Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Y’know how Powerpoint 2007 uses the new Office Open XML file format? (.PPTX)
And y’know how all OOXML files are actually ZIP files?
And y’know how the content in these ZIP files are mostly XML & JPGs files?
And y’know how the benefit of using OOXML is that you get ‘compressed’ files natively?

Well, there’s still this little problem of the JPGs:  They aren’t shrunken or reduced.  They’re kept in their original resolution and size – and simply reformatted when displayed.

Now this is cool if you plan on reusing the content later.  Maybe resizing the photos in the Powerpoint or whatever but if you’ve created a final deck, and you don’t need the images to be 4000×6000 pixel resolution, why not shrink them down to the size of the format in the Powerpoint?  They’d require a lot less storage and would be MUCH easier to email.

Introducing Balesio’s PPTminimizer.  ($40)
I have to admit, I was a little skeptical when I saw this program being that the tool is pretty pricey at $40 and I hadn’t really done any comparison shopping.  But I have to admit – the tool’s demo performed flawlessly against a 9.0MB PPTX file that I had and crushed it down to 3.7MB making it much easier to send to a customer… and near as I can tell, there was virtually no loss in quality.  It was simply stunning.

Why’d I insta-buy the product?  My feeling is this:  I’ll save $40 in my time easily simply by quickly running this product on all the Powerpoints I send to my customers.  It only took 10 seconds to compress my 9MB file and not only saves me space on my Skydrive allocated storage on the web, but it more importantly took only a couple seconds to upload instead of a few minutes. Not to mention that now, at 3.7MB, it’s actually conceivable that I could email the deck to someone.

It also has a mode that will autoseek-and-compress Powerpoints on your hard drive or on a server which could probably save some companies massive amounts of storage on their NAS/SAN-based file servers.  And that ultimately saves you money.

And I’m willing to bet on most file servers not used by marketing groups or folks that deal with media all the time, that if the tool was executed, most business users would never even know it happened because the quality remains the same.

So give it a try:   It comes in two flavors.  One is a installable for Windows, and the other is a standalone executable that runs off of a USB drive without installing.  Good stuff.  Well done Balesio.

LINK:
http://www.pptminimizer.com/eng/

Managing compliance issues imposed by regulations and statutory requirements can be difficult to reconcile with regulations and standards such as:

• PCI DSS
• ISO 27002
• AICPA GAPP
• COBIT

An additional challenge is the lack of a single source of compliance configuration guidance for Microsoft products.

The Compliance Management Series (a MOF–based expansion of the Regulatory Compliance Planning Guide) provides Standards of Care and simple checklists to help you configure Microsoft products to address Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) requirements.  Standards of Care simplify complex categories such as Asset Management, Compliance Management, and Risk Management, and clarify how to configure Microsoft products quickly and effectively for these categories.

The Series uses Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) 4.0 to provide a mechanism for viewing data in a Plan-Deliver-Operate-Manage methodology.

The beta release of the Compliance Management Series is now available and will be open thru September 24, 2008 for your review.

Participation in the beta includes:

• OneCompliance package download
• On-going Interactive LiveMeetings & conference calls for feedback & understanding
• Access to OneCompliance newsgroups

OneCompliance Platform
Microsoft is developing the OneCompliance Platform, a risk and compliance management solution. It will provide a common platform through which organizations can integrate compliance efforts to address business objectives and risks using frameworks, controls, and control assessments. The solution will also create a marketplace for Microsoft partners to develop knowledge extensions and continuous controls monitoring solutions that integrate with the OneCompliance Platform.

REGISTER:  http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9522146
(This link will connect you to Microsoft Connect, our Beta participation enrollment web site which will require you to login using your Windows Live ID/Passport credentials.  You must have a previously established Windows Live ID registered with us.  If you don’t have a Windows Live ID, first go to http://get.live.com/getlive/overview to register and get an ID)

Introducing Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008! 
(I’m late to write about this but better late than never)

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 will be a standalone version of Microsoft’s Hypervisor for hardware virtualization and is a head-to-head competitor with VMWare ESX Server, providing bare metal hypervisor-based server virtualization.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 will be downloadable in 30 days from Microsoft.com and it will be completely FREE.  It was originally slated to be available for purchase for $28 but on September 9th, it was announced that that fee would be waived and that anyone would be able to download and use our best and most powerful server virtualization technology for no charge. 

It’s my theory that Hyper-V Server 2008 would have shipped as a $28 product at launch had it not been for the fact that VMWare in an attempt to match Hyper-V, decided to suddenly make their ESX3i product free.  This marketing move of theirs effectively allowed us in the name of competition to make our product free, since we were simply matching their ‘pricing’.  So thanks VMWare!

IMPORTANT NOTE:  This is not to be confused with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V which is our server operating system that has Hyper-V as a feature, and of course has licensing that is required.  The Server OS of this product runs in a parent partition of a Hyper-V hypervisor and provides rich functionality for virtualization such as automated fail over, hot-add CPUs, & other high availability functions.

HYPER-V SERVER CHARACTERISTICS
Hyper-V Server 2008 provides basic OS functionality to boot up the server and by taking over responsibilities of the parent partition, it provides:

• Management APIs
• Memory management
• CPU cycle distribution, and other basic, bare-bones hypervisor functions. 

It is also has a series of restrictions on usage including a 4 physical processor maximum, 32GB RAM max, and a lack of clustering support.  As a result, Hyper-V Server 2008 makes sense as a technology predominantly used by:

• Hobbyists/Desktop/Laptop users who want a hypervisor on their personal systems
• Labs, test/dev environments, or shops that are cost averse & don’t require the robust features of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V
• Companies looking to consolidate servers that own Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003, or Linux – but not Windows Server 2008

Most Enterprise organizations will likely choose Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, however they now have a low risk, low investment choice.

LINK:   http://www.microsoft.com/servers/hyper-v-server/default.mspx

For those of you who want to subscribe to secure podcasts (like ones created for corporate employees behind SSL-secured web sites that are locked behind Windows authenticated credentials, you’re in luck!

Zune’s Desktop Client v3.0 now enables you to “Add a Podcast” then provide credentials for a persistent on-going subscription to the podcast.

Simply go into the Zune 3.0 desktop client software and add the podcast.  When you do so, the client software recognizes when the the link requires a username and password and the dialog box to the right will appear allowing you to enter in and if you choose, cache you credentials for future RSS subscription downloads.

Wheee!  Podcasting for corporate types!  Now onward and upward to the Podcasting Kit for Sharepoint!

(Download the Zune 3.0 Desktop Client & the new Zune 3.0 Firmware here:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=104738)

Wow.  Y’learn something everyday.  Today, I got my first update on a Technet Plus license in a while (I couldn’t get a subscription for a while… long story) and discovered that Technet Plus has an AWESOME feature that allows you to get more than just product updates.

As part of your TechNet Plus subscription benefits you have access to a set of eLearning courses at no additional charge. These courses change quarterly so take advantage of these training resources while available.

The following courses are now available:

• Course 6171: Designing Operating System Deployment and Maintenance in Windows Server 2008
• Course 6172: Designing Shared Resources in Windows Server 2008
• Course 6173: Designing High Availability in Windows Server 2008

And on top of that, the next DVD shipment is scheduled for October and will include the following:

• SQL Server 2008 Enterprise
• System Center Configuration Manager 2007 with Service Pack 1
• System Center Operations Manager 2007 with Service Pack 1
• Updated Technical Library

If you’re interested in incorporating Silverlight technologies easily and seamlessly into your Sharepoint/MOSS 2007 environment you may want to download and try the Silverlight 2 for Sharepoint Blueprint (Beta 2) from:

DOWNLOAD:
http://www.codeplex.com/SL4SP

What it provides is the ability to do numerous complex interactive functions within the Sharepoint UI with very little cost or time.  For example, the blueprint includes webparts that provide a slider control, a custom navigation toolbar, a colleague viewer and a few other things.

One of the capabilities is that it will enable Sharepoint admins to publish a special user interactive webpart into the Sharepoint site that can point to a Sharepoint list of multimedia such as pictures & videos.  By adding videos and photos to the list, end users find that the Silverlight webpart will automatically make them available for viewing in a very elegant way without traversing the lists themselves.

All navigation is taken care of within the Silverlight control instead of the Sharepoint interface.

Once content has been published into lists, a Silverlight Media Viewer webpart can be added to the Sharepoint front page or site that has properties that allow you to point to the content list that you want the viewer to tap from.

This can be either pictures or video or music.

It’s trivial for Sharepoint administrators to add and enable within their Sharepoint environment, and it’s completely free to use.

Once the webpart is in place, and the content source is set within the webpart’s properties, end users can visit the site and view photos using the web part.

Notice the interactive sidebar in the webpart.  This provides the end user with snapshots of all photos available in this case.

The same goes for videos which shows a thumbnail of each video within the content list, allowing the end user to select what video they want to view along with a description of the content within an overlay window.

.VMC files are Virtual Machine Configuration files that contain the various parameters of the synthetic hardware environment such as the memory size available to the VM, the number of network adapters, etc. etc.

Matthijs ten Seldam, a member of the Virtualization team at Microsoft, has produced a Powertoy tool for migrating these .VMC configurations to Hyper-V installations.

VMC to Hyper-V Import Tool, VMC2HV for short, imports the configuration from a Virtual Machine Configuration (VMC) file. Both Virtual PC and Virtual Server use VMC files to store the hardware and other properties of a VM. It reads the VMC file and maps all relevant properties to those for a Hyper-V VM. For those properties that did not exist, it provides additional options. Those properties that no longer exist are ignored.

VMC2HV was developed to ease the transition from Virtual Server to Hyper-V. As I explained in an earlier post, I was quite annoyed by the fact that I had to enter all hardware properties manually if I wanted to use the VHD files from the Virtual Server VM with the hardware settings as they were in the original VM. It really took a lot of time to get my VS VM’s under Hyper-V. So I did not want to do that again and decided to develop a tool that would import the properties for me (development of the tool took quite more time but it was fun…).

http://blogs.technet.com/matthts/archive/2008/09/12/vmc-to-hyper-v-import-tool-available.aspx

This morning we announced a stock buy back of $40B over the next 5 years as well as an increase in the quarterly dividend by 18%.  In a nutshell, here’s what was announced:

• Plan to buyback $40 billion in shares from now to 2013
• A quarterly dividend of $0.13 per share
• An authorization to borrow money up to $6B liquid for buybacks or projects
• Triple A credit rating from S&P & Moody’s; highest rating available

Translation:  MSFT is a solid, well financed company.  And as Steve Ballmer said, Microsoft shareholder win either way when it comes to the stock:  When the stock goes up, Microsoft shareholders wins.  When the stock goes down, Microsoft’s got the cash to buy the stock back when it’s a “buy”.  And as a company, we’re very bullish about our strategy & annual growth so we’re more than happy to invest in our future if others aren’t.

What blows my mind is that as a company, Microsoft has a market cap of $237B.  I mean, do the basic math: Buying back $40B in shares is a really, really large chunk of the company.  While this is next sentence is a pipe dream, we make about $30B annually in income and if you completely disregard the monetary war chest we have in the bank & non-corporate investments, if we were to execute a buyback like this a few more times at the current market cap, Microsoft could at some point be fully funded private company.

I don’t know too many places that have that ability.* 

• THE STREET:  Microsoft Sets $40 Billion Buyback
  http://www.thestreet.com/story/10438636/1/_msnh/microsoft-sets-40-billion-buyback.html?&cm_ven=MSNH&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA
• BARRONS:  Microsoft Sets $40B Buyback; Hikes Div; Stock Rises
  http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2008/09/22/microsoft-sets-40b-buyback-hikes-div-stock-rises/?mod=barrons_msnhttp://online.barrons.com/article/BL-TB-8805.html?
• PRNEWSWIRE:  Microsoft Announces Share Repurchase Program & Increases Quarterly Dividend
  EXTERNAL:  http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/article.aspx?symbol=US:MSFT&feed=PR&date=20080922&id=9171007
  MICROSOFT:  http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/sep08/09-22dividend.mspx

* And yes, that includes a certain search company with $2B in annual income and a monster market cap of $139B.

MSN Dial up Client software is something I’ve stuck to with great loyalty.  Why?  Because it’s anti-SPAM functionality is something that I adore.  I’d switch over to MSN Premium but apparently, they won’t let me (I’ve got a special employee deal) so no biggie.  I get dial up connectivity (as if I needed it) for free.

But trying to find the MSN client software on MSN.COM is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.  I still don’t know where the heck I found this link from but it’s good to keep in your back pocket if you have MSN:

• http://client.msn.com/msn8/setting/EN/US/MSNI/updatehistory.asp?version=9.20.0029.3000#9.20.0029.3000

This link automatically checks to see what version you have installed and what version is most current.  It also tells you what changes have occurred between revisions.  For example:

Update History

version 9.60.0053.2200

User Interface changes:  None

Additional updates:

• Minor service improvements throughout MSN Explorer.

version 9.50.0039.1900

User Interface changes:  None

Additional updates:

• Minor service improvements throughout MSN Explorer.

version 9.50.0034.2000

User Interface changes:  Minor Improvements

Additional updates:

• Minor service improvements throughout MSN Explorer.