Private Clouds are increasingly important to the efficient operations of your business. The System Center 2012 products provide everything you need to build, secure, maintain and manage your Private Cloud. You can get all of the latest Betas, Release Candidates and Evaluations by clicking one button!
My recent webcast on Exchange Client and Web Access generated a number of emails looking for additional information on developing against the Exchange Web components. I have rounded up some resources here --
Introduction to Exchange 2007 Web Services - Part 1 -- A basic intro with links to other supporting information on Exchange Web Services
Introduction to Exchange 2007 Web Services - Part 2 -- See Above....
Introduction to Exchange 2007 Web Services - Part 3 -- See Above...
Getting Started with Exchange Web Services Proxy Programming -- Self explanatory...
Creating an Exchange Web Services Client Application -- Links and Sample Code for creating apps to run against Exchange Web Services
Exchange Web Services Reference -- This covers the XML messaging that gets sent between client and server
Exchange Web Proxy Services Reference -- Links to materials discussing how to use Visual Studio .NET generated proxies
Exchange Web Services XML Elements -- XML Element documentation
and finally.....
Exchange Server Developers Center on MSDN -- THE source for all things Exchange dev related....
Cheers!
...sort of...
We recently re-arranged our team to get more inline with our customers. We are now aligned to Competitive, Community, or Core roles. The Competitive role addresses competitive scenarios (Domino & Exchange, Linux & Windows, Google & Live). The Community role works with community engagements like local user groups, academic, broad reach, etc. The Core role (where I am at) continues the tradition of Live Events, webcasts, screencasts, blogging, etc....
What this means for me is that I will be delivering more live presentations across a wider area of the United States. In fact, I recently delivered sessions in San Diego, LA, Boulder (Broomfield, CO, and Englewood, CO). I am on deck for presentations in Boise, Spokane, Portland, Tuscon, San Diego, Colorado Springs, & Fort Collins. And that is just in October!
I am still going to work with our community champions to meet with User Groups and other community focused activities while I am in town. So if you have a User Group in one of the cities above, checkout the the dates of the Live events on the Technet Events site and let me know if you are interested in having me out. Doesn't cost you a penny and I usually bring some goodies with me.
I have complied a list of resources that are for the System Center portion of the Live Events I am delivering.
Slides for Live Sessions
System Center Home Page
Download System Center Trial and Beta software
Technet System Center TechCenter
Archived Systems Management webcasts
System Center is a great product for monitoring your servers and applications across your network. But none of it works without Management Packs. Check out the Management Pack Catalog online where you can locate and download MP's for Microsoft and 3rd party products.
I am also doing a Technet Radio Interview today with Edwin Yuen, a Product Manager for Virtual Machine Manager. I will post a link to the final interview as soon as it is posted to the Technet radio site.
UPDATE -- I forgot an awesome link to the Technet Virtual labs for Systems Management!
The end of the world is nigh.....Scoble has taken a blogging hiatus. And not just the "weekend-off-to-get-my-head-on-straight" break. Robert seems to be suffering from something that I have been combating since my humble beginnings as a blogger - The desire to vent - To bitch and moan - To demote instead of promote.
I am not sure if the blog readers of the world understand how difficult it is to stay positive when writing up blog posts. If one thinks about what we (the average person) is exposed to it really makes sense.
The first 30 minutes of practically every local newscast is dedicated to who died, who was killed, who killed, who was drunk, what Paris has done lately, and any number of other sensationalistic, not-really-news-and-not-so-important-to-anyone-outside-the-immediate-sphere-of-influence-of-of-the-"news"-source-subject "news".
In general life, the negative seems to always get more air-play than the positive. Sure, the occasional warm & fuzzy human interest story makes everyone feel good about the world, but by and large, most "news" is of the negative variety. The sensational, the wildly different (read this as freaky out there) always gets more airplay than the 2 minutes at the end of the local news broadcasts reserved for the video of a cat getting rescued from a tree by the local fire department.
Blogging is not all that different.
It is a lot easier blog negatively (think the dark side of The Force) than to come up with nice, positive things to say (without sounding like you are in advertising or employed by the marketing department[1]. I have started countless blog posts where I realize toward the middle I am just venting my frustrations. A few of those have made it to print. Mostly it just helps to write it, read it to myself, then delete it. I try real hard to keep them to a minimum. But now and then the slip through.
Scoble seems to think that his postings to Facebook and Twitter are slanted toward the negative side.
I don't Twitter. So I don't see his posts.
I try to Facebook but I have a difficult time finding relevancy and value in it. And I ignore all the activity from Scoble. I call it ScobleFriendSpam. It is overwhelming and I have simply stopped processing it short of removing him as a "friend".
What I am trying to say is, I have not kept that close tabs on Scoble activities to give an opinion one way or another about his own experiences (....and should I? Am I qualified?). Suffice it to say that I empathize with how he feels. Blogging can be a chore. Bad blogging is easy. Good blogging should be positively passionate and takes thought and work.
I struggle with both and I bet most bloggers so.
The sky is falling.....look out!
[1] - In a round-about way I am employed by the marketing department at Microsoft. I am an Evangelist. Spreading the good word about cool Microsoft products and technologies is my job. There. I said it.
Been a while since I posted, and this one was supposed to go up almost a month ago!
Have you taken a look at the new Unified Communications (UC) services in Exchange? I was recently enabled for UC at MS and let me tell you.....sliced bread has met it's match! It is a wonnermous thing to be sitting at your Laptop....ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.....and see a toast pop-up telling you that your mother-in-law is calling and be able to redirect it to your better half's phone with just a few clicks.
The marvels of modern technology.....
Don't know what I am really talking about? Check out the Unified Communications page here. In a nutshell, UC is Voice over IP, linked into Exchange and Office Communicator. SharePoint and Office apps like Outlook can make use of UC as well to deliver presence information letting people know your availability and how to get a hold of you.
I am going to do a couple of small demos of UC at my live events over the next few weeks. In fact, for those that want to here how well it works, feel free to give me a call at 425-705-8506. That is my new UC enabled number and it follows me anywhere I am signed in with Office Communicator. I am online right now!
For those of you not in the PacWest and can't make a live event and want to know more about how Exchange Unified Communications and Office Communications Server (OCS) work, there are some new Technet Virtual Labs on UC and OCS here. Everything from Deploying and Configuring to Compliance and Archiving.
There is even an RSS feed you can subscribe to so you will know when updates are made to the site!