Use your phone camera to translate printed text, voice recognition to translate spoken text, or the keyboard to enter text that you want to translate.Use your phone's camera to make translating signs, menus, newspapers, or any printed text a snap. Just aim the camera at the text and see the translation in seconds. Download languages and phrase books so you can translate text and images when your phone isn't connected to a network. Speak a word or phrase that you want translated and hear the translations spoken in a native speaker's accent. Voice translations require a network connection. Improve your vocabulary with the Word of the Day on the Start screen.When you're traveling, need to overcome a language barrier, or trying to learn a foreign language, Translator is your go-to app.
http://aka.ms/trans
Wouldn't it be great if there was an App that you could run on your Win8CP or Windows Phone 7 that "pushed" you important Windows Server news?
Do you read blogs like Ben Armstrong, Virtualization Team, Mark Russinovich?
Well colleagues Martin McClean (Poster Guy) and Brian Lich (Awesome Guy) have made an app for you. Server News "... makes it easy to get the latest information and annoucements from program managers, product managers, writers, developers, and, testers within Microsoft. You can browse blogs and Twitter feeds from people that work within the Windows Server Division at Microsoft."
Nice Guys, eh? Enjoy.
http://aka.ms/snews
Free-as-in-beer Hyper-V Poster
http://aka.ms/HVPstr
Increasingly, you don’t need a GUI to get your IT Pro job done. Everything you can do in the GUI, you can do in PowerShell.
This is even more true in Windows Server “8” Beta. Not just because there are >2300 cmdlets. Now, you don’t even need mstsc.exe (Remote Desktop Connection) anymore. You can make “<that server over there><do this thing>” from your console without having to remote in to the box.
How cool is that?
This 21 minute demo video (Hyper-V Cmdlets in Windows Server 8) shows how using the new Windows PowerShell cmdlets for Hyper-V in Windows Server 8 Beta.
This short (4 minute) video (How to Update PowerShell 3.0 Help) shows how to keep the help files for PowerShell updated with new content during the Beta.
This TechNet Wiki topic (PowerShell Survival Guide) gathers all-things-PowerShell-all-the-time into one place, with an RSS feed to notify you of updates.
This blog generates new content you need to know on PowerShell on an ongoing basis: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/
This TechNet Gallery contains hundreds of Free-as-in-beer PowerShell scripts.
The Microsoft Script Explorer for Windows PowerShell helps scripters find Windows PowerShell scripts, snippets, modules, and how-to guidance in online repositories such as the TechNet Script Center Repository, PoshCode, local or network file systems and Bing Search Repository.
Hyper-V PM Eric Bahna recently recorded a video demo of the new Hyper-V Windows PowerShell cmdlets in Windows Server "8* Beta. The complete demo is about 21 minutes long.
For convenience, I also made three shorter versions currently available on YouTube
The wiki article Hyper-V Cmdlets In Windows Server 8 links to all four versions. If you would like to run the demo yourself, the script is available for free at: http://aka.ms/sd4fra the script to configure the environment for the demo is at: http://aka.ms/bzxqkr
You can read more about Windows PowerShell in Windows Server 8 on TechNet. The Hyper-V goodness is here: Hyper-V Cmdlets in Windows PowerShell.
See also Matthijs's blog: Using native PowerShell cmdlets with Hyper-V in Windows Server “8”
In Brain Rules for Meetings John Medina tells us: "you've got 30 seconds before they start asking the question, "Am I going to pay attention to you or not?""
This advice holds true for new UIs as well. If you have installed the Windows Server "8" Beta, and you come upon the new Metro UI in the course of completing some task, you are not in the leisurely "let's explore this new environment" mode. You gotta get stuff done.
You need the Metro UI Survival Guide for It Pros. It is on the TechNet Wiki. Why? Because as you find new ways of using the UI to get stuff done, new tips, you can share them. It is the Wiki way. F'rinstance, DYK the Windows Key + X in Windows 8 gets you this handy menu?
This online PPT explains about why you should wiki - Building a Community Based Content with TechNet Wiki
Bill Laing's blog post today announces Windows Server 8 Beta availability. Some other tidbits to add to your IT Pro reading list include:
The business case for changes to the TechNet Wiki is complex. On the "fit for purpose" side of the equation, I try to explain the numbers thusly:
1. There are orders of magnitude more readers than contributors
2. There are orders of magnitude more contribute-once users than there are contribute-many-more-than-once contributors
3. Page views of articles written by a contribute-once-only user *on average* have fewer page views than articles written by either: a) users who contribute much more than once, or b) articles that contain contributions from many - which may include both once-only users and "proflics"
4. Page views are not a good metric of worth or quality, except to advertisers (of which we have none on TechNet Wiki). Look at only the page views to triage is like "putting the cart before the horse."
5. It is about the content, stupid. The top N% of most-viewed pages are disproportionately likely to have been written by one of the relatively small number of users, who are highly likely to have contributed more than once.
Therefore, when prioritizing new features and functionality changes to the wiki: preference should be given to enabling the "influencers". They are the engines that help power the virtuous circle, both for content, and for community. I nifty side benefit is that *all* users are likewise enabled, and any work in this area encourages once-only contributors to contribute more.
One of these frequently contributing folks recently asked for help. She wanted to find the "list of stuff I wrote."
Here's how:
1. Sign in 2. Scroll down the page if necessary (on some browsers the link is "below the fold") and click More featured articles3. Click My Pages For instructions on how to use the RSS feed for your pages, and Outlook rules, see http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/how-to-find-stuff-on-the-technet-wiki.aspx Some wiki authors also use the tag system. They will add a specific tag to each article they author, and perhaps a different one to each article they edit. That way, clicking on the tag in the tag cloud, or on any article that has the tag, returns a page with all articles that contain that tag.
http://technet.com/wiki/got a facelift, near Valentites Day. Coincidence? You decide.
But seriously folks, here is the new look. How do you like it? leave comments.
According to our IT Pro customer feedback the number one dis-satisfier is finding the technical information they need. When they find technical content from Microsoft, they general review it favorably. Finding it is the chief frustration.
I was taught that one strategy for improving performance is to find the chief roadblock or chokepoint to improving your performance, and eliminate it. For example, statistically speaking, the biggest roadblock to mastery of a particular sport is and insufficient number of hours of practice. It is true that after a certain number of hours of practice, you can start to develop bad habits if the practice is not guided by someone more experience, such as a coach. However, this problem only appears some number of hours down the road. Conclusion: the first thing, the most important thing you can do to improve your game is – practice more.
In the world of technical writing, I like to explain to new writers that the laws of supply and demand in economics apply to writing. The scarcity you must learn to manage in order to succeed is – the reader’s attention. It matters not if your piece of technical writing contains diamond-sharp prose or epoch-making insight – IF YOUR AUDIENCE CAN'T FIND IT.
A recent pilot we ran illustrates how social media and technical content can cooperate to help IT Pros find the content they are looking for faster.
The problem: Microsoft support reported that a number of customers were calling for support with the symptom “"Stop: 0x0000001E" Error Message During Setup”. The three most-likely causes for this error are:
Further research on a combination of related search engine keyword searches showed over 18,000 global monthly searches. This number was taken as an indicatorof many more customers with this issue that were not *yet* calling Microsoft support. It seemed that few of these searches were finding the existing Microsoft Support KB that addressed the issue, because "STOP 0x1E" is a common bug check code.
The solution: we created some additional content in social media channels, including blogs, Twitter (twitter.com/winsrv) and the TechNet wiki to help Hyper-V users direct their attention (the scarce resource, remember?) to the relevant KB *for them*:
"STOP: 0x0000001a" error message on a computer that has an Intel Westmere processor together with the Hyper-V role installed on Windows Server 2008 or on Windows Server 2008 R2”
The result: Microsoft support calls for this issue are no longer on the top of the list, and the same keywords searches are about half (~7,.000). We take that to mean that fewer customers are having this problem and unable to find the fix using search engines.
These are trending metrics, and do not prove causality, however, we are hopeful that they point towards a strategy we can use to help IT Pro customers find the content they need, and thus reduce their number one pain point with our content. What do you think? Leave feedback..
Tell your friends.
As the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) put is: “Use caution when opening attachments, even if they appear to have been sent by someone you know.” I have seen lots of reports recently of an American Airlines e-mail scam.
A version I have seen in my “consumer” free e-mail account junkmailbox looks like this:
Tips you can watch for:
For further info see Email and web scams: How to help protect yourself.
The new www.answerdesk.com service offers free support 24/7/365 with the option to upgrade to paid support right there if the free session does not suffice. *
*Currently for English-speaking customers, however some Answer Techs do speak other languages, and you can filter/select those ones if you wish.
What’s not to like? This is your get-out-of-tech-support-to-my-friends-and-family-jail-free card! Enjoy
Just sign the paper first
and then pick from the self-service menu:
1. Windows and Office – called “premium software support” ($99/hour if the free session does not work) NOTE: the “latest software": list on the website is Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Office applications (2010, 2007 and 2003).
2. PC optimization (the website does not distinguish or exclude server-class PCs)
3. virus removal and protection
4. one-on-one personal training
You get to select your “answer tech” based on profile information filters, such as their pics, language, service name, number of cases and rating. Curiously, “on line right now” is *not* one of the filter criteria – MSFT – you listening?
From the FAQ (http://www.answerdesk.com/support/faq.s2):
Steps:
System Requirements:
"As always, be vigilant when opening any PDF attachments in unsolicited emails."
Headsup that Symantec today issued a warning of Adobe Reader Zero-day being exploited in the wild. Go smack your users and remind them what happens when you open attachments that drop backdoors on the system.
Symptoms and error messages for corrupted Hyper-V VHD files are numerous, from the VM refusing to start, to failures to attach the VHD with messages like
"Failed to open attachment 'C:\ directory \MyVHD.vhd'. Error: 'The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.'”
There are many possible causes why your VHD may become corrupted. It is not necessary to figure out the exact cause if you need it back fast: just restore the VHD from your latest backup, or as Ben Armstrong puts it in his blogpost“Run data recovery tools inside the virtual machine."” As with all things in IT “fast” is a relative term – restoring a 500 GB disk from backup can take hours. Plan accordingly.
If you are going to take the time to investigate the cause, or do not have a backup, then you must “go all forensic”.
No mater what the VHD type, most common causes of data corruption in the VHD (whether fixed or dynamic) are from:
If you can trace back the chain of events leading to the corruption, you will usually find a failure either by disconnecting storage while the virtual drive was being created or moved over the network Note that switching the disk-type from one to the other or expanding the disk may cause the problem, and, for some people, it has solved the problem. Sometimes this failure is not hardware, but caused by 3rd party encryption and anti-virus programs that have been installed on the host.
This Core Team blog post shows one way to begin your analysis.
Fixes to try:
For freee training on Failover Clustering with Hyper-V: Designing a Highly-Available Infrastructure for the Private Cloud
Register here: http://mctreadiness.com/MicrosoftCareerConferenceRegistration.aspx?pid=287
Here's what is covered:
Symon Perriman and Elden Christensen are your presenters. Reccomended.
Did I mention it is free?
We have seen a decline in support cases from Hyper-V customers reporting issues that involve the error message “0x0000001” and “Stop 0x0000001a since the release of SP1 for Windows Server Hyper-V R2. Our advice for Hyper-V users, the solution is to install SP1. This TechNet Wiki article tells you How to Install and Manage Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1.
However, there are confusing results presented in search engines, because these error message strings are also found in Windows 7 and Windows XP. Folks who are in a hurry – for example those dealing with some critical and cryptic error – do not always read the content we publish with dogmatic precision.
So:
Ninjas in lore specialize in not being seen. However, here is a group of community supporters inside Microsoft who are building community around the the TechNet wiki. Inside Microsoft, the employees working on this are called TechNet Ninjas. They are not so much into the hiding. They have a blog.
One of the most prolific* of the Ninjas, Ed Price, sat down with me recently for a chat.
Here is the short (~5 min) video.
You can also follow the Ninjas on twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/WikiNinjas
*Ed’s profile pageallows you to see all his activity, and marvel thereat
IT Pros have longed asked for a way to understand “what changed in this information that you just updated”? A change log. The diffs.
On the TechNet Wiki you can see this by using the History tab.
Example, we just updated the Hyper-V: Update List for Windows Server 2008 R2. It us around 2k words, in a FIFO list! Kindofapaintoscan.
This link gives you the view when you select two most recent versions in the History tab, and then click Compare Versions (new stuff in GREEN):
Now, this list is in FIFO order, so you can intuit that the new stuff is at the end, but that isn’t always the case in every doc, right?
This wiki feature can be used on any article on the TechNet Wiki. You can easily see the diffs between the “first posted” or “authoritative” version and the most recent edit.
Enjoy.
I am reading a great book for IT Pros who want to learn PowerShell: Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches. Why do I have PowerShell on the brain right now?
Don puts it this way: “…your choice is, Learn PowerShell, or would you like fries with that?”
The book is excellent for IT Pros. Best of all, you can use the CTP version of PowerShell 3.0 on Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 to practice and get ahead of the competition.
Download the PowerShell 3.0 CTP for free-as-in-beer here: Windows Management Framework 3.0 - Community Technology Preview (CTP) #1
“Some of the new features in Windows PowerShell 3.0 include:
Ned Pyle has a comprehensive blog post that guides you through the important new stuff revealed at BUILD for IT Pros in Windows Server 8. Go read his blog post Windows 8 for the IT Pro: The New Plumbing.
If, like me, you want to start your reading with the Hyper-V stuff, here is the clip from his post to quickstart:
Virtualization, Networking, & High Availability
Enjoy. Thank Ned and leave a comment on his post if you feel inclined.
At the Build conference Windows Server 8 demo, Bill Laing crammed 7 demos into his session.
Here’s the skip-to guide (all times are *ish*):
VM Scale skip to timecode 7:00
Guest NUMA-8:00
Virtual SAN – 9:00
Live Migration of VM without shared storage/SAN/Clustering – 11:00
Network stuff (tasty) - 14:00
Virtual Switch (teaser) – 26:00
New multi-machine management UI (snover-licious) – 29:00
Windows PowerShell automation – 34:00
“workflows” – 36:00
Storage
Data dedupe and SMB – 38:00
Hybrid apps – 50:00
At the Build conference last week, Bill Laing, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft's Server and Cloud business, opened the conversation with his blog post Windows Server 8: An Introduction. More info is at Windows Server 8.
Bill is hosting the conversation over on the Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform blog. Laing said “I’ve asked some of our engineering leaders to write posts on this blog to further explain some of the hundreds of new features. Be on the lookout for those posts in the coming weeks and months.” Watch that space, subscribe to the RSS feed to catch the new info soonest.
You can catch the video of Bill’s keynote over at Windows Server 8 | BUILD2011 | Channel 9.
Infoworld gives their top 10 list at 10 best new features of Windows Server 8.
Some I think are important include:
Ever wanted to create your own collection of technical documentation on the fly as you look for information on the TechNet Library? Now you can.
Microsoft has released a beta version of the Print/Export Multiple Topics tool (winning tool name, eh?). This is a special view of the TechNet Library that allows you to select articles, group them in a collection that persists across web sessions (requires sign in), and then print them or export them to a file. This tool requires at least Internet Explorer 8, or the latest versions of other major browsers.
To try the tool:
1. Go to the TechNet Library: in my case the URL is http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx
2 Sign in. (required to print and persist your collection across web sessions)
3. Click Lightweight view
4. Search/find a library article you would like to add to your collection. In my case, I’ll use the Best Practice Analyzer for Hyper-V page, because the page also shows links to other BPAs (that collection would look nice on my mantle-piece).
5. Click the small icon next to the printer icon in the top right corner of your screen
Note: If you are using IE9, and you do not see the icon,
Click the Compatibility View button in IE
6. Click Print Multiple Topics
7. Click Start. A new toolbar will appear in the web page. Browse as you normally do, with the toolbar activated.
New toolbar:
8. Add articles or topics to your collection:
In my case, I am going to add all those other BPAs:
9. Click Collection.
Review and rearrange your collection's content as it makes sense to you and then print or export. You can export to HTML* or PDF.
* If you export to HTML with the intention of accessing the pages offline, make sure you choose "save as Web Archive (.mht)" or "Webpage complete" in your browser when you save the generated document. Note that web browsers work best with small HTML pages, so HTML format is not recommended for large collections.
In my case, I’ll try .PDF for my collection of BPA articles, and then I’ll click Generate.
11. A few seconds later, I have my file, and I right-click to download it.
Give it a try. We hope you like it. Please send feedback/suggestions to bacfback@microsoft.com, or post as comments on this blog.
Recently, I claimed to be mini-microsoft, and Spartacus. No one believed me
My point was, on the internet, no one knows you are a dog…
Unless you are part of the Technet/MSDN community!!
As of today, if you click on the username of folks you see blogging/tagging/participating in the wiki/forums/galleries – you can see what they have been doing!
One of the cool things about the TechNet Wiki is that anyone can author content. One of the scary things about the TechNet Wiki is that anyone can author content!
However, when I see a wiki article authored by this guy, a quick look at his profile make me feel pretty confident that I can trust what he wrote.
Likewise, I think this (Virtual PC) guy prolly knows about Hyper-V:
What do you think? What other information can we show you on this profile page that will help? Leave feedback.
Microsoft has a wiki. It is called the TechNet Wiki. It is free-as-in-beer.
A one minute “fly-through” video is at: http://youtu.be/gj5Ug0CEg70
One of the “wiki ninjas” (a group of wiki early adopters committed to helping others use the wiki) has compiled a nifty list of wiki articles that will help you get up and contributing on the wiki.
If you use Twitter, follow the hashtags #TNWIKI and #WIKINIJAS