technical solutions and commentary

The beta version of MAP 8.0 is now downloadable from the TechNet site: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd537566.aspx

Key features are:

Windows Server 2012 readiness: asses your IT infrastructure for Windows Server 2012 deployment. Reports provide detailed and actionable recommendations for specific machines. get a inventory of servers, OS’, workloads, devices and server roles.

Windows 8 Readiness: asses your client environment for Windows 8 deployment. reports on your hardware against the recommended system requirements. provides detailed recommendations per machine, including OS’ and applications. Also included in the report is the scope and benefits of a Windows 8 upgrade.

Office 2013 and Office 365 readiness: provides and in-depth report of client computers and the assessment for an upgrade or migrations.

Windows Azure Virtual Machine readiness: assessment of Windows Server and Linux machines. determines feasibility of a migration to Windows Azure Virtual Machines. Reports on suggested changes to prep machines for migration.

Client Access License reporting: reports on software usage for key Microsoft products including Windows Server, SQL Server, System Center, Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP), and Lync.

While a little dated now (April 2011), I just ran across a post by Luis Ramos which provides a decent comparison between Lync 2010 and Cisco unified personal communicator 8.5. The post compares the produce features side-by-side including a desktop screen capture of the two clients. its very brief and provides a good high level of the client side capabilities.

Microsoft Lync 2013 has been released and a Cisco update to 8.5 is likely around the corner. For those of you which may own rights to both technologies (I am running into this more often), it’s a decent post to review. don’t forget to read the comments.

http://itbasedtelco.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/lync-vs-cupc/

On October 11, 2012, Microsoft signed off on the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) build of Office 2013. The release spans the full family of Office applications, servers and cloud services. The new Office has a touch friendly design that works beautifully on Windows 8.

General availability is still planned for the first quarter of 2013. Starting October 19, customers purchasing Office 2010 from local retailers or resellers will receive the new Office for free upon availability.

There are a number of programs that provide business customers with early access so they can begin testing, piloting and adopting Office within their organizations:

• Microsoft will begin rolling out new capabilities to Office 365 Enterprise customers in our next service update, starting in November through Q1 GA.
• Volume Licensing customers with Software Assurance will be able to download the new products by mid-November. These products will be available on the Volume Licensing price list on December 1.
• IT professionals and developers will be able to download the final version via their TechNet or MSDN subscriptions by mid-November.

if you’d like to try the pre-release version, you can still get it from office.com/preview.

official BLog Post of the Office 2013 RTM: http://blogs.office.com/b/office-news/archive/2012/10/11/office-reaches-rtm.aspx

Government entities typically have requirements on making documents available to people with disabilities. Many other friendly NGO’s and businesses also take this responsibility seriously. So, How do you create accessible Office 2010 documents? The Texas Governors Committee on People with Disabilities developed a series for training videos to teach people how to do this. These training videos are made available to the public for free at http://governor.state.tx.us/disabilities/accessibledocs/

SharePoint Administrators that are responsible for moving content from staging into production can use the SharePoint Deployment Wizard, a free utility on CodePlex. Microsoft’s codeplex has a lot of free utilities that were developed by employees and others in the dev community. The SP deployment wizard works with SharePoint 2007/2010 at this time, and can deploy the following content types":

• site collections
• webs
• folders
• lists
• list items + files

The free utility uses a gui driven wizard to export the content into a package and import the content package into the new SharePoint farm. It could be used for dev to staging or staging to production. Get the utility at http://spdeploymentwizard.codeplex.com/

the utility is written Chris O’Brien, a Microsoft MVP for SharePoint. He has an excellent SharePoint Blog at http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windowsintune/pc-management.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/configuration-manager-2012.aspx

OEMs are beginning to share more on the up coming tablets and convertibles that are launching with windows 8 and windows rt. Microsoft announced the surface a while back, which is really interesting with a touch or a click keyboard that doubles as the slates cover.

Asus has recently released details on two new tablets that have detachable keyboards. so you can have an ultra book experience that changes into a tablet experience if you prefer, by removing the display from the base. these new designs obviously require the processing, and battery power to be integrated in the display. this is a change from traditional laptop PCs where these were performed in the base.

There are also designs that will be releasing from various OEM’s, which have the detachable display/slate from the base – but when attached to the base you will have additional battery and other features enabled.

What I am curious about, is the Windows 8 vs. Windows RT device and how the market will react. Will consumers be savvy enough to understand the major differences? Will consumers even care to load their old x86 programs into a slate or will they view the Windows rt more like an ipad that has a different use than a full PC (Mac or Windows). With Microsoft having two Windows types which will both be available on a slate, will it be confusing to the average consumer? With the launch not to far away, we will have our answers to these questions soon.

I’ve recently been experiencing slow internet domain name service (DNS) resolution recently which affects the performance of my internet experience. I have comcast services and have been checking my router the last couple of weeks after I started having slow internet service. I my be mistaken, but it looks like comcast has been making some routing changes in my local area and it seems to be affecting everything for the negative.

The comcast public dns servers are:
75.75.75.75
75.75.76.76

I switched over to level 3 dns servers which will redirect you to your closest l3 dens servers:
209.244.0.3
209.244.0.4

I also added google dns servers for dns3:
8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4

there is one advantage the concast & google dns servers have over level 3: the dns server are on different networks while the level 3 dns servers are on the same networks. the advantage is that if there is a routing issue on one of the comcast or google subnets that host the dns servers, a secondary server will still be available. with level 3 the dens servers are on the same subnet, so if that subnet goes down you have no dns services. ouch.

The Office Team has released a list of resources for IT Professionals to learn more about the new Office including deployment resources. Included is a Resource Kit (ResKit) for the Office Preview. As these resources are not based on the RTM but the Preview, they will be updated for the release but the content will remain largely the same.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_resource_kit/archive/2012/07/23/resources-for-the-new-office-release.aspx

With all of the new/refreshed products Microsoft is launching – Windows Server, Windows client, SharePoint, Exchange, Project, Office…. not to mention what they already launched SQL 2012, System Center 2012….. the Hotmail team is not to be left out. Today Microsoft announced Outlook.com.  It’s going to replace the existing Hotmail free email, storage, calendaring, and contact service.

I have already started using it along with my new @outlook.com Email address. In my opinion is a leap ahead for free consumer Email services. It has a similar feel to a more professional Web Based Email client. CNET published an article on the servicer here: http://reviews.cnet.com/e-mail/microsoft-outlook-com-e/4505-3536_7-35404526.html