The Electric Wand : Exchange, Random Stuff

Look what I found in my loft: a 9-year old netbook

Ewan — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:56:00 GMT

I splashed out a week or two ago, and bought a Samsung NC10 netbook – a bargain at under £300, and it runs Windows 7 really well.

Impressed with the size and utility of the thing, I recalled a forerunner of the netbook, so went rooting around in my “box of old technology that it pretty much useless but cost money so I can’t ever throw it away”, in the loft.

I came across an old laptop that in its time was known as a “sub-notebook”: we got two of these machines courtesy of Sony, to demonstrate Exchange 2000, specifically the Conferencing Server version, at a big partner event in Birmingham. It was, to date, the biggest audience I’ve ever stood in front of, at about 1,400 people. I had a few minutes to demo the still-in-beta Exchange 2000, and would be doing it jointly with the host for the conference, Jonathan Ross (gulp).

Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server – aka “Jasper”

I’m now struggling to remember when this was, but since Exchange 2000 released in November 2000 (as discovered by the very useful Microsoft Support Lifecycle page), I reckon it must have been early/mid-2000, which would mean the little Vaio has to be at least 8 or 9 years old.

Sony Vaio PCG-C1XN

The two Vaios we had were great – well, great for the time anyway, although even then they were very functionally compromised even when new. The one thing you could say about the machine was it was small, and cool.

Certainly not fast – a 266MHz Celeron CPU (a cut down Pentium II, in essence, for our younger readers), 64Mb of RAM and a 6.4Gb hard disk.

The machines originally came with Windows 98, but we decided to put Windows 2000 on them for the demo; subsequently, I upgraded it to Windows XP and it’s probably a bit too much for the little mite. Suffice to say, it won’t be getting any further along the Windows evolutionary scale.

Other features of note were the webcam (one of – if not the – first laptops to come with one built in, which was the reason we wanted them for the Conferencing demo). A single USB port, FireWire (or iLink as Sony insisted on calling it), a PCMCIA slot, infra-red (you don’t get that any more now, do you?) and a dongle which had composite-video and VGA, complete the mix.

So for our demo we had to install an early Wifi network (it might have been the very first 802.11b from Compaq, costing hundreds of pounds for the router and at least £100 per PCMCIA card). All of this for 8 minutes of Woss-y glory, swept away in the sands of time.

Sony never did ask for it back – I hung onto one, and Steve kept the other. I bet he’s still got it somewhere too.

Dust the old girl off

Enough of this misty eyed nonsense. Amazingly, on plugging the machine in and powering up (apart from my going into the BIOS and setting the clock), it started to resume from hibernate – and dropped me back into the logon prompt for WinXP. I had some head scratching to do, to remember the password – but when I logged in, it was the first time for 6 years and 3 months.

Surprisingly, the Vaio is about the same thickness as my Samsung, so it doesn’t look quite as archaic as you might expect a 9-year old laptop to.

It could even be called a “Netbook”, except there’s no networking on the thing – certainly no wireless, and even dial-up would have required an old modem like the Xircom PCMCIA card I literally just found in my office drawer.

Probably the biggest difference is the price when new. Adjusting for inflation and taking into account what the Vaio would have originally cost, it’s probably nearer £3,000 than the £300 for my NC10.

That’s Moore’s law for ya.

Windows Home Server - would you have it in your home?

Ewan — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 02:24:00 GMT

I just read an interesting article from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes on ZDNet about Windows Home Server, speculating whether there really was a market for such a device, and who would buy it.

Adrian's point - and it is a valid one, if you know anything about what the "typical" home user might do and buy - is that your average Joe or Joanna isn't going to march out and splash a few hundred quid on a box to back up all their home PCs, even if they've lost precious data before.

In an enterprise IT environment, disaster recovery has often been treated as a second-class citizen, until a disaster actually happens - after which point, it's properly factored into things. I vividly recall making the case for DLT drives over DAT over 10 years ago, yet on cost grounds alone it looked like DAT could do the biz... until the crunch came, a disaster happened, it looked like the DR plan wasn't quite up to scratch, and after that it was easy to get money to do DR properly.

Sad to say it, but 9/11 and the London 7/7 bombings in 2005 probably helped a lot of organisations realise that backup (and more importantly, recovery) was actually worth spending a bit of time & effort on. You only realise how important it is to have a contingency plan, when you're faced with the real need to have - or to show you have - one.

As an aside, if you haven't seen it yet, Microsoft announced Data Protection Manager 2007 recently, as a means to snapshot and backup various systems to low-cost disk backup. DPM could allow you to backup not just file systems, but Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL Server, using VSS snapshot technology. We're now using it internally to back Exchange up to low-cost SAS drives, as well as other things.

I have a buddy who's known as "Foggy" (from "Foghorn Leghorn"), so called because he had a loud voice on the phone when he first joined Microsoft in a Product Support Services role. If you're interested in DPM2007, just let me know and I'll put you in touch with him - he's "Mr DPM" in the UK and is keen to tell everyone just how good it is.

ANYWAY.

Back to Home Server. I've been beta-testing the "Q"/"Quattro" product for a while, and I think the finished Home Server looks really good. Have I got one at home? Yes. But then, I only have one other PC at home (besides the corporate laptops that occupy the place, and a few old machines that spend most of their time powered off) so I'm not sure I'd shell out for a Home Server (when they're comercially available) just to protect that one box, and serve it content.

What I'd wish for Home Server

I'd love it if Windows Home Server could be a Media Center - ie I could whack a couple of TV Tuners in the WHS box, and it would stream that content to other PCs or Media Center Extenders around the house. Think of it like a Windows Media Center Server, if you like. I might even think about sticking the box in the loft, next to the Coax-amplifier which distributes TV signals around the house - especially if Bluetooth or WiFi remotes from around the house could control the Server, making the MCE experience available on remote PCs, Extenders and directly on TVs themselves.

I'd also really like some OEM to bring out a device which was hardened and much more appliance-like, maybe with some other features - I'm thinking like a box which had a Powerline-ethernet style built-in power supply (and corresponding remote adapter(s)) which would mean I could stick the box anywhere there was power and not worry about signal or CAT-5 cabling back to the wired/wireless network that all the PCs are on. I was thinking it would be quite cool to have a Windows Home Server in the garage. My garage is separate from the house (by about 6 ft) so if the house burned down, there is a chance the garage wouldn't (though there's probably enough combustible material in the garage to make it happen the other way around).

I thought if I could put a WHS in the garage, it would mean I wouldn't need to cool the box much (even in the summer, the garage is going to be cooler than many places, and in the winter, it's positively COLD) and apart from the odd spider invading the box, it'd probably be pretty hazard-free.

So in an ideal world, a Home Server would be a solid-state box with no vents or fans, which can draw network access through its power supply. There might be one company - Tranquil PC - who'll be able to offer this nirvana sooner than most. Tranquil PC have some very interesting fanless technology, but for a regular PC there's a payoff in terms of performance (ie to run their box cool enough so it doesn't need a fan, it's not exactly cutting edge) and price (there's a premium for the design and low-volume nature). For a home server, you're not bothered about quad core processors with 8Gb of RAM, so Tranquil's offerings could well be in the sweet spot. Time will tell if the price point people are willing to pay will match these expectations.

Coming back to the ZDNet article - Adrian reckons that the average home user will spend $30 on backup. I know I've had hard disk failures but probably only back up to the USB disk I already have, every couple of months. Who's going to buy Home Server this year, in time for Christmas? Tech-savvy folk who have multiple PCs at home, I'd think - maybe families where each of the kids have their own PC, but not exactly the less tech-literate types.

Maybe the time for Home Server is when it can not only stream data to remote devices, back them up and make sure they're appropriately patched - but when users in the home can have the Home Server record stuff from the TV and distribute it directly to their device for later viewing.

Maybe that's v2 functionality, who knows?

The lost art of the .sig

Ewan — Wed, 30 May 2007 15:18:07 GMT

Whatever happened to elaborate and amusing '.sig's? It used to be common practice to have a signature with some kind of witty/pithy quote appended at random to every email.

Nowadays, the autosignature that most email programs can insert (such as Outlook's ability to have multiple autosigs, which vary depending on which account is sending, or whether the mail is a new message or a reply), is typically informative with lots of contact information, job titles, disclaimers etc. I've seen some sigs which are twice as long as the message itself (though there may be a legal requirement in the UK to put company information in the sig, in the same way that letterhead paper would, but some people really go to town).

I've had a lot of people comment on my own sig (or steal it - you're welcome to, if you like), since I tried to make it as small as possible whilst still conveying the maximum information, and using hyper links for the different ways you can contact me:

Ewan Dalton
| +44 118 909 3318 | ewand@microsoft.com
Solutions Architect – Microsoft UK
Sent using Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007
Microsoft Limited | Registered in England | No 1624297 | Thames Valley Park, Reading RG6 1WG

or for replies (where real estate is even more important)...

Ewan Dalton | | Microsoft UK | ewand@microsoft.com |+44 118 909 3318
Microsoft Limited | Registered in England | No 1624297 | Thames Valley Park, Reading RG6 1WG

Since we're using Office Communicator, if someone clicks on the first link (the sip: URL), they'll send me an IM. The 3rd pic (the tel: URL) will call me using Communicator (or whatever else they're using that can support a telURL, such as a Smartphone).

I kind of miss the days where interesting quotes were de rigeur - you know, the kind of thing about BillG saying 640k should be enough for anyone (I'm not actually sure he ever said that, but we'll leave it for now) or Thomas J Watson saying there should be a worldwide market for maybe 5 computers...

Speaking of Thos J Watson, if you have an idle few minutes, you really should check out the IBM Songbook - top marks for IBM to keeping it alive as historical curio in the IBM Archives. My own personal favourite is "To Thos J. Watson, President, I.B.M.", sung to the tune of "Happy Days are Here Again".

Anyway, last word on .sigs. David Harris, author of the now venerable Pegasus Mail (which had support for auto-insertion or random quotes from a .sig file, used to have a cracker or two. One that sticks in my mind (apparently taken from a real newspaper):

After the boat had been secured above the wrecked galleon, the diving apparatus was set in motion by the Captain's 18 year old daughter, Veronica. Within hours she was surrendering her treasure to the excited crew.

When interaction design goes bad

Ewan — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 17:47:04 GMT

For various reasons, I've been testing & driving several different cars lately, a process I quite enjoy - getting to know the foibles of the car's cockpit, playing with the various toys and gadgets, as well as actually learning how to drive each one according to its size, performance etc. It's really pleasing to find a well thought out design in some bit of car UI (Audi's MMI system is just sweet), but even more frustrating that some companies can spend $100ms developing a car but overlook some really basic functions which will just make the driver crazy (like the clock which looks very smooth and lovely but has no obvious way of adjusting the time... I'm currently driving around in a loan car which is 1 hour adrift of real time because I haven't figured out how to move the clock forward to Daylight Saving Time, and haven't yet gotten around to RTFM).

Thinking about all of this reminded me of two great books which, if you've any interest in design at all, I'd highly recommend. I'll do this review in 2 parts, this one being, as it is, part one.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity - Alan Cooper

This is a fascinating book which talks about the doom-laden scenario of everything we use being computer controlled (and since the book was written around 10 years ago, shows a fairly decent grasp of the future, some of which has already come to pass), discusses the design of User Interaction, and a model which Cooper has used successfully for a number of years, centred around "Personas".

Note the use of the term User Interaction as distinct from User Interface (UI)... in this case, we're talking about the whole way that people interact with a system or device, not just the UI of the software - extending the user interaction model to include only as much information as required, without being stupidly modal (eg the same button doing different things at different times based on what mode a device is in, especially bad when the device doesn't make it obvious what its mode is).

A great example of good user interaction is the iPod - good UI in software, but it works so much better because the device complements it totally. Bad user interaction design is evident in many remote controls - they have lots of identical buttons with confusing labeling (what *do* all those symbols mean?) and the software they're controlling on the TV/DVD player etc, is sometimes less than intuitive and not helped at all by having a control that needs the manual to be open in front of the user to make any sense.

There's one great example of good design that jumped out from reading the book - and that was Cooper's commission to design an interaction model for a new airline video on demand (AVOD) system. Various attempts were made to get something that could display quite a lot of possible options (since there were many films & TV shows which could be watched at the user's demand), without having to give any instruction on how to use the thing, even to people who weren't familiar with what they might expect on modern consumer electronics or computer systems.

After selecting and rejecting various ideas, Cooper settled on a simple UI of a rotary dial positioned directly below and in the centre of the screen, combined with thumbnail views of the film/show. Show someone a rotary dial or knob (suitably designed - maybe one with serrated edges and no obvious way to pull it out) and they'll instinctively turn it before trying anything else. (This is a topic also covered by the 2nd book in this series: it deals with how a device naturally affords itself to the user - eg if you pick up something with a single, raised button, your first instinct would be to press it rather than try and pull it off - it affords being pressed more than being prised).

If the user turns the dial back and forwards, the list of titles pans that way, and if they turn it more quickly, the list moves quickly. When they find something they want to watch, they press the button. End of user interaction model.

Again, note the distinction between user interaction and UI. As far as the user is concerned, they turn the dial and push it to pick stuff. The UI can later deal with minutae like what to do if the user selects something by mistake... how do they go back? How do they control the volume or screen brightness etc? Maybe other buttons or controls might be required for that... unless they got into some modal system where the dial would control volume... but that could just confuse things more than adding an extra button or two.

Alan also introduces Personas as a key way of focusing designers and developers on how to address the specific needs of a specific type of user; rather than being generic ("the users", or even saying retired people, or young mothers, or teenagers or tech-savvy twentysomething males, is still vague), the concept means they actually embody a persona with characteristics as if it's someone they really talked to - here's John, he works in a small business IT provider, so he knows a good bit about technology but lacks the time to do lots of reading about how to implement it, etc etc.

The Exchange development group in Microsoft was one of the no-doubt many who have adopted personas when it comes to designing software - so the needs of a whole group of disparate people can be met, hopefully, by using more holistic design processes, than simply concentrating on making it look and function well to the people who're doing the designing.

More info on Alan Cooper's personas

Adjunct: There's an amusing article courtesy of SAP, on Golden Rules for Bad User Interfaces - if you're going to sit down and design a really bad UI, follow these rules and you won't go wrong...

Hosting of applications - the inevitable future?

Ewan — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 20:44:46 GMT

I've been musing over some medium term IT trends lately and one idea that keeps coming back into frame is the seemingly inevitable trend towards hosting of applications. Take Exchange, as just one example...

Hosted Exchange* has been available for years, from lots of different providers all around the world. The basic concept is that instead of buying the software, you just buy the service from a hosting company much like you buy line rental on your phone, or internet access from your ISP. Why not just have your company's email sitting somewhere else, and save yourself the hassle of managing it?

*Hosted Exchange is not to be confused with the somewhat confusingly named Exchange Hosted Services, which is all about hosting the route to get mail into and out of your own email environment. EHS was formed by the procurement of Frontbridge, who had established a good name in hosted filtering... ie the MX record of your domain actually delivers mail to their datacentre, they scan it for spam and viruses, and the remaining "hygienic" mail is delivered down to you.

So what's stopped everyone from adopting Hosted Exchange before? I suppose the cost is one thing - if you had 500 users and it cost, say, £10 a month to provide each of them with a mailbox, you'd be seeing £5k going out the door every month, and might think "surely I can provide the same service, in house, for less than £60k a year?", and you might well be right. But start to dig into the detail, and it could be a lot closer... Think about buying:

the hardware (maybe £10k worth of servers, and any amount of money could be spent on storage, but let's assume £15k),
the software (at full price, this could work out at something in the order of £30k for that kind of user population)
additional software, like anti-virus, anti-spam (if you didn't want to just use what's in the box in the shape of the IMF etc), backup software, archiving systems etc etc

... and then add in the time and expertise required to set it up and keep it healthy long-term, then maybe it is less expensive to do it all in house. But by hosting the application, you could free the time to do other stuff, or just have one less thing to worry about... especially in times when security threats can sap administrator time, and compliance requirements could mean lots more red tape and requirements for recoverability, let alone high availability.

I've seen various analyst reports which reckon that 70% of an average IT budget is spent just maintaining the status quo and keeping existing systems running.

As connectivity gets better and better, it seems almost inevitable that a "normal" Exchange deployment in a few years will actually be hosted by someone else. Of course, there are several models which could be adopted:

Hosting company just operates your own servers/software for you. I've seen this lots of times already, in the shape of IT outsourcing where the "hoster" is just a drop in replacement for an in house IT operation, and maybe even takes servers that were previously operated in house and moves them to their own datacentre for ongoing management
Hosting company provides your servers for you. This is a little less common, but growing - namely, the hoster has their own kit but they dedicate a given server/bank of servers just to you.
Hosting company just provides "service". In other words, you get a mailbox of a given size, but don't need to care how it's provisioned. This is going to be more appealing to smaller businesses, maybe.

So what else? Sharepoint? Yep, you can do that too, as part of the snappily-titled Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging & Collaboration v4.0.

And what about after that? I could see the day when some companies want IT as a turnkey service just like they look at other utilities - you buy the bit of cable and down that comes whatever services you're subscribed to, and you can add and remove services at will, just like you can with satellite or cable TV.

Want your phone system to be hosted and connected to by the same bunch of ethernet cables? No problem. Intranet applications and portals? Sure... I wonder where it'll all end? Hosted desktops?