy, and other elements.
· Make configuration changes that affect the Web server or the Microsoft .NET Framework.
· Make changes or add capabilities that require a custom database or changes to the database schema.
Microsoft BPOS Trials Announced
Today at Cebit, Microsoft announced the availability of trials of their Online Services-BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) in 19 countries (Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom). This follows on from the US launch in November 2008.
BPOS is an online offering of some of Microsoft’s most popular software including Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online, Live Meeting Online and Office Communications Server Online, and it is something I am very excited about.
As a Microsoft Partner I envision that Microsoft Online Services will help more customers access the benefits of these MS technologies, particularly the smaller customers as they will benefit greatly from the lower costs, reduced/removed hardware and management costs and the ease of implementation. Having said that these are all attractive benefits to even the largest customer who can use them to increase productivity and reduce costs, something which is even more important in today’s economic climate!
A great example of this is the case study that MS released today of their work with GlaxoSmithKline and their adoption of MS Online Services. GSK are migrating 100,000 users from Lotus Notes over to MS Exchange Online with a number of users taking the “Deskless Worker SKU”-a new product that gives limited access to Exchange and/or Sharepoint for users who don’t need full access and is thus available at a reduced cost:
“The move to Microsoft Online Services will help GlaxoSmithKline cut operational costs by an estimated 30 percent and create a variable cost model that will provide increased flexibility in the future,” said Ingo Elfering, vice president of Information Technology Strategy, GlaxoSmithKline.
A blog post by GSK about why they swapped to BPOS can be found over at the MS Online Blog here. A great Q&A with the GSK CIO can be found here.
On a personal note, I’ve been trialling BPOS at work for a few months now and it is absolutely fantastic. It gives me a lot more freedom that a standard premise based solution as well as cutting down on hassle such as VPN clients etc. We’ve had great success talking to our customers about it and I think we, as an industry, will see a great take up of this new way to consume MS technology.
Windows 7 Editions Feature Comparison
There are 6 diffferent editions of Windows 7, starting with the Limited distribution Starter edition through to Windows 7 Enterprise. Each edition builds on the feature set of the one before as the following image shows:
Note that Windows 7 Ultimate includes all Windows 7 Enterprise, including multiple-language packs.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 