Rob Costello : Microsoft

Photosynth is cool

robcost — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:33:25 GMT

How cool is Photosynth!?!?! We come out with some cool technologies sometimes, and this is definitely one of them.

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Daylight Savings Changes - October 2008

robcost — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:01:07 GMT

It's that time again, when Daylight Savings changes need to be applied. Please read the guidance below and make sure you don't get caught out...

In October this year, we will again be experiencing Daylight Savings changes in Australia. These changes can have a significant impact on business performance if not dealt with proactively. These effects can range from the incorrect time display on the clock, to calendaring problems, to financial and reputation loss if business critical services fail.

Daylight saving now commences on the first Sunday in October and ends on the first Sunday in April in Australia Eastern (New South Wales, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory and Tasmania) and Central (South Australia). This change affects Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office Outlook and other Microsoft, third party and custom applications. Please find below some of the key things you need to know.

What is the impact of Daylight Savings changes?

Effects can range from the incorrect time display on the clock, to calendaring problems, to financial and reputation loss if business critical services fail.

The 5^th of October commences the second window of time zone harmonisation for this year, however, we expect a greater impact in October as the change is 21 days difference, whereas the adjustment earlier in the year was only 7 days.

What is affected?

- All Microsoft Windows PC, server and mobile devices in the affected time zones must be updated to ensure accuracy of internal time zone tables and correct operation of the system clock.

- Microsoft Office Outlook calendars may need to be adjusted. Client and Server-based tools are available to automate this service.

- Microsoft, third party and custom applications which schedule events at future dates should be reviewed to ensure they will operate correctly during the extended daylight saving period. Previously scheduled events may also need to be adjusted.

- Microsoft recommends that all PC and server systems are updated regardless of location to ensure consistency of operation.

What do I need to do?

Thorough planning and testing for these changes is critical to ensure the change results in minimal user impact, so to help customers prepare Microsoft has developed the Australia 2008 Daylight Saving Planning document which details the nature and impact of the DST changes, along with planning guidance to avoid user impact.

What if the systems have been previously patched?

Where servers, workstations and mobile devices have been added to the infrastructure, organisations will need to audit their environment to ensure all systems are patched according to the organisation’s Daylight Savings Plan.

Where the environment does not have a consistent Daylight Savings Time (DST) patch level, appointments may have been created with a mix of correct and incorrect DST transition dates. Furthermore, Microsoft recommends customers update all systems to ensure consistency of operation, even if none of your systems are in the affected time zones.

Planning for Daylight Savings changes

Microsoft has revised the Australia 2008 Daylight Saving Planning Guide with learnings from the April transition and additional considerations for the October transition. Download the guide and update your daylight savings plan.

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Virtual Machine Library

robcost — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:05:45 GMT

How cool is this, ever wanted to find all the Virtual Machines we have for download for you to try out Microsoft products like Exchange, Biztalk, Vista, ILM etc etc. Well here is the one address you'll need to find all our VHD goodness...

http://www.microsoft.com/vhd

Technorati Tags: Virtualisation

Public IP Requirements for A/V Edge

robcost — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 11:56:00 GMT

So a few people get nervous when you tell them your going to need a publicly routable IP when implementing the OCS A/V Edge role for external A/V Conferencing. Then you tell them they'll need to open up 10,000 high ports, and you can see the blood drain from their faces. :)

Well it's not all bad news. If you understand how the protocols work the risk really isn't that high.

Chad Lacy has a great post discussing the security that is wrapped around the A/V Edge role, check them out here...

http://blogs.technet.com/chlacy/archive/2007/12/21/a-v-edge-server-load-balancer-still-need-public-ip-address.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/chlacy/archive/2008/03/12/a-v-edge-and-publicly-routable-ip-addresses-part-ii.aspx

Technorati Tags: OCS,A/V Edge Role,A/V Conferencing,Chad Lacy

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Upcoming UC Webcasts

robcost — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 11:35:59 GMT

Byron Spurlock, who had a hand in the writing of the Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit, has a pointer to some of the upcoming UC webcasts, check them out here...

http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/unifiedcommunications.aspx?tab=webcasts

Technorati Tags: Unified Communications,Byron Spurlock

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Office Live Workspace beta hits Australia

robcost — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 11:27:37 GMT

Hot on the release of our Office Live Workspaces online services in the US, the beta of the service is now available for us here in Australia. :)

It only takes a couple of minutes to signup at http://workspace.office.live.com/. You can then start creating and sharing documents online.

Then install the Office Live Add-in and you can access and save to your Office Live Workspace directly from your Office Applications.

Cool stuff, check it out.

Technorati Tags: Office Live Workspaces,Office Live,Online Services

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In KL for the UC Voice Ignite

robcost — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 11:51:52 GMT

Well, I'm here in Kuala Lumpur for the UC Voice Ignite that we're running here this week. I flew in overnight last night, and am now just getting myself ready for the event. The Grand ballroom is all set to go, with about 120 laptops setup for the attendees to work from.

So the flight over was an experience in itself. I came from Sydney, straight from the Voice Ignite sessions there, and had a 1hr stop in Brisbane. From Brisbane it was direct to KL, and I gotta say, it was the most turbulent flight I'd ever been on. The whole 7hrs was one bump after another, with quite a few REALLY big air pockets that dropped the plane, thrusting all the passengers, myself included, up from their seat, only to be stopped from hitting the roof by their seatbelts (which ended up being very tightly done up after the first 1/2 hour). The plane was great, it was Malaysia Airlines, which I'd never flown with before, and the staff were really good, but the weather really put a bad note on the trip. Hopefully it will be better on the way at the end of the week.

This is my first time in Kuala Lumpur, and it's very different to what I'd expected. Actually I didn't know what to expect. I deliberately didn't do too much research into Malaysia as I wanted to see it for myself, fresh, without someone else's views of the place in my head. The first thing of interest obviously was the airport. Everything was well signed and easy to get around, and getting through immigration and customs was very fast (take note USA). Then there was the taxi ride into KL to get to my hotel. It was 7am, so traffic was light, but it appears as though traffic lanes and speed limits are optional here, so that was also an unnerving trip.

So now I'm just going over the decks I'll be presenting, making sure I'm all set to go. Hopefully it all goes well.

Here is a bunch of photo's from my hotel room stitched together with Live Photo Gallery, in the middle are the Petronas Towers, pretty cool view yeah. The building down the bottom is a shopping mall, 8 stories high, it is huge inside!!!

Technorati Tags: Kuala Lumpur, UC, Voice Ignite, Travel

Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1 RTM!!!

robcost — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 09:58:06 GMT

Today we announced that Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 have RTM'd (Released To Manufacturing). Cool hey?

You can get the round up from the respective teams blogs here...

Server 08 - http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2008/02/04/windows-server-2008-rtm.aspx

Vista SP1 - http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/02/04/announcing-the-rtm-of-windows-vista-sp1.aspx

I'm really excited about the Windows Server 2008 release, especially with Hyper-V now not far from release too. NAP, TS Gateway, Server Core, this is a very big release!!!

For all the Windows Server 2008 goodness, check out the product site here...

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/default.mspx

Technorati Tags: Windows Server 2008, Vista SP1, NAP, Server Core

OCS Edge Deployments

robcost — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:11:10 GMT

Ok, so we know the OCS 2007 Edge Server Deployment Guide has heaps of great details on how to get your Edge deployment up and running, but it can be a little confusing, especially around some of the different firewall scenario's that people have. Some people have plenty of external IP address, some don't have many spare, some people have external and internal firewalls, some have a 3-leg firewall. It can get confusing, believe-you-me.

Jeff Schertz from PointBridge has a great post on some of these scenarios and good explanations of how you implement them. Check it out here...

https://blogs.pointbridge.com/Blogs/schertz_jeff/Pages/Post.aspx?_ID=19

Technorati Tags: OCS, Edge Deployment

Unified Communications Launch in Adelaide

robcost — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 04:34:52 GMT

We had the Unified Communications launch event here in Adelaide today, and it went pretty good. We had some of the evangelists and UC guru's in town for the day to talk about and demonstrate our new technologies to partners and customers.

Johann Kruse, Mario D'Silva, and Michael Kleef were all on deck to present to about 60-70 attendees. The guys did a great job and hopefully raised the awareness level a couple of notches about UC and how it can add value to our customers.

If you missed the event then you can get the decks from http://www.microsoft.com/australia/business/uc/events/default.aspx.

For more information on UC and what Microsoft has to offer, check out the UC center on MS.com at http://www.microsoft.com/uc.

Technorati Tags: Unified Communications

OCS QOE and QMS

robcost — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 05:53:19 GMT

Wow that's a confusing title for a blog isn't it?

So I've been talking to a lot of people lately about Office Communications Server and how they can take advantage of our Enterprise Voice features to provide Voice Over IP, either to coexist with their existing PBX infrastructure or to replace it altogether.

One of the first questions I get asked is always about bandwidth and quality, it goes something like this... "your a software company, how can you provide good quality voice services and not chew up all my bandwidth if you don't control the network layer".

So the discussion continues and we talk about the Quality of Experience (QOE) features we use in Office Communicator, and how we can natively support DiffServ with DSCP marking for QOS blah blah blah.

Well to top it all off now, we released the Office Communications Server 2007 Quality of Experience Monitoring Server (QMS), to enable IT departments to monitor voice quality based on information sent back by endpoints, such as loss/jitter/delay etc.

QMS is free, and you can get it here...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=09115944-625f-460b-b09c-51e3c96e9f7e&displaylang=en

If you want more details on Quality of Experience and our support for QOS, check out the OCS QOE guide at...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=05625af1-3444-4e67-9557-3fd5af9ae8d1&DisplayLang=en

Technorati Tags: Office Communications Server, Voice Over IP, VOIP, QOE, UC

Microsoft Deployment RC1 Now Available

robcost — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:25:46 GMT

Today we announced the Release Candidate 1 of Microsoft Deployment, which is the new name for the forth generation deployment Solution Accelerator.

This release continues to support Zero Touch Installation (ZTI) of desktop operating systems using Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 with the Operating System Deployment Feature Pack and adds new deployment and task sequencing capabilities for desktops and servers using System Center Configuration Manager 2007. Microsoft Deployment also continues to provide Lite Touch Installation (LTI) support without infrastructure requirements and adds capabilities for Windows Server 2003 and pre-release versions of Windows Server 2008.

It's available on Microsoft Connect, and you can sign up here... Microsoft Deployment Connection program on Microsoft Connect

For related information check out...

Desktop Deployment Center on Microsoft TechNet

Windows Server 2008 on Microsoft TechNet

System Center Configuration Manager on Microsoft TechNet

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Deployment, BDD

OCS Virtual Labs on Technet

robcost — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:17:52 GMT

We've got some Virtual Labs up on Technet for common things you'll want to do with Office Communications Server, check them out here....

Technorati Tags: Office Communications Server, OCS

Microsoft Unified Communications Launch

robcost — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 02:36:26 GMT

So we've had a couple of really exciting days with the launch of our Unified Communications range of products.

We've had the big launch events happening in the US, with followup events happening all over the world. Bill Gates headlined the launch in San Francisco, if you missed it you can check out the video at 100K | 300K | 750K. Bill also released an executive email to customers which you can read at: Bill Gates’ executive email .

Also some a little older news about Gartner's recent Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications (August 2007), which puts Microsoft in the Leaders quadrant, which is defined as “The Leaders quadrant contains vendors selling comprehensive and integrated UC solutions that directly, or with well-defined partnerships, address the full range of market needs.”

Locally we've also published several Case Studies of companies using the new capabilities in Office Communications Server 2007 and Exchange 2007. For more details on each of these Case Studies you can check out Oscar's post here... Australian case studies on Unified Communications.

Oscar and Mario have also been out there spreading the word, including a new article yesterday on iTWire here... Microsoft's unified communications blitz

With the launch event our partners have also started releasing hardware that is optimized for Office Communicator. For details of these partners check out the UC partner page on microsoft.com at http://www.microsoft.com/uc/partners_hardware.mspx. From here you'll get pointers to handsets and conferencing hardware like the kit provided by Polycom here... http://www.polycom.com/usa/en/products/voice/desktop/cx/cx.html

Technorati Tags: Unified Communications, UC Launch, Gartner Magic Quadrant, UC Case Studies

WSV Webcast

robcost — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 13:53:39 GMT

Jeff Woolsey and Edwin Yuen recently did a webcast (with WSV demo) for Windows Server Virtualization.

Check it out here...

TECHNET WEBCAST: EXAMINING VIRTUALIZATION WITH WINDOWS SERVER 2008 (LEVEL 300)
DATE: Thursday, September 27, 2007
TIME: 8:00 AM Pacific
EVENT ID: 1032351233
PRESENTED BY: Jeff Woolsey & Edwin Yuen
WWE REGISTRATION URL:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032351234&Culture=en-US

Technorati Tags: Windows ServerVirtualization, Windows Server 2008