Latest news on Microsoft licensing, Cloud, and AI
I just saw over on Endgadget that Samsung’s European Product Manager Patrick Pavel has said he expects Windows 7 to spell the end for Linux on Netbooks 🙂
That’s yet another great compliment for Windows 7-and it’s not even finished yet!
He also said that, depending on licence fees, Samsung would like to include some of the higher end versions of Windows 7 on their netbooks…that would excellent!
Gartner have said something that I suspect many thought they’d never hear in these post-Vista years…there is no need to wait for Windows 7 SP1 before you get it installed or to quote:
“The first Service Pack for Windows 7 is not necessary for the operating system’s stability and security readiness…”
How awesome is that?! Windows 7 is not even at Release Candidate stage and it’s already super stable!
This is yet another example of how different Windows 7 is to Vista and really helps to show the vast improvements Microsoft have made.
Are you looking to deploy Windows 7 in your corporate environment before SP1?
I had a funny little issue with my PC at work that took me a fair while to figure out today. I’d set up a new Site Collection in Sharepoint and connected it to Outlook (something that I’d never done before) and it was excellent…I could see all the different documents (Excel sheets, Word docs etc) in Outlook just as I could in the portal…nice 🙂
However after a while I noticed that Outlook was taking it’s time to send mails etc and then when I tried to swap to another application-it all went wrong! Apps started “not responding”, hanging, the works…a quick CTRL+SHIFT+ESC and Task Manager showed OUTLOOK.EXE on 99%…WTF!!! I killed the process tree and restarted Outlook but to no avail…I rebooted my machine too but it was useless; my processor was maxed out.
I started turning off add-ins in the Trust Center and then noticed 3 search/index related processes in Task Manager so I killed those and disabled indexing of the Sharepoint list I’d created. This was bound to work so I closed and re-opened Outlook and it was on 37%…not brilliant but better, then all of a sudden BOOM-99% again…holy maxed out processor Batman!
After having a look online I became pretty sure that it was related to .PST files but I was equally sure that I didn’t have a .PST file so that left me in something of a conundrum! However I went off to have a look anyway in:
C:\Documents and Settings\<Username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\<PST File name>
and what I found was interesting. While there was no Outlook .PST there WAS a Sharepoint List .PST…I deleted that and lo and behold, Outlook started behaving again (I also deleted the list from Outlook).
While I was happy to sort the problem out and be able to use my PC properly again, I am sad that I seemingly can’t have Sharepoint lists in Outlook 😦 Perhaps if I’d left it for a while the indexing would have finished and calmed the processor down but I just don’t have time for that…if anyone’s got any ideas please let me know!
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 😉
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!
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 🙂
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!
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.
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.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 