Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Virtual Earth just got and update along with Live Search Maps which went up including a new version of the 3D control.  Here’s a quick list of the major feature additions to VE:

• Communities
• Local Search Vertical
• Details page
• Multi-Point Directions
• Landmark Hints
• Geocoding
• Imagery Processing and Rendering
• Vector Data (roads and places)
• Localized Tiles
• 3DVIA
• Weather

One of the cooler things is the real time weather that is displayed within the maps when viewing an area using the 3D Map rendering tool.

LINK:
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/archive/2008/09/24/new-feature-release-of-live-search-maps.aspx

We’re putting up a new datacenter – but this time it’s in Texas, and it’s the largest yet.  Larger purportedly than even our Quincy, WA facilities.

Microsoft data center goes live today
Web Posted: 09/22/2008 12:00 CDT

Microsoft Corp.’s most technologically advanced data center opens today in Westover Hills.

It’s a massive $550 million, 470,000-square-foot building that will contain thousands of computer servers, which will begin serving up e-mail, Web pages, pictures, software applications and videos to customers online.

“San Antonio is a key hub for Microsoft in its North American distribution system,” said Mike Manos, Microsoft’s senior director of data center services.

Microsoft has built two nearly identical buildings under one roof on its 44-acre site. The servers in the first building go live today. The second half of the building is almost done, Manos said. It’s expected to be complete within the next few months, he said.

Microsoft’s facility with 75 employees also has helped to ignite a data center building boom in Westover Hills. Six other companies — Frost, PowerLoft, Stream Realty, Lowe’s Corp., Valero Corp. and Christus Health — have projects under way or planned there.

READ:  http://www.mysanantonio.com/business/local/Microsoft_data_center_goes_live_today.html

Additionally, the plan is to install solar panels to assist in powering the facility sometime in the future.  Of course this has hit the mainstream media like a Mac truck, what with their “save the planet” orientation.  Unfortunately for many press writers, many have already written that the datacenter will have photovoltaic cells on the center’s rooftops – despite the fact that that’s not actually going to happen any time soon.

Microsoft plans to install solar panels on the roof of its new data center in San Antonio, and will use photovoltaic power to supplement the 50 megawatts of capacity it has provisioned from local utility CPS Energy. The solar panels are just one example of the many steps Microsoft is taking to incorporate green technologies into its new data centers. While providing a visible illustration of the company’s commitment to environmentally-friendly technology, the solar panels may not make much of a dent in the energy bills for the $550 million San Antonio data center.

Solar energy hasn’t been widely used in data centers because of the large amounts of energy required to power the servers and cooling equipment in modern mission-critical facilities. It requires a very large installation of photovoltaic (PV) solar panels to produce even a fraction of the energy required by most data centers.

UPDATE: While Microsoft discussed plans to install solar panels at the San Antonio data center during Monday’s media event, the system won’t be operational in the near future. “While it is indeed sunny quite a bit of the time in San Antonio, the economics for solar are not yet a good fit for this facility,” said Mike Manos, general manager of Global Foundation Services for Microsoft. ”As solar technology advances, we anticipate that solar may become a more viable option within a few years. As a result, we have enabled our building to accept the technology and weight of solar panels when the technology matures.” 

READ:  http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/09/24/microsoft-uses-solar-panels-in-new-data-center/

Interested in knowing how Wikis & Blogs can provide value to your organization?

This paper, “User Blogs and Wikis in Business”, provides business and technical discussion about the use of wikis and blogs in the business environment. The use of wikis and blogs (Weblogs) in business is the latest development in the fast-moving content publishing revolution that has been created by the Internet and Web technologies. Like all technological advances, they are already affecting the way we work.

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 now offers both wikis and blogs, so business and technical decision-makers can understand what the technologies offer and the technical and business considerations for their adoption. The wide-ranging business and technical impact of wikis and blogs means that the information about uses and management is pertinent to many staff members within a company, because of the enormous variety of business applications of blogs and wikis.

The paper includes discussion and examples of uses that are relevant to board, business, and technical managers, such as program management, departmental and organizational collaboration, partner team working, and compliance.

DOWNLOAD: 
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6224aa0b-2eb5-4780-8161-c8c94d86b9e9&DisplayLang=en

—————————

Additionally, Eileen Brown wrote a magazine article, “Wikis, blogs, IM – cool business tools?”, that is fully downloadable, that talks about blogs & wikis as interesting business tools that workers will actually want to use:

DOWNLOAD:
http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/technet/
downloads/technetmagazine/issue4/
page10_wikis_blogs_im_cool_business_tools.pdf

Our Office Sharepoint Technology Specialist recently wrote something up for a customer of ours and I thought it was useful enough to share here.

The question is, if I want to move an Access database to Sharepoint to expose it’s data and functionality to others, how do I go about doing that?

Access databases can be upsized to SQL Server easily enough to provide enterprise scale & data integrity. However, you either still need to rely on Access forms and views for readwrite processes or create customer interfaces to expose the data to users.

Access 2007 offers a new approach where it can be “upsized” to SharePoint! (See the screenshot of Access 2007’s ‘Move to Sharepoint’ function above -ks) This offers enterprise scale as the data is centrally managed within SharePoint (whose data is technically stored in SQL Server) and it can be viewed and edited in the browser or back in Access. For most Access databases, It’s relatively simple to set up while offering great flexibility for the db owner and users.

I have included a couple of links below to introduce you to the concept…

• TechNet Magazine article on publishing Access to SharePoint
  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc434695.aspx
• Access Team Blog post on publishing to SharePoint http://blogs.msdn.com/access/archive/2006/09/18/761366.aspx

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.