One of the questions I get asked constantly is about the safety of placing your data into particular environments, so I was quite pleased when I noticed that we’d released the Data Classification Toolkit for Windows Server 2008 R2 which helps you to do one of the basic tasks you’ll have to undertake.  Understanding your data.  I make no bones about it I think this is one of the key skills for IT Professionals going forward and it’s one of the key ways that you can help your business by providing intelligence to them to help the business make decisions.  The pack has the usual US take on it but that’s no bad thing in this case.

I shouldn’t have to say that using the tool doesn’t equate to proper advice from auditors, accountants or attorneys but I just have.

A few weeks ago now we made the following video tour of our Datacentres available for all to see on the GFS website and also on YouTube.  At the time I forgot to post it but having just happened across it I thought it worth sharing.  I constantly get asked about the size and scale of our DCs and this really shows them off…and yes the Dublin DC is one of the worlds largest DCs at 330,000 square foot or about the size of 3 of the UKs largest Super Markets all under one roof.  Why does that matter?  Because building and learning about Data Centers at that scale is something few others can do.

Today I went to talk to a group of IT Apprentices at QA’s centre in Birmingham, thanks for a good day guys and especially to Lorette who organised the day.  If you aren’t sure what apprentices are then you should find out more about IT Apprenticeships, however this is probably mostly being read by the folks who were there so here’s my deck from the day and some links to some of the things we looked at.  Remember all these resources are free.

Free Trial of Office 365

Free trial of Windows Intune

Free trial of Windows Azure

And here too is my previous deck from another apprentices session

I’ve already highlighted how IT departments are going to change over the next few years a few times and what some people in those departments are going to be doing as their roles inevitably change but there are going to be some new roles that appear too.  These roles will start to shape how the IT department works for the next few years and, just like all IT jobs are, they’re a response to the changes going on in the business and in the market.  As the industry chases the promised befits of cloud like reduced cost and increased agility these roles are going to be the new linchpins (as Seth would say) able to cross boundaries and pull leavers.

They won’t be the only people in the team, they will be new people or people who’ve stepped over from another discipline.

Cloud integration engineer

Linking everything together is going to be critical in the future.  I wouldn’t say we’re at cloud version 1.0 yet – we’re probably closer to 0.7 where people are working out how to do cool things, there’s lots of experimentation going on.  As we as an industry marches forward we’re turning over more rocks and identifying new bugs that need squashing.  Who is doing the squashing though depends upon the type of bug but it’s clear that, as with anything new, we’ve got technology blazing a trail and lawmakers and regulators playing catch up.  Add to that mix the fear of vendor lock in that some people have, the fear of giving up “control” and the worries that accompany anything new and you’ve got a mix complex mix of problems to overcome.

That’s where hero number one, the Cloud Integration Engineer comes to the rescue with his super power – connectivity.  Cloud integration engineers will be adept at connecting public clouds and private clouds to create the now much touted hybrid cloud, part in your sphere of granular control, part in the sphere of vendor management.  These guys will know the technology involved in Windows Azure to a deep enough level to understand how to connect an Azure and an on premises application together (hint they’ll be using Windows Azure Connect).  These guys will also know how to throw up an EC2 instance and have it pull data from a SQL Azure database and they’ll know how to connect Exchange 2010 to Office 365 in a coexistence scenario so that the 2000 guys in a field in Devon get fast internal email over their 256k internet connection whilst the field guys get rapid connections where ever they are around the world.

Some will be experts in plumbing finished services (SaaS) together using APIs and code to do magic, others will be PowerShell gurus that can provision 100 mailboxes with a single command, others still will make ninja like use of the tooling.  These guys will likely be capable of code but will understand the plumbing of enterprises well enough to make things seamless.  They’ll have a better understanding of security than most developers and IT pros but they’ll be connected to the business so they’ll work as guides to security not gate keepers to access.

Cloud operations manager

Operations in the cloud is far simpler than it is with traditional infrastructures, primarily because you don’t need to manage everything at the most granular level.  Managing IT Operations in the Data Centre is about managing servers, making sure they’re up, making sure the hardware is working, making sure they have enough memory and CPU for their highest load ( + 15% or so) , for some this will be the old days, but for most it’s today – even if they’re virtualised.  Virtual doesn’t make resource management go away – it just changes the economics.

With the cloud you still need to manage resource and ensure availability to some extent – but it is an easier job.  You don’t need to make sure that servers have enough memory any more, you need to make a choice about scaling up or out on demand.  Scaling up is adding more servers, scaling out is about adding more powerful servers.  It takes intelligence to make that call, it takes understanding of the business value of scaling, both the process of scaling and the decision can be automated though.  To crystallise that lets take the ever-so-much over used tap metaphor of cloud.

In the tap metaphor we equate supply to a tap, when you turn it on the tap runs and you get the resource you want – cool.  However you pay for what you use, so what happens if you’re not doing anything useful with your water, if it’s just running down the drain?  If you equate the tap to a cloud service and the water to compute resource you get the picture – especially when you consider that taps get broken, develop leaks or occasionally a rogue plumber installs them.  You need to ensure that the capacity you use is being used for business – that’s where the Cloud Operations Manager comes to the rescue with their power of insight.

These guys will be able to use their close business relationship to determine when it’s right to allow the tap to run free, and when it’s time to turn it down.  When you’re being DDOS attacked and when you’re seeing a sales boom, when you’re internal users are hammering your SharePoint because the company just announced pay rises or because Bob from accounts accidentally posted his personal photos to the whole company he looks funny.

Cloud Operations Managers will also be watching what’s happening to ensure it’s sensible and complies with policy (which is obviously boring and stifles innovation / agility) but who else is going to make sure that when Bob in accounts leaves he doesn’t take his Docs account with him and oh the company looses all that information – that knowledge, the business intelligence, the competitive edge – just because the employ left taking their personal documents with them in cloud storage.  They have the super-power of understanding.

IT Marketing and Communications Officer

Communication is why businesses succeed and fail, you can have a great plan, sound strategy, superb revenue streams but if your team can’t communicate they can’t succeed.  When IT is one of the resources in the mix that allows your organisation to get things done communication about it’s benefits is essential.  If you’re going to guide your organisation to make the most informed choices and to make the most of what they’ve paid for you need someone to be evangelising the options.

We’ve tried this as an industry before, numerous times over but a skill set that allows your IT department to market it’s wares it’s what’s needed.  You need your people to know that they will benefit from using cloud storage because it’s pervasive and lets them access their information anywhere.  Previously we as IT guys would probably have said that in terms of “to reduce the load on the file server so that we can save 2gb of storage” – terms that don’t matter to the end user.  Marketers are adept at making things relevant to the their market, internally this means translating, explaining and engaging a user community.  I’ve seen this done a few times, often under different banners with differing levels of success – however it’s worked best when a marketeer got involved.  Essentially these folks will breed cooperation.

Summary

So there we have it, three new roles, superpowers of connectivity, understanding and cooperation, which when you think of it don’t sound that super do they?  By the way all of these roles are available on job sites today.  Whilst researching I found a role paying £120k per anum doing Windows Azure integration with existing systems, Operations Manager roles that commonly reference SaaS/IaaS/PaaS and private cloud and for the IT Marketing roles are hidden away in specialist recruitment circles – which is always a good sign.

If you think that these new roles will add cost to IT then, sorry, you’re wrong and for two reasons.  The first being that they will possibly not be part of IT itself, IT will virtualise these roles into other areas of the organisation to provide deep integration with the day to day reality of what the organisation does.  Secondly they’ll be saving money or making it, IT Marketing Officer will be extracting every last penny from the move to cloud based email like Exchange Online, the Cloud Operations Manager will be ensuring things stay on track and costs don’t scale out of control and the Cloud Integration Engineer will be helping make money by doing new innovative stuff – day in, day out – creating competitive advantage.

As an IT Pro how do you get there?  Learn.  Learn about virtualisation, learn about cloud.  We have webcasts, jumpstarts, downloads, resources and you probably have free training hours if you have Software Assurance or an Enterprise Agreement.  Us it.

No one can fail to see how much impact the ideas of cloud are having on our organisations and as IT Professionals the most direct impact we feel is on us, on those we work with, on our IT Department.  It doesn’t matter whether your “IT”, “IS”, “ICT”, “Information Management”, “IM” or whatever 2 or 3 letter abbreviations you have the cloud is starting to have an impact.  Is it bad?  Is it good?  Two questions that only only time will reveal the answers to but there are changes afoot.  It doesn’t matter whether your company has started to embrace cloud yet – eventually it will – in this article I’m focusing on how it’s going to change some of those specific roles in your IT Department.

Before we do that though lets just add some cloud clarity so that we know where we are.  The cloud is any technology that enables on-demand rapid provision and release of resources that are highly available and shared between a group of users.  For the purpose of this article we’re talking about resources shared between people who do not necessarily belong to the same organisation a.k.a the public cloud.  Public cloud is arguably one of the top two technology trends affecting your IT Department today with the second being consumerisation – all those “unmanaged” devices that are popping up and you’re now being required to support.

You are now probably seeing demand for some of the following types of services:

• Web based email
• Web based file sharing
• Web based CRM
• Web based line of business software
• Web based support software
• Cloud based hosting

And in addition you’ve probably started to notice that you’re being excluded from conversations.  A macro level trend is going on around you, your users have started to be tech savvy enough to make IT decisions without you (or at least they think they have – you’ll obviously have to come to the rescue!)  One of the interesting key words just before that bullet is demand the trend of consumerisation has had an impact here and your users are now demanding that you provide them with IT Services on their terms. 

If this hasn’t happened to you yet it, will, it probably but someone forgot to tell IT.  This trend is most apparent when information starts leaking from your organisation through people emailing stuff home to work on because they have better tools. 

Think of a train hurtling down the tracks, if you���re in front of that train the futures not so bright…if you’re on it then it’s a better place.  That analogy is very close to home for some IT departments – I say it’s time to get on the train rather than trying to stop the thing with your bare hands.  So what does it mean for the life of some of our favourite IT Department people:

The helpdesker (a.k.a. Frontline support analyst)

As the first point of contact in the IT Department the helpdesk staff have always been a linchpin of the team, taking calls, taking flack.  It’s part of the job.  Most people start out here and learn one of the key skills that’s always seen them through the career they made: customer service.  And you know what, this is a growth area with public cloud.  Very few public cloud operators will provide end user support, they normally provide level 2 support (which tends to materialise in IT depts as level 3) meaning that they won’t answer user queries such as “how do I do x”, “I’ve deleted this email, how do I get it back”.  These folks provide a 2nd key skill too – business knowledge – even if you’ve outsourced your helpdesk you’ll find that the best operators know your business better than the worst.  I personally am starting to see a trend of “insourcing” where the helpdesk is being brought home.

The desktop technician (a.k.a. 2nd level support, a.k.a “Dave in IT”)

Desktop technicians are still seen as the face of IT by most end users, even if they don’t see them that often.  Most avoid giving out their direct line for fear of being stalked by Sally in accounts who just cannot use Excel – I know I’ve been there for many (joyous) years.  Again these folks know the people they help, they provide deep business knowledge and have early warning radar  and they combine a level of technical skill that makes most users think of them as heroes but interestingly they don’t get many calls from the younger people in the organisation but they do spend time with them exchanging stories around the coffee/tea/water/cigarette machine/shed.  And they’re friends with them on Facebook.

The desktop guys aren’t going anywhere though because the cloud doesn’t take the desktop away, you still need a machine to access it….well not so much.  In the future the desktop guys will spend more time working on other peoples kit than the companies.  They’ll spend more time ensuring people can work safely for the company with their own kit and less fixing problems as the end users naturally become more adept at fixing problems.

The server huggers

These guys have been the centre of the world for a good few years, they have the hard job – running the infrastructure – occasionally harbouring a small god complex (I am very much guilty).  The folks need to make the biggest change to their world, if you are one you need to be learning new skills day after day to keep up.  You need to know about virtualisation, what it is and what it isn’t (a magic bullet), you need to know about management technology, you need to know about public cloud platforms and infrastructures and the differences.  You also need to start to understand cost models (yuck) and you need to know how to connect both public cloud and private cloud resources.  You might not see this right now but people are going outside of your team to get hold of servers to do their job.

There are possibly people within your organisation using a personal credit card to setup a business critical ecommerce system, or store some data in the public cloud…without your governance.  It will become impossible to do anything about it because it will be too business critical so you’ll need to focus on connecting and managing it and ultimately on governing it.

The IT Manager

You’re probably going to meetings and being asked for more by the business (or they might have stopped inviting you).  Before it’s too late though you need to switch up what your team is doing, get them out from in front of the train and bear their whole weight down on making public cloud work for your business.  Why?  Because public cloud WON’T work for your business.  Not in isolation, you’ve got to couple it to what you do already, those servers and services your IT department is already running at 99.999999% uptime (+ added LOVE).  You’re role will be to become the leader of a group of trusted advisors to your business, a group of cloud savvy people who deeply understand the technology and who deeply understand the business.

Every aspect of the business is different the accountants want different things to HR who want different things to marketing and the security guy on the front desk.  You can give the accountants systems that don’t require downtime and manual upgrades each year while TAX changes are made – the software provider will do that for you.  You can give HR a web based payroll system whereby a huge data send isn’t required every month at pay run time (whilst everyone holds their breath).  You can give the security guy secure cloud storage and offload the constant video encoding of security camera footage from his PC to the cloud.

Summary

There are countless more roles and countless better examples but the idea here is to show you that the world is changing.  You don’t however need to be under the train since we’re at the right point to get in front and help our businesses make better decisions.  There’s no need to loose the technical skills we hold so dear, they just evolve and theirs no need to learn new skills in business analysis or some other discipline it’s just about applying what you know already.

Really the public cloud is a case of learning about the technology and helping your business apply it…that’s the secret sauce.  Try Windows Azure, Try Office365 and try what other people offer (then come back )

The web has changed and things have moved on, not really a shock, but the evolution of the latest web browsers is changing things.  In particular Internet Explorer 9 allows you to take any site you see on the web and turn it into a native application by simply dragging a tab down to the task bar.  If you think that pinning a site isn’t overly useful consider some of the stats that the process drives, Huffington post drove views by users visiting their site through pinning up by 11%…now translate that to your SharePoint site, your intranet.  Your users could be finding more stuff through the intranet, saving them some time.  The cost? a few lines of simple code.

What you need to do

Rather obviously I’m only going to describe the steps for SharePoint 2010, you can probably work them out for other versions just fine.

Open your SharePoint site using SharePoint designer (you’ll need to get SharePoint designer from here if you don’t already have it) and open your site.  Then you’ll need to:

1. Select Master Pages from the left Site Object pane
2. Select the v4.master document and check it out to change it
3. Select the code view
4. Enter the code, which you’ll see listed below the picture.

So this is the code you need to enter and it needs to go within the <head> and </head> tags, I’d suggest placing this code towards the end of the HTML header. 

1. <meta name="application-name" content="Fourth Coffee Intranet" />
2. <meta name="msapplication-tooltip" content="All the latest info @ 4th" />
3. <meta name="msapplication-window" content="width=1200;height=600" />
4. <meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Main Page;action-uri=http://sharepoint;icon-uri=http://sharepoint/SiteAssets/SitePages/Home/4th.ico"" /
5. <meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=FAST Search;action-uri=http://sharepoint/fast;icon-uri=http://sharepoint/SiteAssets/SitePages/Home/4th.ico"" />
6. <meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=My Site;action-uri=http://sharepoint/my;icon-uri=http://sharepoint/SiteAssets/SitePages/Home/4th.ico" />

Now that you know where it goes, lets walk through the code, line by line to understand what it does.

1. We provide a name for the application, all Windows apps need something to identify them after all
2. We configure a tool tip that will appear when hovering over the pinned icon before it’s launched
3. We setup the size of the window when it initially opens
4. Now for the meat, lines 1 to 3 are enough to be able to pin the app, but it’s time to do something more…  Jump lists! that increased page usage involves having fast access to pages from jump lists, so in lines 4-6 we configure the Jump lists.  Lets break down the line:

• meta name="msapplication-task" tells IE that we’re defining a jump list item.
• content="name=Main Page;  tells IE what to name the jump list item, the user sees this.
• action-uri=http://sharepoint; tells IE what address the jump list points to.
• icon-uri=http://sharepoint/SiteAssets/SitePages/Home/4th.ico tells IE what icon to use for the jump list item….ahh we’re into favicons…

You will also need to create a favicon, I use icoFX which is free and can take a normal image and turn it into an ico file.  You’ll also want to do the same thing to create a nice custom icon for the SharePoint site, so simply do that and ensure you save it with a 256×256 pixel size.  Finally to make this icon the favicon for your site you’ll need to edit one more line…

<SharePoint:SPShortcutIcon runat=”server” IconUrl=”xxxx”>

Here you need to change the IconUrl value to be the location of the new favicon on your SharePoint server, this will be the same icon that is used on the toolbar and in the top left of the browser window.

Going further

In a future post I’ll show you how to take this simple code and do more with it, isolate it from browsers that don’t support it and create overlays of the icon on the task bar to show you there new things.

We’ve just released the results of a study of 1,979 IT Professionals and their opinion about the cloud and I decided to take the numbers and turn them into an infographic, you can get the full report and more here but the number of organisations using IaaS (48%) jumped right out at me.

Just a quick one to provide people access to the slides from todays OD unplugged session in London.  I can’t share my demo just now but I will record it…here are the slides for OD unplugged.  But also embedded in the post here courtesy of Windows Live and don’t forget to checkout Springboard and the Windows 7 Evaluation I mentioned.

And also here’s the productivity video from my session.

Securing and managing the devices that users take for granted when accessing the cloud is top of mind for IT Professionals everywhere and there are lots of solutions to make things more secure. What about desktops PCs? Everyone in the desktop world is accustomed to managing, patching, remote controlling and securing computers but are there new opportunities presented by the cloud? The answer is of course yes. Windows Intune is a new Microsoft product that allows you to manage Windows computers from the cloud, without the back end infrastructure normally associated with endpoint management.

One of the most striking benefits and one that resonates very strongly with those responsible for paying for business IT is the potential cost savings that come from not having to intensively manage infrastructure. Windows Intune is a pretty cool product because it allows for management of corporate PCs without the need to deploy costly servers and spend time engineering that back end infrastructure normally required in a corporate environment. Not only that but some interesting license benefits make Windows Intune exceptionally valuable for some organisations. First off lets understand what this new offering does.

Manage Windows Update

Windows Update is one of Microsoft’s largest publically available cloud services providing patches and updates to millions of computers around the world each day absorbing the scale required on busy days like patch Tuesday (the 2^nd Tuesday of every month when Microsoft releases patches). In fact if you every try to update a computer from Windows Update you’ll find that the service is out there, ready to serve. Contrast that to the “traditional” approach whereby you have a Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) server installed in your business to achieve control over the patches applied to corporate computers and you’ll see that, whilst its and essential service, it’s another server to run, another server to manage and another server buy. WSUS is perfect for some circumstances but increasingly whilst WSUS provides both local caching of updates and control over which are applied the caching is a reducing requirement with increased bandwidth.

With Windows Intune you have control over which updates are applied to which computers and when within your organisation. All updates are pulled from the highly available public Windows Update service though reducing the need for a local WSUS server. Why this need for control? Occasionally an update can cause issue with an incompatible line of business (LOB) application. Windows Intune allows you to group computers together to apply updates or to reject them so you can create a scenario just like I have in my test lab: I have a “testing” group that applies all Windows Updates automatically, when I’m sure they’ve not caused any issues with the applications running on those machines I allow my “corporate” group to apply the updates but I have a group of special machines ���CXO office” that only allow updates to be installed when manually approved. This scenario allows me to retain control, something that some people fear the loss of with cloud.

Malware protection

Windows Intune comes with anti-malware software built in that uses the Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection and Microsoft Security Essentials technology to provide a highly reliable yet simple to use solution. The testing I’ve done found every test virus in seconds as you’d expect but the notifications to the end user are simple, elegant, unobtrusive and easy to understand. The centralised management that’s built in lets administrators know that malware was detected and what action was taken to resolve the issue or if there was a reason that the issue wouldn’t be resolved lets the admin know what to do next. When it’s a known malware problem the admin is given detailed information from the Microsoft security response centre which makes their workflow even easier by giving them useful follow up hints.

Updates to the malware protection features are handled through Windows Update so as long as you’ve got an internet connection updates area available and they’re controlled in the same way as Windows Update. That makes it simple to introduce testing or validation if your business needs it.

Manage Windows Firewall

Increasingly with laptops and devices being more mobile a device firewall is essential and increasingly so within the corporate environment. Two examples for you of why they’re necessary. Firstly you need to defend those devices when they are used in less secure locations, like a coffee shop when your sales guys are having a meeting. Secondly within the corporate network you are likely having (lets call them) uncontrolled devices coming in, someone brings their mobile in and connects to the corporate WiFi network or the like. You don’t know what could be on that device so better to protect all your devices to some degree and one way is with device firewalls. Windows includes one as standard in all versions from XP to Windows 7 and Windows Intune allows you to centralise that management, to be able to push out policies to devices and even to be able to open or close firewall ports on those devices.

Inventory

Knowing what hardware and software you’ve got in your organisation is a critical task for most administrators and one that introduces enough pain that most hate the task: I know I once had to write a script that used WMI to interrogate more than 5000 devices! Windows Intune includes hardware and software inventory that reports back on what software is deployed to which computers and will simply tell you what hardware each computer has. The information can be used to populate spread sheets or create HTML based reports but critically it can be used to understand what you need to do to upgrade to Windows 7.

I’ll do licensing in a but every Windows Intune license includes Windows 7 Enterprise for the life of the Windows Intune license.

Monitoring

Not only do administrators get alerted about updates that have been missed or malware that’s been detected by they find out about all sorts of computer specific stuff that could be causing users concern. For example hard drive space shortages can be spotted and addressed by admins with a phone call explaining how to clean up some space, or by ordering a new drive. That’s the kind of shift in customer service that users love but that cloud represents, IT being able to add more value and do more with less.

Remote Assistance

One of the best tools for helping users is to be able to take control of their computer or even just to watch it whilst they explain a problem. For me that traditionally meant knowing some kind of information about the computer and obtaining that from the user was like pulling teeth… “I need your hostname”… “my hostname?”… “the name of your PC” … “where do I find that” … “right click Computer and select properties” … it says “Local Disk:C: , Devices with removable storage” … “no, right click” … etc. etc. sound familiar?

Windows Intune doesn’t need any of that, the user clicks a link in the Windows Intune client software and the administrator is sent a link to start a remote session. No back and forth or preamble, it just works.

Client software

The only software required for Windows Intune is a client application which when downloaded from the Windows Intune administrators console is unique to your organisation. From then on as soon as it communicates with the Windows Intune cloud service the computer is identified as your organisation and off you go. Zero client configuration required, just Next, Next, Next.

The back end

It’s a cloud service, there is no back end infrastructure to deploy. It’s that simple.

How much does it cost?

Ah now onto the always very worrisome licensing conversation. Except that it’s not a worrisome conversation and in this case I think you’ll like it. Licensing for the UK is £7.25 per month, per PC and included into that you get Windows 7 Enterprise installation rights for any PC that is licensed with Windows Intune. That means that for £7.25 per month per PC you can finally get them all to the same version of Windows and get the best possible Windows 7 experience. On top of that pay a little more 60p per PC and you’ll get the rights for MDOP…so you get App-V, Med-V, DaRT etc.

And to answer your question yes, if you have an EA it does get cheaper, and yes the more machines you have it does get cheaper, go over 250 machines and the price drops then again at other levels.

Is it right for you?

If all the above sounds fantastic then you’re probably thinking you’d like to investigate you can get a trial for 30 days free, have a look at http://windowsintune.com for details. Who are Microsoft aiming this at though? Well it’s perfect for smaller businesses that lack an existing solution and for larger businesses that don’t have the need for Operating System Deployement (OSD) or Enterprise Software Deployement (ESD) those are the two things that Windows Intune can’t yet do. It has however been tested up to 20,000 devices in an organisation, which will do most people I think.

And finally

I like when there’s an and finally part to a post, a couple of things that I think are brilliant about Windows Intune but that don’t get a lot of air time. It’s the cloud; that means that the infrastructure is run for you, so upgrades happen for you, when there’s a new version of Windows Intune there will be a smooth way to upgrade and Microsoft will do it for you.

Also because it’s the cloud the second the computer can see the internet it can see Windows Intune and the Windows Update service and that means that wherever that computer is you can manage it. You can deploy updates, update malware definitions, update anything else needed and provide remote assistance. That for me is the biggest advantage of Windows Intune, it could mean an end to devices brining in malware and such just because they’ve not been connected to a VPN for a while and not hit the antimalware and patch servers that are available only inside the traditional corporate environment.

What to do now

Get the 30 day trial to give Windows Intune a go yourself and don’t forget to download the trial guide to get the most out of the trial. You might also want to take a look at this video to see Windows Intune in action. Finally to get some support you’ll want to take a look at the Windows Intune Tech Center

There is a simple way to answer that, Microsoft has “lots” to offer in the cloud, arguably a more complete and coherent set of products than anyone else but then I would say that I’m an employee.  From a product viewpoint there are a myriad of offerings like Windows Azure, SQL Azure, Office 365 (currently BPOS) and Windows Intune is the newest into the stable of public cloud offerings not to mention Microsoft Dynamics.  Microsoft also has a full spectrum offering in the private cloud space too with Hyper-V Cloud (the combination of Hyper-V 2008 R2, System Center and a Self Service Portal).  Throughout the rest of this article I’ll outline what we mean by cloud and how we think about it and provide a window into each of these technologies.

What’s a cloud

When you engineer products you can’t  have some esoteric definition of a cloud you need some specific characteristics to engineer against and latch onto.  For this reason we use this definition of the cloud that provides some solid underpinnings and was created by the US Government National Institute of Standards and Technology.  The definition provides us a solid engineering foundation, I suggest a 5 minute read of the full document but the first paragraph is an interesting read, I’ve highlighted my favourite terms:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

If you feel that definition is still a bit woolly then we will come to more detail in a moment, but those key words should be set into your mind when thinking about the cloud.  This is how of them:

On-Demand = always available
Shared = reduced cost per use
Rapidly provisioned and released = Little management needed to add more capacity for use and to free it up again for someone else to use
Promotes availability = it’s available when and where you need it and easy to make use of

Part of the NSIT definition goes into service models too and lists Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS),  Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as ways of providing what users need.  Again this is a model that we follow and we’ve aligned our products and services around these.  It’s important too to understand the differences between the service models.

SaaS is a finished bit of software that an end user can just use.  This is where Office365 with it’s cloud based email and collaboration workloads sits and where other email services sit.  We’re very used to consumer facing SaaS solutions with Hotmail being a prime example.  Windows Intune and Microsoft Dynamics are our other public cloud based SaaS solutions, highly scalable, available, on demand applications.

PaaS is the foundation for building applications in the cloud and it’s where Windows Azure and SQL Azure sit.  The function of any platform is to provide a solid base upon which anything can be built but you don’t necessarily need to know how it’s underpinnings work.  For example to write a Windows application you don’t necessarily have to know the ins and outs of memory management.  With Windows Azure you don’t need to know that the platform manages a whole load of network components, servers and racks to get the job done.  Simply put platforms provide a level of abstraction.

IaaS is most akin to what we’ve seen for some time with virtualisation.  A lift and shift of workloads into an implementation that has the characteristics of a cloud.  It provides a simple slip road to the cloud but without the abstraction level of a platform, so it’s still necessarily to build a solution around the infrastructure itself.  One of the major signposts that should make you aware that something is an IaaS solution is if you need to place management around the solution to provide the characteristics of a cloud.  This is where Hyper-V Cloud lives.

Now that we’ve framed the general idea of a cloud lets look at Microsoft’s products.

Windows Azure

I’ve taken to starting with Windows Azure whenever I enter a discussion about cloud because so many people don’t get what Windows Azure is.  As above it’s platform that lets you build pretty much whatever you like and as such you’ll need some developers and an architect to design and build an application to sit on Windows Azure.  When they do that they’ll be able to create an application that has enough understanding about the role it’s performing to be able to take advantage of self scaling. 

Some people are beginning to think that Windows Azure is some sort of IaaS solution.  It’s not.  You can’t just place an existing workload into Windows Azure and take advantage of the cloudiness without architecting the solution to take that advantage.  I guess part of the idea that Windows Azure has some IaaS characteristics is that we’ve made some solid improvements like the ability to RDP into a Windows Azure role or that they web roles run a fully functional IIS (Internet Information Services) server exposing a bit more of the roles Windowsyness.  However Windows Azure roles are stateless and that takes some getting used to.   I think it’s enough of a mind shift (that nothing persists on the role between reboots that’s not in the original image) that you can see you need to design specifically for Windows Azure.

Windows Azure is the place for new stuff.

SQL Azure

SQL Azure is a highly scalable SQL infrastructure.  A database on SQL Azure is to all intents and purposes just the same as a data base on SQL Server which means that all those existing DBA skills are still valid and valuable.  The secret sauce of SQL Azure is that it’s got failure built in (just like Windows Azure).  Hang on! It’s build to go wrong!  Are you MAD?  Nope, it’s built so that when something fails it keeps on going; every bit of data is stored 3 times in the data centre in a fully redundant way.  When something does go wrong the live copy is switched and the second copy is used to build a 3rd live copy a little like a RAID5 array of SQL Servers (but obviously it doesn’t use RAID).  SQL Azure is a superb highly available SQL environment and you could pop almost any existing SQL database onto it, you could place your existing customer database there now if you’d like.

Office 365 and BPOS

And now we segway into Software as a Service Solutions which unlike Windows Azure and SQL Azure are ready to use no development required.  BPOS (uncommonly known as Business Productivity Online Suite) is the currently available public cloud productivity service which provides Exchange and SharePoint features.  Office 365, which will be released later this year, is the new generation of productivity and differs because provides Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Lync 2010 provided as public cloud services and in some licensing scenarios, that we expect to be the most common, the full Office 2010 Professional Plus application suite to install locally.  It doesn’t end there though because the SharePoint 2010 collaboration features include Office Web Apps that allow documents to be editied in the browser without the need to have Office installed locally.  Essentially it does everything for productivity.

For me though the killer feature, being an IT Pro, is that Office 365 integrates with what you already have.  You don’t need to create a whole bunch of new user accounts and manage passwords and the hassle that entails because it can be safely integrated with Active Directory for authentication and to provide that ever so useful Global Address List for your company.

Probably the major reason people will go for Office 365 is the dramatic cost savings and ease of migration.

Windows Intune

Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to manage all the client computers in your organisation without having to deploy a server infrastructure to look after them?  That’s what Windows Intune does, cloud based management of client computers.  If provides the ability to manage Windows Updates, Firewalls, to do remote control, to inventory to understand software in the organisation and to ensure license compliance for Microsoft products.  Oh yes it also comes with malware based on award winning, enterprise scale and consumer loved technology out of the box and to be able to manage that malware defence across the whole organisation from the web.

Hyper-V Cloud

And we’re into the home strait with IaaS for which Microsoft provide the Hyper-V tool set.  Microsoft don’t host a public Hyper-V Cloud that you can place your workload into, instead you can take the Hyper-V Cloud guidance and implement your own private cloud (one that’s for the sole use of one organisation) or select a hoster that provides a hosted Hyper-V Cloud and offload to them.  Why doesn’t Microsoft do this?  Hosters are able to better meet the bespoke requirements of those seeking to use IaaS today, you can have a more bespoke service provided by a hoster.

Hyper-V Cloud is the combination of a couple of technologies because virtualisation alone (Hyper-V) does not create a cloud – anyone trying to tell you it does hasn’t RTFM recently.  To meet the definition of a cloud there must be some automation and intelligence so System Center is added to the mix to provide that (System Center can successfully manage VMware by the way as part of cloud without the need to convert the VM to Hyper-V).  That covers the shared and rapidly provisioned and released parts of the NSIT definition but a 3rd component is required to cover on-demand: a self service portal.

The self service portal is the friendly face to the Hyper-V Cloud, it’s what the users (er) use to access the clouds resources when they need them.  Need a HR workload, turn it on.  Need a Finance work load, turn it on.  The Self Service Portal is created by the Administration team in conjunction with the owners of those applications from HR and Finance (or any other arbitrary team that has a function) so that people within those departments never need know about networking and hard drives and servers and bits and bites and ip addresses and … they just need to know they need a HR Application.  Back to a level of abstraction.

• Written by Simon May a Microsoft IT Professional Technical Evangelist.
• You can read more by Simon at Simon’s Client and Cloud blog. 
• Follow Simon on twitter @simonster

This article was originally posted on the Cloud Power Blog at ITpro.co.uk

When you read all the wonderful marketing hyperbole around the cost savings that cloud can help your CIO make, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you were one of those cost savings. With a little thought, however, you’ll see that this technology change isn’t going to make you a pointless cost, but it will make you a valuable driver of efficiency and savings, and you’ll probably find that work becomes more fun .

Most of us get into IT or Technology because we love technology. A big, big part of that for me has always been that it’s constantly changing. Unlike being, say, an accountant we get the rules thrown up in the air every few years. We have to learn a whole lot of new skills in order to make those adaptations and that’s always been the way that technology has worked. We are, however, just coming to the end of one of the longest periods of IT stagnancy we’ve arguably ever seen where a global economic crisis combined with “good enough” technology to deliver a period of stability few of us in technology have had before. A stable period like that leads to many things, one of which is the dulling of our learning skills. Time for a change.

What are the top skills required as we move into the cloud era, how do you gain them and how will your job change?

The number one skill you’ll need in the future is going to be business knowledge,  Just like everyone else in your business,you will need to know how it works. Many IT Professionals already do and please don’t take what I’m saying wrongly –  it’s not that I believe that IT Pros are out of touch with the business – that obviously depends on your individual circumstances. Broadly speaking, though, experience tells me that not many IT people know their business. I left financial services IT not so long ago (I think it’s 8 months) and I can handon- heart say that most of my colleagues didn’t know an option from a guilt or what shorting is (I’m not sure I do), but perhaps more applicable, lots of IT Pros don’t understand the pressures that marketers or sales people are under and how they can help. The best do understand this, and aligning with the business in this way is the best way to do more with the cloud.

In terms of technical skills, though, here are my top 4.

• Understand the technologies that power cloud. There are some fundamentals that you really need to grasp before you get the cloud in its entirety. Until you do “Do not pass go, do not collect £200”. As luck would have it, those technologies are ones that you are probably already familiar with, the cornerstone being virtualisation. Why do you need to understand that technology? Well, the answer is because everything in the cloud is virtual. Virtual storage, virtual computers, virtual networks – nothing is real, unless you work for a hoster. You don’t need to understand the specific technology, just what it means to divorce software from hardware – which really is that you can’t manage hardware, only software, so, for example, no network card hijinks to make something work.

Second, you need to understand the idea of cost. You need to understand that doing anything in the cloud costs money, just as it does, in a hidden way, in your own data centre. I’ll give you an example. You have data stored in the cloud but it’s not been accessed for six months. You need to pay for that storage. The same on-premises you’ve already shelled out for the hard disk. That understanding of cost will soon make you realise that you need to store some stuff in the cloud and some stuff not. For example, event logs from a web role for today – yes, store them in the cloud. Event logs for last month – no, archive locally or delete all together. Gaining this level of understanding will revolutionise what you do and clear clutter.

• Connection technologies for traditional models to the cloud. Moving to the cloud takes some time. You need to build up confidence in your own mind (and in the mind of the business) that it’s possible, safe and sometimes better to move to the cloud than keep something on premises but also that  it might not always be the right thing to do. There’s a much bigger hurdle in moving to the cloud versus putting in something new because there’s already a reliance on that infrastructure (insert good word) doing something, be it generating revenue or handling some business critical function. You need to understand how to link the two together.

So which technology is that for the Microsoft cloud technologies? For Windows Azure you need to know about Active Directory Federation Services and Windows Azure Connect, with a little of Windows Azure Service Bus. If you’re thinking Windows Azure is just for devs then ask yourself this question: “Do the devs understand networking, Identity and all the rest of our infrastructure?” You also need to know PowerShell and System Center to be able to manage the cloud, but we’ll come to that in point 3 in more depth. You’ll find an understanding of SQL Azure DataSync will be seriously helpful if you want to use SQL Azure, too. If you’re making the move to Office 365 you’ll again need to understand ADFS, and you’ll also need to understand DirSync.

• Know what your business needs to measure and monitor it. Knowing what’s important to your business and how the technology marries up to that is critically important. You need to be fully aware of what’s required and what’s important so that you can ensure it happens. You need to make sure that services are available to the business when they need them and not when they aren’t (or at least dialled down). There’s a misconception that the cloud has this automatic elasticity that scales things up and down as it sees fit. It doesn’t really work that way.

OK, it can work that way if the designers and developers built-in intelligence that really delivers that. With Azure they have use of an API to control scale based on the needs of the application. They need to have enabled that functionality and it’s not always the right thing to do. The classic example is pizza demand in the super bowl ad break – more orders = more capacity instantly added. That’s the reality but it doesn’t cover every eventuality. Imagine for a moment said pizza experts also know that the super bowl is happening, if they prepare for those additional instances then they have a better chance of hitting the demand at the right time, especially if the devs did something complicated too that meant that each additional role took 10 minutes to become live. Yes, it’s possible to code around that, but easier to work with an IT Pro to smooth those obvious peaks and use code to work for the unexpected.

Measurement and monitoring tied to business knowledge will allow you to deliver higher levels of value and be more of a hero. The reality is that you don’t need that deep an insight into the business to deliver exceptional value, and you can do this better with cloud because you’re no longer spending time keeping it running. Instead, you’re now helping them generate more money by matching demand curves.

• Understand how to govern the cloud. You’re going to get into serious trouble if you don’t look after customer data and the like. You need to know when employing cloud technology is the right thing to do and when it’s the wrong thing to do. You also need to understand what it takes to trust a cloud provider. Here are some questions that you might like to pose or research:
• Can I get an assurance of where my data is held?
• Can I get an assurance around uptime?
• Can I get an assurance about the practices that the provider uses in their data centre?
• Can I find out about who’s auditing a provider?
• Can I found out what testing and certification a provider has provided and what it supports?
• Can I find out how the provider is trying to move the industry and regulation forward for its customers?
• Can I found out how I exit the contract?
• Do they give me time to read the contract?
• Wait – there was a contract?!
• Have we built applications that adhere to our own practices?
• Have we deployed the application in a compliant way?
• What’s the update process, where are the patches, what’s the security like?

You need to have an understanding of all this stuff to protect your customers and your company, and I can assure you that you can find all the above information for all Microsoft products. You’ll find most of it on the web or by asking your Microsoft team – I’m not going to point you to it because you won’t believe it if a company man tells you. OK, that’s not entirely fair – take a look at my blog and you’ll find the start of the breadcrumb trail.

So now you’re reading that list and thinking that’s not technical. You’re right, it’s a ruse.

Actually it’s all technical because all technical knowledge is knowledge about how things work. Most of this knowledge requires a technical expert to relate it clearly back to the business. It leverages your understanding of how things work and builds your intuition and intelligence to trust or distrust. Go forth and change the world of IT.

This article was originally posted on the Cloud Power Blog at ITpro.co.uk

In todays Tech.Days online we’re covering Security Integration with the Cloud using Active Directory Federated Services (ADFS). Active Directory Federation Services might seem an obscure topic for a Tech.Days session of its own, but it will be a core skill for a cloud administrator as it allows domain joined desktops/users to seamlessly work with Microsoft’s cloud services. Sign up here.

You can see what else is coming up in the Tech.Days online series here and don’t forget that you can see our previous sessions online now.

Last night I had the opportunity to present at the Windows Management User Group an event organised by our excellent System Center MVP Cliff Hobbs.  Cliff asked me to present on “Microsoft’s cloud strategy” something that’s tricky not because it’s something we don’t have, far from it, but because it’s a challenge to bring the whole cloud together, explain what it means and why it works and importantly for this user group – how to manage it.  Embedded below is my presentation from the evening – you’ll also be able to get it from the WMUG site along with the video we recorded.

One final thing, here are the links to the trials and stuff that are in the presentation.

• Windows Azure: http://bit.ly/azureoffer
• SQL Azure: http://bit.ly/smsqlazure
• Office 365: http://office365.com
• Windows Intune http://windowsintune.com
• Microsoft TechNet UK: http://bit.ly/tnuk
• My blog: http://simon-may.com

If you find Windows 7 deployment options to be confusing you might find this handy new – stick it to your wall and refer to it daily – tech sheet to be rather helpful.  The Windows 7 Deployment Options for Small and Midsized Businesses printable overview is one of those things you can print and stick to your desk to make your colleagues think you know what you’re doing…of course you could also try the deployment learning portal for a similar effect .

A few days ago as part of our Tech Days online series I did a webcast on how to deploy Windows 7 using free tools like WDS, MDT and WAIK and that practical deployment webcast has now been made available online.  We’re running these three weeks out of every four (we need a week to prep) and you can findout about the rest at the Tech Days site where you can also find out about the Tech Days event in May which is going to be pure brilliance itself!

I’ve been sat on this for a while and since it’s some time since I mentioned MDT I thought it was worth a very short post to endorse the great work that Dave Coleman (@Davecoleman146) created.  Dave’s got some excellent insight into using MDT “in the real world” for doing proper deployments.  Check out his book, via the download on Dave Coleman’s blog here.

I’ve just hopped down off stage from presenting about the above at Data Centre World and I wanted to share my deck so the people in the audience who didn’t fall asleep can get hold of it quickly.  I got loads of questions about Identity and less about Hyper-V than I expected.  Any who there are some nuggets in this on connecting stuff and I don’t think we’ve articulated our cloud in this way before.  Seemed to work, but possibly too much info?  The presentation is embedded below from my Windows Live SkyDrive.

Applicable Limited, a Microsoft Partner in the UK has rebuilt its website at http://www.applicable.com using SharePoint 2010 with the help of an extended team drawn from its own service delivery group, and associate Microsoft Partners with specialist development and design skills.

Applicable chose SharePoint 2010 because of the enterprise social collaboration and web site themes of the 2010 release. You can read from Microsoft directly about the capabilities of SharePoint 2010 so I won’t repeat that positioning here, but this isn’t just a web site it is a response to the culture shift towards social enterprise collaboration we are observing in the community that includes our customers, suppliers, partners and competitors.

In building the site Applicable kept in mind several objectives:

• To clearly position what the company does, and showcase its capabilities in managing and hosting its own complex SharePoint 2010 farm.

• To provide a razor sharp focus on the purpose of the business, what is going on ‘now’ through social media including Twitter, YouTube and Linked-In; and case studies, services, information for the CIO or head of IT, and positioning about cloud collaboration services.

• To provide a focus area for key partners including Microsoft. Driving potential customers to very specific pages, with a call to action, to respond to our marketing.

• To engage with people outside Applicable; from customers, partners, suppliers, and even with competitors. Engagement is two-way. Static web sites do not foster two-way engagement. Consequently the site must be editable by people with no special skills in web formatting or HTML.

Together with our partners, we achieved all these objectives, and more.
There is one click access to the topics we are interested in engaging with customers about, as well as all the usual information such as links to events, offices, partners, products and jobs. The sites contain SharePoint 2010 blogs and enterprise wikis for specific information, and have different permissions pertinent to the teams responsible for them.

Curating content is being devolved to managers in the company who use the Office 2010 style ‘ribbon’ user interface in the browser and the WYSIWYG editor to edit directly the content for which they are responsible. Content owners do not require special knowledge of web content management technologies in order to achieve their objectives. All that is required is the ability to use Office 2010, and a web browser. The AJAX enabled interface means that most end user actions do not require page load, making for a very positive user experience.

To keep the main pages under control there is a light touch publishing workflow to ensure governance of the main content pages.

Keeping the content on the site fresh and engaging was a major goal for the SharePoint implementation too. Bliss Systems, a specialist development partner, built our Social integration with Twitter, and several custom format regions through special Applicable web parts for SharePoint 2010. Our Twitter feed @appl1cable is on the home page. The web part is reused inside the site to highlight focus areas and events by twitter hashtag.

The Applicable.com SharePoint site runs on a server farm, with an additional SQL Server 2008 backend, which is setup in a mirror configuration across 2 datacentres for high availability.
The SharePoint servers and SQL Servers are running Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit.

The SharePoint servers are virtualised servers which have been assigned Dual CPUs and 8GB of RAM each. The use of virtualisation combined with the ease of adding additional servers to the SharePoint farm, allows for rapid expansion of the farm if resource requirements increase.The content databases are stored within SQL Server on a NetApp SAN which also allows us to provision large amounts of extra disk space when and if required and gives very low latency access to the SQL content which is at the core of SharePoint.

The farm is hosted within a datacentre with 1 Gbit/s bandwidth and links to other international networks to allow for fast page loads when combined with the virtualised hardware. The front end web servers accept incoming requests and serve the site content, while indexing and searching – synchronisation with Active Directory and the central administration of the site is separated.  The web servers are separated in a DMZ network to provide the best security and separate the website from the SharePoint administration and our Active Directory environment. Only limited traffic is allowed to reach the web frontend servers on port 80 and any traffic destined for our internal network will be filtered by an additional firewall level.

The combination of Applicable best in class service delivery capability plus specialist help from Microsoft Partners with the skills required has allowed Applicable to deliver the new site with the latest technology, hosted on its own high availability infrastructure, with a great set of engagement capabilities that can be adapted and grown to support business objectives for the foreseeable future. Of course everyone involved learned a lot as well, and that will directly help Applicable SharePoint customers as they look to move to the latest release to enjoy these benefits for themselves.

Angus Fox, Product Management , Applicable Limited @appl1cable

Now that SP1 is pretty much out there for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 it’s far off time to start thinking about upgrading things in your Hyper-V environment.  I’ve been running the RC version of SP1 on my Hyper-V laptop for a while to get the benefits of Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX, but what about when I need to move over to the final bits?  Well this is the process taken from KB2489240 :

1. Start all of the virtual machines and upgrade them from the Beta or RC build to the released build of SP1 using the following steps:
  a.  Uninstall the Beta or RC build of SP1 on the virtual machine
  b.  Reboot the virtual machine
  c.  Install the released build on the virtual machine
  d.  Reboot the virtual machine
  e.  Shutdown the virtual machine
2. Remove the RemoteFX video adapter from each virtual machine using Hyper-V Manager or System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1

3. Upgrade the Hyper-v host from the Beta or RC build to the released build using the following steps:
  a. Uninstall the Beta or RC build of SP1 on the Hyper-V host
  b. Install the released build of SP1 on the Hyper-V host
  c. Reboot the Hyper-V host
4. Re-install the RemoteFX role service on the host(it will be removed in Step 3-a above)
5. Add the RemoteFX video adapter back to each virtual machine using Hyper-V Manager or System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1
7.  At this point the virtual machines should be able to boot up and RemoteFX sessions can be established to them

So why all this complexity?  Well you need to update the Hyper-V integration services and the operating systems on each virtual machine to get everything working just so.

A few weeks ago @deepfat and I ventured to the underground lair that is Churchills war rooms and listened to the story ouselves direct from a partner, Inframon.  Well the videos are now online and I especially like this one about our private cloud vision.  Take a look, enjoy, it’s just like you were there…without the bomb proofing and lack of phone signal…unless you live in a bomb proof bunker in which case best of luck to ya!

If you want to check out the rest, then they’re just here:

War on Cost event: Attack the Costs and Complexity of managing mobile devices in your enterprise
War on Cost event: Microsoft Private Cloud Story
War on Cost event: Microsoft Keynote – Desktop and Security Convergence
War on Cost event: Keynote from Gordon McKenna, CEO at Inframon

War on Cost event: Microsoft keynote – Datacenter to the Cloud
War on Cost event: Heterogenous Management with Operations Manager 2007
War on Cost event: Operations Manager R2 and V.Next
War on Cost event: Service Manager – the Better Together Story
War on Cost event: System Center Configuration Manager v.Next Highlights
War on Cost event: Datacenter IT Process Automation (Opalis)

Last week I posted about how to use the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit to plan your deployments of Windows 7 and Office.  In the same vein I’ve noticed an article on the Knowledge Base that brings together tons of resources to help you to go beyond and do more.  The article provides resource to help plan your Office 2010 rollout and provides links out to some really helpful resources like these two which stand out for me:

Deploy Office by using System Center Essentials. Provides detailed technical guidance on the processes and procedures when you use Microsoft System Center Essentials to deploy Office
Office 2010  / Office 2007

Deploy Office by using Microsoft Application Virtualization. Provides detailed technical guidance on the processes and procedures when you use Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) to deploy Office in a medium-sized organization.

Funny what turns up in the KB.

On January 1st 2011 Estonia joined the single EU currency and is now getting to grips with using the Euro on a daily basis.  Funny thing is with money that it affects all sorts of things, not least the layout of all those keyboards!  Imagine everyone in Estonia now needs a new keyboard with the correct symbol.  Also they need the correct mappings for the keyboards.  Luckily we’ve released updates to make that happen but it’s a good time to explain the manual way of changing currency.

1. Click Start, type Change the date, time, or number format in the Start Search box, and then click Change the date, time, or number format in the Programs list.
   Note If you are prompted for an administrator password or for confirmation, type the password, or click Continue.
2. In the Region and Language dialog box, click Additional settings under the Formats tab.
3. Click the Currency tab and then change Currency symbol from kr to €.
   Note If you have applied the update that is described in the "Resolution" section, and you want to change the currency symbol to the earlier version, click the Currency tab, click to select € in the Currency symbol list, and then type kr.
4. Click OK two times to apply the change.

After you make this change, the new currency symbol is displayed as your system currency in all Windows and Microsoft Office products.

Over the holidays I got into a sticky situation where I needed to use my Laptop as an access point to share a network connection. But it doesn’t give you much of a chance to change IP settings so if you have some other device that uses an overlapping IP range you might need to change some settings, thankfully there’s a KB on How to Change the IP Range for the Internet Connection Sharing DHCP. service.  It involves editing the registry so don’t forget to backup the registry first.

To change the IP address that is assigned to the host and the IP address range that is used by the DHCP service on the Connection Sharing host, use Registry Editor to change the following values. These values are located in the following folder:

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\services\SharedAccess\Parameters

• (REG_SZ) ScopeAddress
• (REG_SZ) StandaloneDhcpAddress

The ScopeAddress value is set to the address range that you want to use with Connection Sharing. The StandaloneDhcpAddress value is the address range that is used when Virtual Wi-Fi/SoftAP is enabled. For both values, a network mask of 255.255.255.0 is used and is not configurable.

A couple of days ago I had to head into London for content creation of a different kind, being interviewed about cloud by PC Pro and IT Pro, so it was time to break out the small Evangelism bag because I didn’t feel I needed the weight and capabilities of the Large bag.  So what’s in the small evangelism bag?  Again a deep zoom is available.

To list the contents though:

• HP EliteBook 2540p – My work horse and general purpose laptop.  4GB RAM, i7 640 4 cores, 300gb HDD.  It does the job perfectly every task it’s thrown works well and the keyboard is very good, the track point and nipple don’t have the problems of the other EliteBook.  Shame the colour isn’t matched to the other one.
• Amazon Kindle – Brilliant device, I use it like paper, sending documents to it to read.  It’s better than paper because I don’t loose it.
• 3 Broadband dongle – £5 per month for 1GB and I always have access to the web.
• USB sticks – Odd how these get given to me, I never used to have any.
• The Bag – Is from IKEA it was really cheap but it’s actually nice, small and handy.

A very nice chap just wrote to Rachel asking for help with a problem* I think a few other people must have experienced so often so I thought I’d share how to fix it.  I just hope I’ve got it right from the problem description.  When clicking a link in an application, like your email program, you get an error that says “Application not found” and Internet Explorer doesn’t kick in to handle the link.  Basically Internet Explorer isn’t known to the PC as the default browser and nor is anything else so you get the error.  It’s simple to fix:

In Windows 7

Click Start and type default programs into the search, then select Set your default programs.

Then from the list select your broswer and click Set this program as default

Next select Set program access and computer defaults, select your browser under Choose a default web browser and click OK

That should sort things out.

If you’re on XP, it’s just a little different:

• Go to Start and select Set Program Access and Defaults
• Then select Custom and select the down arrows to the right, select the browser you would like to use (I recommend Internet Explorer and click OK

Then you should be fixed.

*people often writer to Rachel with problems, some of them are unprintable but she appreciated them all

The first step in any Windows 7 deployment is to start by understanding what your current environment looks like and what you’ll need to do to get your machines to meet the minimum system requirements or even better the recommended requirements.  The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP Toolkit) is a toolkit that lets you do that and the newly released MAP Toolkit 5.5 can be downloaded here along with full documentation.  In this post though I’m going to talk you through the steps you need to take and I’ve created a video that takes you through it too.

The MAP Toolkit is an agent less discovery tool which means that it’s easy to deploy and use since you only really need to install it onto one machine on your network and it can do the rest.  There are some pre-reqs for using the tool though.  You’ll need Microsoft Office 2007 or (obviously 2010 is best) and you’ll need SQL Server Express Edition installed on the PC on which you’ll run MAP.  You might be wondering what Office is used for:  The MAP toolkit creates pre-baked reports for you that you can use to help justify any required upgrades.

Once you have Office on the PC you need to install the MAP toolkit and as part of that installation SQL Server Express will be downloaded or you can provide a previously downloaded install.  You then setup a database to store the information that the tool collects.  That’s really all there is to setup, it’s quite simple and it’s covered from 00:00 to 2:56 in the video.

Next you’ll scan your network in order to gain an understanding of it.  To do this click Inventory and Assessment Wizard and then determine how you want to scan from various options including looking in AD and scanning using an SCCM database, a file containing a list of computer names or a range of IP addresses.  In the video I choose AD and an IP Address range as I know that I have some PCs that I’ll want to consider upgrading that aren’t members of my Active Directory Domain.  If you selected AD as a scanning option you’ll need to provide creds that give the tool access to AD DS to find computer accounts, for an IP range you’ll select the start point (for example 10.1.1.1) and end point (10.1.1.255).  IP Ranges don’t have to be contiguous or any such.  You then provide creds for the machines and an order in which to try multiple creds, so you can provide a Domain Admin account (eek) and a Local Administrator account.  Finally the scan runs and WMI is used to query each machine and populate your database. (2:56 to 6:28)

The next step is to dig through the data.  For the purposes of understanding Windows 7 compatibility use Windows 7 Readiness and for Office 2010 compatibility use Office 2010 Readiness, Internet Explorer also has a readiness check too.  These panels only provide you, the IT Pro doing the work, a view of what’s out there.  To produce something you can show the person with the purse you need to produce some reports by selecting Generate report from the task pane on the right. (6:28 to 9:21)

Once that’s done you’ll get reports that list more detail and tell you what you need to do to upgrade specific PCs.  In my video I have an XP PC with just 64mb of RAM so that will need an upgrade to the Windows 7 Professional minimum of 512MB. (9:21 to end)

The MAP Toolkit is a great tool to have in your box and as it’s free using it is a no-brainer really.  You can download MAP 5.5 here and for more info on Windows 7 deployment check out springboard.

So it seems pretty popular to share the contents of your gadget bag again.  Mine however is more of an Evangelism bag than gadget bag so what does your average IT Pro evangelist carry with him on day to day adventures?  To find out I’ve created a deepzoom of my bag contents thrown around the floor.  This is my Large bag, I have various sizes depending upon what I need.

So before we get into what’s in it, lets do the bag first.  It’s a Ogio Metro in blue with Bing logo.  It’s the most comfortable back pack I’ve ever used, so much so I bought the wife one for Xmas – lucky her!  The best thing about the bag is space for 2 laptops, which is kind of hard to find out there.  So what’s in it (clockwise from the bag):

• Sony Bloggie MHS-CM5 – Great little pocket HD (720p) camcorder.  Great because it has 5x optical zoom and it goes with me most places, just in case I need to capture something.  When I have my a55 with me I use this one as a back up or a second angle.  It lives in a case from a pound shop.
• HP EliteBook 8540w – My powerhouse and for Hyper-V and Video Editing.  8GB RAM, i7 720 Proc (8 HT cores), 500gb HD, 250gb SSD.  It’s fast, does everything but the track point and nipple buttons suck.  The aluminium finish is nice.  I currently have 11 VMs running at once thanks to Dynamic Memory.
• HP EliteBook 2540p – My work horse and general purpose laptop.  4GB RAM, i7 640 4 cores, 300gb HDD.  It does the job perfectly every task it’s thrown works well and the keyboard is very good, the track point and nipple don’t have the problems of the other EliteBook.  Shame the colour isn’t matched to the other one.
• External Hard Drive – 500GB used for stuff
• ArcTouch Mouse – perfectly flat and the most portable mouse ever.  The dongle is permanently in the 2540p (I’d love it to be Bluetooth but get why it’s not)
• Wash bag – I tend to need to wash
• Business cards – Its nice when people call me
• Pen – to write my real phone number on the business cards
• Amazon Kindle – Brilliant device, I use it like paper, sending documents to it to read.  It’s better than paper because I don’t loose it.
• 3 Broadband dongle – £5 per month for 1GB and I always have access to the web.
• USB sticks – Odd how these get given to me, I never used to have any.
• Charger for my HTC Mozart from Tesco
• A spare Ethernet cable and through connector because I never know when I’ll need to plug in.
• Oh and spare batteries.

If that’s the large pack (which weighs more than a small but cute cow) what’s in the Extra large one?!

I spent much of last week at the crazy busy BETT education fair at Olympia showing people Office 365 and meeting some very interesting techies working in schools, collages and universities all over the country.  I had a lot of misconceptions about the type of IT Professionals working in education before I got there, most were blown out of the water and my thoughts reset.  I’ll get a video of the Office 365 stuff out later this week…

Scale was the first thing I wrongly assumed.  I thought that schools would be small, but it’s the opposite.  Mail administrators in schools face a battle of provisioning hundreds of mailboxes each year, archiving old ones and constantly managing their users and storage requirements.  AD DS administrators face the same but with the added complication of load as every student logs on 4 , 5, 6 times a day as they move between classrooms.  Those AD DS servers are taking a battering folks and they need to be up to the job.

I was expecting lots of people to be stuck in the dark ages – and some are – but many are not.  Schools are readily adopting cloud technologies to cope with the scale and flexibility they need to provide.  Many have rolled out Windows 7 or are planning to do so in September.  Many are using Hyper-V to virtualise (the ones who aren’t are very actively looking to ditch Vmware because of cost), application virtualisation and VDI and RDS are hot technologies too as schools look to make it easier to rollout application updates.

Saving money is high on the agenda as you’d expect so using virtualisation, cloud and making their infrastructure easier to manage are top of the agenda.

Security is paramount.  Firstly they have lots of kids doing the Bring Your Own Computer thing and it’s causing infections and virus outbreaks a plenty – except those schools that have deployed NAP (Network Access Protection).  Secondly I was showing off a bunch of slate devices and the critical thing there is that they can be encrypted preventing anything that the kids do with them such as taking pictures with the web cams from falling into the wrong hands.

There are lots of people doing clever things with Windows 7 and much of what’s used in the class room, like digital white boards and interactive projectors are useful in the board room or the meeting room.

The best thing though was that there was a palpable enthusiasm for using technology to help reduce cost and more importantly help our kids to learn in better ways.  It seems education is a space full of early adopters and a good segment to watch for ideas.

Office 365 Beta gives you automatic access to Forefront Online Protection for Exchange to protect the mail flow into your Office 365 environment.  We recently released a guidance document that includes some of the known issues and some of the scenarios for more advanced mail flows.  The document discusses the following scenarios in depth but there’s also a video available if that’s more your cup of tea.

Fully hosted scenario—Email flows exclusively through the cloud (Internet), without any interaction with on-premises servers. For more information, see Fully Hosted Scenario.

Shared address space with on-premises relay scenario—Email is hosted partially in the cloud (Internet) and partially on-premises, and mail flow is controlled on-premises.

Internal mail flow scenario—Both the sender and the recipients are within the same organization, and the organization has mailboxes both in the cloud and on-premises. However, unlike the previous scenario, not all mail is controlled by the on-premises mail server. In this scenario, email is sent between the cloud and the on-premises server without being sent to the Internet and FOPE skips all filtering operations.

Outbound smart host scenario—FOPE acts as a smart host, redirecting outbound mail to an on-premises server that applies additional processing before delivering mail to its final destination. However, incoming mail goes straight to the Exchange Online servers without passing through an on-premises server. You may want to consider this option for your organization if you have an on-premises application or other compliance solution you use to filter outgoing mail and you also want the benefits of FOPE edge, virus, policy, and spam filtering.

Inbound safe listing scenario—Email is sent inbound through FOPE to Microsoft Exchange Online from a trusted organization. In this scenario, FOPE is configured to skip IP address filtering on inbound mail sent from IP addresses specified in a safe list. You can also configure FOPE to skip policy and spam filtering.

Regulated partner with forced TLS scenario—Forced inbound and outbound transport layer security (TLS) is used to secure all routing channels with business regulated partners.

There’s no way to get access to the Office 365 Beta right now but you can get a BPOS trail if you’d like to see how exchange online works.

Licensing is a complex subject and to be honest it’s not one that I talk about much because it’s a complex discipline in and of it’s own and there’s too much fun stuff to talk about in the client and cloud world.  This document, Licensing Windows 7 for Use with Virtual Machine Technologies tells you all you need to know about licensing with Software Assurance and Windows 7 on Virtual Machines.  Such nuggets as if you have Volume Licensing, an SA and the Windows 7 Professional Upgrade License (Volume Licensing Upgrade License) or Windows 7 Enterprise then you can run 4 virtual copies of Windows 7 on a server or desktop, just like this:

What’s more there’s a great FAQ in the document, some of which is worth calling out:

If I install and run four additional copies of the operating system, do I have to use Windows 7 Enterprise as the host operating system?

No. You may use prior versions of Windows, including Windows Vista Business and Windows XP Pro. In addition to third-party product to host the four virtual machine environments, Volume Licensing customers have some flexibility in how they can deploy Windows 7 in their organizations.  As a benefit of Software Assurance coverage for Windows desktops, customers may leverage virtualization use rights.  This use right allows running the software in up to four local virtual machines.  While a customer’s right to use Windows 7 Enterprise may survive the expiration of their Software Assurance coverage, the Virtualization Use Right does not.

Can I store my virtual machine in a .vhd file on removable storage media and open the .vhd file on another PC?

Yes, as long as both PCs are licensed for Windows VECD and are not already running more than three copies of the software.

Can other users remotely access virtual machines that I’m not using on my PC while I’m using my PC?

No. The use of the software is limited to one user at any given time.

How do I license my employee and contractor owned PCs so that they have access to my centralized desktop PC environment?

Employee- and contractor-owned devices can be licensed with Windows VECD, which enables them to remotely access your centralized desktop PC environment. Additionally, for devices with a pre-assigned Windows 7 Professional license, they may run the permitted instances locally in a virtual machine on the Windows VECD licensed device.

Go grab the document here (email it to your Licensing dude if you aren’t a licensing dude) and learn about Desktop Virtualisation

Over Christmas I decided to have a really good read so I got hold of MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-680): Configuring Microsoft Windows 7 by Ian McLean and Orin Thomas.  Over the years I’ve read a ton of self paced study guides and I find them to be a really good way to learn, or in this case to consolidate knowledge, of a product.  Having read lots of these books I can tell you that some really do suck.  Sometimes they aren’t written in an engaging way.  It’s not that they need to be a novel or have some kind of story line, really I just want the facts.  But I do need the language to be accessible and a little bit conversational.  Ian and Orin have delivered both the facts and the context.

The book’s structured in a very sensible way.  It tells you what it’s going to tell you, tells you, then tells you what it’s told you.  It’s a tried and tested technique that helps you revise as you go and beds the key points into your head.  The summaries are written in a way that covers all the basics from the lesson and jogs your memory.  There’s also constant questions that help you to make sure you understood what you just read.  The companion DVD helps with practice exams and a few extra resources.

One of the best things though is that there are two scenario questions at the end of each chapter and they’re written in a way that really gets you thinking and applying what you’ve learnt.

So what’s bad?  The answer is: not much.  If I had one complaint about the book it would be about using it in ePub format.  The issue is that it’s tricky to use the practice questions in the book using eBook because it means switching from, say, the middle of the book to the end of the book, finding the answers and then finding where you were again.  Bookmarks help but it would be much better to have the answers just after the questions.  It won’t stop me using eBooks from now on, but it would be a very welcome improvement.

One of my favourite features of the book is a the real world examples that Ian and Orin have thrown in.  They give you some good examples of how what you’re about to learn is useful in the real world.

The proof however is in the pudding and this being an exam training kit the pudding is exam 70-680.  So last Friday I went and did the exam, you can see how I found that here.  The book though is really good preparation for the exam, but it’s not good enough on it’s own.  There were questions that were not well covered in the book because they were quite tangential and that’s where an IT pros experience comes into play.  If you haven’t deployed and administered Windows 7 yet you might struggle so I’d suggest grabbing another book like Troubleshooting Windows® 7 Inside Out by Mike Halsey to augment your experience.  Or if you’re a book lover read the far too excellent for words Windows 7 Resource Kit (like I do when I need to sleep!).

To help you get through, you’ll need to get a free Windows 7 Enterprise trial.

Being a bit of a fan of exams (!) on Friday went to a lovely little training centre in Wokingham and sat a couple of hours worth of exams, 070-680 and 070-685.  Thankfully I passed both and I can now report back on them, just like I did with the MTA exams.  The first thing to say is that these were, just as you’d expect, much harder than the MTA exams requiring both depth and breadth of knowledge of Windows 7 and how to deploy, manage and troubleshoot it.  Why are they worth it?  How did I study?  What’s next?

When I started my IT career just over 10 years ago I met a bunch of guys who had their NT4 MCSE and I also had a boss who knew his onions, the guys he hired with MCSEs knew their onions too, they didn’t just have the bit of paper.  They formed my view of why it’s important to be well trained and why it’s worth getting the cert.  What I learnt was that studying Microsoft’s products according to the official curriculum helps you flesh out all the facets and features of a product that you might not necessarily see in your day to day life.  Overall the biggest thing that certifications do is make sure you cover all the bases and widen your knowledge.

Some people expect that when they get a certification they should suddenly earn more money.  Wrong.  Some people expect that when you get a certification you should suddenly get a promotion.  Wrong.  It’s about how you apply the skills you’ve learnt to your business and add value, not about a bit of paper.  There’s one place that certs matter and that’s when you’re getting hired as a contract employee.  In my experience certifications get you past the junior recruitment consultants who vet CVs.  When you’re passed there you are back to how you’ve applied your skills again.

So why are they worth it?  Studying for a cert improves your knowledge and that improves the skills that you apply to your day to day life as an IT Professional.  I think of extra skills as extra tools in the kit bag, making me more capable in more situations.

Over the years I’ve developed a pretty good understanding of how I learn, every IT Pro probably has.  The way I do it is to grab a nice thick study guide, in this case I used MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-680): Configuring Microsoft Windows 7 by Ian McLean and Orin Thomas (review here tomorrow) and I grabbed it in eBook format from Safari Books Online downloaded it to my Kindle and took it away with me to Tenerife over Christmas.  There I proceeded to read it all, including all the bits I thought I knew.  As always in those sections I picked up new nuggets of knowledge that I’d never picked up before.  When I got back to the UK I sat down a couple of days before the exam and did all the exercises that I don’t do all the time…I use MDT quite a lot so I skipped those.  Finally I read all the chapter summaries over again in one sitting.  Essentially I was packing my brain with focused information about what I needed at a particular time.

I could not have done the exam with just that information.

If I hadn’t had experience to apply to the scenario questions in the exams there is no way I’d have made it.  In fact I didn’t think I had made it on either exam until I got the results.  The current crop of exams are really taxing.  They aren’t as taxing as the Windows NT to Windows 2000 upgrade exam but they really aren’t easy.

For me certifications are also a matter of professional pride and I don’t under estimate what that professional pride will drive me to.  I used to work in a team (of contractors) where certification was a competitive sport and that’s still with me.

So what’s next?  I’ll be doing Exam 70-686 next but I’m currently proofing some books and reading previews of others so it’ll probably be a few months.

An interesting paper crossed by virtual desk today;  Privacy in the Cloud: A Microsoft Perspective.  It does exactly what it says on the tin and spells out our approach to privacy with regard to cloud applications.  It’s one of the most detailed papers I’ve seen that we’ve produced yet and it’s a must read for anyone interested in the issues of putting your data into the cloud (any kind of cloud) and how we will help to protect and secure it.  The paper covers everything from Private cloud, Public Cloud, Hybrids, SaaS, Paas, IaaS and how we look at privacy with respect to them as well as consideration of International boundaries.

It’s interesting to read about just how much of a focus there is inside this place on privacy, there are standards that we adhere to like The Microsoft Privacy Standard for Development (MPSD) which helps ensure that privacy and data protection are systematically incorporated—from the ground up—into Microsoft products and services.  There are 40+ people dedicated to privacy and over 400 who ensure that our policies and procedures are applied to those products and services.

Some of the standout stuff for me:

Microsoft Privacy Principles
Accountability in handling personal information within Microsoft and with vendors and partners
Notice to individuals about how we collect, use, retain, and disclose their personal information
Collection of personal information from individuals only for the purposes identified in the privacy notice we have provided
Choice and consent for individuals regarding how we collect, use, and disclose their personal information
Use and retention of personal information in accordance with the privacy notice and consent that individuals have provided
Disclosure or onward transfer of personal information to vendors and partners only for purposes that are identified in the privacy notice, and in a security-enhanced manner
Quality assurance steps to ensure that personal information in our records is accurate and relevant to the purposes for which it was collected
Access for individuals who want to inquire about and, when appropriate, review and update their personal information in our possession
Enhanced security of personal information to help protect against unauthorized access and use
Monitoring and enforcement of compliance with our privacy policies, both internally and with our vendors and partners, along with established processes to address inquiries, complaints, and disputes

I’d suggest comparing Microsoft to others, see if you can find their information on the subject of privacy and security and their business processes….

You can download the paper here but it might leave you wanting to dip your toe into Azure or BPOS

Rooting around in the details of things that we’ve published recently and I found this interesting guide for how Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 (FEP) was deployed to thousands of clients within Microsoft.  The deployment has delivered a reduced SLA for policy enforcement from more than 1 day to just 4 hours and provides an holistic view of over 100,000 clients.  Not only that but because FEP builds on System Center 2007 there was little need to deploy extra infrastructure and bandwidth usage is tiny at about 50kb to 100 kb per client.

After being on the receiving end of this rollout I can say it was really slick and seamless.  I won’t repeat the entire case study but it’ll be of interest to anyone looking at implementing FEP or even at deploying any kind of security software.

Get the case study here

[EDIT I’ve fixed the hyperlink!]

Sound scary?  Well it’s not, but it’s critically important in spurring cloud adoption in your organisation and therefore a set of key skills for IT Professionals.  We have a technology toolset called Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS 2.0) that uses a set of secure protocols like SSL and Public Key encryption to provide Single Sign On to applications that are not hosted inside your network.  It doesn’t even require a physical connection between your Active Directory Directory Service (AD DS) and the application, or even for you to dangle your AD DS on the internet like tasty shark bait.  In fact you don’t even have to place your AD DS into a DMZ.  All this means you can provide secure single sign on…but why would you and how do you?  (hint the how is at the bottom).

Lets take a look why.  What are the applications that your users use most frequently and easily?  Probably Word, Excel, PowerPoint…then probably some line of business apps (LOB).  How do people sign onto those LOB apps?  If you’re in a good place then they don’t need to, they just launch the app and get signed in automatically but if you aren’t then they probably need extra user names and passwords.  How many helpdesk calls does that create?  What perception of IT services in your organisation does that create?  I know, I’ve been there….the answer is usually lots of calls, poor perception.  That user experience can be better with simple AD authentication for the application.

The pain not having single sign on with a cloud application can be extreme.  Imagine this scenario:

But with ADFS 2.0 in place all that has to happen is that the user remembers their Windows password and logs in.  Just once and it’s far more secure because your organisation is in charge of the password reset policy, the complexity policy and most importantly – because they don’t have to remember lots of passwords they stop writing them down on their desks.

We’re pretty serious about this being a major piece of the cloud for the IT Professional, so much so that both @deepfat and I took two days out a week or so ago for offsite training on how to build ADFS 2.0 infrastructures.  It’s not all that complex either…once you have an understanding of PKI.  But to make it even easier you’ll find whitepapers that take a step by step approach to the technology just here: Single Sign-On from Active Directory to a Windows Azure Application Whitepaper .  Not only is this essential for Azure it’s also essential to know for the best possible Office365 integration.

A couple of days ago I received the beautiful Arc Touch mouse through the post from our company store.  Got to say it lives up to what it says on the tin, it’s an Arc, it’s got touch sensitivity and it’s a mouse.  Hardware does something that not all software does in my mind, it creates an instant connection and I think it’s because of the kinaesthetic relationship that only hardware provides.   The moment you touch this mouse it feels high quality.  The flexible tail feels soft and you want to stroke it a little.  The glossy buttons are almost reflective and I found myself catching the light on it.  The scrolly bit, which includes haptics (little vibrations) to provide the feedback of a wheel in a flat form factor is cool.  In fact it’s not just haptic, it makes a subtle clicking noise so I found myself holding it next to my ear.

That’s pretty good, sight, touch and sound all in the first few seconds of opening the box.

Oh yeah the box is cool too, it’s got a little magnetic lid on it.  Nice.

**At this point I’m going to point out that I didn’t smell it**

The usb nano receiver is nice and small 18mm if you check the picture below, and if holds onto the mouse with a very strong magnet.  As you’d expect there’s no software to install, super simple.  The blue track laser has worked on every surface (including glass) that I’ve tried it on.  Love it.

Here’s some photos of the little puppy to enjoy (all captured with my Sony a55 and 30mm macro lens).

You’re trapped by snow, you tried to escape in the car but hit some ice and and skidded into the curb at less than 10 mph and bent your wheel axle.  There’s limited mobile reception.  There’s internet but only directly connected by cable to one PC.  You’re a geek who needs to work and that involves 2 laptops.  Your wife also needs to work on her laptop and connect to work remotely.  Your hosts , providing the house to keep you warm, also need to be able to work…this was the situation I found myself in (and still do) this weekend.  The answer, turning one of the laptops into a WiFi hotspot and sharing that single Internet Connection (aka SoftAP)  And also calling the car insurance!

So what’s involved?

Well first off I turned a laptop into an WiFi hotspot, which is simple with the right drivers from Intel and Windows 7.  What happens here is a virtual network adapter is created to handle to the hotspot traffic.

netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=SiWiFi key=password

Once the connection is setup you need to share whatever network connection is providing internet access with the new hotspot.  To do that simple open the adapter settings, select the sharing tab, tick the box and select your new virtual network adapter. Obviously change SiWiFi and Key= to a ssid and key that you like.  This can be used to share any internet connect, be it coming from WiFi or from Mobile or a wired connection.

The next step is to start the new adapter and hotspot whenever you need it done with a simple command at the command line:

netsh wlan start hostednetwork

Finally connect to the hotspot as you would from any laptop to a wireless hotspot.

I remembered hearing about this ages ago from Long at iStartedSomething.com but I got the detail from MSDN this time around and if you don’t like the sound of this in your corporate environment then this video on Edge will help you prevent it being used in your organisation.

My buddy @deepfat and I were just having a chat and we thought we’d see if we could work out how much kit you guys are huggin.  So we’ve produced a couple of posts, mines on the desktop…his is on Servers.  So here’s my magical poll….

I first saw this earlier in the week and thought it was a brilliant project, but I didn’t take much of a look under the covers as it was embedded on someone else’s site, might have been my boss’s blog.  Anyway this project uses the Lync 2010 SDK and that makes is super amazing because it shows some of the cool things you can do with great software, connected people an SDK and a bit of code.

LED Christmas Lights as IM presence indicators from Andrej Kyselica on Vimeo.

Hi I’m Andrew Fryer and I have hacked into Simon May’s blog, to show you how more power uses less power.  I was checking out the latest technical goodness on the Dell stand at TechEd and I noticed they had a couple of their laptops hooked up to power meters one of which was a trusty old Dell 630 the other one of their state of the art machines sporting an Intel i7 processor. The rig shows how power management on the newer processors is surface through the Dell firmware to Windows 7  to carefully control the power used compared to what was possible 4 years ago. 

I grabbed a member of the Dell team briefed him on how to make movies on my Canon 60D and made this…

When you hit a web page you send lots of requests to lots of places to get all the content for the page be it images, scripts embedded videos or adverts.  When that request happens the people who you’re requesting that stuff from also get to learn what you’re viewing when you send the request…that’s how you get adverts specific to what you’re looking at (or have looked at) and sometimes specific to your location.  Being a tech savvy TechNet reader you probably know that, but do the users in your organisation?

It’s a guess but some possible do, most probably don’t.  Why would it matter that someone serves up an advert to someone in your organisation based on what they’re looking at?  Well generally it wouldn’t but they also get information about your browsing habits and (if one were to don a conspiracy theorists hat) one might say that it was possible to gain intelligence about what your company were considering doing.  For example if a job advert site found that lots of your employees were browsing for new roles a week before you announced your profit and loss would that or could that be used to imply financial uncertainty at your company and therefore affect the stock price?  It’s a way out there but it could happen.

Internet Explorer 9 will have features to help you manage this type of risk and a couple of days ago we announced something new, Tracking Protection.  In essence this means that you can define a list of sites that you only want to send information to if you EXPLICITY visit them (or you can subscribe to a list of sites so you don’t have to micromanage it).  By explicitly visit I mean if you click a link to a site or if you type the site into the address bar.   Practically this will result in you seeing less advertising and lower the risk of phishing attacks or other types of attacks that haven’t even been thought of yet occurring.

It’s another example of the exceptionally high level of innovation in the IE team that the moment.  We had something similar in IE 8 with InPrivate Filtering which was dynamic and based on heuristics (or learned behaviour) but, whilst it’s pretty darn good, the end user experience can be unpredictable and you couldn’t control it.  Tracking Protection will bring the ability to subscribe to multiple RSS based tracking filter lists and as a result nothing stops you from defining a corporate one and layering it over a public one.

You can read more on the feature at the IE blog but you should be giving IE9 a try now in your test environments (hint moving to IE9 is going to be a cinch!)

I was just surfing about our sites as you do and happened across this rather interesting little video that covers some of the reasons that Outlook is better for business than Gmail.  As an ex Gmail user I wasn’t thinking about this stuff when it was just me using Gmail on my own but it’s hard to see how it can work well in a corporate environment.  The amount of time a PA needs to be able to see resource availability or to securely (or in a SOx compliant way) access someone else’s info is frequent enough that they’d surely get pretty frustrated pretty quickly.  The need for BES servers to be on premise and for remote wipe to be a pain in the butt must cause lots of pain for IT Depts too.  Anyway the video walks through some scenarios quite nicely and only takes a couple of minutes.

One of the top cloud questions I get asked when I’m out and about is “how secure is my data in the cloud”.  It’s a simple question with a complex answer that spans dimensions, physical security, data redundancy, data protection, service levels and an underlying reliance on everything being trusted because it’s out of your own hands.  Traditionally your business would have been trusting you, the IT Department, and that trust would have been based on the premise that you’re part of the organisation and so working to a common goal.  So how do you build up trust if you’re in an outsourced situation where your data is being looked after by a cloud provider?

Mutual pain

Well if you look at the basis of the reasons that you trust the people in your IT department (and conversely the reasons why you loose trust) you start to gain a peak at the answers.  First and foremost the people in your IT department were probably employees or contractors under a contract of employment to provide services, 37.5 hours of work for example, in exchange for remuneration.  In a cloud or outsourced situation it’s fairly obvious that this is a very similar relationship.  You have a contract with your provider and you pay them to perform the the level of service that you agreed with them when you last renewed your relationship.  So you (and they) have the protection that the contracts affords you both.  With Microsoft if we don’t match up to those levels of service we give you a discount against the time you have remaining on the contract – so much like you could dock an employees pay for not turning up to work.  This builds trust because you have an element of mutual loss if something goes wrong.  If you had an employee and they didn’t turn up to work one week would you probably prefer not to have to pay them than have them work for an extra week (and possibly not turn up again) for free. 

Skills and training

Being well skilled as an IT Professional is essential and everyone expects their IT Department to be well skilled.  In the scenario of a cloud provider you want to know that they really know what they are doing.  You want to be able to see that they’re running this stuff, just like you want to see people in your IT Department running the same laptops as their users, you want to know that a cloud provider is using it’s own stuff.  We do.  This builds trust in two ways, firstly because you know that you share similar values to the company providing the service, we tend to trust people who are like us.  In a business situation it’s actually comforting to know that you’re trusting people who are in it to make money, but it’s also important to know that there’s more to it than that like pushing things forward with innovation in the right space.  In addition we also have International Organization for Standardization / International Society of Electrochemistry 27001:2005 (ISO/IEC 27001:2005) and Statement of Auditing Standard (SAS) 70 Type I and Type II attestations.  Which is a bit like trusting an employee to do a job because they have an MBA from Oxford.

Management

I’m pretty positive that 99.999% of people reading this will have a manager.  Even if you are the CIO you have a manager, they’re called shareholders or owners or partners or your family.  They tend to make sure you are doing the right things in the right way.  In most larger businesses this role gets devolved to a compliance or risk manager who overseas operations to make sure they’re done in the right.  You trust them, again usually through a combination of some of the above but their over watch assures trust in other people and helps you correct mistakes.  In cloud computing we’ve recognised this in buckets and so all good vendors strive to achieve the highest standards and to be audited with regularity.

Microsoft’s data centres were recently granted authorisation to operate under FISMA approval allowing them to host US Federal data.  That means that Microsoft has met a whole bunch of requirements and recommended security controls that the US Federal government requires to be in place to allow customer data into the hands of a 3rd party, in other words the US Government trusts the processes and procedures behind our data centres.  The same is true of passing those ISO/IEC standards they require upkeep and management.  In fact there’s a bunch more:

• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard – Requires annual review and validation of security controls
  related to credit card transactions.
• Media Ratings Council – Relates to the integrity of advertising system data generation and processing.
• Sarbanes-Oxley – Selected systems are audited annually to validate compliance with key processes related to
  financial reporting integrity.
• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act – Specifies privacy, security, and disaster recovery
  guidelines for electronic storage of health records.
• Internal audit and privacy assessments – Assessments occur throughout a given year.

Transparency

Experience tells me people loose trust in their IT Departments due to lack of transparency.  The best laptops go to “special” people.  The most senior guys get “admin” accounts.  The IT Guy lords his skills over someone not from IT.  People don’t know the progress of their problem tickets.  Transparency around process and procedure goes a long way, a very long way, to helping give people trust in a system or cloud vendor.  With our cloud services you can actually see the processes we go through to run our cloud, so can anyone else who fancies doing it right.

Trust at depth

Security at depth is a term often used to describe how you get more security by layering different security sub systems (AV, Spyware, Patching, Encryption) on top of one another.  I think the above represents a similar idea for trust.  You know you can trust your cloud provider because they provide you with a number of indicators, some of which will be comfort some necessity, that build up into a model of trust.  Also there’s some law to revert to if you are in doubt.

Now that you know that you’ll be wanting to try Azure, BPOS or Office365 and you might find this whitepaper useful.

Tomorrow Scott Guthrie (aka ScottGu) will be donning a red shirt and revealing the future of Silverlight.  There’s also the chance to pose questions to the Silverlight team directly and to get some training.  It’s a one day event streamed live and direct to your desk / coffee shop / IT dungeon.

The event is here and starts at 9am Pacific Time or 4pm in the UK

Last week we released the new Lync Server 2010 and Lync 2010 client, the replacement products for Office Communications Server and the OCS client.  I’ve been using Lync for about the past 4 months internally and it does some amazing things for communication in your company.  Having just joined Microsoft from the outside world I can say that some of what you get is revolutionary:  Integrated presence across email, IM, voice, document sharing and with APIs extensibility of that to your own applications; the fact that you never need to remember an extension number, you just call a person; voice over IP that doesn’t splat a large graphical approximation of a phone handset on your screen obscuring what you’re actually doing.  Those are just a few things Lync 2010 does, and that’s not without getting into the sizable cost reductions…

You won’t want to take my word for it though so I introduce you to Vicente Fraser from The London School of Business and Finance.  Vicente has already deployed Lync because he felt that his business (which is 400 employees strong across 4 continents) would see immediate benefits, and it has.  I sat down with Vicente last week and had a chat with him about it.  We also talked about implementation, user training, administration and call routing.  Once you’ve seen this you might want to grab the Lync 2010 180 day trail download or if you don’t have some tin, try the hosted trial.

They’ve made initial savings of £20,000 and the rollout costs have already paid for themselves…in fact the amazing thing about this is a that the Financial Controller, Michael, doesn’t even think that the ROI they’ve seen is all encompassing enough.  Because Lync touches him personally he can see beyond ROI and sees how Lync’s powering Flexibility and Expansion.

When you connect your Windows Phone 7 device up to the cloud you get a whole bunch of abilities through the windowsphone.live.com portal including the ability to remotely change device passwords, to locate your phone and to remote wipe your phone.  What you might not realise is that when you connect a device to an Exchange account you also get the ability to do a remote wipe thus giving corporate level security to your device.  Rather than detail the steps I recorded the following little video of the process:

If you don’t have a BPOS account you can get one by signing up for the FREE trial

A few minutes ago I rocked over to the ultra high tech Microsoft Learning centre and took a few exams, just for some Friday fun…I might need help!  I’ve always been a big fan of certification (when it’s done right).  I started on the road to MCSE in NT4 back in the day, completed that, upgraded to 2000 and have kept things going since then.  There have been lots of changes to the programme though over the past decade (GULP!) and we now have a set of exams designed for the new crop of IT Professional entering the business out of the academic world.  The MTA.

Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) certification helps schools teach and validate fundamental technology knowledge [and] provides students with a foundation for their careers

That’s a pretty darn important thing in the ultra competitive market and I thought it was a great idea when I was at Uni to do my MCSE to get me real world experience – I then rocked into a better job for more money than most of my peers.  Nice.

What I can say having just taken the exams is that they’re pitched at about the right level, they aren’t super deep dive exams that require the depth of experience of a seasoned IT Professional but they are exams that let you demonstrate to an employer that you’ve got more of a grasp of Networking fundamentals and Security fundamentals than you might just get by attending some lectures.  The Windows Server 2008 exam was actually quite tricky, offering up some more complicated Active Directory Directory Services questions that you wouldn’t be able to answer without some real world experience.  To my mind that would make it a perfect exam to round out an industrial placement or internship year.

If you’re an employer looking at a candidate with these exams you can rest assured that your not just getting someone who’s sat through some lessons.

I took:

• Networking Fundamentals: Exam 98-366
• Security Fundamentals: Exam 98-367
• Windows Server Administration Fundamentals: Exam 98-36

But there are developer VB.net and C# focused exams too to prove your skills.

As a result I can now add this logo to my business cards and blog and I’ve got a greater chance of standing out.

If you want more info on the MTA program and how it builds into the MCTS exams then check out the Microsoft Learning website

I was just thumbing around the Sysinternals site (for some handy tools for a deployment I’m doing) and happened across Mark’s PDC presentation which he re-ran at TechEd Europe last week and which I happened to be at.  It’s a fantastic way for the IT Professional to understand some of the (very) interesting back end of Windows Azure.  How it works, what it does, what fabric is, how it heals how it deploys how it all bolts together.  When you’re done watching the vid, go get an Azure trial.

I was just pointed at this post on Springboard and it’s too good not to share…it’s written by  Dave Trupkin, Senior Product Manager for App-V and Med-V and gives a nice overview of our desktop virtualisation technologies.  It includes  video interviews and breakdowns of the technologies that are worth a watch and read, a quick summary if you aren’t sure what the technologies offer, courtesy of the Windows for Business blog:

User state virtualization enables user mobility and fast recovery of data in the event a device is lost. Because the data is stored centrally and delivered on demand when the user logs in, they get their Windows experience immediately regardless of the location they log in. If they lose their primary device, IT delivers a “vanilla machine” without needing to copy any data. Microsoft offers roaming profiles and folder redirection to address user state virtualization.

Application virtualization enables IT to deliver applications much faster to their end users with fewer interruptions. With streaming, applications are delivered on demand when the user needs them, not when IT decides to push them. Application updates happen automatically on launch without the requirement of installation or rebooting. Overall, it reduces IT labor effort in all aspect of the application lifecycle to deliver higher-quality, more responsive services to the business. Microsoft offers App-V and RemoteApp for local & hosted virtual application delivery.

OS Virtualization offers benefits in two areas. When installed on a local PC it allows you to run two versions of Windows simultaneously on the same device to address legacy application compatibility issues. I described this in my MED-V 2.0 Beta post last month.

If you’re looking to make sure that your enterprise desktops are secure and all to the same level then you’ll want to check out the recently updated Security Compliance Manager tool and with Windows 7 in your environment you’ll be wanting the Windows 7 settings pack.  Full details of the pack are available in the TechNet library.  Why is this tool useful?  Well the solution accelerator team have the best answer:

Since the release of the Security Compliance Manager tool, one of the most frequent requests has been to add all of the available Group Policy settings to the Microsoft-recommended baselines so that they can be accessed through the tool. While our baselines include hundreds of settings, there are hundreds of additional settings available in Group Policy. In response to this request, the team has created setting packs. The setting packs include the basic information required by the Security Compliance Manager tool to define custom baselines that you can use to create GPO backups, DCM configuration packs, and SCAP content. This is a temporary solution to address this request. A future version of the tool will provide the capability to add the settings customers need to their baseline without using a setting pack.

To learn more about Windows Deployment check out Springboard