Well, I've been in the Xbox Live team for the past 3 days and my head is swimming! I had never thought about all the work that goes into keeping Xbox Live up and operational, but now that I'm here and get to see it, it's pretty remarkable. There is a large team working around the clock to make sure that gamers around the world can get on their Xboxes and have a troublefree experience whenever they want to.
Anyway, I'll have more to post down the road, but right now I'm still focusing on getting my feet underneath me so I can start contributing.
Starting this Tuesday, I will begin a new job at Microsoft: I am joining the Xbox Live Operations team as a Program Manager. I have really enjoyed my nearly 3.5 years on the Solution Accelerators Team, but am looking forward to a new challenge. My job on the Xbox Live team will be to help ensure that the Xbox Live network stays up and operational while we continue to add new features and capabilities.
Anyway, it's been fun and I will probably continue to post, but obviously on different topics!
I'm happy to announce that the External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint has been released and is now available at http://www.microsoft.com/collabkit. This toolkit helps you easily deploy a SharePoint-based external collaboration facility at your organization. Once this facility is in place, end users can quickly create a new collaboration site (using a SharePoint site collection) and add internal and external users to that site. Both these process can be workflow enabled so that an administrator must approve both site and user creation.
The toolkit runs on both MOSS 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. It also leverages SQL Server 2005 and ADAM. All external users are created in the ADAM directory so they are segregated from your primary user store.
Please take a look at the External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint. If you have any questions, please let me know.
Bill
My buddies down the hall recently released the Windows Server 2008 Security Guide the other day. This security guide is targeted at the latest Windows Server release (obviously!) and helps you implement the appropriate security settings based on the server's role.
You can access the Windows Server 2008 Security Guide at http://www.microsoft.com/wssg.
In my previous post (since corrected), I included an incorrect link to get access to the beta of the Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint. The actual URL is https://connect.microsoft.com/SelfNomination.aspx?ProgramID=1657&pageType=1&SiteID=14. Sorry about that!
I am happy to announce the beta release for the Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint. We are making this beta release available in order to get feedback from our customers and partners. With your help, we can ensure that the Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint (ECTS) meets your needs.
What is the Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint?
The Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint provides guidance and tools to deploy a pre-built, customizable SharePoint solution that teams can use to collaborate with those outside the firewall. At the same time, the toolkit helps ensure that sensitive data on these systems is protected.
Using this free toolkit, administrators can set up a secure, SharePoint-based extranet collaboration site in a short time. End users can then use this site to easily create new site collections, posting sharable documents that are centrally located inside the firewall. The toolkit also enables users to invite internal and external partners to collaborate on documents. And the toolkit makes it simple for team leads to assign or revoke access rights for any team member.
Once the ECTS is installed, your users can be up and running with a secure, SharePoint-based team site in minutes. They can easily invite and enable external users to collaborate with them, sharing documents that are centrally located on a SharePoint site inside the firewall. Administrators can require administrative approval for all new sites and users, or can allow precisely control the information outsiders can access, or they can delegate this control to end users and free up time for other tasks.
Where do I access the Beta?
To get started with the beta, please click here, then click the Downloads link. Note that you may have to register to get access to the Connect site. On the list of downloads, click the Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint. From this page, download all the beta files. I recommend that you read the Release Notes first to learn about any late breaking information related to the ECTS.
We are looking for beta participants for my current project, a set of guidance and tools that makes it easier to collaborate with people outside the firewall using SharePoint. If you are thinking about extranet collaboration, please get in touch by using the email link above. I'd love to discuss this with you and give you a chance to participate in our beta program.
Employees need to share documents with individuals from other companies, such as partners and suppliers. These documents often contain sensitive information that needs to be kept safe and secure. Microsoft SharePoint products deliver the document collaboration capabilities, but many IT departments have been reluctant to use a SharePoint infrastructure with external parties because of concerns about security and user management.
Project Inverness is an effort to address these concerns. This project will provide authoritative guidance and tools to help your organization set up SharePoint to provide users with the flexibility they need to collaborate easily with external people while simultaneously allowing the security manager to rest assured that confidential data is protected. This Solution Accelerator will be freely downloadable from TechNet.
To help us develop a Solution Accelerator that really helps address our customer's pains, we need customers like you who can review our designs, preview early versions of the guidance and tools, and provide valuable feedback. The benefit to Microsoft is obvious: with your help, we can provide a Solution Accelerator that better meets the needs of our customers. You can also benefit from participating in our development process. You will help ensure the final deliverables meet your specific needs, get early access to the solution accelerator so you can begin planning your implementation, gain access to Microsoft experts, and be acknowledged for your contribution in the final deliverables. In addition, we will provide a nice thank you gift to those users who make a particularly significant contribution to the project.
If you are interested in helping out, please visit https://connect.microsoft.com/InvitationUse.aspx?ProgramID=1657&InvitationID=PRM1-C3FJ-W3FP&SiteID=14 and follow the instructions to enroll in the program.
Thank you,
Bill Canning
Sr. Program Manager
Solution Accelators - Security and Compliance
It's 5:30pm on Wednesday and it's been pouring down rain for the past 2 hours or so. This was bound to happen; after all, this is Florida! I'm hopeful that we're getting this stuff out of the way so that we'll have nice weather for the attendee party.
Today I conducted what I would characterize as a very successful side meeting at the Peobody hotel. The side meeting was focused on secure collaboration, and ran about 2 hours. We got about 60% of the RSVPs that attended which seems to be about par for the course.
Generally speaking, the things we were thinking about are also on our customer's radar screen. We did gather some interesting new information that was a bit different than what we suspected. For instance, some of the interesting findings were that the customers seemed much more worried about strong authentication than I expected them to be (now that I think of it this isn't actually that surprising). In addition, they also seemed more open to CardSpace than I expected.
I am happy to announce that the we have released the Data Encryption Toolkit for Mobile PCs. This solution accelerator is designed to help you understand the encryption options that Microsoft provides that can help protect laptop data (BitLocker and Encrypting File System), and then deploy and operate the selected technologies. The DET includes a tool called the EFS Assistant, a small program that installs on your client PCs (desktop or laptop) and enforces your EFS encryption policy.
You can see the Data Encryption Toolkit online or access the download page at www.microsoft.com/det.
Let me know if you have any questions!
On the way to lunch today, I was approached by someone with a small black device just a bit too large to fit in your shirt pocket. It turns out that it is an OQO, a device she billed as "the smallest Vista PC in the world". This thing was pretty amazing, featuring 1GB of RAM and a 60 GB hard drive, and a full keyboard in a really small package. I'm not sure how useful it would actually be to own and tote around, but it has pegged the Geek-Meter here at Tech Ed!
I managed to attend a few sessions yesterday. One was a session on ADFS "2". The speaker talked about how the new version of ADFS integrates with CardSpace and showed an interesting demo. Having spent some time in a past job looking at SAML, this was fairly familiar. On the other hand, I was never fully acquainted with ADFS 1, so I'm not sure how this product has changed...
I went to a session on Home Server that ended up being cancelled when the presenter never showed up! There were about 400 people in the room and I can tell you they weren't pleased... I assume the presenter had a big problem to 1) not make his own session, and 2) not be able to let someone know/fill in for him...
I attended a cool chalk talk on how ADFS and RMS work together, especially in the Windows Server 2008 time frame. The presenter talked about secure collaboration scenarios, some of which I'm looking at for my upcoming project. Several new features are coming for RMS in Longhorn. First, RMS is a server role in the new product, making set up much easier. In addition, whereas RMS had a web-based configuration previously, it is now configured through the standard management interfaces in the new server. Finally, it integrates much better with ADFS in this new version. I'm sure there are lots of other new features that I didn't pick up here, but it sounds much better than before. RMS is a great technology that just needs to get easier to deploy and use, and hopefully this new version will help make that happen.
Finally, I spent some time talking to the ISA/IAG guys about Microsoft's firewall product. I'm going to admit that I didn't know just how many people where running ISA. It apparently a lot more that I thought! Anyway, the IAG (formerly Whale) provides an SSL-based clientless VPN capability for internal web applications. This is pretty cool: I log into the ISA server that hosts IAG and based on my credentials, I get access to the appropriate internal sites. When I click on a site, I get taken to that site as if I were on the internal network. I've dogfooded this at work and it is pretty nice, and takes a lot less time to get connected to than our VPN. An additional capability is that you can install a bit of software and actually run thick client applications over the IAG-based VPN tunnel. When the application notices that you have a live connection to the IAG, it routes packets intended for the internal network to the VPN tunnel that IE has set up with the ISA server running IAG. (Don't quote me on the technical details, but this is generally what happens). Long story short, once you've used your browser to connect to the IAG gateway, you can run fat client applicaitons on your remote client as if you were logged in locally. It makes the VPN client much less complicated...
Anyway, those are some highlights from Day 1. I'll be back with more...
Well, Day 1 is in the can and I've got some general impressions:
- The convention center is more spacious than Boston, so it seems like everyone has a bit more room. On the downside, that could mean more walking...
- It seems like it is easier to get to the breakout sessions this year than last. I'm not sure if this is really true, but it seems like it is the case.
- The bag is a big hit, especially after last year's fiasco bag!
- The disappointment this year is the pen they stuck in the pen holder on each badge. It is both a highlighter and a pen, but it is designed in such a way that you can't put the cap anywhere when using it as a pen. People are working the vendor booths hard to find replacement pens!
- They had a live band at lunch this year. It was actually kind of nice, but if you happen to sit near the band while eating you can kiss any lunchtime conversations goodbye...
That's it so far. I'll be back with more from Tech Ed 2007 soon...
The first thing I had to do at Tech Ed this year was a chalk talk on the Data Encryption Toolkit for Mobile PCs that I just finished. The session was pretty heavily attended, with all chairs filled and lots of folks sitting on the sides and standing in the back. Basically, I talked about the DET for about an hour, and fielded lots of good questions from the attendees.
It was cool to do a chalk talk instead of a breakout because it is much smaller and much less formal. In fact, you are not supposed to use slides at all for a chalk talk (I threw in a few... Come on, I'm a PM for cryin' out loud!).
For the rest of today and Tuesday I am an attendee, with no official responsibilities, so I will be attending sessions and taking in the show like everyone else. After that I'm really busy working at the booth (Security and Compliance), running my side meeting and doing other stuff, but until then I can just enjoy myself...
