Eileen Brown's WebLog

Coders hack Microsoft website? They need to learn DNS...

I was amused at Viral's take on the fact that we'd hacked our own website the other day with the Live to Code ethic that developers seem to embrace so much.  More so, as I recently met Josh at our Technical conference this year.  Josh had admired my Women in Technology sticker, and gave me one of his Live to code, code to live stickers (like this one) in exchange for one of my Women in Technology stickers like the one on my laptop. 

His mission (apart from coding of course) is to try to get more women into IT in the US as they can't seem to attract enough female developers into his team.

Girls, you'd like Josh.  He looks like someone who would be totally at home on a Harley, or building a custom bike, or tinkering around in his garage, or blogging, or writing code, or even out hiking with some large dogs. He's a really nice guy too - even though he is obsessed with developing and coding  (I wonder if he has a tattoo about it?)

But I reckon that instead of a hack, it was just a DNS mistake - and that's where coders need the infrastructure guys to help out.

"Live for Infrastructure.  Infrastructure for life"

It just doesn't sound the same does it?...

Operations Manager cross platform Extensions demo at MMS

I've finally got round to having a look at this video about Operations Manager cross platform extensions. Wow.  I wish i'd seen this before.  Just look at how easy it is to manage and report the health of Oracle, MySQL, Solaris, Apache, Unix and Linux systems - all in one interface.

Operations Manager with Barry Shilmover

The back end of this uses system uses open source so it's familiar to Linux and UNIX users.  it allows Operations Manager to discover Unix and Linux environments and then uses WS manager to manage them in the windows GUI

You can see all the systems with the agent installed, Operations Manager will view and install the agent on all of these systems.  you can then use health explorer to see the availability and health of the systems, configuration and performance of the systems.  it all ties in to reporting so that Operations manager can report on all of the systems.

You can have a look at the servers and services - all in Operations Manager, identify problems and components that are giving issues - no matter which platform the server is running.

So powerful - so amazing. - especially if you're trying to manage a heterogeneous environment.  you can now manage these 2 environments - side by side.

Well worth 11 minutes of your time...

Sharepoint Webcasts for July 2008

Momentum Webcast: The Enterprise Search Platform in SharePoint Server 2007 (Level 100)
Wednesday, May 14, 2008 - 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Pacific Time
Justin Chandoo, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032374284&Culture=en-US

Unified Communications Webcasts for July 2008

TechNet Webcast: Configuring DNS, Certificates, Ports, and Load Balancers for Communications Server 2007 (Level 300)
Tuesday, May 06, 2008 - 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM Pacific Time
Byron Spurlock, Consultant - Microsoft Consulting Services, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032374265&Culture=en-US

TechNet Webcast: Compliance and Archiving in Communications Server 2007 (Level 200)
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Pacific Time
Byron Spurlock, Consultant - Microsoft Consulting Services, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032372164&Culture=en-US

Too many worms

I didn't get a chance to blog on Friday due to the words all IT professionals hate to hear from their friends:

"My computer is running slowly, could you come over and take a look at it please?"

My friend June is a nurse who uses her computer for emails, IM and medical research.  Her 2 kids use it for all sorts of things, animation, movies, music, puppies and  kids stuff.   Well lately their PC had been running slower and slower and now annoying websites had started to pop up.  So I agreed to have a look at it.

The first thing I notices was that Windows Defender had been disabled on their machine and IE Privacy tab had been set to accept all cookies (there were hundreds and hundreds of cookies on the machine).  Every time I reset the settings and enabled Defender, the reboot would change everything back.

I tried all of the spyware killers and spyware destroyers I cold find, deleted lots of roadkill .DLL's and spent far too long deleting keys from the registry - just to make sure.  There were over 100 worms, bots, spies and other nasties in the machine - no wonder the damn thing wasn't working too well.  The malicious software removal tool certainly did it's job well enough.  But I'm still not sure...

And with everyone in the family having Administrator access, I knew I was on a hiding to nothing.  Who knows what the hell other stuff could possibly be on there?

So now I need to spend several more hours round there sorting the PC out (totally formatting it) out so it can be trusted again.  No more administrator access for them - and no more downloading of stuff just because it looks nice.  But the main thing I need to do is to educate them all on the dangers of downloading bits of software whenever they're asked to.

Just how I feel... :-)

Much more scary than doing live demos

I get nervous enough when I'm on stage, demoing beta products - especially the first time I demo stuff live (remember all the problems I had when I demoed Exchange unified messaging to a live audience when there was lots of background noise).  But sometimes I like to get scared for fun.  Like roller coaster rides, horror movies and Stephen King novels.

But this is just scary. Really My legs were twitching and trembling the whole time I watched this video.  The man is totally mad!

• Video of a walk along the path
• Video of a walk along the path (Extended)

So I did a little bit of research on the Camino Del Rey. Thanks to Wikipedia and discovered that mad souls have been walking this highway for over 100 years now.  Even though the government has closed the road 8 years ago, people still walk the walk.  Aargh!

I think I'll stick to demos - they seem rather safe after seeing this...

Build your own Photo Zoom demo...

Oooooh!  I've found a demo that the IT pro's will love, and the developers will have a great time creating more images.  I'm at our team offsite.  It's a great opportunity to find out what other parts of the Evangelism team is doing, find out our challenges (getting together often enough is one of them), and see some of the great tools in action.

I've been aware of SeaDragon technology for some time, and I've blogged about how amazing Photosynth is in action - it blows people away if they haven't seen it before.

Well the site i've seen today is the Hard Rock Cafe memorabilia site  (have a look at the plectrum selection at the bottom left of the screen).

But what makes this so amazing is the fact that you can make your own zoom images up fairly simply.  If you haven't read the Expression team blog, then you won't have heard about Deep Zoom Compser  It allows you to use the multi scale image control to put your photos up into a deep zoom environment, so with a camera and a bit of html knowledge you can build your own sites like Hard Rock.

You can also use the Photo Zoom site that MsLabs have created to make your own sites up too.   Or put the Photozoom application  onto your Facebook profile and amaze your Facebook friends with your compositions.

One thing though which frustrates me.  apparently there are Easter Eggs in the Hard Rock site - but I can't find any of them as they move around the site.  If you find anything really cool in there that looks like a hidden Easter Egg, can you tell me how to get there please - so my demos on this can look extra cool...

Playing with Live Meeting 2007

I've just been showing Claire and Maxine in the Developer Marketing team how to use Live Meeting 2007 this time as a presenter instead of a participant.  I often forget how confusing things may seem when viewed from the other side of the fence so to speak.  So walking them through the things that they need to be aware of as presenters reminded me to go and have a good look at the basic features of Live meeting 2007 before you get started.

Step one - if you've never seen Live Meeting before then watch the demo!

Step 2 - if you want to attend a Live meeting as a participant then I'd recommend that you attended one of the sessions held by the Live Meeting user Group and watch Chris demo the features for you.  Ask the team a question on the Live meeting forum and I'm sure that someone would be glad to get you involved in some demo / training.

Step 3 - Try it out for yourself - there's a free 30 day trial that you can use for your organisation - to let you all have a play with creating meetings

Step 4 - Read the notes on "fundamentals of presenting" - and don't forget the time lag from you changing the slide - to the viewer at the other side of the world getting the slide.  It's the thing that we all forget about whilst we present...

Step 5 - go and make yourself a cup of tea - after all you're working from home, you didn't need to travel in to deliver that presentation and you haven't used the car so you can feel good about your carbon emissions too - so go on - have a biscuit with the tea - you've earned it...

Get 30% off the TechNet plus subscription

We're running a little competition in the UK where all the team have been given promotional codes to give out so that you can get 30% off the cost of a new TechNet plus subscription or 10% off your renewal subscription either Online or on DVD

Steve so far is in the lead - as he blogged about this last week, but I'm amused to see the competition between each member of the team at the Roadshow.  Every opportunity to advertise their code is used, it's on screen, talked about, and cards with the individual code on are handed out at any opportunity.

They're even doctoring the VPC images to show their unique code on stage  -

And doctoring each others image and code.  Hilarious.

I've been roped into this too, so visit http://microsoft.com/uk/technet plus and use my code UKITPRO1 so I'm not trailing in the league table behind the team.  Ha!

But seriously - 30% is a good offer and certainly worth taking advantage of... so if your subscription is up for renewal, it's worth a look.

And I'll turn the team into Sales guys - eventually... 

Live Mesh - the next web...

I'm really delighted that we've announced the technology preview of Live Mesh (see the article in the NY times) after hinting about it at MIX the other week.

It allows all your devices to work together - wherever you are - even on the web - you can add a new device to your mesh.  Even if you need access to something that is only available on your PC at home- once you've added it to your own mesh, that program becomes available to you - wherever you are.  Keep track of what's going on too find out who has updated what on your  Live Mesh too.

This really is amazing stuff - even at this really early preview stage.  I've already subscribed to the mesh blog as there's some videos up there which are worth watching.  Have a look at the first entry too which says:

First, this is a limited Technology Preview and we’re seeking your feedback. There’s some pent-up demand, so we appreciate your patience and understanding as we scale the system. We’ll do our best to scale as quickly as possible, but we also want to make sure the system is reliable and responsive.

Second, initially the user interface will be English only and we are hosting the service from our United States data center; this may have impact on some users. We’re working on this, and will announce broader availability in the coming months.

Third, this Technology Preview initially supports Windows (Vista & XP) machines but our vision of your device mesh extends far beyond this. In the near future, we’ll add support for the Mac and mobile devices, and then we’ll build upon that foundation.

It is only available in the US at the moment ( GRRRRR!) but you could try to add your details to the waiting list for when we open this up further. 

So as Ray Ozzie says: “The Web is the hub of our social mesh and our device mesh,” I think we're really bringing it all together now - and it's a great thing bringing this all into the Cloud.

So I wonder whether it'll work over 1/2mb home broadband though?  one of the drawbacks for me living out of town...

Exchange 2007 Prerequisites

Andy mailed me as he's having problems upgrading to Exchange 2007

I wonder if you can help. We are just starting to transition to Exchange 2007. We have three Exchange 2003 servers all with Exchange SP2 (but two don't have Windows SP2). When we run setup.com /PrepareLegacyExchangePermissions we get a failure and a message stating that not all of our Exchange 2003 servers have SP2. Do we need to have Windows SP2? Do you know of any other things that could cause this?

Fortunately there's a nice little table on the TechNet website that shows you all of the other pre-requisites you need to have before Exchange 2007 can be installed but Windows 2003 SP1 is a primary prerequisite.  Here's the table with all of the prerequisites

... just in case you were struggling with the upgrade too...

More champions in IT needed...

We announced the winners of the last Champion IT award - read their stories here.  So we've started to think about our next Champion IT guy for next quarter (the 3rd time that this has been done. 

We are currently looking for a new Champion of ChampionIT, click here to nominate.  You can nominate themselves or even recommend a friend.  (or me of course!)

Here are some dates for your diary.

Nominations:  21^st April – 9^th May

Public voting: 19^th May - 2^nd June

Winner announced: 4^th June

The Warm feeling of the roadshow

This is really odd.  I'm in Cardiff in a cinema (Odeon) of the first leg of our TechNet roadshow and its HOT.

I'm sitting in the back row of the movies back catching up on my email and its really really hot up here at the back of the cinema.  Probably because the place is totally packed to the gills with people wanting to hear about Windows Server 2008 and Security.

As the day has progressed, the temperature has increased steadily.  So we've asked the cinema to turn the temperature down on the air conditioning in here.

But climate for all of the Odeon cinemas is apparently centrally controlled across the Internet in the UK so we need to call Rotherham (200 miles away) to get them to turn the A/C down.

So I'm in a branch office cinema with read only climate control, listening to my team talk about Read only Domain controllers for branch offices!

Bizarre...

Things you didn't know you didn't know

There's always something you can learn about in technology - even with tools you've been using for years.  so when the It evangelists from around the world got together for a summit day, we had to create a fun video about being an evangelist.  So our team got together and decided to show some of the stuff that is already in the product, but often not talked about.  The video if really rough and ready - we made the video in the coffee area and you can tell there's a lot of other people around.  But you may pick up some tips about Vista and office that you didn't already know about.  The Video is up on Edge...

Back in February of 2008 before TechReady 6, some of our IT Pro Evangelists (ITEs) came out for a pre-conference where we held a competition entitled “Edge showdown” amongst the ITEs.  What you’re watching is the winning team video which was produced from start to finish in less than 45 minutes.  Tony Krijnen (Netherlands) is the host while:

·         Mariusz Kedziora (Poland) demos the snipping tool in Windows Vista

·         Eileen Brown (UK) demos how to make sure that when someone declines a meeting request they don’t get any updates

·         John Baker (US) demos WM6 mail search functionality

·         Hiroshi Okunushi (Japan) demos adding additional time zones to the Outlook calendar

Stream: Download:

We all learned something when we were filming this - nobody knew all of the tips we demoed.  Which makes me wonder just how much stuff is already in these products that we don't know about or use?  Topic for another roadshow perhaps???

Thinking about Office Live?

Ben, one of our Student partners was looking for an effective solution to help him share information for a small group of people

I love outlook. I've really got into using it for everything - email, calendar, contacts, tasks. I've got to a point where I want to start collaborating on things, and I've run in to a brick wall... I can't share my calendar etc off the bat.

Now, I know you're the Exchange guru - is this the path I should be pursuing? Can exchange do what I want it to on a small scale? ... I just really want to share my calendar, maybe my tasks and contacts. Is Exchange the best approach, and if so, are there any recommendations that you could make to me?

Thanks in advance for any help and advice you could give me on this - you came straight to mind when I was thinking of who to ask!

If you want to just share your Outlook 2007 calendar, click on the link that says "publish my calendar" and you can share it with anyone on the net. If you want to collaborate why not use office online workspace? and if you have Office 2007 professional you can always use Groove which will allow you to share your information

Look at the Office live learn more page, or you can also go to Office Live for more information.

A really great solution if you don't want to go down the Small Business Server or Exchange Server route...