Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Google tries to convince customers that Gmail is “just as good as Exchange Server” – which most Exchange administrators naturally laugh at.  More incredibly, Google also claims that Outlook seamlessly integrates with the Gmail service and that there’s really no difference.

People:  There’s a BIG difference.

Outlook’s got a litany of problems when used against Gmail through Google Apps Sync.  Here’s a short list of some of the problems & missing features that end users will soon discover.  Buyer beware.

• No public folders access
• No shared calendars available in Outlook
• No task syncing
• No conferencing integration
• Web client interface different than Outlook
• User delegation cannot be managed from Outlook
• No notes syncing
• No distribution lists offline
• No follow-up flags
• No server-side rules
• No categories!
• No ability to recover deleted items!
• No ‘Tentative’ meeting status
• No optional attendees
• No attachments in appointments
• No rich content in appointments
• No subfolders
• No shared contacts folders

I wanted to make sure you were aware of upcoming System Center product and licensing changes as you may want to take advantage of today’s pricing on some of your planned projects. 

In December 2009, Microsoft acquired Opalis, an industry leader in I.T. Process Automation or “Run Book Automation” software.  Opalis software provides new ways to help reduce costs, improve IT efficiency, and free up resources. This can be achieved by replacing manual, resource-intensive and error prone activities with standardized, automated processes.  Together, Opalis and System Center enables IT leaders to deliver a truly dynamic datacenter by integrating data center tools and automating, orchestrating IT processes across them. Dow Chemical achieved a 30% reduction on operational costs and reduced actionable alarms by 66% and response times dropped from 17 minutes to less than 3 minutes per alert. Watch the video case study.

These powerful automation capabilities are available to System Center server management suite customers via a grant from the Opalis subsidiary, at no additional cost until August 1*, 2010.  Customers who purchase or have purchased System Center server management suites (SMSE/SMSD) will be granted licenses for Opalis capabilities along with our emerging Service desk, CMDB capabilities (“Service Manager”) for the servers they are managing.  There are no additional license fees until August 1, 2010. However, the price of our server management suites will increase on August 1, 2010 so take advantage of the cost savings now before this pricing change occurs. The estimates for this increase are around 30% for SMSE and 70% for SMSD licenses.

As you might already know, the SMSE and SMSD suite provide a simple, flexible and economical way to license both physical and virtual server infrastructures to be managed by the four main System Center components (System Center Server Management Suites FAQ). Those components include:

• System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2
• System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2
• System Center Data Protection Manager 2007
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2
• System Center Server Manager (New to SMSE & SMSD)
• Opalis (New to SMSE & SMSD)

We’re excited about these new components in the System Center server management suites and wanted to communicate the upcoming changes so you can take advantage now.  We would be glad to demonstrate these new capabilities for your team and help you evaluate the benefits.

I forgot about this post on the Windows Engineering blog that we put up back in January 2009.  It’s a very interesting article on how to properly tune your Windows configuration to extend the life of your laptop’s battery.  What makes it interesting is this chart in particular which explains what uses the most power on your notebook:

MORAL:  TURN DOWN YOUR DISPLAY’S BRIGHTNESS & SET DISPLAY TIMEOUT TO 2 MINUTES
Got it?  Hopefully that makes things pretty clear up front.  The component that is the single biggest consumer of power on your laptop is the LCD display and reducing it’s brightness can SUBSTANTIALLY enhance battery life – far more so than any other component on your machine.  Even better still, enable your display’s timeout function to something aggressively short – like 2 minutes.  This will kill power altogether to the display saving you even more battery power when you’re not using the laptop. 

In comparison, functions like Intel’s “SpeedStep” that adjusts processor power via the hardware doesn’t affect your battery life that dramatically in comparison to the power used by your LCD panel.  In fact, if you’re running Windows 7, the operating system itself will dynamically set the utilization of the CPU depending on how much processing you need so you can minimize power consumption even more flexibly in comparison.

(Now what’s missing of course is the DVD ROM drive.  That’ sucker CHEWS power but it’s assumed that most people don’t use it all that much.  That it of course unless you watch DVDs on your laptop in which case, you’re in for some dramatically shorter battery life.)

For more on this topic, visit the Windows Engineering blog post that this references:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/06/windows-7-energy-efficiency.aspx

In case you haven’t been to them in a while, here’s the link to the Microsoft Technet IT Professional Forums:

• Microsoft Technet IT Professional Forums
  http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-us/categories

What’s interesting is that a number of forums have been added in the past few months that may be of some interest to you folks.  Naturally they still have Exchange Server, Windows 7, Configuration Manager, BizTalk Server, Forefront, etc.  but did you know they have specific forums for the following technologies?

1. App-V General Sequencing
2. Microsoft Office 2010 Volume Activation
3. Microsoft Office 2010 Application Compatibility
4. Windows Performance Toolkit
5. Office Communications Server Certificates
6. SharePoint 2010 – Using SharePoint Designer and other customization
7. Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
8. SQL Server Reporting Services
9. Virtual Machine Manager – VMware
10. Opalis v5/v6 General
11. Cross Platform Solutions for System Center

The Microsoft Security Response Center launched a Twitter account:

• Account: @MSFTSecResponse (http://twitter.com/msftsecresponse)

To quote the MSRC: 

“We will use this account to augment the content here on the blog. For example, we will use the account to rapidly respond to emerging issues while we are gathering information for a more complete blog post. In addition, we will also use the account as a way to push content to our followers quickly.

You probably will not see us responding to each reply or request that we get but we will be listening there and when we see emerging issues and trends, we will respond in a more general way to the entire community.”

If you’re a Microsoft-focused IT Professional, this is probably the one Twitter account from us you should bother to follow because while the tweet count will be low, when they post, you’ll likely want to know about them immediately.  For example, this was posted just a few hours ago:

“Advance notification: We will release 11 bulletins next week 5 Critical 5 Important 1 Mod addressing 25 total vulns http://bit.ly/c0fglv”

The Security Compliance Manager is the next evolution of the Security Compliance Management Toolkit (SCMT) Series. We’ve taken our extensive guidance and documentation and incorporated it into this new tool, enabling you to access and automate all of your organization’s security baselines in one centralized location.

The Security Compliance Manager provides centralized security baseline management features, a baseline portfolio, customization capabilities, and security baseline export flexibility to accelerate your organization’s ability to efficiently manage the security and compliance process for the most widely used Microsoft technologies.

Take advantage of the experience of Microsoft security professionals, and reduce the time and money required to harden your environment. This end-to-end Solution Accelerator will help you plan, deploy, operate, and manage your security baselines for Windows® client and server operating systems, and Microsoft applications. Access the complete database of Microsoft recommended security settings, customize your baselines, and then choose from multiple formats—including XLS, Group Policy objects (GPOs), Desired Configuration Management (DCM) packs, or Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP)—to export the baselines to your environment to automate the security baseline deployment and compliance verification process. Use the Security Compliance Manager to achieve a secure, reliable, and centralized IT environment that will help you better balance your organization’s needs for security and functionality.

Send any questions or comments to the development team: secwish-AT-microsoft-DOT-com.

For more information:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=113940

• DOWNLOAD: Security Compliance Manager
  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=182512

Our regional Sharepoint Specialist write this list of links and products up for a customer of ours that talks about:

• What Development Best Practices & Guidance should be given to Sharepoint developers to ensure good development practices
• What Operational tools are available to monitor Sharepoint Servers for more than just uptime but also utilization & security
• What processes should be practiced from an operations perspective to continue to maintain a Sharepoint farm

DEVELOPMENT

• Developing SharePoint Applications:  This is our latest guidance on building custom applications in SharePoint.  It provides sample/reference projects and various best practices with various aspects of the development process.  (There is a CHM file in the download for this that is a great place to start.)
  SharePoint Design Basics: This gives some guidance on some of the fundamental challenges that developers will encounter when building SharePoint applications.
• SharePoint Server Developer Center: This is a great starting point for most of our documentation around SharePoint development.  This is just one of those sites that’s good to know for reference on how to accomplish various tasks.
• SharePoint Developer Training Site:  This site contains some really good training and learning materials on various topics related to SharePoint development tasks.  Includes webcasts, online videos, samples, and more.
• Development Best Practices Checklist (non-Microsoft blog post):  Checklist of general things to keep in mind when doing SharePoint development.
• 10 Best Practices For Building SharePoint Solutions: This article is specific to SharePoint solutions (which should always be used in SharePoint development).

UTILIZATION

• Enable Usage Reporting in SharePoint:  This is how to configure the usage report capabilities of SharePoint out of the box.
• Nintex Reporting 2008:  Tool from Nintex that provides various types of reports on SharePoint usage, trends, and system activity.
• Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint:  Tool from Quest Software which gives more detail in the usage and security of SharePoint
• Universal SharePoint Manager v2007:  Tool from iDevFactory that provides reporting on: Account Security Management, Environment Management, Sites Management, List & Item Management, User Management, and more.
• AvePoint SharePoint Monitoring & AvePoint SharePoint Report Center:  SharePoint Monitor provides a real-time, graphical topology of your entire Microsoft SharePoint environment, including all your servers and their functions, relationships, roles, services, and system health. It lets you explore your entire deployment, with search filters by Domain, Server Name, IP address, and Site Collection.

OPERATIONS

• Best Practices Resource Center for MOSS 2007:  This site helps with information to keep your system available and performing well.  Includes everything from planning to ongoing maintenance.  Look at the Operational Excellence section for ongoing best practices.
• Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for SharePoint:  This tool will check for common issues and best security practices. The tool generates a report that can help you optimize the configuration of your system.

An Information Week Bank Systems & Technology Webcast:
Increasing Customer Retention and Growth with Microsoft Dynamics® CRM and Customer Effective

 Date: Thursday, April 15, 2010
Time: 9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET
Duration: One Hour

Learn how you can improve your competitive advantage by increasing customer loyalty while improving efficiency, and developing more profitable relationships.

Firms are seeking a fast, flexible, and affordable solution that drives consistent, measurable improvements in every business process. See how FSIs can streamline business processes, reduce complexity and IT costs.  Microsoft Dynamics® CRM provides an easily customizable, scalable platform that integrates with current systems and allows firms to expose the infrastructure for the development of new products and channels.

Hear from industry experts how to gather consistent customer data in a single information repository for a better view of customers, including better understanding of each customer’s worth and better ability to enhance and cultivate profitable customer relationships.   Microsoft Dynamics CRM improves customer insights by providing the tools and capabilities needed to help financial services firms increase employee productivity, grow revenue, attract and retain profitable customers.

Find ways to deliver the right information to frontline staff and consistently enhance the customer experience across all channels of your organization.  Customer Effective helps financial services clients maximize their relationships using solutions based exclusively on Microsoft technology. As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, they are Consultants and Solution Implementers serving midmarket and enterprise financial services organizations worldwide. Customer Effective delivers business process automation and collaboration solutions and has engaged in hundreds of Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation projects since the product’s release in 2002.

Registration:
https://www.techwebonlineevents.com/ars/eventregistration.do?mode=eventreg&F=1002183&K=CAA1ACc

Hewlett Packard.  God, you make me proud to have once been a former HP’er in Palo Alto.  Any other graduates of the SEED program out there?  Can I get a WOOT WOOT?

Damn.  This is so “in-your-face” fantastic is makes me giddy like a frickin’ school girl.  Built-in Camera:  In the front AND the back for photos or video conferencing.  USB-connectivity.  SD Memory Slot.   Flash compatibility.  Docked redirection to a flat screen.  Just imagine HP yelling at you:  “PWNED.  Now take your damned medicine before I hit you again so hard, your children will feel it.”

Do you manage a web site?  Would you like hands on tools that enable you to control how Bing exposes your web site to the world through searches?

This whitepaper “Bing Webmaster Center FAQ” provides answers to webmasters’ frequently asked questions regarding Bing webmaster tools, the IIS SEO Toolkit, robots and crawling, indexing, malware, sitemaps and more.

• Webmaster Center tools
  How do I start using Bing Webmaster Center tools?
  What does the authentication code do?
  How do I add the Webmaster Center tools authentication code to my website?
  Why does my website’s authentication fail?
  I’m not able to gain access to Webmaster Center with the authentication code used in a <meta> tag. Can you help?
  How can I find information about the status of my website in the Bing index?
  How can I tell which websites are linking to mine?
  What issues did Bing encounter while crawling my website?
  Can I access the Webmaster Center tools functionality through the Bing API?
  How does my website perform when people use Bing to search for specific words?
• Ranking
  How does Bing determine how to rank my website?
  How can I increase the ranking for a website hosted in another market?
  How do I relocate my website’s content to a new URL without losing my page rank status?
  Why isn’t my site ranking well for my keywords?
  How can I develop better keyword targets for my site?
  How important are inbound links? Are all inbound link equal?
  How do I get more high quality inbound links?
  Do inbound links from low-quality sites adversely affect Bing ranking?
  Why has my site’s rank for a keyword recently dropped?
  Will paid links or link exchanges get my site the top ranking as advertised?
  Do the optimization recommendations you give for Bing affect my ranking performance with other search engines?
• Crawling
  How do I submit my website to Bing?
  Is my robots.txt file configured properly for MSNBot?
  What is the name of the Bing web crawler?
  Why isn’t Bing fully crawling my site?
  Bing is crawling my site, so why isn’t it indexing my pages?

Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) directives in web page code
How do I prevent a search engine bot from following a specific link on my page?
How do I prevent all search engine bots from following any links on my page?
How do I prevent all search engine bots from indexing the content on my page?
How do I prevent just MSNBot bot from indexing the content on my page?
How do I use REP directives to remove my website from the Bing index?
How do I prevent all search engine bots from indexing any content on my website?
Which REP directives are supported in <meta> and X-Robots-Tags in Bing?
Which REP directives take precedence for allowing content to be indexed versus disallowing the bot access to content?
Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) directives in robots.txt files
How can I control which crawlers index my website?
How do I specify what portions or content types in my website are off-limits to bots?
Do Disallow directives in robots.txt block the bot from crawling the specified content?
How do I use wildcard characters within robots.txt?
How can I limit the crawl frequency of MSNBot?
How do I increase the Bing crawl rate for my site?
Can I point the bot to my Sitemap.xml file in robots.txt?
How do I control bots with directives for files and directories that use non-ASCII characters?

• Indexing
  How does Bing generate a description of my website?
  Why was my website removed from the Bing index?
  How does Bing index websites?
  Why is my website having trouble getting indexed?
  What are Bing’s guidelines for webmasters getting their sites indexed?
  How do I remove my website from the Bing index?
  How do I request that Bing remove a bad link to my website?
  If my website was mistakenly identified as web spam and removed from the Bing index, how do I get it added back?
  Why is the number of my indexed pages in Bing decreasing?
• Web spam
  What sort of content does Bing consider to be web spam?
  How do I report web spam that I find in search engine results pages to Bing?
  My website offers tax-related services. As a result, I use the word “tax” numerous times in my content. Could Bing consider my site to be web spam due to the appearance of keyword stuffing? When do I cross the line from acceptable use to web spam?
  Regarding backlinks in forum comments and link-level web spam, is it only a problem when the page linked to is not relevant to the conversation in the forum, or is this a problem for all backlinks?
• Malware
  …
• Sitemaps and mRSS
  …
• Web page coding for SEO
  …
• IIS SEO Toolkit
  …
• Miscellaneous
  …
• Blog
  …

WHITEPAPER:  Bing Webmaster Center FAQ
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=05bcf5b6-c0ea-4bef-b381-72434e826681