technical solutions and commentary

I ran across a post that timelines the attitude from Microsoft regading the Linux OS. Sounds like the same thing they thought of the Internet back in 1992-1997. The read can be found here, “A Brief History of Microsoft FUD” (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt)

Microsoft published their first promotional video of Office 2007 which talks about and demos the changes in the office suite and primarily focuses on the user interface. You can view it directly using this link:  http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/asx/OfficeUIIntro.asx

Some thoughts on the Office 2007 Suite.. The menu ribbon is neat and I think it will be of benefit to the usability of the software. However what I haven’t heard is if it can be unachored from the top of the primary window and be moved around the screen as a seperate window or be moved to the side. I would prefer this in order to free us some of the horizontal space in the window. For a wide screen monitor moving this tool set to the side of the screen males more sense that having it at the top.

The “Office Menu” is no longer a ‘File’ option on the toolbar. The “Office Menu” is a circle icon with the Office Logo. This is like the changes in Windows Vista where the ‘Start’ button has been replaced with the “Windows Menu” — a circle with the Windows logo.

I can already see this being EXTREMELY confusing for the average, non-tech user and difficult for the helpdesk person to explain. At least in the versions prior to Windows Vista and Office 2007, you can can tell people to click on the “Start” button in Windows or the “File” menu in Office. Try explaining what the “Windows Menu” or “Office Menu” is which doesn’t have any text description. And how many people really know the difference between the Windows Logo Icon and the Office Logo icon? Hopefully this can have the classic shell  that can be turned on to bring back the basic file menu in addition.
I can already hear a helpdesk person trying to explain this to an end user… Click on the Office Menu… it’s the circle icon in the upper left hand corner of the window that has the logo on it, no… on the left, no not the one that looks like a disk, the one that looks like a logo, yes, that is a button.

I just finished reading the book “Winning” by Jack Welch, te former CEO of General Electric Corporation. This book is focused toward managers at all different levels in an organization. He addresses issues that are common in all organizations at different stages in an organizations life. He provides provides solid advice managing people, and dealing with your manager, how to handle mergers, family-work balance issues, and how to be a star employee and stand out. He also addresses common issues that people face as they grow in their career and begin to outgrow the job postion or even the organization.

I would recommend this book for anyone that is interested in how an organization works (or doesn’t work), and anyone who is interested in growing in their career. It takes an honest look at business today and addressed problems which are faced around the world in business and provides suggestions on how they can be addressed, and how tell if you should move on.

AOL is streaming classic TV episodes free. You can view them at http://television.aol.com/in2tv. You may have to be on the internet to watch them but it beats paying $2 per episode to download.  

Microsoft release a new Temrinal Server utility to help resolve printing issues. Looks like a must have utility.

The Terminal Server Printer Driver Redirection Wizard will help you troubleshoot and replace print drivers that were unsuccessfully redirected. This tool automates the process found in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article KB239088 entitled “Windows 2000 Terminal Services Server Logs Events 1111, 1105, and 1006”.

Te utility can be downloaded from the Microsoft Web site here.

In an interesting move, Microsoft released the C++ source code for MEchCommander 2 to the public. The code is from a game that is 4+ years old, but any aspiring game developer could probably learn a few things from reviewing this source code.

The source code can be downloaded directly from Microsoft’s web site here. This is the Shared Source release for MechCommander 2. This release contains all of the source code and source assets required to build MechCommander 2.

I have been running Windows Live Toolbar for a couple of weeks on a Windows XP Pro SP 2 machine with IE6 installed. I had MSN toolbar installed originally, primarily to be able to use tabbed browing in IE6. Both of these toolbars are somwhat customizable so you don’t have to display every toolbar feature icon, and you can move the toolbor next to the address line so you don’t lose too much screen real estate.

After installing the Windows Live Toolbar (WLT), my browser would lock up after having the computer for more than a couple of hours. After ending task on IE the PC performance was horrible and the machine needed a reboot to et back to normal. I thought this could possibly have been caused because I didn’t uninstall the MSN tool bar before installing the WLT. I uninstalled the WLT and all MSN toolbar add-ins, then reinstalled WLT. I experineced the same problem.

What seems to ave been causing the problem was one of the WLT add-ins, Onfolio. I thougt the concept behind Onfolio was great and would like to be able to use it, but uninstalling that add-in from the WLT beta seems to have resolved the performance and IE lockup issues on this machine. (update 3-16-06: it did turn out that the WLT was causing the IE lockup in just the plug-in. I went back to the MSN Toolbar and everthing is working fine again now. Guess I’ll wait for the next beta to try again.)
If you haven’t tried out the WLT, you should. It as some nice features such as a RSS feed client, Windows Live Bookmarks synchronization utility (if you are using them). By default to uses the live.com search which is getting better, but is still not as good as google for results ranking. That can be changed easy enough though.

Feel free to let me know wat you think of the Windows Live site and services if you’ve had a change to use them.

I have been runing Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 at home for a few weeks now. The interface has been changed, or should I say simplified. It takes a litlle to get used to if you are used to IE 5/6. After using it for a few weeks I do like the interface better. There is finally built-in tabbed browsing whcih Opera and  Firefox have  had for quite a while now. I have run into some compatibility issues with certain web-based products which require Internet Explorer, but that is to be expected with a beta product.

Stability wise, the browase has been running solid on my PC and hasn’t crashed at all on me over the last few weeks. I haven’t used the RSS feeds feature yet because I still like prefer managng RSS using a differernt application such as feed demon. I’ve tried using the RSS features in Firefox and even installed web-based RSS managers for IS and firefox in the past. I just don’t like the idea of having a browser manage RSS feeds for me. However, for a casual user of RSS feeds it should work well.

I am currently beat testing Windows Live Family Safety Setting Beta. The product is simple to install and straightforward to configure even for non-technical people. There are 12 categories you can select to fiter on. There is a simple interface to select who you want to apply the filtering to. Such as everyone except those in the administrators group. If you run into sites that are not automatically filtered out you feel should be, you can easily  add the sites to the ‘blocked sites’ list. The same is true to over-ride the defualt filters in adding sites to an ‘allowed sites’ list.

I started out testing the 1.0 version of the product which I ran into issues with when I performed a web search, such as with google.com. Occassionally I would enter a search phrase and then when the results should have been displayed I would get the message that the site was blocked do to inappropriate content. There must have been some trigger words in the search results which caused that to happen. It was easy to fix this by adding google.com to the ‘allowed sites’ list. A new 1.5 beta was just released today which addresses specific installation issues and other minor bugs.

As with the Windows Live OneCare product, the Family Safety Setting is an easy to use powerfl product that the home should be able to install and maintain in order to filter internet content. A simple product to filter internet content is something that is long over due in my opinion. Hopefully Microsoft keeps the price reasonable when it’s released to production so many families can benfit from this service.

Oh yeah, the installation uses under 1MB of hard disk space. tHis makes it practicle for even dial-up users to download and istall.

One of the compinent of Small Business Server that seems to be plagued with problems is the POP3 Connector. I can’t count the number of times I have been called with questions on the configuration and troubleshooting of this component. A lot of time (= money) could be saved if we could convince those small businesses using SBS with a full-time internet connection to use direct mail delievery to Exchange.

Sometimes you just can’t convince people saving money is a good idea. Other times small business owners don’t understand what the pros and cons of using the POP3 connector is — as IT Pro’s we really need to do a better job of explaining this to  them.

Then there are the times where getting a DSL/Cable connection to a business is nearly imposible and using a leased line to too expensive. That is the scenario when it is a good idea to use the POP3 Connector to dialup an ISP and retrieve email — thats really that it was design for.

If you run into issue with the POP3 Connector there is a really good troubleshooting guide from Microsoft here:
KB 885685: How to troubleshoot the POP3 Connector in Windows Small Business Server 2003