technical solutions and commentary

When deciding whether to deploy Windows Terminal Services out of the box, or to deploy Terminal Services using a third-party solution such as Citrix, a common need either scenario is server/user load balancing. Microsoft does provide a basic solution for this out of the box by using ‘Network Load Balancing’ (NLB) services, however the Enterprise Edition of Server is required for the Terminal Servers. You can find details on how to configure the load balancing on Terminal Services in Microsoft KB 243523 - Using Terminal Server with Windows Load Balancing Service

What the configuration of NLB on the terminal services does not provide is the ability to automatically reconnect users to disconnected sessions . This feature is actually accomplished by deploying another built-in Windows service called Session Directory Service. This service analysis the connection requests to the terminal services and determines if the user has already opened a session which was disconnected. If is discoveres the user is disconnected, it will direct the session request back to the server and reconnect the user to the disconnected session. This service can run on the Standard Edition of Windows Server 2003. In small environments it can even be enabled on a server doing double-duty such as a Domain Controller. Details on this configuration are in Microsoft KB 301923 - How to Configure Terminal Services Session Directory Service

When planning a terminal service environment there are more items to consider when deciding to use plain terminal services or a third-party solution. For example, Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 combines the features and capabilities of the Windows Server Terminal Services and Citrix technologies to:

• Simplify farm administration
• Increase server user capacity
• Publish applications and desktops to users
• Simplify client access and deployment for Windows, Macintosh, Unix/Linux based clients
• Provide application access to clients through a Web Interface and Web Browser
• Reduce network traffic between clients and servers
• Provide enhanced load-balancing capabilities (Advanced Edition, Enterprise Edition)
• Provide server resource monitoring and management (Enterprise Edition)
• Provide software packaging and management services (Enterprise Edition)
• Provide an isolation environment to applications which allows conflicting application to be installed on the same servers (Enterprise Edition)
• Plus additional server/client enhancements compared to standard Windows Terminal Services

I stumbled across a new free service which will convert image files to PDF files via email. ScanR.com allows you to use your cell phone or digital camera with at least 1 megapixel of resolution to take a picture of a document or a white-board drawing, email it to an automated email address at ScanR, which will convert it to a PDF, run OCR on the file, and email it back to the originating email address.

This is pretty handy if you have a way to take the picture and send it as an attachment using a mobile device. Sign up for it free at ScanR.com.

There is a problem with a Windows patch (MS06-015) which among the symptoms are Office programs (Excel, Word, Etc) hang when opening files from the network. This is actually caused by the update conflicting with installed HP software. The problem is with the file Verclsid.exe. Renaming the ”c:\winnt\system32\verclsid.exe” fixes the issue. Microsoft also has published an article with the official Microsoft fix.

Microsoft KB 918165 - Problems in Windows Explorer or the Windows shell after you install security update MS06-015

It behaves just like the old Word macro virus where you could not perform a “Save As” and Excel and Word would hang when opening/saving a file using a network share. 

There is a problem with a Windows patch (MS06-015) which among the symptoms are Office programs (Excel, Word, Etc) hang when opening files from the network. This is actually caused by the update conflicting with installed HP software. The problem is with the file Verclsid.exe. Renaming the ”c:\winnt\system32\verclsid.exe” fixes the issue. Microsoft also has published an article with the official Microsoft fix. 

Microsoft KB 918165 - Problems in Windows Explorer or the Windows shell after you install security update MS06-015

 It behaves just like the old Word macro virus where you could not perform a “Save As” and Excel and Word would hang when opening/saving a file using a network share. 

Microsoft has announced that FrontPage is being discontinued at the end of 2006 and will be replaced with other development tools. FrontPage, an aging, no frills web design application was targeted at non-coding, non-designer web site builders which mainly used to tool to maintain company intranet or low budet web sites. In the professional design and development communities FrontPage was never considered a good option for building web sites.

Microsoft is preparing to launch it’s “Microsoft Expression” suite which contains: ‘Graphic Designer’, ‘Interactive Desginer’, and ‘Web Designer’. These powerfult tools represent Microsoft’s entry into the professional desgin software market. Expression looks to be targeted at Adobe and Macromedia design tools such as Ilustrator, Photoshop, GoLive, Flash, Driector, Dreamweaver. While not encompassing all the capabilities of the mentioned products from Adobe and Macromedia, Microsoft appears to be aiming toward the “sweet spot” in the market by incompassing the most common tools and providing additonal features in their products.

Microsoft Expresion Web Designer is a much needed replacement for the old FrontPage product. It has better capabilities for buildin and mananging style-sheets, integrates with ASP.NET 2.0 controls and databases without having to know how to write .NET code. The pae rendering in the application is such that you don’t have to go back and forth between the application and a web browser to see how the rendered code will look, a big draw back in FrontPage. Second-half 2006 is the target release date.

Another tool, Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 focuses on allowing corporate users to build SharePoint sites, and even workflow’s – without having to have code execution rights or upload code on the server. Site administrators assigned users customization levels which give them different site design abilities.

The sites:

• Microsoft Expression
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007

Looks like Microsoft is changing their strategy a bit. Competing fiercly against OpenSource and Linux in he software sales front, Microsoft has launched a site under technet that focuses on communicating information about their Open Source lab. The site is called “Port 25” and the tag line of the site is “The people, insights, and analysis from the Microsoft Open Source Software Lab.”

At this point the site doesn’t have a great deal of content. While some articles I have read on this have implied that this is an effort to better communicate with the community, we’ll see what the real motives behind this site are over the coming months. I can see this site being used in one of two ways. (1) To genuinely communicate with the Open Source Community to help the software industry as a whole develop better software for users, or (2) promote (market) Windows and Microsoft software as superior products by pointing out the weaknesses in the OpenSource software they are testing. If the latter is the case, I’m sure they won’t be blatently obvious about the site being focus on marketing. Hopefully this site will be a possitive move both for Microsoft and Open Source.

This will move Firefox & Thunderbird to your hard drive when you minimize it, and use less than 10MB of memory while minimized. Do the following:

1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.

You can also set the browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers value to 0 which will prevent Firefox from caching pages for the back button.  

These steps were found on this blog post This May Help Your Firefox Memory Leak.

Users love to have simple, visual ways to find network resources. Administrators like them as well, when it reduces the time they have to spend configurung end user workstations and tend more to the server side issues.

How this works is that the IPP uses an IIS web page to show print queues and install print drivers on workstations by clicking on URL’s. It is simple to use in itself, however for end users they typically do not know the name of the printers on the network which they need to connect. As an admainistrator you can simplfy this process of installing print drivers and setting up print queues for end users and management thinks it the next best thing in IT.

In order to do this you will need to:

1. Enable IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) on your Windows Server.
2. Obtain, or create, a simple layout of the building or floor in which your users work.
3. Use an image editing program to place printer icons, and device labels, on the building map.
4. Copy each print device link from the the IPP printer web page, and use them to enable image map hot spots on the building layout graphic. (YOu can do this in FrontPage or almost any WYSIWYG HTML editor.)
5. Save the image file and the HTML page to an internal web server. This can even be saved on the print server that you have IPP enabled on.
6. Have the user click on the printer icon on the map to install the driver and print queue on the workstation.

If you have an existing Intranet such as SharePoint or another custom intranet site, place a link to the printer map you created on the intranet in an easy to find location for the users. If you have multiple locations, you can create muiltiple printer maps and place a links to the different pages on the intranet. For example you might have a link to “LA Office Printers”, “Denver Office Printers”, “Chicago Office Printers”. This keeps things simple for users that may travel from office to office as well.
This can be a time consuming process if you need to create the office layout from scratch, but try and start with somehting simple to test the pages with and disciver how much the maps will be used.

The BBC article “Rumours surround Google browser” has been getting attention of many with the idea of Google doing something revolutionary in the browser market. The article said they may use the Mozilla Firefox as the basis for a new browser. How revolutionary has google really been in anything but the search engine technology?

The way I see it is that Google has built the majority of it over-hyped features from existing Open Source projects. Talk for example Google Talk, the IM and VOIP client they released months ago. It was built on top of existing Open Source technology. Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL already had this technology for years before. MSN Messenger also already had the ability ot have voice conversations. So where was the revolutionary new Google technology? 

Look at GooglePack announced at CES. It took freeware and trialware software that existed for years and allowed you to download them and install them on your machine from a single source. At the release of GooglePack some of the software was already outdated, so how do you keep it all current? That would be something revolutionary… a site you can go to which will update all of your installed software from one place.

Some of the other cool software they have such as Google Earth, Bloger, etc they acquired by buying out software companies. Don’t get me wrong, google does have some great products search, groups, news, video, etc but these are really all based on its core search engine technoloy. Everything else just seems like a “me-too” and a “look what we can do to further distribute software which integrates our Ad technology”.

If Google does release a browser based on Firefox, great… but I’m sure it’s not going to be revolutionary. It will likely just have: (1) a lot of the free Firefox extensions integrated into the browser of of the box to make it simpler for end-users (which is needed), (2) it will definately have the Google search integrated in order to place more Ads and gather statistical data for better Ad placement, (3) the Google desktop search — remember Ad placement is Google’s revenue stream – will probably included in the installation routine, (4) it will have a simplistic google style interface. But revolutionary? I really don’t think so.

I just got a Windows Mobile 5 device from Sprint (PPC-6700) a couple of days ago and love it. I was waiting for a device that could be: mobile phone, still camera, video camera, internet browsing device, high-speed mobile modem for my laptop, music player, portable video player, picture viewer, digital map device (MS Pocket Streets & Trips -sold seperately), eBook reader (Adobe Reader for PPC), digital voice dictation device, Mobile Outlook (Email, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes), Alarm clock, and portable gaming machine… all in one. Oh, yeah, and it comes with Pocket Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Now that IS a great device. And if you want to spend a little bit more on an enhanced data plan, you can also get streaming TV channels, and Sirius streaming radio stations.

The only bad thing was that I had to go in and edit my Contacts in Outlook in order to display them the way I wanted to for dialing them from the Phone.