I was telling someone recently that before I joined Microsoft I spent the late 1990s running a small training company. The number of employees varied, averaging out at a dozen or so. I delivered training, did the business management, helped the win over customers and I looked after the IT. It was like...

For as long as we have been talking about “Green IT” I’ve thought the opportunity to save carbon emissions by using IT to reduce travel was far greater than the opportunity to reduce the carbon emissions of IT itself. That’s not an excuse for leaving your monitor on or not using the Power saving features...

Inside Microsoft we have this custom of “dog-fooding” new software, and Exchange 2010 is now at the point where Microsoft IT feel they can run it outside of North America. So a few days ago I got a mail saying my mail box was going to be moved to a new server “using the new Exchange 2010 Online Mailbox...

My job as an evangelist focuses on Windows platform (client and Server OS), including management (i.e. PowerShell) and Virtualization. But there are other Microsoft products which from my day to day use of them I feel evangelical about. One is Windows Live Writer which is the best tool for composing...

The first big PowerShell project I worked on was to produce the scripts in the OCS resource Kit. With OCS R2 announced, it won’t come as a great surprised that we’re working on the Reskit again and I’ve gone back to my scripts. Boy oh Boy have I learnt some stuff in the last year. PowerShell nouns are...

Eileen has already mentioned that she's going to San Diego (there's a song in there somewhere).  I've only been to San Diego once - the year I joined Microsoft - and it was jolly nice city for a conference, although after the flight back I asked our travel agents to make a note that I would rather...

The news went live on the Exchange Web Page yesterday. Technet Magazine has " 16 new features in Exchange SP1 " the one which is of most interest to me is " Improvements to Unified Messaging "... that's all about integration with OCS and communicator. Update : Jason thinks the mobility improvements are...

First to explain the title: Sooner or later I will stop banging on about hot-desking and the bedlam which is our office area - last week it did seem to plumb new depths with one team sitting round a speaker phone in the open plan office yelling into a conference call and another playing the flutes/recorders...

Since I posted about Parlano , a couple of people have asked me about persistent chat. So.. (very briefly) most people understand Mail and Instant messaging. IM is usually 1:1, but we can have multiple users in a a chat. One of the major grumbles about LCS 2005 and Communicator 2005 was that when you...

One of the things about working odd hours is I see things come in from the US, when most sensible Brits are in bed. One came with the message "This announcement was originally scheduled to happen Thursday, August 30 th , 2007 at 7AM PDT- however CNET broke embargo http://news.com.com/Microsoft+to+buy...

I had a mail from the Unified communications team over the weekend. They were happy to announce that the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Trial Downloads (both Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition Servers) together with their associated client, the Office Communicator 2007 Trial download...

I've had an outlook rule in place for a while to tell people about broken phone numbers, I thought I'd report back. The first thing I found was that colleagues who forward lots of mail threads soon tired of seeing the message, so I've filtered out anything which is a reply or forward. The rule now goes...

Two sets of information have come my way about OCS. The first is the licensing is beginning to get clearer. Please don't send me questions on upgrades and pricing – talk to whoever you normally go to when you acquire software. Licensing The different versions of the server (standard and Enterprise) describe...

Maybe I'm getting mellow in my old age, or maybe things in Microsoft IT are changing. There was a time when I really didn't think much them - directly after they off-shored the help-desk was the low point. But since then they've been doing this and that to improve the service they deliver to us. One...

I've already blogged about the Devil Wear Prada videos that the Unified communications team put out. Kevin who looks after the Unified communications team blog sent me this link Usually these movie posters don't get seen outside product group offices, but for a little fun, allow the pop-up and you get...

Bias declaration: I've been a fan of Windows Mobile since before we started using the name. But having picked up my new Orange E650 aka HTC S710 codename “ Vox ” I'm left thinking " Boy oh boy Mobile 6 devices are a jump forward ". You could dismiss some of the changes as cosmetic , but I find they really...

I had a list of interesting bits on the web in my mail this morning, and I thought the following two OCS ones were worth passing on. A 13 minute Video in which Paul Duffy explains to David Berlind of ZDNET , where we are with LCS and where we're going with OCS Tom Keating has an entry on his VoIP and...

OK,I'm a bit slow off the mark here but last week we announced we're linking Xbox live into Windows Live messenger.I've got to get one of these... I not sure if Live Communications Server users with Public IM Connectivity to MSN / Windows Live will be see the Xbox live users - they better had ! Of...

A year ago tomorrow, I posted something entitled "Civilisation will come to an end because no one will understand what anybody else is saying" It seems I manage to post that the Beta of Office Communicator is live, before the product team did . And more tersely too. How's this for saying "Surely in the...

Little more to say. It's here Documents are available separately. So is speech server Given our propensity to move these download URLs, Just be aware that if you search for it putting 2007 in the search terms narrows the hits down. Technorati tags: Microsoft , office Communications Server , live Meeting...

I said last week that Jeff Raikes was going to make an announcement, he has. It starts: " Within three years, more than 100 million people will be able to make phone calls from Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint, and other Microsoft Office Systems applications; and customers will be able to gain this value...

Er, no. After what I said about leaking a few days ago I'm not going ruin Jeff's carefully prepared keynote. But on March 7th he's doing a keynote. Our Press pass site will have information, and (I'm told) a video. This is the next installment of the stuff Jeff started to lift the curtain on last June...

Eileen blogged a few days back about her frustration that we can't roll out Unified Messaging any quicker, and I want it for one reason and one reason only. A while back I wrote about Stupid phones . I listened to Gurdeep at TechReady saying that his phone hasn't learnt any new tricks in 20 years. Voice...

"If you hadn't fixed it to the desk it would be pushing up the daisies! It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This is an ex-business tool" I never deleted Darren Stange's post "My deskphone is stupid" from its RSS folder. Our desk phones just got more stupid: until this week a...

Eileen wrote Recently "Companies are still in the dark about Real Time Communications, some people view it as a waste of time and an invasion into their work time. " You can get a 14 day free trial of live meeting and this video shows where we're going with RTC - personally I can't wait for...