Category: Uncategorized

When bean counters start counting things they don’t understand the value of.

Posted on by ewand

I’ve been having a discussion with an old friend, who’s telling me of a large financial institution that have suddenly started getting very picky about spending on IT. Maybe it’s the financial environment right now – the tabloids are desperate to paint a doomsday scenario where all the banks are on the verge of collapse, whereas in reality it’s just a blip out of the norm…

Anyway, this scenario is driving the IT people crazy – instead of investing in IT, the accounts department is back to thinking about how they can reduce the spend.

The other day, I was talking about the Gartner-inspired Infrastructure Optimization models and how they can be used as a way of trying to show what value investment in IT can have – maybe this particular company needs to step up a gear to show their bean counters how short term it might be to slash budgets and expect people to just muddle along.

Reminds me of another story about a company whose penny pinchers decided to stop ordering stationery supplies for the stock cupboards on each floor in the building – the idea was that if you had to go to a designated Keeper Of The Stationery Supplies in order to get something, you’d bother rather less and stop being so wasteful.

What happened in that instance was that people spent so long wandering the halls looking for staplers/pens/paperclips etc, that the move to save a few $$ simply caused huge frustration in the end user and probably cost them a fortune in lost productivity too.

I first came across this particular scenario when I saw a spoof video lampooning the draconian stationery rationing measures.

The company was Microsoft.

Stationery supplies were reinstated in the ensuing months.

Sometimes it takes ground-floor people power to make the spreadsheet jockeys take note 🙂

Zune software and firmware upgrade now live

Posted on by ewand

Just noticed that www.zune.net has the latest Zune software for the PC and corresponding device firmware, available for download. Today marks the on-sale date of the new Zune devices too. I’ll be in NYC early next month… and I’m confident (at the moment at least) that I’ll resist the urge to upgrade the hardware…

Given that other makes of music players (like Creative’s Zen range) and even other consumer devices (Philips’ Pronto remote controls are a great example), have had software updates provided long after the devices were sold, this is hardly anything new.

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Zune Software

It does keep users happy though – I’m pleased now that my 9-month old Zune has a fresh lease of life. Happier, I’m sure, than the early adopters of a certain touch screen phone (or a certain Blu-ray games console) were when the price dropped not long after they’d shelled out for it…

Gartner’s wisdom and the IO models

Posted on by ewand

Over the years, Microsoft and Gartner Inc (neé Gartner Group)  have had an interesting relationship: sometimes very close partners and colleagues in research projects, sometimes taking opposite stances to a position and being criticised by the other.

I’ve met a lot of IT people who have a similar bias – some pay Gartner for their advice, and basically don’t do anything that Gartner doesn’t advocate (a favourite was always the “Wait for SP1” behaviour when looking at deploying anything new from Microsoft). Other IT directors look dimly on any analyst report, figuring that that they’re all recycling the same old opinions, dusted with acronyms and supposedly cutting edge insight.

Gartner’s had some cracking ideas in the past, however – my two favourite models of theirs behind the Hype Cycle (particularly the “Trough of Disillusionment”) and the Magic Quadrant.

The latest Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications looked pretty favourable to Microsoft and Nortel (compared with last year, both have moved up and right) and a bit less so to a couple of other vendors who’ve dropped out of the “Magic Quadrant” altogether (the aforesaid being the top right quarter of the plot area, signifying the leaders who have the most complete vision and the best ability to execute on it).

I know they’re rather particular about licensing of reprints etc, and although Microsoft has licensed the Magic Quadrant report to be able to distribute, I’m not sure about taking an image from the report and posting it here. As a result, I’d encourage you to go directly to Gartner to view the latest Magic Quadrant diagram…

Infrastructure Maturity Model

A couple of years ago now, Microsoft was working with Gartner to simplify its existing Infrastructure Maturity Model, a means of describing an IT infrastructure’s level of advancement towards a well-managed, low-cost infrastructure. Gartner’s model has 7 stages, ranging from the chaotic “Basic” to the nirvana of “Policy-based”, but have estimated that 90% of customers never make it past the 3rd stage, “Standardised”.

IO, IO, it’s off to work we go

If you head over to http://www.microsoft.com/io you’ll see the output of some of this work – Microsoft boiled the 7 stages down to just 4, describing the Infrastructure Optimization (IO) model. Infrastructure Optimization Model

Since then, they’ve worked with analysts to show that as an organisation moves its operations from left to right, there are many cost benefits – eg the average cost of managing a PC for a customer in the “Rationalized” segment could be as little as 1/6th the cost of one in the “Basic” stage.

The key part in this model is that it’s self-measured, so you can use tools and techniques to figure out where you are in the model for any given metric – eg you could be Standardized when it comes to identity management, but Basic in what you do with it or even Rationalized in some more.

The same 4-stage model has since been applied to other areas besides core Infrastructure, such as “Business Productivity” (essentially, user-oriented communication & collaboration software & services) and “Application Platform” (ie the back-end applications which sit behind line of business systems, such as SQL Server).

There are some fantastic additional resources about these additional models, on BPIO and APIO. I tend to present this whole model to IT people, as a vocabulary with which to have the discussion around IT investment, with the finance department. It seems to work well (even though I thought it was a load of hot air when I first saw it… gaining an understanding of when it can be useful has since helped me appreciate it!)

Careful what names you give to Outlook Contacts when using UM!

Posted on by ewand

This is a follow up to Friday’s post about what happens if you have Exchange Unified Messaging set up to send you notifications on missed call alerts (and on voicemail), using caller-ID to reverse lookup against the personal contacts folder.

Stephen Spence commented:

Fingers crossed nobody is using silly names for any of their contacts and finds out about this the hard way!

And he’s absolutely right – I tried renaming the contact I have for my wife (to “Mrs D!”), then called my desk number (whilst OOF was on), from her mobile.

Here’s what she got (viewed in her mailbox via Exchange 2003 OWA):

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Just as well I wasn’t calling her “Trouble & Strife” or something like that 🙂

So, be careful… if you have UM and external  OOF turned on, don’t add people into your contacts with disparaging names in case they happen to phone you one day and find out, as Stephen says, the hard way….

I learned a cool thing about Exchange UM today

Posted on by ewand

I’ve seen this behaviour in practice before, but I don’t think it really clicked with me until Neil May from PostCTI (who was hosting our penultimate Exchange Unplugged event today) told me how pleased he was with it.


This functionality concerns the “missed call notification” feature of Exchange Unified Messaging – as well as the server telling you that you have a new voicemail, it will also tell you when someone has connected to UM but hung up before leaving a message.


In both cases (ie when someone leaves a message, or if they hang up beforehand), if the server can identify their caller ID as belonging to someone in your contacts, you’ll see the voicemail or the missed call notification as if it came from the person themselves (it’s actually Microsoft Exchange on behalf of <the caller>, but it primarily shows as if it came from the person directly).


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So in this case, if I hit “reply” to the notification, it will send an email to the person that was identified as the source of the message. Cool, yes.


What’s nice, though, is that if I have my Out of Office message set, and someone calls me then either leaves a message or hangs up, when the notification lands in my Inbox and appears “From” them, their email address will be sent the Out of Office message I’ve set.


As it happens, I have a contact entry for my own mobile number, in my Outlook contacts folder, but set with my Hotmail email address. When I call my office extension from the mobile, it identifies the contact as the source of the call, and the return address is the Hotmail one, so the Out of Office message I set on my mailbox will be sent to the Hotmail account, since I had associated the mobile number that called me, with that address.


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Neil (who spends a lot of time on the road) said this was one of the most unexpectedly cool parts of Exchange UM – customers who call him up and don’t leave a message (but who he’s already added to his Outlook contacts), will get the Out of Office message as if they’d sent him email. So the next question they ask him is, “How can I get that for myself??”


Seeing this in reality brings the technology alive in a lot of users’ eyes.

Voicemail sizes on Exchange 2007

Posted on by ewand

A question we get asked a lot is regarding the sizing of voice mail messages in Exchange 2007. If you’re not familiar with the built-in voicemail capabilities, Exchange can function as a voice mail system (or Unified Messaging system, really – it’s a way of unifying voice and inbound fax messages with email).

image What’s particularly nice about this is that as far as Exchange is concerned, email and voicemails are just messages. I can respond to a voicemail (such as the one pictured here) by hitting reply, and Outlook (or OWA, or Windows Mobile etc) will create a email response to the “sender” of the voice message, assuming it can work out who they are based on the caller ID that was identified when the message was left.

Lots of people get nervous when thinking about holding voice mail in Exchange, worrying that the message sizes will burden their already overloaded mailboxes. In reality, the size is rarely a big deal – we tend not to get too many voicemails (I probably get less than 10 a week), at least in comparison to the volume of emails received. Add to this the fact that most voicemails are relatively short (and you set a limit on how long the system will let a caller ramble before cutting them off anyway: generally if it’s more than 2 minutes long, then it’s more of a soliloquy).

There are a few ways of encoding the voice content that Exchange will record as voice mails, and which option you choose might depend on how the users are going to be collecting the voice mails. Outlook, OWA and Windows Mobile can all play Windows Media (WMA) format files, so that’s the default – and offers the highest quality for minimum size of message – typically a couple of Kb per second or so (a combination of some overhead for the message, and then the encoding rate of the sample).

The options are to stick with WMA, or if you’re looking to interoperate playback of voice content with other telecoms equipment, you may want to encode using GSM 06.10 (an 8-bit compressed format derived from the GSM mobile specifications), or G.711 (a 16-bit PCM non-compressed format, defined as an ITU standard). Both GSM 06.10 and G.711 use the WAV format for representing the sound, and will deliver larger sound files than WMA.

There’s a nice explanation of the options over on http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998670.aspx, including this comparative graph of the file sizes:

Basically, don’t use G.711 unless you want *really* big voicemails… 

Finally, SP1 will add the option of using Microsoft’s RTAudio codec for playback to Office Communicator Phone Edition devices – part of the integration between OCS and Exchange 2007.

Holy smoke, it’s an explosive demo

Posted on by ewand

I’ve spent the last couple of days in London helping out with the first Exchimageange Unplugged 2007 events, which have gone really well. One attendee to the first session, held with BT at the Tate Modern, said in 15 years of working in IT, it was the best Microsoft event he’d ever been to. Let’s hope the rest can keep the standard so high.

Anyway, today’s event (in association with Dimension Data, at the Radisson Mayfair hotel) had an unexpectedly dramatic turn. Brett‘s demo server (used to run all the demos for the first 3 sessions, running numerous VMs in Virtual Server) gave a sudden burst of fan noise and emitted a puff of smoke, during the 2nd session. The noise continued throughout the session in bursts, and there was a funny ozone-like smell close to the box…

Somewhat amazingly, it carried on and he wisely decided to leave it on, until after the 3rd and final session was complete. Just as well, since after it was powered off, it wouldn’t come back online again – power supply failure, methinks.

Anyway, here’s Brett and Julian standing by with precautions, in case it happened during Julian’s brilliant unified messaging demo session.

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They got through that session and hopefully a replacement Shuttle box will have arrived before the third event of the week, tomorrow!

Geek T-shirt cool – or not

Posted on by ewand

I always like reading Jason’s blog, and had to laugh the other day when he posted a great picture of a now-favourite t-shirt, which glows when in a WiFi zone.

I’m not much of a t-shirt wearer, but I think the best geek slogan I’ve seen so far is (from the same shop as Jason’s Wifi catcher originates) …

 

It’s one of those things that you wear and forget you’ve got it on really quickly. All day, people walk up and look at your chest then look puzzled, or else smile because they get the joke… Now all we need is for ThinkGeek to open a .co.uk store so we can order without paying massive delivery costs and customs duties…

Microsoft launches “Online” hosted services

Posted on by ewand

In an attempt to clarify the whole online software branding, with “Live” being consumer oriented and “Online” being aimed at businesses, Microsoft launched a new service recently, but that may have gone unnoticed (what with other launch events such as PerformancePoint Server for business intelligence, or the Unified Communications launch of OCS and Exchange SP1 etc).


The new “Online” service (“Business Productivity Infrastructure“) is offering Exchange mailboxes, Sharepoint sites and Office Communication Server hosted presence & IM. Currently the service is aimed at larger enterprise customers, though it will be extended to smaller organisations in due course. The Exchange, Sharepoint and OCS parts are all available separately, under the titles Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online and Office Communications Online.


The whole online services offering can be a bit confusing – at one level, Microsoft sells “Exchange Hosted Services” (EHS), which is a hosted filtering, archiving and encryption service that routes inbound & outbound SMTP mail to/from an organisation, weeds out the spam and infected messages then delivers what’s left, optionally keeping a copy “in the cloud” for later access (eg for compliance purposes).image


In this EHS model, you can still run Exchange “on premise”, it’s just that the hosted filtering etc helps reduce the volume of inbound junk.


This kind of service differs from the hosted Exchange offerings from various partners, who will host Exchange mailboxes for you in their data centres. Hosted Exchange has been around in one form or another for years, and it makes a lot of sense for start up companies or smaller orgs who don’t want the overhead and up-front expense of buying & managing their own server in-house.


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Rather than buying Exchange servers & licenses, with Hosted Exchange, the customers have a monthly subscription to the hosted provider, who provide all the service via a URL which can be used by Outlook or Outlook Web Access to connect. Hosted Exchange typically has a separate login for the end users, though in more advanced cases, the hosting provided may have a private network link back into the corporate network, allowing access to the corporate Active Directory.


There are hosting providers who will basically manage the server and the delivery of the service to your end users, but the licenses are owned by the customer directly – so in effect, you’d buy Exchange but instead of running it yourself, on your own premises, you outsource that operation to someone else, for a negotiated price.


The new Microsoft Exchange Online service effectively delivers hosted Exchange, but allows for customers who’ve already bought Exchange etc directly. In other words, you’d be able to go to a partner who re-sells the Exchange Online service, and buy the hosted service from them at a lower cost because you’ve already bought the rights to use the software (so the cost would be the operational part, not the software subscription).


This new service adds an extra choice, but it’s not going to replace Hosted Exchange – it’s quite likely that you’ll be able to get a more customised service directly from a hosting partner, and it might be less expensive than the Microsoft Online service too, depending on who’s offering it and where.

Windows Home Server – would you have it in your home?

Posted on by ewand

I just read an interesting article from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes on ZDNet about Windows Home Server, speculating whether there really was a market for such a device, and who would buy it.


Adrian’s point – and it is a valid one, if you know anything about what the “typical” home user might do and buy – is that your average Joe or Joanna isn’t going to march out and splash a few hundred quid on a box to back up all their home PCs, even if they’ve lost precious data before.


In an enterprise IT environment, disaster recovery has often been treated as a second-class citizen, until a disaster actually happens – after which point, it’s properly factored into things. I vividly recall making the case for DLT drives over DAT over 10 years ago, yet on cost grounds alone it looked like DAT could do the biz… until the crunch came, a disaster happened, it looked like the DR plan wasn’t quite up to scratch, and after that it was easy to get money to do DR properly.



Sad to say it, but 9/11 and the London 7/7 bombings in 2005 probably helped a lot of organisations realise that backup (and more importantly, recovery) was actually worth spending a bit of time & effort on. You only realise how important it is to have a contingency plan, when you’re faced with the real need to have – or to show you have – one.


As an aside, if you haven’t seen it yet, Microsoft announced Data Protection Manager 2007 recently, as a means to snapshot and backup various systems to low-cost disk backup. DPM could allow you to backup not just file systems, but Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL Server, using VSS snapshot technology. We’re now using it internally to back Exchange up to low-cost SAS drives, as well as other things.



I have a buddy who’s known as “Foggy” (from “Foghorn Leghorn”), so called because he had a loud voice on the phone when he first joined Microsoft in a Product Support Services role. If you’re interested in DPM2007, just let me know and I’ll put you in touch with him – he’s “Mr DPM” in the UK and is keen to tell everyone just how good it is.


ANYWAY.


Back to Home Server. I’ve been beta-testing the “Q”/”Quattro” product for a while, and I think the finished Home Server looks really good. Have I got one at home? Yes. But then, I only have one other PC at home (besides the corporate laptops that occupy the place, and a few old machines that spend most of their time powered off) so I’m not sure I’d shell out for a Home Server (when they’re comercially available) just to protect that one box, and serve it content.


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What I’d wish for Home Server


I’d love it if Windows Home Server could be a Media Center – ie I could whack a couple of TV Tuners in the WHS box, and it would stream that content to other PCs or Media Center Extenders around the house. Think of it like a Windows Media Center Server, if you like. I might even think about sticking the box in the loft, next to the Coax-amplifier which distributes TV signals around the house – especially if Bluetooth or WiFi remotes from around the house could control the Server, making the MCE experience available on remote PCs, Extenders and directly on TVs themselves.


I’d also really like some OEM to bring out a device which was hardened and much more appliance-like, maybe with some other features – I’m thinking like a box which had a Powerline-ethernet style built-in power supply (and corresponding remote adapter(s)) which would mean I could stick the box anywhere there was power and not worry about signal or CAT-5 cabling back to the wired/wireless network that all the PCs are on. I was thinking it would be quite cool to have a Windows Home Server in the garage. My garage is separate from the house (by about 6 ft) so if the house burned down, there is a chance the garage wouldn’t (though there’s probably enough combustible material in the garage to make it happen the other way around).


I thought if I could put a WHS in the garage, it would mean I wouldn’t need to cool the box much (even in the summer, the garage is going to be cooler than many places, and in the winter, it’s positively COLD) and apart from the odd spider invading the box, it’d probably be pretty hazard-free.


So in an ideal world, a Home Server would be a solid-state box with no vents or fans, which can draw network access through its power supply. There might be one company – Tranquil PC – who’ll be able to offer this nirvana sooner than most. Tranquil PC have some very interesting fanless technology, but for a regular PC there’s a payoff in terms of performance (ie to run their box cool enough so it doesn’t need a fan, it’s not exactly cutting edge) and price (there’s a premium for the design and low-volume nature). For a home server, you’re not bothered about quad core processors with 8Gb of RAM, so Tranquil’s offerings could well be in the sweet spot. Time will tell if the price point people are willing to pay will match these expectations.


Coming back to the ZDNet article – Adrian reckons that the average home user will spend $30 on backup. I know I’ve had hard disk failures but probably only back up to the USB disk I already have, every couple of months. Who’s going to buy Home Server this year, in time for Christmas? Tech-savvy folk who have multiple PCs at home, I’d think – maybe families where each of the kids have their own PC, but not exactly the less tech-literate types.


Maybe the time for Home Server is when it can not only stream data to remote devices, back them up and make sure they’re appropriately patched – but when users in the home can have the Home Server record stuff from the TV and distribute it directly to their device for later viewing.


Maybe that’s v2 functionality, who knows?