I think Apple scored a home run with their "I'm a Mac"/"I'm a PC" ads, and in the UK have done a great job (and no doubt spent a good chunk of cash) in getting Mitchell & Webb to feature in them. You can see the UK ads on Apple.com/uk if you have QuickTime installed, or if you haven't, see some of them here. Nay-saying their coolness, there was a hilarious (depending on your persuasion, I suppose) article in The Guardian (I'm always tempted to call it the Grauniad, can't think why*) which has the author admitting why he hates Macs, and rails against the latest ads as part of the argument.

Whatever you think of the merit of the ads and the messages they're putting across, they are very effective - but the opportunity to be spoofed is clearly too good, given the rash of comedy vids that have appeared on Soapbox and YouTube since.

My favourite bunch came from TrueNuff TV!, which does a great spoof of the whole GetaMac! website, and has some genuinely side-splitting ads...

Computers are Computers

Macs are great. So are PCs.
So are toasters - what's your point?
It's just a computer, get over it.

They even manage to poke some fun at a few other communities besides Macs and PCs... Be careful, though, some of the content is a little "mature"...

* Interestingly enough, searching on Live.com to just check I had the spelling of "Grauniad correct", guess what the top link is... www.guardian.co.uk :)

The second wave of releases for the Windows Sharepoint Services v3.0 templates (being referred to as the "Fabulous Forty" in some quarters ... anyone remember the Nifty Fifty?) is now online...

Server Admin Templates
Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management
Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects
Bug Database
Call Center
Change Request Management
Compliance Process Support Site
Contacts Management
Document Library and Review
Event Planning
Expense Reimbursement and Approval
Help Desk
Inventory Tracking
IT Team Workspace
Job Requisition and Interview Management
Knowledge Base
Lending Library
Physical Asset Tracking and Management
Project Tracking Workspace
Room and Equipment Reservations
Sales Lead Pipeline

Exciting news if you're looking to migrate from Lotus Domino to Exchange 2007: the development group has recently released the first wave of the new "Transporter Suite" for Domino (be sure to check out the release notes).

Exchange 2007 no longer needs a "Notes Connector" per se, since it uses SMTP to transfer mail to/from Domino, although there are some extra services (eg address book synchronisation, free/busy interchange) which are provided as part of the transporter suite.

Erik Ashby, Program Manager from the Exchange team, has been working on migration tools for years (he was behind the Exchange 5.5 Move Server Wizard, aka Pilgrim, which could lift a whole server between one site and another, and has been involved in cross-site mailbox moves, Notes & Groupwise migrations etc, ever since). There's a nice video over on Channel9 of Erik talking about & demoing the new Transporter Suite.

The Virtual PC team released the latest version to the web the other day, and it's available for free, downloadable from here. Headline changes over previous versions are the ability to be run on Windows Vista, and to have Vista as a guest OS within VPC as well as miriad performance improvements.

I've been using VPC 2007 in beta for a while and it's been rock solid, and performs snappier than I recall VPC 2004 doing (though since VPC 2004 wasn't happy running on Vista, it's been a while).

More technical information on Virtual PC 2007 is available here.

The other day when I posted about VIrtual Earth Mobile, I was using some really great software to do remote control of my device and screen capture from the PC... SOTI Pocket Controller Professional.

It's perfect for demoing Windows Mobile devices... even comes with a huge library of skins (which are updated online) so you can match the screen output from your device as its displayed on the PC to a surround which is identical, adding to the realism of the thing. Oh, and if you have a device which rotates the screen, the software auto-detects when you do that, and it redraws the skin in rotated mode - cool!

One tip: using USB/Activesync (or WMDC in Vista) as the connection method works fine for the basic show'n'tell, but some things aren't available - device connectivity can be a bit confused, since it sees the Activesync connection as a possible route to the internet, but the PC might be disconnected. Also, the actual Activesync options (eg Schedule for sync) are grayed out when connected on a cable.

I use it over a Bluetooth PAN... so I connect the device to the PC as a network adapter (doubly useful in that it puts the PC on the net too), and then connect to the IP address of the device, which is always 192.168.0.1 (since it's the gateway through which the PC will connect). That way, your PC is connected, the device is visible, and all the connectivity (such as Direct Push mail) & other options work just fine.