Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 – 10:00 AM ET

Risk visibility, understanding the customer base and managing the customer on-boarding process is now a top priority for every board executive in Finance. During a time of increased competitiveness and uncertain economic conditions, financial organizations need to have a more complete picture of their customers. Often, solutions can be expensive and have lengthy implementation periods. Enterprise search is a fraction of the cost of traditional data integration solutions and can deliver in-year ROI.

Join us for a live interview with Julia Sutton, Global Head of Customer Accounts from Citigroup who will explain how her team is using innovative solutions to mitigate risk and help the organization identify who they should be thinking about lending to.

To register for the webinar, please click here
http://www.fastsearch.com/citigroup

[I’m reposting this blog post on the Live Search Webmaster blog here because I’ve received complaints about MSNbot crawling from folks recently.]

MSNbot Complaint Escalation Path

The Live Search development team is busy making significant improvement to the quality and depth of our search index, and these changes often affect how our crawler, MSNBot, collects data. As we test new algorithms, we invite webmasters to contact us to give us feedback on these changes, especially if you have any concerns.

Live Search always encourages webmasters to use our product support escalation paths to help identify and resolve issues as quickly as possible. We thought this would be a good time for a quick reminder on how to send us your feedback. For specific questions and concerns about our bot behavior and crawl frequency, please do one of the following:

· Check the Live Search Webmaster Center’s Crawling/Indexing Feedback and Discussion forum. Check to see if your feedback has already been addressed in an existing thread. If not, post your feedback in a new thread. Please be sure to include all of the pertinent details surrounding your incident. This will help us investigate the incident from our side and assist in the process of providing a response to you.

If you don’t want your details posted in the forum, please post the basic information and identify the issue as a private matter. The Webmaster Center forums moderator will contact you directly for more information.

· Contact Live Search Support directly. You can use the Live Search Support form to send us your feedback. Select option Other from the form’s drop-down list and complete the rest of the form. Include as much detail as you can in the comments box on specific events, dates, and other information that will assist us in tracking down the details from our side.

Of course, all feedback is welcome, not just bot-related issues. Once we have received your feedback, we will investigate and get back to you as soon as possible. Please allow time for the technical investigation.

Thank you for your assistance in enabling us to address your issues, questions, and concerns with Live Search.

— Nathan Buggia and Brett Yount, Live Search Webmaster Center

[taken from the Live Search Webmaster blog – http://blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/archive/2009/04/23/msnbot-complaint-escalation-path.aspx]

In response to customer inquiries to what our response is to a potential disaster such as a pandemic flu, Microsoft has a prepared explanation as to what our procedures are for addressing such a situation.

We believe this document best describes Microsoft’s approach to business continuance and how we are addressing the latest threat.

Microsoft’s Flu Pandemic Preparedness Program

Microsoft is dedicated to the safety and well-being of its employees worldwide and is responding to this risk by developing specific Pandemic Flu preparedness and response plans. 

In addition, Microsoft has established certain business continuity plans to facilitate resumption of critical business function following an interruption to operations caused natural disasters and other defined circumstances. Emergency situations such as bomb threats, medical, fire, earthquake, civil disturbances, and many other emergencies are  considered in Microsoft’s continuity planning. These plans are aimed at ensuring that through proper planning and preparation, interruptions can be minimized and avoided whenever possible. For example, systems exist for routing customer calls to provide seamless connection to support personnel independent of site location. 

…

[Read more in the document, downloadable below]

http://cid-00da410c7f7e038d.skydrive.live.com/embedrowdetail.aspx/Miscellaneous/MicrosoftPandemicResponse.pdf

I’m parsing through some files on Office 2007’s CD ROM (don’t ask) and I’m examining one of the setup files content.  One of the qualifiers for the edition, along with “IsUltimate”, “IsEnterprise”, and “IsHomeStudent” includes, “IsMondo”.

…Wait.  As in, Office 2007 “Mondo” Edition?

I’m a blue badge and even I’ve never heard of this thing in any of the Office SKUs. And I’m one of those pre-sales techs that reviews all the SKUs with a fine toothed comb so this was a little distressing that there might be an edition on our price sheets that I’d somehow missed. 

But seriously.  How does one miss something called “Mondo”?  So naturally, I start searching and about the 3rd result into the search, I come up with this:

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – Office 2007 won’t upgrade from a …
… Local" DisallowAbsent="no" DisallowAdvertise="no" PreReq="IsEnterprise; IsEnterpriseR; IsHomeStudentR; IsOneNoteHS; IsOneNote; IsOneNoteR; IsUltimate; IsUltimateR; IsMondo"/> and I …
www.hanselman.com/blog/Office2007WontUpgradeFromAPrereleaseVersionOfThe2007OfficeSystemOff…
Cached page

How ‘bout that?  It’s a test edition of Office that we have internally.  I’d thought of doing some digging around to get more details on what it’s purpose is but then it dawned on me that even if I did find out… it probably wouldn’t be that interesting and I probably couldn’t blog about it, so why bother?

Interesting news today from the WSJ. 

APRIL 28, 2009, 2:45 P.M. ET.
Microsoft, Verizon in Talks to Launch iPhone Rival
By AMOL SHARMA and NICK WINGFIELD

Microsoft Corp. is in discussions with Verizon Wireless to launch a touch-screen multimedia cellphone on the carrier’s network early next year, in a bid to compete with Apple Inc.’s iPhone, people familiar with the matter said.

Microsoft’s project, which is code-named "Pink," is aiming to produce a phone that extends the tech giant’s Windows Mobile cellphone operating system, adding new software capabilities. It would also likely include Microsoft’s new Windows Marketplace for Mobile, a mobile application store along the lines of Apple’s, these people said.

While Microsoft is involved in the design of the phone’s software and hardware, a third-party is expected to make the device, just as Google Inc. has worked closely with partners to make handsets based on its Android operating system, people familiar with the matter say.

The Microsoft-Verizon relationship is evolving from a more limited search-and-advertising partnership the companies struck early this year. The two companies are looking for a response to the iPhone, which has boosted the fortunes of their rivals, Apple and AT&T Inc. AT&T’s exclusive rights to the iPhone in the U.S. expire next year, but the carrier is trying to get a one-year extension, people familiar with the matter say.

Apple has had discussions with Verizon in recent months about its product roadmap, including a mobile multimedia device that is bigger than the iPod Touch but smaller than a laptop, one person familiar with the situation said. However, the talks have not become advanced, the person said. Some analysts say Apple may simply be trying to gain negotiating leverage over AT&T by holding early talks with Verizon.

Verizon has performed well despite not having the iPhone. On Monday, the company reported solid first-quarter results in its wireless business, edging out AT&T in net customer additions. Still, Verizon has sought to come up with a true rival to the iPhone. Last year, it launched Research In Motion Ltd.’s touch-screen BlackBerry Storm.

The Pink project is the work of a team of designers within Microsoft’s mobile division known as the premium mobile experiences group, which is focused on creating software for mobile phones that connect to a variety of online consumer services, such as social networking and photo-sharing applications. That group includes staffers from Danger Inc., a company that Microsoft acquired a year ago that designs the software in the Sidekick, a popular cellphone sold by T-Mobile.

LINK: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124093915558664239.html

It’s out there.  Not much more to say other than there’s a few highly recommended sets of fixes in here that makes this SP a “must install” for Sharepoint, Outlook, and Excel.

• LIST OF UPDATES:
  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968170
• PRESS RELEASE:
  http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/Apr09/04-28Office2007SP2QA.mspx
• OFFICE SE BLOG RELEASE:
  http://blogs.technet.com/office_sustained_engineering/
• DOWNLOAD:
  
• 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 2 (SP2)
  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b444bf18-79ea-46c6-8a81-9db49b4ab6e5&displaylang=en
• 2007 Microsoft Office Servers Service Pack 2 (SP2)
  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b7816d90-5fc6-4347-89b0-a80deb27a082
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2)
  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=88eff285-0b92-45ed-979b-65aa22304dd6

Here’s a few of the major functional changes:

Save as ODF 1.1 for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
OpenDocument 1.1 (ODF) has been added as an available file format for saving documents in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Doug Mahugh has covered this extensively in his blog, and the ODF 1.1 implementer’s notes have also been available for a while. We first announced our intent to add ODF to the list of supported file types over a year ago. It is great to see this activity come to fruition. I’m especially pleased / surprised at the level of engagement from folks in the ODF community, helping talk through some of the harder parts of the installation. In case you are observing the feature-level impact of saving to ODF in Office, you can visit the links below to learn more about how ODF in Office will behave.

• PowerPoint: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HA102877231033.aspx
• Excel: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA102877221033.aspx
• Word: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA102835631033.aspx

Save as PDF and XPS
Many have seen our announcement a few years back about the addition of PDF and XPS to the list of supported file types of Office 2007. This add-in was originally offered a free download for Office 2007, but SP2 has taken that a step forward and added the bits to the release – no longer a manual download. PDF export functionality will continue to support the creation of PDF 1.5 documents, as well as the ability to generate PDF/A – IS19500 compliant files.

File format converter API
Stephen Peront has an excellent post which illustrates how to use this new interface. The converter API is an extension of our strategy to support file format choice in our products. It enables solution developers to register a new file type for Office, so that it appears in the file type drop-down dialog box for saving documents next to the other 18 that you now get in the box. In a way this will help developers “future proof” Office desktops for new document format standards that may emerge.

Charting Object Model for Word and PowerPoint
An area of pain for users of Office charting has been addressed. A charting Object Model (OM) for Word and PowerPoint has been added to align with the charting support in Excel. Many customers expressed a need to programmatically insert, manipulate the size, and set the formatting of the charts similar to what was provided in the Office 2003 release.  Potentially managing charts programmatically across the three core applications could save workforces thousands of hours of manual labor, depending on the level of complexity and content re-usage taking place. For more information on the changes to the Word and PowerPoint OM’s for Charting, look at this post from David Hale on the Office Developer Content blog.

Cryptographic Agility
Today Vista supports a feature / interface commonly referred to as Cryptographic Next Generation (CNG). Essentially this refers to a capability of Vista which (among other things) allows you to swap crypto providers without breaking your solutions, or perhaps to help future-proof Office 2007 installations about encryption algorithms that may emerge in the future. Office 2007 SP2 has been updated to support the same CNG functionality when installed on Vista. This provides the capability to swap crypto providers for Office documents. This was done in part to help people who desire to implement Suite-B encryption for Office documents. David LeBlanc has written an excellent post describing this addition in depth.

Outlook Performance
One of the most important end user benefits of the SP2 release is the improvement in Outlook performance. I have been dogfooding SP2 for over a month now, and I can attest personally to the life improvement that these changes bring. I think if you asked the Outlook team, they’d be quick to tell you that SP2 is an update you should install as soon as you can.

Performance improvements that apply to the following general responsiveness areas:

• Startup: Removes lengthy operations from initial startup
• Shutdown: Makes Outlook exit predictably despite pending activities.
• Folder View and Switch: Improves view rendering and folder switching.
• Calendar improvements: Improves data structures and the reliability of calendar updates
• Data file checks: Greatly reduces the number of scenarios in which you receive the following error message when you start Outlook: “The data file ‘ file name ‘ was not closed properly. This file is being checked for problems. “

Office Service Pack Uninstall Tool
Traditionally, you cannot uninstall Microsoft Office service packs without completely uninstalling the Microsoft Office products. The new Microsoft Service Pack Uninstall Tool for the 2007 Microsoft Office suite (Oarpman.exe) lets you uninstall all the updates for the 2007 Office desktop products that are included in the 2007 Office suite SP2. The Service Pack uninstall tool will be available on the Microsoft Download Center as a free download.

You can use this tool to streamline the removal of all the client updates or individually
– Sample command line:  “msiexec /i { MSI GUID } MSIPATCHREMOVE={ Patch GUID } /l*vx Path of the log file “

—————–

If you want to learn more:
Lots of folks will have lots to say about SP2 – they should; it’s a big release. Here are some links to great blogs that you can read. The table below contains a link to the KB articles & downloads for each product to be released.

For those individuals having problems with “comment SPAM” or “post SPAM” on Windows Live Spaces, and are interested in having things corrected, I suggest the following courses of action:

1. FEEDBACK
   Please provide your feedback through the Windows Live feedback form at the following URL:

   https://feedback.live.com/default.aspx?productkey=wlspaces 

   For those of you who’ve already done it, if you’re happy with our current provisions for preventing or eliminating comment SPAM, great.  Good to hear it. 

   If not, I suggest you write again.  It’s not like we keep feedback forever, y’know.

2. SUPPORT
   Please open a support ticket on Windows Live Spaces requesting a means of easily removing multiple SPAM entries from your comments field at the following URL:

   https://support.live.com/eform.aspx?productKey=wlspaces&ct=eformts

   This will again provide a record of need in our support database.  If enough tickets get opened, it’ll rise to the top of our priorities.

If you want something fixed, you need to report it.  And do it again.  And again.  And again.

Well, looks like the cat’s out of the bag.  Virtual XP lives.  And it’s gonna be free and ready to deploy with Windows 7 desktops.  Completely free.  

For those that know MDOP, think of it as MED-V for consumers.

WHAT IS “MICROSOFT ENTERPRISE DESKTOP VIRTUALIZATION” (MED-V)?
For Enterprise IT professionals familiar with Microsoft’s Enterprise Desktop Virtualization solution (a.k.a. MED-V, formerly “Kidaro”) you’ll find “Windows XP Mode” very familiar. 

Essentially with MED-V, you run compatibility-challenged applications within a local Windows XP virtual machine on Windows Vista however this differs from simply using Virtual PC 2007 in several very important ways.  The biggest most noticeable difference is that the application running within a virtual machine is bordered with a RED outline, and the rest of the Windows XP virtual machine is completely invisible to the user.

Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V)
See my demo MEDV above,  Notice the RED OUTLINE around Word 2002 running within the XP virtual machine.  The rest of the XP virtual machine is “hidden” by MED-V.

There are other benefits from MED-V including centralized change control, byte-level differencing, etc.  but from a visibility standpoint, this is the benefit most people see.

WHAT ABOUT “WINDOWS XP MODE”?
“Windows XP Mode” (XPM) from an end user experience is very similar.  XPM provides:

• the ability to install applications into Windows 7 however funnel the installation & files into a local Windows XP virtual machine
• the capability of running that application directly from a shortcut within Windows 7’s START menu and have it appear on the Windows 7 desktop as a standard application window, while in reality, it’s running within the XP virtual machine

In this manner, “Windows XP mode” is similar to MED-V however, XPM does NOT have a RED outline around applications running within XPM.

Windows 7 “Windows XP Mode”
Word 2003 running within an “invisible” virtual machine, along side Word 2007 running natively
If nothing looks unusual in the above image… good!  Then we’re doing our job well.

As you can see the photo above(taken from Paul Thurrott’s site – no point in reinventing the wheel here) the same scenario of showing two versions of Word running at the same time each looking like their running within Windows 7 natively when in reality Word 2003 is running seamlessly within a virtual machine.

Essentially “Windows XP Mode” will be an “OOB” or an “out-of-band” released product that will be downloadable for licensed users of the business editions of Windows 7 – namely Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate.

It will ship with a fully licensed copy of Windows XP with SP3 to allow end users to legally run Windows XP within Windows 7 without relicensing the OS.

UH… WHY?
Besides the obvious ability to run applications that require Windows XP to execute, Paul Thurrott points out the primary reason for Windows XP Mode:  By isolating all legacy compatibility functions into an optionally installable virtual machine, compatibility hooks for applications don’t need to exist in the core OS.

The fact is, all those legacy APIs & libraries from previous revisions of Windows burden the OS when in reality, only folks with compatibility issues need them.  The majority of people will use applications that have no need for Windows XP compatibility so why include it in EVERY DEPLOYED COPY OF WINDOWS 7?

By making Windows XP Mode an optional virtual machine, Windows 7 becomes lighter and cleaner than it’s predecessors.

——————

FYI:  FOR THE RECORD, THIS IS NOTHING LIKE MAC OS X
Before certain individuals start crowing that Mac OS X had this capability years ago with Mac OS 9, to be clear – this is nothing like that.  This is complete hardware virtualization and dramatically more advanced work than what Mac OS X did to execute legacy applications due to the simple fact that Windows XP was and remains a much more advanced OS that Mac OS 9 classic.

For example, Mac OS 9 never had preemptive multitasking nor did it have memory protection, capabilities that were both available all the way back in Windows 95.  Mac OS 9’s time slicing and memory model across applications was more accurately the same as CPU time allocation and memory management within Windows for Workgroups 3.1.  A more appropriate analogy would be the execution of 16-bit Windows 3.1 applications within Windows NT 3.1’s WoW subsystem.

Enterprises across the world need to build applications that span their network and bring together services, systems, and people. The new BizTalk Server 2009 enables this connectivity while eliminating many of the cost and complexity challenges enterprises currently face.

Microsoft product specialists and experts from gold-certified partner Neudesic will give you a “first look” at BizTalk Sever 2009 and how they can help streamline and integrate business processes while reducing cost and complexity.

AGENDA:

• 8:30 – 9:30  What’s new with BizTalk Server 2009
• 9:30 – 10:30  Using Microsoft ESB Guidance to reduce cost and complexity
• 10:30 – 11:30  Interactive Q&A discussion about SOA and ESB and emerging technologies

WHO SHOULD ATTEND
Application Development Directors/Managers and Architects, Supply Chain Directors, Process Analysts, and Developers who are interested in learning more about the features available in BizTalk Server 2009 and their impact on SOA and BPM solutions.

EVENT DETAILS:
May 26, 2009
8:30 am – 11:30 am
Microsoft Los Angeles Office
333 South Grand Avenue
Suite 3300
Los Angeles, CA 90071
(213) 806-7300

REGISTRATION:
Please contact me for registration details if you’re a customer of mine.

Looks like we’ve created yet another game… this one’s called “Are you Certifiable?”

• LINK:
  http://www.microsoft.com/click/
  areyoucertifiable/

With a bit of humor, you can see that they highlight “Clippy” as one of the avatars that you can use to represent you in the game, along with some other highly recognizable pictures from Microsoft lore.

It seems to be patterned after “Who wants to be a Millionaire?” with questions that you might find on certification exams.

In fact, one of the features of the game will really “ring home” as familiar:  You have the ability to get and use vouchers that give you “abilities”:

There’s apparently something like 400+ questions in the game so you’re not likely gonna “run out” of interesting challenges and get bored.  I’m kinda surprised that I hadn’t heard about this before though.

NOTE:  Top score appears to be around 30,000.