Windows Live Mail Beta - a user's perspective

alipka — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 11:04:00 GMT

Today I got an account in Windows Live Mail Beta (FINALLY, after 2 months). Although it is a little early to comment on it, it is hard not to compare it to GMail. GMail’s been around for a long while, evolving all the time.

Here are my impressions:

POSITIVES

+ The UI look & feel is great. Outlook is used by many people around the world, so they will find the interface quite intuitive. Drag & drop is nice too.

+ Calendar is just as in Outlook. Plus you can share it.

+ Pulls up all your Messenger contacts into Mail Contacts automatically

NEGATIVES

- You need to wait a long time to get on the Beta program, and it’s not so obvious how to sign up, it is limited according to citizenship (which I don’t find nice, but probably is due to some legal implications).

- There’s no little tool to have an automatic notification (like the GMail Notifier). You need to have MSN or Windows Messenger for that.

- The ads are very intrusive comparing to a one line, simple, text-only ads in GMail. I personally hate such ads, especially when I check my account over a GPRS connection.

WHAT I WOULD FIND VERY USEFUL

¾ Something like the GMail Notifier – lightweight and efficient tool for checking my inbox in the background. I don’t want to use MSN or Windows Messenger, since Office Communicator is my one-point communicator for SIP and MSN contacts

¾ Ad-blocker, especially that the ads are Microsoft Live, not other company

¾ Correction of the bugs (but this is Beta, so it’s clear): just on the 1^st hour of use I found one (go to calendar, and then you can’t go back to your Inbox)

¾ In the future maybe a way to synchronize chosen items from/to my Live Mail calendar, tasks, notes with another account that I’m using in Outlook.

SUMMARY

This is just a few, quick thoughts after using the account for a few hours. The Microsoft Live Ideas are well worth checking. Even though they are in Beta, the builds are quite solid and I personally, did not have any problems with the software. But remember to backup your system beforehand as alwaysJ

Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) – Changing Quadrant: the "What", "Why", and "How"

alipka — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 01:01:00 GMT

WHAT?

This week, Wednesday till Friday, I took part in the MOF – Changing Quadrant training. I already had some background about MOF and IT Operations in general:

¾ Rough knowledge of ITIL (be sure to check a great ITIL overview on Wikipedia)

¾ MOF Essentials course

WHY?

It was an interesting training, but frankly speaking, I was highly skeptical about the real business value and application of MOF in “real” IT environments. But during the training I had 2 phone calls from 2 different customers about an unexpected, urgent problem in their IT environment. Fortunately we managed to correct all of the issues pretty quickly, but nevertheless it was impossible to avoid the stress. The most interesting part was finding the root cause of the problems. And surprise, surprise… The cause of the problem in both cases was an uncontrolled and unapproved change introduced to the live, production environment. It may be hard to believe but over 60% of problems in IT environment are due to this kind of changes.

The whole concept of MOF is very difficult to grasp at first, since it involves a total switch of approach to IT operations: from technology-oriented to process-oriented. However when you make the first, most difficult steps forward, you will begin to see lots of benefits:

a more pro-active focus on IT environement management and monitoring, higher ROI, lower TCO). If you want more exact information and numbers, have a look at some of the MS IT Showcases, e.g. IT Change and Configuration Showcase.

This is what the Changing Quadrant of MOF is about: how to introduce approved changes into the production IT environment effectively, quickly and with minimal downtime.

HOW?

How to go about MOF in your organization? This is what I would suggest:

1. If you are totally new to MOF, start with the overview to understand how the 4 MOF quadrants in the process model work

2. Perform an internal (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/cits/mo/mof/moftool.mspx) or external (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/cits/mo/mof/coned.mspx) MOF assessment – this will result in a scorecard-type result of the review. You will be able to see where you are now, and how to improve.

3. Use the MOF IT service management toolkit to execute service improvement in your organization.

4. After setting up a plan on how to improve, be sure to check out the possible solutions/technologies to aid you in deploying these processes. The SMS Desired Configuration Monitoring is one of such solutions for the changing quadrant.

Andrzej's "IT Thoughts" Weblog : IT

Windows Live Mail Beta - a user's perspective

Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) – Changing Quadrant: the "What", "Why", and "How"