Archive for June, 2010

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Microsoft Conference Redux

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

It may sound familiar, but I’m heading off to another weeklong Microsoft show. I’ll be spending the week of July 11-16 in sunny Washington, DC learning all about the upcoming business strategy from Microsoft. You heard that right, I’m staying local for this one and I am very interested in helping my customers get their questions answered and be able to plan how to best implement the next round of technology coming from Redmond. If you have anything you’d like me to discuss and get answers for, just let me know!

Also, as an added bonus Microsoft and Washington Sports and Entertainment have an insane week planned for the 12,000 attendees coming into town. There will be sessions at the Convention Center, the Verizon Center and hotels in between. To help the attendees stay connected, they have installed an elaborate WiFi system in Penn Quarter and THEY ARE LEAVING IT! That’s right, starting in a few weeks, Penn Quarter will be a free Wi-Fi mecca for the foreseeable future (the city is footing the bill for the ISP).

Everyone say Thanks Microsoft!

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iPhone 4/iOS4 – A Technophile’s Sob Story

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

I had a new iPhone for about 10 minutes. It was approved and I was ready to pre-order. Then someone asked a terrible question – “Is that in the budget?” Why I did not budget for a new iPhone this year I don’t know (and I’d prefer not to think about) but I am quite happy that I have an iPhone 3GS that can take advantage of the new iOS4 upgrade. Yes, I will freely admit to walking around the office targeting Droid user. “What’s that? I can’t hear you because I am listening to Pandora while checking my email.” The problem is that the novelty of that quickly wore off and business went back to usual. Now the question is, does it really matter that I have a 3GS and not a 4G if I can run the same version of the OS and get the same features? I’m tempted to say it does, but I don’t really have a very good reason why.

To me, there are three KEY hardware differences (there are a lot more but since you don’t necessarily SEE them, they don’t count): the camera has a flash, the camera can face you and the screen (the beautiful awesome screen that you only understand when you put the 4G next to a 3GS). To me, It looks the same, it feels the same and has the same old AT&T coverage (is that the right word?). But let’s talk about these features.

  • The Flash – I’ve never had a smartphone with a flash before, but I know people who have. Anyone who has taken a picture with the iPhone understands how useful this feature is.
  • The Camera – I watched the Jetsons as much as anyone else while growing up and I must say that I don’t want to video chat. I have webcams on laptops and on my desk that go unused and TO ME, this is not a useful feature. That said, if I had the capability, I may use it more but…
  • The Screen – I thought my 3GS had a sharp screen. Then I compared it with the 4G that one of my team members waited in line for (&#%^$*%). The screen on the 4G makes the 3GS look downright blurry. I was and still am amazed. If you find the screen on the 3GS to be a problem, you will be quite pleased with the 4G.

As far as the software goes, the multi-tasking is a nice addition. I can now stop what I am doing, do something else, and then return to what I was doing. I can listen to music while doing other things and my Apps don’t have to reset. It really is convenient. I also enjoy the App Folders so I can better organize and manage my Apps. The easy Spotlight web searching is nice as well. Honestly, that’s it. I haven’t delved into anything else – oh, except for my custom home screen wallpaper! All in all, nice features but the 3GS now feels a little clunky. Things seem to “pause” a bit more now and apps seems to take a little longer to load. I wouldn’t not upgrade your 3GS, but I would be aware that some things may become a little slower than you are used to.

Overall, I’m still wrestling with wanting the 4G or not caring. Rumors are abounding (as they ALWAYS do after a new iPhone launch) that Verizon will be getting an iPhone next year – but that is only 4 years into the 5 year exclusivity agreement AT&T so it seems unlikely to me. In essence, I think I would enjoy the toy. I would enjoy the status, but I just don’t think it’s worth the money to replace a 3GS.

What do you think? Any early adopters who want to share their story and keep the conversation going?

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New Features of Outlook 2010

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

Sometimes I forget that I don’t always have to actually write EVERYTHING I post up here. To that end, I came upon this slideshow this morning about the top 10 coolest new features in Outlook 2010. I definitely approve!

http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid43_gci1514139,00.html#slideshow

Number 7 is my favorite – which one is yours?

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Google Voice Goes LIVE!

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

I’ve been on the waiting list for a Google Voice account for about 11 months. Last week, I got my invitation. Today I read that the service has opened up to everyone in the US (making my invitation worth much less that I had hoped). As is always the case with new technology I have yet to play with, I immediately dropped everything I was doing and started setting up my new account. I’ve spent about 45 minutes so far and I am a big fan of what I see. However, the first question that most people will ask is…What is it?

Google Voice is basically a cloud-based telephone service. When you create your account, you pick a new phone number (you can transfer your current mobile phone number) and whenever anyone calls this number, Google Voice will forward the call to one or many different ‘normal’ phones. For example, when someone calls your Google number, your mobile phone, office phone and home phone can all ring at the same time. Pick up the call in one place, and the other phones stop ringing. Google also throws in voice mail transcription, so you don’t have to actually listen to the voicemail, but can read it instead. It will also send text messages to your email. All of this is just the basic level. Advanced features include call screening. New person calling you for the first time? Google will let you screen the voicemail and decide to answer it. You can choose who gets screened and who doesn’t – and you can block callers so your phone never rings (goodbye telemarketers). The service is also web based. You can use plugins on your website and initiate calls from the Google voice application.

From a business perspective, a cloud-based phone system has huge ramifications. No longer are your employees tied to a single location. A Google Voice number means that whether they are at their desk, at home waiting for the plumber, sitting in traffic or in the Florida office your team is able to be reached – without wasting time tracking people down. Power goes out? No problem, head down to Starbucks and forward incoming calls to the mobile phone. Communications no longer has to be tied to the corporate PBX.

Don’t get me wrong, this is brand new and still technically in beta. This is NOT ready for prime time business. However, it is an excellent example of what is coming and certainly something that is growing in popularity.

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Take Control of the Uncontrollable Situation

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

I have become quite accustomed to being the hero. I’ve built a career on being the guy that can come into the direst situation and solve the problem in 10 hours or less. I’ve developed the swagger, built up the big gun mystique and earned the respect of just about everyone whose IT network I’ve saved. I excel at this not only because I do what I do well (I never mentioned modesty), but because I can stay level-headed and see through the emergency to the task at hand. In short – I have the control. Bringing modesty back into the equation, I currently find myself in a situation where I have absolutely no control and I suddenly see the other side of the spectrum. I understand what one of my customers may feel when they are suffering an outage and all they can do is rely on me to solve the problem. I see this other side – and I just don’t like it!

Let me start from the beginning. I found and fell in love with a house. It’s an awesome house. It’s big, renovated kitchen, huge master suite and in a great location. What’s not to love? The small problem is that before I can move, I have to SELL my current house. I’ve sold lots of things: IT services, cars, candy bars and other countless fundraisers through my life. I’ve never felt as powerless as during this process. We’ve fixed things up, painted, landscaped and even built a new bathroom. We’ve done everything we can in areas that we can control – and now we have to wait. All I can do is talk to my realtor and listen to her clouds have silver lining comments and then go mop the floor again. What a horrifically awful experience!

Thinking about my customers and an IT outage, this scenario is just too similar to ignore. If I had a dollar for every customer that hovered over a server room door waiting for an update – well I probably wouldn’t sell my current home and just become a land baron. In all seriousness, this experience has given me some insight into the other side and I think I can now be far more in tune with what I see in the situations, and I can provide some insight as to how you can better handle yourself in this type of situation.

  1. Remain optimistic. Some people in my family have allowed themselves to imagine certain scenarios of doom and have decided that is the only possible course of action. If you allow pessimism into the equation, it will take over. Remain optimistic that your system is built to handle whatever is thrown at it and the problem will be resolved.
  2. Trust your provider. I think my real estate agent is just about done. She’s great, she doesn’t show her emotion and she remains positive, but I think she might be happier than we will be to sell our house. You’ve hired your IT consultant for a reason, and now is the time where you need to trust that you made the right decision. Hovering, fretting, demanding constant updates only serves to slow the process down and even cause mistakes that end up harming the environment. If you don’t have that trust, then maybe it’s time to look around for somewhere you can get it.
  3. Plan. I wish I had planned to sell my house. We would have done things YEARS ago so we could enjoy the improvements, instead of rushing them into a one month period of pain. Similarly, plan for what your office will do if the IT fails for a day. If you could plan for a complete day of disconnect – what would you do? Perhaps hold a training seminar? Get to that filing? Clean your desk? Put together an action plan for what happens in the event of a 4 or 8 hour outage. We typically know pretty quickly if we are down for the whole day or just half – and then you can plan for some spontaneous employee development time and benefit from the outage!

Keep those three tips in your back pocket and if your IT fails again, I’ll be riding off into the sunset while you become the hero for making the best out of a bad situation.

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Microsoft TechEd Day 4 – The End

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

And all good things must come to an end. Today is the last day of the show and while I’ve learned a lot, I am ready to get home! Two weeks on the road is more than my wife and my inbox can handle!

Today was more virtualization, but with a twist. I attended sessions on session virtualization (hmmm, that sounds funny) and about using the Microsoft backup product to backup and perform disaster recovery. Oh, there was one more thing. I did NOT win the free Ducati motorcycle at the expo.

Session virtualization is basically terminal services, but on steroids. The next service pack will introduce technology to actually make this a viable desktop replacement. Instead of users having highly customized computers on their desk, they have generic shells of machines that will connect to a session (think cloud-based or at least remote worker access – this is a terminal server after all) and still have a rich media filled environment. This is all brand new and I’ll believe it when I see it, but I did see some pretty awesome demos.

The disaster recovery session was pretty good, but a big advertisement for buying more Microsoft software. Microsoft Data Protection Manager has some very powerful capabilities and they certainly compete with the other major vendors. A new feature is the ability to backup virtual machines while they are running and then complete an individual item restore. It can also support a second server in an offsite location and sync the backup files across the WAN. Both Iron Mountain and Seagate are offering a product that allows you to sync your server with their cloud-based system.

I’m sitting in the last session of the show as I finish this and I’m looking forward to my last night in New Orleans. Someone get me a hurricane! I hope everyone enjoyed my highlights from the show. Let me know if you’d like me to expand on anything.

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Microsoft TechEd Day 3 – Even More Virtualization!

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Have I used the work ‘virtualization’ in regards to TechEd yet? If there is a central theme to take away from the show this year, that’s it. Between upcoming virtual desktop technology (VDI), single application virtualization and improved remote desktop capabilities, the future is here and now is the time to start thinking about making a significant change in your networks.

Today I spent a lot of time learning about the joint Microsoft/Citrix VDI programs. Basically, VDI allows users to have a hosted desktop. This desktop would be accessible from anywhere and all a user would need it a very basic computer with an Internet connection. The magic if VDI is that a single image can be shared amongst literally thousands of users. Customized settings are stored in separate locations, applications are streamed to specific users. Simply put, VDI allows IT administrators to never worry about a computer failing ever again. The local machine becomes disposable.

I’ve spent some time in the labs virtualizing applications and streaming them to workstations. This is pretty amazing technology that I have watched mature over the years. Today I am saying that it is ready!

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Microsoft TechEd Day 2 – Virtualization Abounds

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

I’m sad to say I missed some of the morning sessions while I was with some pressing client matters, but I was able to make all of the afternoon sessions. Today was spent learning all about the new technology in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and a lot of Hyper-V virtualization technology. In fact, I logged about two hours in the hands on labs working with Hyper-V’s management framework and setting up fault tolerant server clusters.

Most of the big deal things in Server 2008 R2 SP1 focus on Hyper-V. Microsoft has added dynamic RAM to the mix (this allows an operator to increase or decrease the amount of RAM the virtual server uses without a reboot) and also created some plugins to allow the server to automatically allocate the RAM without human interaction. The other big new feature is RemoteFX. This allows for an even richer remote desktop environment. This is a great move for those of you using a virtual desktop infrastructure throughout your user base.

Hyper-V is really coming into its own. With the latest releases of its software, I can see a stark contract between their capabilities this year and last. They have improved the product to become more than a viable competitor with VMware. While I don’t have anything new to announce, I do have an excellent understanding of the software, its requirements and functionality and when the use it!

Day 3 is in process, look for another update tomorrow!

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A Small Tribute to New Orleans

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

I had always heard about how great the food and drink is in New Orleans, but until you experience it for yourself there is just no comparison. Last night I had the original Banana’s Foster for dessert – original as in flambéed table side in the restaurant that invented the dessert. That is just not an experience that you can get in DC, and until you’ve done it once, you just cannot understand it. Then follow that up with Hurricanes and Jambalaya at Pat O’Brien’s on Bourbon Street and the entire experience becomes complete.

I know that I’m at a technology conference and there is work to be done, but I feel like I would be remiss if I didn’t take a minute to thank the Microsoft conference team for their efforts at making sure that the attendees get a true taste of New Orleans and have a great time in the process.

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Microsoft TechEd Day 1 – Office and Exchange 2010

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

The first day of the Microsoft TechEd conference started with a discussion of the cloud and its future in IT environments. MS has clearly positioned itself to fully embrace the cloud and their software will continue to provide great security and access to cloud based system – specifically so that organizations can deploy private cloud infrastructures using their licensing :)

I spent the day learning about some new Office 2010 features. Always pushing their better together message, there is a sharp focus on integration with the new Windows Phone 7. For example, Sharepoint will be able to sync whole workspaces into a phone offline mode, which allows full access to the workspace even when the phone loses it’s connections. When documents are updated on the server, the change is also synced over the air down to the phone. Access anywhere is the key.

Also with Office 2010, there are new security features that allow for required cleaning of metadata or a section 508 compliance every time a file is saved. This means that the hidden data about who create the file, when and other identification information can be quickly and easily scrubbed every time. Government workers know that section 508 compliance is an accessibility requirement. Office 2010 scans the whole document and makes recommendations to achieve compliance. Both of these scans can be run manually, and now a group policy can force Office 2010 to run these on every save.

With Exchange, there are a lot of enhancements on the way with Service Pack 1. From themes in OWA to customize the appearance to better management of compliance requirements. Better together with Outlook 2010, users will now be informed about retention policies when they move messages between folders. No more guesswork. It’s a pretty amazing feature that really brings the auto-archiving feature into its own.

That was the end of day one at the conference. Later that night while having dinner and drinks on Bourbon Street, I was able to, well let’s just leave that alone :)

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