I’ve now upgraded 4 different PCs to Win7 Release Candidate (build 7100) and each one has gone swimmingly – you too can share in the fun by downloading the release candidate for yourself.

The Windows development team are looking to test the upgrade process from Vista to Windows 7, so are asking customers who upgraded from Vista to Windows 7 beta, to regress first to Vista then upgrade to RC from there. Out of the box, the RC won’t do an in-place upgrade from previous versions of Windows 7, before build 7077. [The beta was 7000].

Since I did a clean install of the beta on a few machines, I’ve used the cheeky workaround here to allow the setup to be tricked into allowing it to go ahead. The only problem I’ve had – and this happened on going between interim builds of W7 too – is that the Lenovo thinkpad keyboard & tablet buttons driver doesn’t work until I go into Device Manager and force a driver update… so initial login needs to be from a Remote Desktop connection or via a plugged-in USB keyboard.

I’ve been beta testing Office 2007 SP2 since the beginning of the year, and it’s been great – the single biggest reason to use it is the myriad improvements made to Outlook, in terms of stability & performance (particularly relating to search and to startup & closedown).

Download Office 2007 SP2 here

From the summary of what’s new, check out:

Microsoft Office Outlook

• Performance improvements that apply to the following general responsiveness areas:
  • Startup
    Removes lengthy operations from initial startup.
  • Shutdown
    Makes Outlook exit predictably despite pending activities.
  • Folder View and Switch
    Improves view rendering and folder switching.
• Calendar improvements
  Improves underlying data structures and the general reliability of calendar updates.
• Data file checks
  Greatly reduces the number of scenarios in which you receive the following error message when you start Outlook:

  The data file 'file name' was not closed properly. This file is being checked for problems.

• Search reliability
  Improves search reliability when you use SP2 with Windows Desktop Search 4
• Improvements to Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
  There are now fewer duplicated items.
• Object Model improvements
  Now contains many customer-driven fixes.

968774 Outlook 2007 improvements in the 2007 Microsoft Office suite Service Pack 2

Today, the Exchange team released details of Exchange 14, now to be known as Exchange Server 2010. [download here]. There’s plenty of new stuff in the box, but I’m just going to look at one: high availability & data replication.

[My previous missives on Exchange 2007 HA are here, here and here]

There are some interesting differences between 2007 and 2010, particularly in the way databases are handled and what that means for clustering.

THERE IS NO SINGLE COPY CLUSTER ANY MORE.

Single Copy Clusters, or the traditional way of deploying Exchange onto a Windows Cluster with several nodes sharing a copy of the data held in a central SAN, have quite a few downsides … like there being that Single Copy, or the fact that the storage hardware is typically complex and expensive.

There are other pretty major changes, like storage groups going away (it’s just a database now, a move that Exchange 2007 previewed by the advice that you should only have a single DB per SG), or the fact that databases are now the unit of failover (rather than the whole server…), or the ability now to install multiple roles on servers providing high availability – so you could deploy highly available, clustered/replicated environment to a small number of users, without having lots of boxes or VMs.

Oh, Local Continuous Replication goes away too…

Well, reading the documentation explains a bit more about how Exchange 2010 will change the way that high availability can be achieved – no more the need for a MSCS cluster to be set up first should make it simpler, for one. From that site:

Changes to High Availability from Previous Versions of Exchange

Exchange 2010 includes many changes to its core architecture. Two prominent features from Exchange 2007, namely CCR and SCR, have been combined and evolved into a single framework called a database availability group (DAG). The DAG handles both on-site data replication and off-site data replication, and forms a platform that makes operating a highly available Exchange environment easier than ever before. Other new high availability concepts are introduced in Exchange 2010, such as database mobility, and incremental deployment. The concepts of a backup-less and RAID-less organization are also being introduced in Exchange 2010.

In a nutshell, the key aspects to data and service availability for the Mailbox server role and mailbox databases are:

• Exchange 2010 uses an enhanced version of the same continuous replication technology introduced in Exchange 2007. See the section below entitled "Changes to Continuous Replication from Exchange Server 2007" for more information.
• Storage groups no longer exist in Exchange 2010. Instead, there are simply mailbox databases and mailbox database copies, and public folder databases. The primary management interfaces for Exchange databases has moved within the Exchange Management Console from the Mailbox node under Server Configuration to the Mailbox node under Organization Configuration.
• Some Windows Failover Clustering technology is used by Exchange 2010, but it is now completely managed under-the-hood by Exchange. Administrators do not need to install, build or configure any aspects of failover clustering when deploying highly available Mailbox servers.
• Each Mailbox server can host as many as 100 databases. In this Beta release of Exchange 2010, each Mailbox server can host a maximum of 50 databases. The total number of databases equals the combined number of active and passive databases on a server.
• Each mailbox database can have as many as 16 copies.
• In addition to the transport dumpster feature, a new Hub Transport server feature named shadow redundancy has been added. Shadow redundancy provides redundancy for messages for the entire time they are in transit. The solution involves a technique similar to the transport dumpster. With shadow redundancy, the deletion of a message from the transport database is delayed until the transport server verifies that all of the next hops for that message have completed delivery. If any of the next hops fail before reporting back successful delivery, the message is resubmitted for delivery to that next hop. For more information about shadow redundancy, see Understanding Shadow Redundancy.

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about Thread Compressor on here – it’s an add-in to Outlook which removes unnecessary emails, on the assumption that most people reply to mail and leave the original intact, so you could keep the last mail in each branch of a thread, and remove all the others.

Way back when I was still developing TC, I tried to get it included on the Office Downloads section of Microsoft.com, but our legal department was (with some justification) very nervous about us offering a download which would go through the end user’s mailbox like a dose of salts, deleting stuff. So it stayed (more or less) an internal tool: I even started developing a “version 5” with a much groovier UI and some extra features.

Included in the v5 beta (which is a real pain to install nowadays – the previous v4.2.030 version has nearly the same feature set and is a lot more self contained), was a piece of logic which captured stats on TC usage and emailed them back to me.

Since many people at MS are still running that beta (it’s a long story, but the source code went south so it’ll never get out of “beta” state), I still get maybe 20-30 statistics mails a day…

Since August 2003 when the first statistics email arrived – from me, kind-of naturally – until 24th April 2007 (when I last did an analysis of the stats), TC v5 beta had scanned over 400m email messsages and had compressed over 30m, worth nearly half a terabyte of email data.

To the reader, the spoils

Well, I finally decided – in an “ask forgiveness rather than permission” move – to make the last complete and stable version available for download.

It’s not particularly elegant looking by modern standards (given that most of it was written 7 years ago in VB6) but it does work, even on Windows 7 (x86 and x64) and Office 2007. Basically, anything post-Office 2000/Windows 2000 should be OK.

A reader called Mark Ruggles emailed me the other day and said:

“It is fantastic and it works like a champ in Outlook 2007. I turned it loose on my Inbox and my archive and I deleted 103Mb of redundant data. I sent it out to some of my colleagues and my manager used it cutting his archives down by 2Gb.
…
This is the coolest utility I’ve found in a long time.”

So, thanks to Mark's comment, I’ve now registered www.threadcompressor.co.uk and posted install instructions and a download file up there.

Microsoft & Polycom announced yesterday that the Microsoft Roundtable conferencing device (used with Live Meeting or OCS 2007 to present a 360° view of the room to participants joining from elsewhere), will be replaced.

Polycom are taking over the manufacturing and distribution of Roundtable and renaming it to the somewhat-less-natty “CX5000 Unified Conference Station”.

In many ways, this is good news since it fits within Polycom’s core strength rather than being something of an adjunct product (which is there to support something else, which is pretty much how the Roundtable fitted into the Microsoft world), and it should be available from a lot more places than before.

If you haven’t seen the Roundtable/CX5000 before, check out Forrester Research’s Erica Driver, on her own blog, comparing the experience of using Roundtable to An IMAX Movie after listening to FM radio.

SMSE – pronounced (in the UK at least) as ‘Smuzzy’, short for Server Management Suite Enterprise – is a licensing package from Microsoft, which can be an amazingly effective way to buy systems management software for your Windows server estate.

If you’re planning to virtualise your Windows server world, then SMSE is something of a no-brainer, since buying a single SMSE license for the host machine allows you to use System Center to manage not just the host but any number of guest (or child) VMs running on it.

Combine that with the license for Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition, which allows unlimited licensing for Windows Server running as guests, and you’ve got a platform for running & managing as many Windows-based applications servers as you can squeeze onto the box, running on any virtualisation platform.

System Center is the umbrella name given to systems management technologies, broadly encompassing:

• Configuration Manager (as-was SMS, though totally re-engineered), which can be used for software distribution and “desired configuration state” management … so in a server example, you might want to know if someone has “tweaked” the configuration of a server, and either be alerted to the fact or maybe even reverse the change.
• Operations Manager (or MOM, as it was known before this version), performs systems monitoring and reporting, so can monitor the health and performance of a whole array of systems, combined with “management packs” (or "knowledge modules” as some would think of them) which tell Ops Mgr how a given application should behave. Ops Mgr can tell an administrator of an impending problem with their server application, before it becomes a problem.
• Data Protection Manager – a new application, now in 2nd release, which can be used either on its own or in conjunction with some other enterprise backup solution, to perform point in time snap shots of running applications and keep the data available. DPM lets the administrator deliver a nearer RTO and more up to date RPO, at very low cost.
• Virtual Machine Manager – a new server, also in 2nd release, which manages the nuts & bolts of a virtual infrastructure, either based on Microsoft’s Hyper-V or VMWare’s ESX with Virtual Center. If you have a mixture of Hyper-V and VMWare, using VMM lets you manage the whole thing from a single console.

It’s easy to overlook managing of guests in a virtualised environment – the effort in doing such a project typically goes into moving the physical machines into the virtual world, but it’s equally important to make sure that you’re managing the operations of what happens inside the guest VMs, as much as you’re managing the mechanics of the virtual environment.

I’ve used a line which I think sums up the proposition nicely, and I’ve seen others quote the same logic:

If you have a mess of physical servers and you virtualise them, all you’re left with is a virtual mess.

Applying the idea of SMSE to a virtual environment, for one cost (at US estimated retail price, $1500), you get management licenses for Ops Manager, Config Manager, VMM and DPM, for the host machine and all of its guests.

Think of a virtualised Exchange environment, for example – that $1500 would cover Ops Manager telling you that Exchange was working well, Config Manager keeping the servers up to date and patched properly (even offline VMs), VMM managing the operation of the virtual infrastructure, and DPM keeping backups of the data within the Exchange servers (and maybe even the running VMs).

Isn’t that a bargain?

See the FAQ for SMSE for more information.

Having just read Andrew Orlowski’s article over on The Register, it chimes exactly with a belief I’ve had since the original iPhone came out and showed a clean pair of heels to pretty much every other single device: someone had to put the mobile operator networks in their place, and only Apple were in the right place & time to do it.

As I’ve said previously on here, I’ve been a fan of Windows Mobile since day one, and I recall the frustration with the first generation Smartphones, that the mobile operators exerted so much influence not just on what the device would look like, but what software capabilities it had. The whole design of the application locking of Smartphone (which is the single biggest impediment to the easy spread of applications, a la the Apple App Store), was down to operators demanding that degree of control over the devices… or else there’d be no room on the networks for them.

In some ways, Apple’s brazen approach to the iPhone and it choosing the networks, rather than the other way round, has helped turn the industry on its head. I’m sure Google would have found a way to market with Android, but the fact that T-Mobile doesn’t offer the iPhone (in the US, at least) sure made it a lot more receptive to the boys from Mountain View, I'd wager.

It can be a dangerous game looking to the past for analogies that will prove future outcomes …

Look at the mess in the financial markets as proof – the CFO of Goldman Sachs said in the summer of 2007 that they were seeing 25-standard deviation moves, several days in a row… *

… but what Apple has done to break the shackles of the network operator, could be equivalent in effect to what happened at the dawn of the PC compatible industry. Through a combination of reverse engineering the original PC BIOS, and the fact that the software – DOS – was available from the same guys who provided it to IBM, the control that Big Blue exerted on the design, supply and pricing of that market was effectively wrested from them, initially by a rag-tag of would-be competitors (though some did make it, such as Compaq).

Just like the fixed-line phone companies have had to reinvent their business models numerous times – see Bob Cringley’s archive for lots of commentary on this hobby horse – maybe history will relegate mobile network operators to being a connection utility rather than controlling the content and the whole user experience, as they at one point wanted to do.

Still, Apple has a lot still to do, to be the saviour of the industry … it could still end up as a footnote in the history of this part of the race, with someone else coming along to take the finish line.

//E

* … meaning their predictive statistical model that was based on historical events, was telling them that things that will statistically NEVER HAPPEN were occurring regularly. What does that tell you? The model is now WRONG.

According to Tim Hartford from the FT, who I heard give a talk on this, their models said that:

• 3 std devs would occur once in every 3 years
• 4 std devs, once every 126 years
• 5 std devs, once since the last Ice Age
• 6 std devs, once since man started walking upright
• 7 std devs, once in 3 billion years…

… so 25 Std Devs would be something that has never and, statistically, will never, occur.

I haven’t been looking forward to an F1 season as much, for ages – since the Damon Hill years, probably. A number of things are helping to build anticipation:

• Rule Changes – this year, the FIA has torn up the rule book somewhat by resizing aero components of the cars, introduced hybrid-style energy recovery from braking, moved back to slicks etc.
  
  The best explanation I’ve seen of all of the changes comes from a cool video from Red Bull…
  


 

• Honda/Brawn GP looking good – I’m a Honda fan. I like Ross Brawn. I think Jenson Button has been unlucky with the car/team selection for years, and Rubino is the most experienced (and some say, the nicest guy) of all the drivers on the grid. They deserve to do well – and reports from the latest testing indicate they’ve nearly a second faster than everyone else, with defending champ Lewis Hamilton’s Mclaren team looking very much like they’re on the back foot. You can be sure that the Woking lads & lasses won’t be willing to give up the title without a fight…
   
• BBC Footage – Brundle. Good. Coulthard. Great. Jordan. Legend. Oh, and the trailer footage …
  
  … forward to 00:50s into the clip and you’ll find perhaps the best thing about F1 coming back to the BBC…
  
  The Chain.

Sorted…

I recall the 1st of August in years gone by, as the day that new car registrations would be released – in the UK, if you didn’t know, car registration numbers are centrally issued and every year, the prefix or suffix letter used to advance. For a young boy, it was really quite exciting to spot the first cars with the new registration, and people buying new cars would wait to take delivery on the 1st August, so their pride & joy would have the latest ‘plate.

A few years ago, the system changed (to try to smooth demand out a bit more, so there wasn’t a huge spike in new car registrations in August, but a dearth in June/July…), to being twice a year, on 1st March and 1st September. The prefix/suffix letter scheme also changed to be a numerical advancement, based on the year.

It’s now the 12th March and I’ve yet to see an “09” registration, even though I’ve been travelling on the motorways most days, and for the last few (since realising this), I’ve been actively looking, but found nothing…

Is this a barmoter of the economic slowdown?

UPDATE: 28/2/09

Just got an email from the general manager of the restaurant (after my message back to them), graciously admitting to “what can only be described as a complete failure of our internal system”, which has led to the entire team getting more training on the promotion… Thanking me for taking the trouble to write to him following our “ordeal” and in apology for the “catalogue of errors” from last week, he’s going to send us a bottle of Champers. Now that’s what I call rescuing a situation!

Here’s a salutary lesson in how not to deal with a customer who was expecting to spend a lot of money in exchange for a good experience, through inattention to a small detail which was introduced in the first place by the provider of that experience…

Saturday was Mrs D’s birthday – not a major one, but a special occasion nevertheless. We decided to celebrate by going to a good restaurant – the kind which features on www.viamichelin.com with more than a single star next to it…

I love ViaMichelin. It’s a great resource which shows (on a map) good quality hotels and restaurants, pubs etc, all over the world – the kind of place which is decent and not necessarily too expensive, all the way up to the best of the best. If ever we’re going on a long trip and will need to stop for lunch or dinner, I’ll take a look in VM to see if there’s anywhere nearby … and it’s never let me down.

As it happens, said restaurant sent me email a couple of weeks ago saying they hope I’d enjoyed my visit (even though I’d only made a reservation), and offered me a couple of glasses of pop as an aperitif and a nice glass of wine each with the main course, should we choose to visit again in the near future.

It’s a bit cheeky, but I figured I’d ask them if the offer applied to my existing booking; their customer services mailed me straight back saying they’d informed the restaurant that we’d be on the “Drinks are on us” promo, and they looked forward to seeing us on Saturday. Splendid. Couldn’t wait.

On arrival,when the maître’d asked if we wanted a drink, I discretely said we were on a ‘drinks on us’ promo … (not exactly wanting to shout into the quite-busy lounge area “AH! WE’RE ON A COUPLE OF FREEBIES ACCORDING TO THIS EMAIL <TADA>”).

After wiping his “My goodness, sir, you appear to have sprouted horns on your head” look from his face, he took our name and beetled off to check the reservation. And that was the last he spoke to us, except when I chased him (twice) for the bill, since we were standing in the door, coats on, with the taxi waiting outside..

This is an example of a small piece of poor customer service which actually cast quite a shadow on an expensive meal and what would otherwise have been a memorable evening for all the right reasons. They had offered me something free of charge which I was surprised and delighted about, but then manifestly failed to deliver, and I didn’t want to make a fuss on the night.

I sent mail to the customer services lady (who had corresponded quickly and efficiently before), expressing my disappointment - as yet (3+ days later)… nothing.

So what’s the lesson here [see? this isn’t just a rant and rave]?

The actions and inactions of a few people executing on something that was essentially unimportant and which was offered and not asked for, partly cancelled out all the work of the people who prepared the ingredients, made the great food, designed & built the venue, the guy who played the piano etc etc.

Makes me hope that I don’t ever fail to do something which in effect ruins the hard work of everyone else…

I got one of these things a couple of weeks ago… in essence, a great phone (I prefer the “smartphone” type device as opposed to the touch screen variety) – I’ve spent the last couple of years with the HTC s620 and it was time for a change. Key differences are that the s740 is a “candybar” type device rather than a squatter, wider phone, and has a slide-out keyboard rather than the full qwerty affair on the front.

Technology wise, the new device is bristling with features – 3G/HSDPA (so nice & fast browsing), GPS (paired with Google Maps or Windows Live Search mobile, works well). It even has an FM radio and a half decent camera.

I’ve written recently about nicely designed, functional items which remind & reinforce how good they are every time you pick them up or use them – well the s740 has one design feature which does the exact opposite.

EVERY time I use it as a phone, I curse the stupid design of the Call & Hang up buttons.

Those tiny little buttons that stand just proud of the sleek and shiny surface of the phone? Impossible to hit them without also pressing the soft keys above, or the home or back keys below. Well not quite impossible, but requires dextrous thumbnail gymnastics to use them.

Now I’d have thought that for a PHONE, these two buttons are kind of the most important? I’m not the only one, as PC Pro opined. It’s a shame – the s620 doesn’t look as groovy, but it does have an easier to use keyboard, and phone buttons that work. If only it was 3G and had a GPS…

Well there’s a thing. CNET reported that today officially marks the 1.2-odd billion seconds past the beginning of 1970, a standard that’s used in UNIX (and by the C programming language) as the basis for all time measurements. If you’re reading this before 23:31:30 on Friday 13/2/09 then you can see the countdown clock on http://coolepochcountdown.com/. Who knows what will happen after?

Actually, let’s hope they figure out how to patch all Unix (or 32-bit C) systems before 03:14:08 19th January 2038, otherwise we could all be in big trouble. Unix time is typically represented by a signed 32-bit integer (so has 2^31 positive values, ergo 2,147,483,648), and maybe we’ll be dealing with Y2k38 or something like that.

Apparently there was some debate about whether to use a signed or unsigned integer here – Dennis Ritchie (inventor of C and co-creator of Unix) figured it would be quite nice to numerically represent all the days he would live (since he was born in 1941, and if they’d used an unsigned integer, then time would have started in 1970 …)

Fortunately, modern Windows systems aren’t quite so dependent on this time code, though it is still heavily used. If you’re really interested in this field, there’s a comprehensive post on the oldnewthing MSDN blog. Turns out the Common Language Runtime (bedrock of .NET development) counts in 100-nanosecond intervals since the 1st of January “0001”.

Cor.

I had a really interesting discussion with a customer last week, when we were musing over the effects that the snow had on UK businesses. It was another example – like the floods which have hit parts of the country over the last few years – of a threat to business continuity which it’s easy to overlook.

Most businesses have prepared some contingency for what IT should do when it all goes wrong – starting with individual equipment failure (using RAID disks, redundant power supplies & the like), to clustering of services and replication of data to be able to survive bigger losses, either temporarily (like a power cut) or for longer-term outages (like loss of connectivity to a datacentre, maybe even loss of the datacentre itself).

What the weather conditions taught us the other day was that the people are even more important than the premises – the customer said it was ironic, that all their systems were up and running well, it was just that nobody was there to consume them.

Warwick Ashford from Computer Weekly writes about how their publisher, Reed Business Information, has built remote access into their business continuity plans. Interestingly, most of the discussion focussed on how to use VPN technology to connect to the office.

Funny, really. With Outlook & Office Communicator not needing to use a VPN to securely connect back to my office, I spent most of the WFH-time connected, productive, but not using a VPN at all.

I posted a while back about custom presence states (here and here). Well it turns out that a change made to an updated version of Communicator, requires (by default) that the custom state XML file is downloaded from a “secure” URL (so ruling out the file:// URL type).

I’ve posted my XML file to SkyDrive (since it’s available with an SSL connection and tends to be available from everywhere).

If you want to use the same URL, just open the following registry file and it will point your Communicator client at my XML file…

Otherwise, add your own URL to the registry at

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE
\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator
in a string value called CustomStateURL.

Registry file

(tip – if you don’t trust me, download the REG file and drag/drop it into Notepad to verify that it’s not going to do bad things to your machine).

… the UC technology is soooo delightful.

OK, it’s cheesy as you can get, but very true. The weather forecast on Sunday night was for heavy snow, and sure enough we awoke on Monday to about 4-6 inches of fresh snow – something that many countries would take in their stride, but in southern England, we just don’t have the infrastructure to cope. [since it’s such a rare event].

I had decided on Sunday night that I was probably going to stay at home, so changed all the face/face meetings I had scheduled for Monday, to phone/video calls.

One director at Microsoft sent an e-mail round to his team on Monday morning:

SNOW CHANGE: Team meeting to be changed LIVE MEETING ONLY! DO NOT DRIVE!

I have been clearly informed that South England does not own snowploughs. And as I look out the window at the 5 inches of snow with no snow tires on my car, as a Canadian who has driven in very big snow storms, I know when not to drive – and this is one of those times. It will be too risky. So, we will probably trim the meeting to the MYR presentation and maybe 2 other topic. More to come – but don’t drive! Looking forward to our meeting – ‘see’ you all there :-).

Thanks;

Michael

I also had a half-day partner meeting which had been scheduled for weeks; that was converted to a Live Meeting so everyone could join remotely. In this instance, the actual partners were stuck on motorways, or holed up at the airport, so in the end it was rearranged for another day.

It was amazing to see how, if the infrastructure is in place to allow it, some companies just flick to having (nearly) everyone work remotely and it not drastically affect productivity. OCS Product Manager Sean Olson wrote about the “Snow Day” phenomenon that happens to Redmond every so often.

In fact, in the mid-December incident hit the news over here, with a bus skidding through a barrier and hanging over the I-5 freeway. Here’s an article with a great VR picture of the scene.

As it happens, we released OCS 2007 R2 yesterday. Also, there’s a report which should be published soon, looking into the business impact of deploying UC at Microsoft, using Forrester Research’s methodology for measuring business value.

The outcome? The RoI for Unified Comms is so clear that it paid for its procurement & deployment in 2 months.