James.Random()

Put the volume to 11 and press play...

Via Mark Brown's Blog.

I've just been reading the Microsoft Small Smart Business newsletter (sign up here) and they are advertising the StartupsLive events that are running up and down the country during May and June.  They look pretty good with interesting speakers ranging from the CEO of Love Film to the lady who started up Texperts.  As well as a chance to hear inspiring stories from the UK's leading entrepreneurs it's a fantastic networking opportunity.  Think of the business angels and investors who will me milling around ;-)

The Microsoft Small Business Center has more details. 

The Smart Business Newsletter is full of useful tidbits this month!  I've been having internal conversations with people at Microsoft arguing that small businesses can have mature IT practices and fit on the IO model - in addition to using Small Business Server or Essential Business Server, here's another example...

How to stop worrying about IT security

When you're confident that you can find the information you need, quickly and simply; that you can retrieve 'accidentally deleted' files, and that your systems are being backed up regularly and automatically, you can stop worrying about technology and focus on growing your business.

- Why it's time to upgrade to Windows Vista SP1
- How do you stay safe, not sorry?
- Get a free 90-day trial of Windows Live OneCare

I was chatting with my pal Viral today and he pointed out an employee at Microsoft who had the title "Zune Ninja" stored in Active Directory.  What a cool title I thought - I wonder if I can change my title to become "Partner Technology Ninja".  Anyway Viral emailed the guy and he explained the interesting story behind how he became a Ninja whilst working in the Xbox team under J Allard.

Anyway it seems that the title stuck and as Josh moved into the Zune team he took his rather individual title with him.

Cool Stuff.

The product managers for Live Maps in the UK have taken a slightly more proactive approach than last time to let you and I know that they will be changing the way that you get to Live Maps or Multimap.  Here are the golden rules you need to remember:

If you visit the URL http://maps.live.com you will get to Live Maps UK.

If you go to maps via http://www.live.com then you will get to Multimap.

If you go to maps via http://www.msn.co.uk then you will get to Multimap.

The changes will come into affect on the 9th May.

The idea is to have the minimum impact to business and developers who have used the Live Maps platform in their own applications, whilst allowing Multimap (which according to Autoexpress is the #1 site for directions) to receive traffic from our other web properties.

Here's the official statement:

We recently announced the integration of Multimap into Live Search in the UK and will start to route users directly to the Multimap service from MSN UK and Live.com from 9^th May.

This release is part of our longer term consumer strategy to have one mapping and local search site in the UK, integrating the best of both Multimap and Virtual Earth (Live Search Maps) technologies. The management and development teams of Microsoft and Multimap are working collaboratively, with a common vision bringing localised products to market faster.  Given that Multimap resonates successfully with UK consumers serving over 45% of the UK mapping audience, building on this brand is the right strategic direction.

We recognise, however, that we must continue to offer users a choice of services while we complete the integration of all Virtual Earth features into the Multimap site.  We are therefore maintaining the Live Search Maps UK site and users can still access this at http://maps.live.com to use favourite features such as Windows Live Collections and 3D maps. Powerful VE Aerial and Bird’s Eye imagery has been integrated into the Multimap site to give consumers the broadest array of map styles on the market today.

Additionally, we are going to provide prominent signposting to Live Search Maps UK from the Multimap site for those who are redirected there. All Live Search and MSN UK mapping traffic through ‘Maps’ links will be redirected to www.multimap.com but any shared Collections links will not.

Developers and businesses that have invested in the Virtual Earth technology are unaffected by the redirection of our Live Search Maps and MSN mapping traffic to Multimap. We will continue to support both technology platforms and expect to offer an expanded set of opportunities and features over time.

We thank our users for the feedback and passion they have shared so far as we continue to evolve our local and mapping sites in the UK. We encourage you to try out these sites for yourselves.

Does this work for you? What do you think?

I'm always reading the blogs from Chris Pendelton and Johannes Kebeck because they are rich with information about the latest happenings on the Virtual Earth platform (a part of the Live Services from Microsoft). 

One of the interesting additions that has been unlocked for enterprise customers who are using their Customer Identification to authenticate with the service is the ability to display multiple routes for directions to the same place as shown in the image above.  Johannes has also covered what is new in Version 6.1 of Virtual Earth, including Bird's Eye Hybrid mode with road names and vegetation featured in 3D mode.

Las Vegas looks stunning now in 3D - I can't believe how realistic it is.  I almost want to go back again ;-)

A quick headsup that I posted a new interview on the Partner TV blog on System Center Operations Manager where I cover off with Andrew Driver topics like:

• Product overview
• How to position it to customers
• Differences to MOM
• Key Features
• How ISVs can hook into System Center

I was also chatting to one of our licensing experts, Emma Healey, who I discovered keeps a fantastic blog on all things to do with Microsoft licensing.  It's a great resource and I would encourage you to take a look if you have questions on how to license our products - it even has a post on System Center licensing too!

Well I never.  Having been at the Future of Web Apps conference last year and hearing a "leading" web 2.0 company say they had no idea what Microsoft had in the form of authentication and identity APIs having reeled of options from Google, Yahoo, eBay, Facebook, (insert other web 2.0 company here).  Clue = LIVE ID, I mean hello?  I was pleasantly surprised to read this week that Microsoft was rated as having the number 1 platform for developing web 2.0 apps on.  Yes that's right, numero uno.

I have to say that has got to be down to some of the fantastic work our DPE teams do as well as the product group who in Angus Logan have found someone who just won't shut up about Live and it's services - and that's a good thing Angus, don't worry. 

Even more surprising is the giant leap that Microsoft has made in the survey that was undertaken by Evans Data Corporation who last year placed Microsoft in last place in opinion amongst web developers.  Here's an excerpt from the report:

"A big surprise in this category is Microsoft’s top ranking. In last year’s survey, MSN ranked last among developers. But as Microsoft moved from the relatively closed-in MSN portal to the more Web 2.0-savvy Windows Live collection of services, users have begun to recognize it as a provider of top-notch web services.

While most of Microsoft’s web service products have so far been geared towards commercial consumption, a lot of their current work attempts to address infrastructure issues that aid the flow of information for the next Web."

You can read more about the report here on Computer World.

Two new courses have just been released for MDOP Technical Training.  Not only do you find out how to implement and configure the tools in MDOP but you get a free 120GB external hard disk too!

Here are the dates:

15^th-16^th May - 09.30am                    

Venue: QA-IQ London – Roseberry Avenue                     
Cost: £0 
Bonus: 120Gb hard drive for each attendee

29^th-30^th May - 09.30am

Venue: QA-IQ London – Roseberry Avenue       
Cost: £0
Bonus: 120Gb hard drive for each attendee

Regiter here: MDOP Deployment for Mid-Market tech course

Chris has details on the recently released Microsoft Pro Photo Tools that provide extra functionality beyond Windows Live Photo Gallery.  The Microsoft Pro Photo Blog provides some more insight on what the tool can do:

Microsoft has released the first version of Microsoft Pro Photo Tools with geotagging today.   Microsoft Pro Photo Tools provides a set of tools for photographers to perform various tasks with their images—including RAW captures. Download the current version to quickly geotag your photos, view and edit numerous metadata fields and much more, leveraging the power of Windows, Microsoft Live Local and Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Features include:

• address to latitude/longitude conversion
• latitude/longitude to address conversion
• loading track routes stored by GPS devices
• placing images on track routes based on time stamps, with a visual adjustment tool
• integration with Virtual Earth for
    -- text based location searches
    -- interactive placement of photographs
    -- visualization of track routes
    -- 2D and 3D map browsing

The integration with Virtual Earth is a cool thing to happen.  It allows me to quickly add geographic information to my photos to record where they were taken.  You can then do interesting things with Virtual Earth itself like this mashup that someone has created in Popfly mapping their photos onto the globe.

Big drawback for me is that the tool is 32bit only (James smacks forehead on desk) so I won't be able to run it on my laptop :-(

A new CSI episode was aired in the states last week and I've been waiting for a certain clip to appear on YouTube.  This weekend it appeared and I thought you might like it.  They use Microsoft's Photosynth technology to rebuild the 3D world of a party to identify suspects and solve the crime.  If you haven't played around with Photosynth yet I would strongly suggest you take a look and have a play - it's great fun!

Hat tip to the Virtual Earth / Live Maps blog

The Live Labs team have news of a Web 2.0 Pattern Mining workshop taking place in Zurich at the end of June.  The overview is this:

Web 2.0 features are now commonplace—blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, social bookmarking and the like are almost everywhere you look online. Now that these technologies are maturing, what are their common problems and challenges? How are these problems being solved? What similar challenges do Web 2.0 developers face, and how can they leverage the most common solutions? Here’s your chance to gather with other professionals facing the same issues and work together to identify solutions.

This week I've posted a couple of new videos on Partner TV. 

The first is an interview about the New World of Work - and the research and concepts behind the now famous Bill Gates keynote at the CEO summit a couple of years ago.

View the video here

The second is an overview of System Center Configuration Manager with Andrew Driver that talks at a high level about the technology and what it can do and what the partner opportunity is for this particular technology.

View the video here

I just had a customer question routed to me about running Terminal Services on SBS 2003.  Quick answer is to check out the official deployment guide on how to achieve this:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0a06e845-57ef-43eb-802f-f274fd937400&DisplayLang=en

Some of our MVPs have been busy making some quite amusing videos that help explain the different between our standalone server product and Small Business Server (SBS) and Essential Business Server (EBS) our new product for mid sized companies.  Hat tip to Oliver for finding these.