Just read an interesting analysis at http://firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_vista_aero_glass_performance/ where they tested a couple of different systems running Windows Vista with Aero Glass switched on and off. (Windows Aero - if you're not aware of it by name - is the new user interface functionality, with transparent windows and the swish new effects present all through Vista)
The cynic in most techies would assume that flashy graphics mean hammering the system performance; I've known plenty of people who even switched off all the fancy UI features, on the basis that the machine would be a few % more responsive... remember the old advice on Windows 3.1 or 95 to not use a graphical desktop backdrop since that put an overhead on system performance?
Anyway, the FiringSquad results are predictably games-focused, but draw an interesting conclusion - graphical performance is, in some cases, marginally better with Aero switched on, and even in the cases where it isn't, it's only fractionally less so.
"Quite frankly, we were shocked by these results."
So, the moral of the story is... switch on all the bells and whistles if you can :)
After my post last month about getting a new MP3 player, I went ahead and bought a Sansa e280 8Gb device from Amazon UK. In general I'm pretty pleased with it - battery life looks good, sound quality is good, it supports direct sync from Windows Media Player etc.
There are a couple of grumbles though - the touted ability to display Album Art is only available if you manually copy a file called "Album Art.jpg" into the folder on the device where the music lives... which is a fairly tedious process to go through IMHO. Come on Sansa ... Windows Media player already stores AlbumArt<somenumber>.jpg files in the same folder - any chance you could come up with a sync utility which automates the copy process?
Oh, and the European models don't have an FM radio... something I'd missed in the specs (assuming that it was the ability to record FM that was missing from European models, not the entire FM tuner). Ho hum, not a big deal but a minor niggle nevertheless.
We all know that travelling on business can be a pain, and the glamour of travelling on holiday has long since worn off...
... so I thought I'd share some useful travel websites to help ease the pain (if you feel that way, and haven't seen them before)...
I've already booked the summer holiday, and have used all of these sites in making sure I get the best deal :)
Ewan
I came across a problem recently when a colleague was building a virtual Windows Server environment, and was reminded of it the other night when on a webcast with Exchange MVPs, when one of the attendees said he was hitting issues with Exchange 2007 servers not finding the Active Directory properly.
The solution lay at the heart of how the VM environment had been built - using a single source "base" OS image which was then configured to join the domain and had Exchange installed on it, for each machine in the environment.
If you're building a multi-machine environment, it saves a lot of time if you build a single image and make sure it's all patched up through Windows Update etc, then it's just a matter of installing the Exchange (or whatever) servers once you've joined a copy of the VM into the domain.
Trouble is, when you install a new server (such as the base OS build), it creates a unique Security Identified (SID) which stays the same even if the machine is renamed and domain membership changed - whilst you'll typically be able to join a cloned machine into the same domain, and it might look like it's working OK, numerous strange things can happen - making it look as if the trust between the machine and domain is broken, or having problems authenticating to resources.
NewSID is a free tool that Mark Russinovich developed while at Winternals/SysInternals, and is now available from Microsoft since the acquisition of Mark's company. The trick is to run NewSID on your cloned machine before joining the domain, and it will create a new, random, SID which means you won't get clobbered later on with the kind of problems described above.
(NB: It's worth noting that NewSID isn't supported for production use - for that, you should really SysPrep the machines instead).
//E
A lot of customers have looked at archiving solutions for Exchange over the last few years, and the most common reason for doing so is to reduce the volume of data held on the Exchange server. This obviously brings benefits for the administrators - they don't need to back so much "stuff" up every night, and they have a chance to use the archive for longer term compliance/discovery purposes. I've even seen customers using archives as a way of migrating content from another email system - eg company migrating from Novell Groupwise to Microsoft Exchange decides they would just bung all the Groupwise content into an archive so they can start with nice clean mailboxes on Exchange, but the users don't lose access to their historical data.
Archiving does pose an interesting question, though - what if you're just archiving all the garbage that people don't delete? I've seen cases of companies who have an archival solution but have implemented no mailbox quotas, on the basis that the archive takes care of handling everything they don't want to back up every day. Now this, to me, seems like a situation where the Exchange mailbox stores are going to be relatively static, but the archives are just going to grow indefinitely...
Exchange 2007 Managed Folders
There are some good papers and demos here on Managed Folders in Exchange 2007, and if used appropriately these capabilities could provide a decent alternative to archiving altogether, or could at least provide a way of throttling the amount of junk that ends up in the archive. A nice side effect is that "important" mail is kept online on the server, so is always accessible from any client (without needing to put additional plug-ins or install any other archive-aware software) such as OWA or even mobile devices.
I say this with some personal experience, since I've been using Managed Folders for a while now, in the real world. My mailbox sits in the Exchange Dogfood environment where the Exchange development group and Microsoft IT get to implement very early technology before it's finished, and before it gets rolled out to everyone else in MS, let alone our customers. My mailbox was on Exchange "12" for a year before it released, and it is set to a gut-busting 2Gb quota, so I don't really need to use PST files any more.
The approach to using managed folders is one where all mailbox content (and it's possible to differentiate different types - eg having different rules for emails, calendar appointments, voicemail etc) would have some age limit set (eg 6 months), and on expiry of that time, the content gets "dealt with". This could involve deleting the content, forwarding it somewhere (through journaling, perhaps sending to a different mail system, to a Sharepoint 2007 site, etc), or moving it from the main mailbox folder into one of the managed folders...
These managed folders are defined on the server and applied to the user via a policy (so that users in different departments might see different folders from others), but it's important to note that they are mailbox folders (ie they appear as regular-ish folders within the user's mailbox, are only visible to the same people that might be able to see the mailbox itself - ie they're not public folders of any sort -and count against the mailbox quota).
Retention limits can be set on both the "regular" mailbox folders (such that after 6 months, everything will get shifted into one of the managed folders), and also on the managed folders themselves... so in this example, everything from the Inbox etc would get shoved into the Cleanup Review managed folder, and after 30 days in there it will be deleted from the server. So the onus is now on the user to decide if they want to keep anything in that managed folder, and if so, move it to one of the other managed folders, which will typically have a longer retention period (eg HR records might be kept for 7 years).
I'd liken this approach to pushing the user into deciding what they need to keep, and basically assuming that anything which doesn't get specifically tagged or categorised by the act of moving them to the correct place, is therefore assumed to be disposable and can be removed from the server. Of course, it could still be archived somewhere else for long-term storage. It's a bit like when I was a kid - my mother would periodically come into my room and put anything left lying around into a bin bag and threaten to chuck it out... if I protested, she would retort "Well, if you wanted to keep it, you shouldn't have left it lying on the floor now, should you??"
I remember this 10-question quiz being sent around a couple of years ago, but was reminded of it the other day. The first time I did the quiz I was...
but after re-taking the test, apparently I'm now...
That's progress I suppose :¬|
Just read Jason O'Grady's blog over on ZDNet and it's quite eye-opening... one thing leapt out:
"Wireless syncing. iPhone can only be synced with a cable and can't be synced via WiFi or Bluetooth. This is unacceptable. iPhone has three radios and should be able to be synced with all three. WiFi and BT minimally, then OTA to Dot-Mac for bonus points."
So the device won't be able to sync with Exchange natively and unless Apple changes the stance of not allowing 3rd party applications (another strange decision), presumably precluding a 3rd party ISV from building an ActiveSync client (such as DataViz RoadSync which is available for loads of other devices). Maybe even RIM would have wanted to build a Blackberry Connect client for the device, but again, might be unable to...
Sounds like the iPhone v1 will be pretty limited in terms of competition with other smart devices - basically a music player which can do a bit of web surfing and make and receive phone calls.
Who knows, maybe that's what the masses actually want - maybe smartphones and connected PDAs are too complex for the average user on the street - but it could be some future iteration of the iPhone which expands on the basics which the v1 device establishes. It'll be interesting to try out the iPhone when it comes out... no doubt, it'll sell shed loads and if the UI is as good as the hype suggests, it could force everyone else to concentrate on doing a few things well, and carefully adding more functionality gradually.
Related reading:
IGot-over-it-already
Apple iPhone for now ignoring synch
Windows Mobile iPhone
Apple attacks iPhone UI emulators
Finally! Apple announces the iPhone!
Ever since reading Robert X Cringley's excellent 1996 Accidental Empires book (which actually has the even more excellent full title of Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can't Get a Date), I've been interested in some of the history behind the way the PC and internet industry has evolved. I've always loved Cringley's description of Steve Jobs as "The most dangerous man in Silicon Valley"... (in fact, he even opens Accidental Empires with a line akin to the opener from the sadly departed Douglas Adams' tome, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, which was, "High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.")
Many commentators would trace the genesis of a lot of technology we now take for granted back to Xerox Corp's famed Palo Alto Research Center, aka PARC. The roll call of what was supposedly invented at PARC is long - laser printers, ethernet, the bitmapped display, GUI, mouse, object-oriented programming, distributed computing... the list goes on.
Legend goes a little fuzzy though - not everything that came out of PARC originated there, but a lot of the researchers who worked there in the glory days brought ideas with them and refined them enough to be useful (eg Doug Engelbart, who invented the mouse before coming to Xerox but perfected its use with the new bitmapped displays and Graphical User Interface). Legend also has it (backed up by some fact, in fact) that The Most Dangerous Man in Silicon Valley himself was given a guided tour of PARC's facilities, saw the Alto computer they'd invented (showcasing their GUI, mouse et al) and became inspired to have Apple launch the Lisa computer, which was the forerunner of the Mac.
Anyway, a few years ago I picked up Dealers of Lightning - a potted history of what happened at PARC, and it really is a fascinating read. It can be a bit heavy going in places but gives a great insight not only into the amazing work they did at PARC (and the disdain the industry poured on Xerox Research for basically inventing the world as we know it but then alledgedly doing nothing with it, because they couldn't see how it related to selling photocopiers), and it also paints an inspiring portrait of the head of the Computer Science Lab, Bob Taylor.
Taylor's basic philosophy was to hire people that were smarter than he was (and he was the guy who founded ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, so must be a bit of a smart cookie himself). He also decided, in the CSL, that he couldn't manage any more than 50 people directly, so he set the cap on that size of organisation (since he didn't want to introduce layers of management), and just went about making sure those 50 were the best he could possibly find. What an visionary management style, and an amazing story.
It's also interesting to see how many of the luminaries mentioned in this book as the fathers of computing as we know it, now show up in the Microsoft Global Address List :-)
//Ewan
It's time for a new music player. I got a Creative Zen Micro a couple of years ago, and it's been a good little player but the headphone socket has now developed a loose connection and it's getting a bit annoying. It's time to start choosing a successor.
Things I liked about the Zen Micro, which help to shape the criteria I'm using:
All my music is in WMA format and I can't really be bothered with the idea of re-ripping it all or converting to MP3 (a process which would inevitably degrade the sound quality quite some), and I've bought some stuff from MSN Music so would like to be able to carry that forward.
Point 1 (WMA) rules out anything in the iPod range (why won't Apple just get over it and put WMA support on the iPods??), and point 2 (DRM) rules out the Zune for the moment since (almost unbelieveably) it's not compatible with Plays4Sure.
I suppose at some point I'll get a Zune: maybe even when I'm Seattle early next month... but for the moment, I'm leaning towards the Sandisk Sansa range... I did love their "iDont.com" viral advertising on the tube last year, and these devices seem to be getting decent write ups though there are some minor niggles (like no mini-USB, for example).
Buying the right technology and not ending up with an expensive dud or a short-lived manufacturer's folly... it's not easy, is it?
I've been a long-time user of the Philips Pronto programmable remote - it's an LCD touch screen based affair, which can be programmed to the 9th degree to create your own UI of macros which correspond to lots of different activities on different remotes - eg a "Watch the TV" button which powers on your screen, starts up the satellite box, switches the TV to the right input, fires up the Amp and selects the TV audio input on that. Or "Shut everything down", where it would send "Off" commands to all your A/V kit.
To get a flavour for what's possible, just have a browse on RemoteCentral's amazing file archive ... the principal downside is you could spend hundreds of hours tweaking and tuning the setup ...
Any IR-based remote can be frustrating though, since it's all one-way - meaning, if it sends the signal to the TV to change inputs, there's no way of verifying that the TV actually acted on the command - maybe something was blocking the IR window on the screen, or maybe your macro sent it too soon after switching the TV on so it might not have started up properly.
Anyway, I started looking into the promised Sideshow Media Center remotes which we'll see later this year - remotes which have 2-way communication with a Vista Media Center PC (using the Vista Sideshow framework), so could not only control the PC and any associated A/V kit (using Bluetooth & IR), but could also let you browse media libraries or TV guides on the remote, without disturbing what's happening on the screen.
Engadget has a preview of the Ricavision remote which was on display at CES ... should be available towards the middle of the year, for around $200. I think I'll get my order in now :)
There's so much new stuff in Exchange 2007, that it's easy to forget just how useful some of it is... like the calendaring improvements both in the UI of Outlook and OWA, but in some server-side cleverness too.
In Exchange 2003 and earlier, when someone sends you a meeting request, it will just sit in your Inbox until Outlook picks it up and does something with it (depending on how you have Outlook configured). One standard behaviour would be for it to take meeting requests and stick them in your calendar as tentative appointments which you've yet to respond to. Outlook does need to be running, however...
This could mean that if you're on holiday, people might be sending you meeting requests which conflict, but your free/busy time might look free because Outlook isn't running. Exchange 2007 now does the tentative booking of time on behalf of the mailbox, as well as taking care of other meeting hygiene features - like removing out-of-date meeting requests when the organiser sends a change (solving another pain if you've been away for a while, and come back to loads of meeting requests which are out of date). This is part of what the "Calendar Attendant" does - more calendaring stuff can be found on a description of the collection of services referred to as the "Calendar Concierge".
Now, I'm on a lot of internal distribution lists which I filter from my inbox into subfolders using server side rules. In the past, I'd sometimes missed conference calls etc where invites had been sent to the DL, but had been moved into my subfolders before Outlook had a chance to shove the tentative meeting in the calendar. Now, with Exchange doing both acts, anything sent to me directly or indirectly will get put in the calendar. Nice!
Well, there is one downside - in a multinational company, there are meetings and conference calls going on at all hours of the day and night... and invites might be sent to DLs to drum up interest in attending. It's easy to forget to switch off your phone or PDA from reminding you about the out of hours meetings, if you're not in the habit of deleting/declining the requests...
Sometimes, it's the seemingly little improvements that make applications so much more usable - and yet don't get the same degree of attention. The Calendar Concierge is definitely one of them!
You have to admire the way Apple stage manages announcements and releases - despite months of rumours, there's been little of real substance about the iPhone until it was announced in San Francisco on Tuesday. The media coverage the announcement has already got is hard to believe - let alone all the discussion that's going on over the net about it.
Now, I have never bought an Apple product*. Partly through bloody-mindedness and some kind of desire to be a bit different, and partly because over a decade ago I never got on with the Mac and, more crucially, never (then) got on with the kind of Mac users who behaved like religious zealots...
The iPhone looks interesting for a number of reasons: time will tell if it is really a success in Europe when compared to all the various Smartphones, PDAs, Blackberry devices etc, as well as the more basic mobile phone devices as used primarily by consumers who just want a phone, maybe one that takes pictures, that can make and take calls, and do text messaging.
Some initial thoughts about the iPhone, IMHO:
Oh well, I suppose we'll have to wait & see what happens...
* I do actually own some Apple merchandise - the iPod sock that I use to keep my Orange SPV M3100 warm and scratch-free (thankfully now washed and smelling sweetly). And I once had a Mac classic - when I left a previous employer, one part of my leaving present was an old monochrome Mac (which I don't think ever booted up). I took it home and turned it into a garden ornament - it looked quite funky sitting in the back border, covered in moss and with the plastic cracking somewhat. Wish I had some photos...
Following on from my recent post about search folders, I got a few questions and comments via mail. One, from Christian, asked if it was possible to use a search folder to filter out only mail which came from "outside" - eg Only show me the last day's mail from external senders, thus filtering out all the organisational spam that will typically be clogging the mailbox.
I had a bit of a scratch of the old bonce, and figured out one possible way - there may be others, but none are really obvious. There are a couple of requirements for this to work out, though...
Once you've got the SCL form installed, you can create a search folder with the appropriate length filter (eg all mail since yesterday morning, as described on my previous post) and add a new filter to restrict the SCL value (click on the Field drop-down, and look for either the name you gave the SCL form, or the "Forms..." link to add that).
If you set the filter to be at least "0", that means that any message with an SCL value of 0 or higher will be shown (you might want to add an additional filter to not show stuff with a high SCL value, since they're lkely to be in your junk mail folder anyway). You could also restrict which folders are shown, based on the same logic in my earlier post.
Anyway, mail with an SCL value will have come from an external source (ie internal Exchange<->Exchange mail won't have been scanned by the IMF at all), and will have come from an anonymous connection (mail sent by authenticated servers through the same gateway will be assigned an SCL of -1 to show that it's exempt from filtering by the SmartScreen logic within the IMF).
It might take a little while to render the search folder if you've a large mailbox, but it does provide a nice way of showing you only stuff which came from outside.
It's funny when you look back a few years to see just how communications technology has changed - remember when you might have asked (or been asked), "are you on the phone?"... meaning not, "are you using the phone" but "do you have a phone at home"... now we just assume that (pretty much) everyone's got a mobile phone, everyone has internet access and everyone has at least one email account.
Organisational culture has evolved a lot in the last 5-10 years, to the point where a lot of people hide behind email while some try to escalate into other forms of communication as soon as possible. There's one guy at Microsoft who always phones in response to getting an email from me. I tend to enjoy playing cat and mouse by letting the phone drop to voicemail, listening to the message, then emailing him back :)
A lot of us have settled on corporate Instant Messaging as a happy medium, for a number of reasons:
Interestingly enough, John Westworth IM'ed me halfway through my writing this post to ask a question about my mobile device (an SPV M3100). He theorised that he doesn't answer his phone much (more through accident than desire, I should add), and figured that I might be the same... so it would be better to IM instead ...
This led to an idea for some canny Windows Mobile developer to pick up, and make riches from - an AI-like Bozo Filter for the phone. Just think ... it could pick up the Caller ID from an incoming call, figure out if that user is in the Outlook contacts list (or maybe even the GAL) and cross reference with the number of times that individual appears in the Call History (ie have I called this guy before? Has he called me a lot and actually got through?) and in the mail client, then apply a Bozo Confidence Filter (BCL) to the call... which would then allow me to set up rules to decide my preferences for when I will accept calls and from what level of Bozo...
Combine all this with the inherently linear nature of a phone call - it's synchronous, you (generally) can only have one at a time, and they tend to be fairly short. IM conversations can be done in parallel with each other (though make sure you don't type a comment into the wrong window by mistake...) and some may have many rounds of dialogue/response stretching over a reasonable period of time (usually at most a day). Email would suit much more asynchronous communications that might be shared with hundreds of people, stretched over any length of time. Choosing which one to use is increasingly a personal preference, and in future, the choice is increasingly going to be with the recipient rather than the sender. So, when the guy I mentioned earlier picks up the phone to call me and I don't answer, I might receive the call as an IM stream if I'm online and want to take it, rather than dumping straight to Voicemail...
Exciting times, eh?
[This is a re-heat and update of an older blog post on You Had me at EHLO!]
Search Folders in Outlook 2003 and 2007 can be a useful tool to manage large volumes of mail in your mailbox; one tip is to create a folder for "all mail since this morning" or similar; I also have a search folder for "all unread blog posts" which means I get a single filtered view, grouped by folder and sorted by date. Here are a couple of examples...
The second condition here sets the list of folders we want to exclude… I use ‘DL: Sent Junk Draft Deleted’, which means any item in Sent Items, Drafts, Deleted Items or Junk Items will automatically be excluded, but so will any folders which contain the letters ‘DL:’ in their name. This way, I filter social mail and less important Distribution Lists into folders which all start DL: <name> and the other DL items which are more important still show up in the Search Folder.
The last stage is to add the Search Folder to the Favorites Folders collection, and set the default view of the Search Folder to show Arrange by Folder… then it’s really easy to quickly collapse & expand the groupings to show and hide specific folders from the results. Now, all I need to do is get round to reading and responding to all that email :) The sad thing is, that as of writing (around 5pm), the filtered mail from yesterday morning is showing 202 items, 172 of which are unread :(
More info on search folders is on Office Online – some here, and here.
As I mentioned the other day, I've a penchant for using shortcuts in Windows: most (if not all) are documented in help files and the likes, but it is amazing how many people don't know about them or just don't use them.
Continuing the list of shortcut keys that can save a few fractions of a second each time you use them...
There are lots of handy commands which you can type, used in conjunction with Windows-Key-R, to speed navigation in the UI. You could even set up shortcuts to some of these for quick activation using the mouse/start menu etc...
Some favourites:
NCPA.CPL - jumps straight into the network control panel, rather than (depending on which version of Windows you're running), fiddling about in Control Panel and looking for Networking connections. Under Vista, the guts of Networking is hidden behind the Network & Sharing Center.
DESK.CPL ,3 - (note the space before the comma) - takes you straight to the display settings page that's used to change resolution, select monitors etc.
COMPMGMT.MSC - quick way of getting to the main Computer Management snapin, which branches off to event logs, user manager etc.
SYSDM.CPL - System Properties dialog (same effect as pressing WND-BREAK)
There are many more - from SERVICES.MSC or EVENTVWR typed directly at the Start menu, to MSTSC /v <server> /console to take over a remote machine's console using the Terminal Server client.
Enjoy - and Happy New Year!