Well that was a fun week for me, you might not have realised it but I wasn’t in the office I was enjoying the sun on the isle of Evissa.
However before I went I blogged up with all this goodness…
I can’t say it was the best week, but it wasn’t far off.
We already showed you how Messenger is a great social media aggregator so you know it brings everything together for you to make life easier. What if you don’t have lots of people to talk to on messenger wouldn’t it be great to be able to save time and connect with your Facebook friends in a handy single chat window. Well now you can.
Facebook chat is now integrated with Messenger and it’s done in slick and trustworthy way.
The first thing you see if you already have it installed and the links setup is this following box appear at the top of the social stream. There’s no automatic assumption made that you want to chat with your Facebook friends, some apps might do that but Messenger is built to keep your trust. If you don’t already have FB integrated you can do the same thing through Tools > Settings… hit Alt first.
The next thing you get is choice over what you want to share with Facebook, one obviously being chat.
Hit Connect with Facebook provide your logon deets and your golden! Now in your Messenger window you’ll start to see the online status of your Friends when they’re on Facebook or using any other application that enables Facebook chat.
I’m finding I’m actually using Facebook chat where I didn’t use it before and there are always more people online for me to talk to, oh yeah and I get alerted when new people are online through a little slice of toast popping up in the bottom right of my screen that tells me the difference between my messenger and my Facebook friends…some are both obviously and if they’re connected to both at the same time Messenger takes the load because it’s a richer experience.
You can get the loveable refreshed beta here.
This was originally posted to Underbelly where we talk about cool webby stuff and things like that.
Danny Burlage of BPOS Rocks wrote this fantastic article on why Google is not fit for business – it’s something we know all to well, people who’ve gone Google tell us. Danny’s article is very good so I’m not going to paraphrase it much but I love this quote:
Google's Business Model is based on advertising, not on creating business applications.
BPOS Rocks: Why Google is not a business platform
Last week this popped up in my twitter feed and I really think it’s worth of some link love, so that’s just what I’m doing.
Thoughts on OpsMgr: SCOM Operators Basics SuperFlow
It’s on Maarten Goet’s blog, he’s a SCOM MVP and knows far too much about System Center Operations Manager. The superflow tool he’s talking about here is your perfect resource for training your operators.
I was just browsing around our internal sites and found this excellent white paper on Solutions for Virtualising Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), what amazed me was that it was externally available.
If you’ve got some applications that rely on IE6 (like the British government) and you need to go Windows 7 (
EVERYONE NEEDS to go Windows 7! 
) and IE6 compatibility is slowing you down or bloating your deployment project costs, or if it’s a show stopper, then this papers got great advice. It covers solutions like:
- MED-V which is part of MDOP
- XP mode (which no longer needs a processor capable of virtualisation)
- Terminal Servcies
And it weighs up the pros and cons of each, the licensing considerations, system requirements and just about anything you can think of. I’m currently building a list of essential reading and learning for desktop deployment and this just made the list.
If you can think of any other creative ways of doing it, let me know.
Get the whitepaper: Solutions for Virtualising Internet Explorer
Weezer have released a new album, Hurley that I’ve added to my download list.
- Because it has a picture of Hurley from Lost on the front cover (I’m not a LOST fan but I like the thought)
- Because my Windows 95 CD had Buddy Holly by Weezer on the CD and I love it. By the way I love Ninja Tuna by MrScruff which is in Windows 7.
Hurley by Weezer via Uncrate
I know it’s silly but it made everyone on the conference call laugh. I just attended a meeting like this having just attached a LifeCam HD Cinema to my laptop and used it with the Communicator 14 beta….a warning to those messing with their webcam software perhaps? Yeeehhaawwww
Ok it might not be breaking news but it sometimes feels like it. The cloud is here to stay and yet I know it scares some people. It’s kinda like moving from DOS to Windows, some people back then thought that all these GUIs would make it easier for people to use PCs and they wouldn’t need the techies so much. That didn’t turn out to be true and it won’t for the cloud. Sure it meant some skills transition but That’s a good thing good IT Pros know how to keep their skills up to date.
We’ve just released a micro site with some nice info to get you started in this brave new world through TechNet and the above image is of some of the stuff there. Time to put the cloud to work.
So not only that but in the UK you’ve got myself and @deepfat showing you where there’s ground to be broken. How can we help more?
Today I went to grab a copy of the Windows 7 resource kit that I reserved from the learning center to read on holiday. It has since been used as a dumbell, a door stop and has as a booster to help a colleague feel taller. It might be heavier than my baggage allowance. Still it’s a good resource…who out there considers it invaluable…I do!
I’ll actually be reading and reviewing the new Step By Step book for Outlook 2010 on hols.
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Simon is an IT Pro Evangelist for Microsoft UK, everything here is his own thoughts and opinion.
