Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Please make sure you update your Live Meeting Console and Outlook Add-in’s:
We have released new versions of the Live Meeting 2007 Console and Outlook Add-in.  These new builds are available for manual, voluntary download here (you will not be automatically prompted to download the new versions).

I recommend upgrading to the latest versions particularly for any users who have encountered problems. The new downloads will automatically uninstall older versions that are present. Please make sure that all Microsoft Office applications (especially Outlook) are closed prior to installing. If you use LCS or OCS for your corporate IM and Presence please exit this application as well.

Here are the links to the new versions:

• http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA101733831033.aspx (Console version 8.0.6362.62)
• http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA102368901033.aspx (Add-in version 8.0.6362.62)

Live Meeting 2007 Console (version 8.0.6362.62 – April 11, 2008)
The Live Meeting 2007 Console release includes fixes for several issues, including, but not limited to:

• Improved Application desktop sharing –  includes network connection improvements and faster screen refresh
• Fixed Application desktop sharing freezing when uploading multiple files
• Accessibility improvements to enable red-green impaired users

Please refer to Knowledge Base article 946764 for more detail:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946764/en-us

Live Meeting 2007 Outlook Add-In (version 8.0.6362.62 – April 11, 2008)
The Live Meeting 2007 Outlook Add-In release includes fixes for several issues, including, but not limited to:

• Recurring Meetings are now supported
• The Add-in no longer deletes a cache file that is used by Outlook workflow add-ins (such as Interwoven)
• Attendee meeting Accept/Decline tracking will now show up

Please refer to Knowledge Base article 943017 or 948738 for more detail: 
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948738/en-us

If you encounter any problems installing the new clients please contact Live Meeting Support at 866-493-2825 or via www.livemeeting.com/ask

All politics aside, this is a really nice affirmation of the power of our streaming video platform.  My beloved Silverlight & Windows Media HD… gettin’ some airtime!

Microsoft picked for Democratic convention
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/article.aspx?symbol=US:MSFT&feed=ACBJ&date=20080428&id=8552457

Software giant Microsoft Corp. will be the official software and HD web content provider for the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

The Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC) made the announcement Monday. The convention will be held Aug. 25-28 in Denver.

"Microsoft’s standing as an industry leader in software development makes them an ideal partner for the DNCC," said Leah Daughtry, CEO of the DNCC.

Microsoft software will be used to track delegate votes and the company’s Silverlight platform will be used alongside Level 3 Communication’s network to bring live video coverage via the DemConvention.com website.

On behalf of the Speech Components Group, I’m very pleased to announce the initial public availability of Windows Speech Recognition Macros!

•  Download and install now!
•  Read our blog announcement

WSR Macros combines the ease of Windows Speech Recognition with the power of an XML-based scripting language.   It makes it easy to create speech interfaces to applications and perform otherwise tedious tasks with simple spoken commands.

This tool is the brainchild of Rob Chambers and has been in development for quite a long time.  Once in SCG, Rob and Onur Domanic worked on refining the functionality, fixing issues and getting the code in shape to ship.  Aziz El Ouaqid ran the test effort.

Please email listen@microsoft.com with any feedback or questions.
Check out our Speech Blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/speech.

Here are a couple of examples WSR Macro commands:

<speechMacros>
<command>
<listenFor>What are macros</listenFor>
<setTextFeedback>Macros are cool!</setTextFeedback>
<speak>W S R Macros extends the power of my voice</speak>
</command>
<!-- Play Artist Command -->
<command>
<listenFor>play ?the ?artist [Artists]</listenFor>
<listenFor>play ?the band [Artists]</listenFor>
<listenFor>play ?the group [Artists]</listenFor>
<disambiguate title="Which artist do you want to play?" prompt="Choose an Artist" timeout="25" propname="Artist"/>
<wmpMediaControl command="pause"/>
<speak>Playing Artist {[Artist]}</speak>
<wmpMediaPlay attrname="WM/AlbumArtist" attrvalue="{[Artist]}"/>
</command>
</speechMacros>

Also delivered today was the public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly code-named “Virtual Machine Manager vNext”), which enables customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and to centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure, whether running on:

• Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V
• Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2
• VMware ESX Server

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 tightly integrates with Operations Manager 2007 to deliver a new feature called Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO). Using deep knowledge of the IT environment including operating systems, applications and hardware, Operations Manager identifies opportunities for more efficient physical and virtual resource allocation and generates “PRO tips” within the Virtual Machine Manager console. Administrators can implement these PRO tips and dynamically optimize their datacenter based upon pre-defined policies and the real-time, changing demands of users. When used in conjunction with the broad System Center management suite, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 enables customers effectively to manage both their virtualized and physical servers and applications across their desktops and datacenters with a single set of consistent, compatible tools.

“Deploying, monitoring and managing applications across a heterogeneous IT infrastructure can present many challenges and complexities, all of which are compounded when consolidating servers, optimizing desktops and applications, or creating business continuity solutions using multiple virtualization solutions,” said Jerry Phillips, senior director of Systems Operations at Clear Channel Communications Inc. “Our experience with System Center solutions has demonstrated that Microsoft not only recognizes our need to manage our Windows datacenter infrastructure, but also non-Windows and virtual servers from other vendors. Being able to do so through a single administrative console will provide improvements in productivity and reductions in our cost of IT operations, enabling us to improve overall organizational contributions.”

A number of partners, including Brocade, Dell, EMC Corp., Emulex Corp., HP, NetQOS, QLogic Corp. and Quest, announced they will deliver management packs enabled for PRO. These management packs enable partners and customers to integrate their domain-specific knowledge directly into Virtual Machine Manager and further integrate physical and virtual management.

“Dell’s focus is to simplify IT for our customers and drive complexity out of the datacenter, and virtualization is a key technology driving this effort,” said Laurie Tolson, vice president of systems management at Dell Product Group. “By working with industry leaders like Microsoft on advances in systems management between Dell OpenManage and Microsoft Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Windows Server 2008, we’re able to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual management spaces, providing an optimized solution that helps our customers get the most out of their hardware and virtualization investments.”

“New ways to lower energy costs, reduce server sprawl and optimize datacenters are provided by the collaboration between HP and Microsoft as virtualization goes mainstream,” said Scott Farrand, vice president of Industry Standard Server Software at HP. “Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager used alongside HP Insight software on HP ProLiant servers, and HP Server Automation software, allow customers to seamlessly manage physical and virtual environments. The combined solutions also allow customers to maximize availability, performance and flexibility of physical host servers, virtualized guest operating systems and workloads.”

Beta software of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 was made available to attendees at the conference and can be downloaded at http://connect.microsoft.com. Customers interested in finding more information on the System Center offerings or in evaluating them through trial offerings can visit http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter and the System Center blog at http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter.

Microsoft today announced the availability of a public beta for System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, which build on the existing Operations Manager 2007 technology and capabilities and are designed to help customers extend the value of their Microsoft System Center investments.

Providing customers with a comprehensive management solution, this new end-to-end IT systems monitoring capability incorporates industry standards and proven open source technologies, including Web Services for Management (WS-Management) and OpenPegasus, extending the capabilities across both physical and virtualized Windows and non-Windows operating systems and applications.

Microsoft delivers the core foundational cross-platform support out of the box for:

• HP-UX
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Sun Solaris
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

…so that partners can focus on adding their deep domain expertise in the form of management packs. Companies such as Novell Inc., Quest Software Inc. and Xandros Inc. have demonstrated their support by working to deliver monitoring abilities for applications made by organizations such as The Apache Software Foundation, MySQL AB and Oracle.

Further demonstrating support for its commitment to OpenPegasus, Microsoft also announced today that it will be joining the OpenPegasus Steering Committee and contribute code back to the open source community under the Microsoft Public License, an Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved license.

“The System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions have already delivered exciting results for Xandros,” said Andreas Typaldos, CEO of Xandros. “They enabled us to cut our expected development time in half as we created our management packs for Apache and MySQL running on Linux and Solaris, resulting in quicker time to market and delivery of betas to our customers today. This new foundation from Microsoft enabled us to focus on the development of high-level management functions for applications, with the knowledge that the Cross Platform Extensions were providing the necessary underlying interfaces to System Center Operations Manager, enabling heterogeneous management from a single location across customer environments.”

Microsoft also delivered a beta of the updated System Center Operations Manager 2007 Connectors, based on many of the same extensible open source technology and industry standards as the Cross Platform Extensions, which provide an integrated administrative experience and the ability to interoperate and exchange System Center monitoring data with third-party management offerings such as HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console.

Beta software of System Center Operation Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions & Connectors were made available to attendees at the conference and can be downloaded at http://connect.microsoft.com. Customers interested in finding more information on the System Center offerings or in evaluating them through trial offerings can visit http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter and the System Center blog at http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/apr08/04-29MMS08PR.mspx

With the launch of the 1^st public beta for Forefront Stirling on April 8^th, I thought it would be relevant to do a post this week on it. This release proves that the Stirling vision scenario in my previous blog article is becoming a reality. “Stirling” seems to be thrown around quite a bit and can be misunderstood, so let me 1^st clarify. Codename Stirling refers to the next wave of all Forefront products, scheduled to hit RTM in the 1^st half of 2009. This wave includes the “next version” of:

• Forefront Client Security (FCS)
• Forefront Security for Exchange Server (FSES),
• Forefront Security for SharePoint (FSS)
• ISA Server – new name Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG).

Additionally, this wave includes a server and single management console to interact with all of the above, commonly referred to as the “Stirling” server and “Stirling” management console. The console and server can be run on the same or separate machines. Down the road, we’ll have an official name to replace “Stirling” and “next version of”.

Ok, so what is some cool stuff to check out with the public beta?

• Dynamic response capabilities – see how the forefront products share information and interact with each other.
• Single management console and reporting for the entire technology suite except FSS – get a security state assessment for all of the connected machines & specify how you want to remediate through forefront policy.
• Integration with NAP – use NAP to remediate your machines
• Integrated malware and anti-virus protection – check out how it downloads & pushes out the updates
• Use powershell to manage it – by default Stirling uses powershell behind the scenes, but you can do it yourself if you feel inclined.

  What are some things you can NOT you do yet?

• Install a topology which has more than one Stirling server
• Install the Stirling server, console, or next version of FCS on Windows Server 2008
• Install Terminal Services or a DC on the Stirling server
• Install non-English versions 

Get started

• Download the Stirling beta here.
• The most helpful pre-requisite page to install everything here.
• Stirling homepage
• TechNet technical documentation for deployment, operations, etc.
• Stirling blog
• Forefront team blog

SQL 2008 Track  – 1:00- 4:30pm (Coffee Break provided)
Microsoft & Microosft Partner Neudesic will be sponsoring a Deep Dive session on two topics:

• Beyond Relational
  As Microsoft continues to pursue the Data Development platform, one of the areas they want to progress in, is the handling of binary and unstructured data. The next release has a number of enhancements to the handling of large and non-relational types of data. This might include video, audio, documents, etc.
• Pervasive BI
  Business Intelligence is the largest growing portion of the data world currently, with advances in dashboards, scorecards, ad-hoc query tools, the need for a stable scalable data platform both relational and OLAP have never been greater. SQL 2008 will provide a number of enhancements in performance, new features to ease development and insure best practices, as well as provide a more scalable and functional reporting environment.

Date/Time:
5/29/2008
1:30 PM – 4:30 PM
Welcome Time:
5/29/2008 1:00 PM Pacific Time

Location:
Microsoft Corporation
333 South Grand Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90071

Parking Location and Instructions:
Parking will be available at Joe’s Auto Parks (Lots 220 and 240) located on the corner of Hope and Gen Thaddeus Kosciuszko Way (lot address: 220 S. Hope Los Angeles CA 90071). Please park in the Joes Auto Parks lot.

Registration:
If you are a customer of mine, please contact me for registration details.

How Strong is Your BI House?

A lot can go wrong when your enterprise information infrastructure is built without a solid architecture. The challenges you face when your end-users can’t get the information they need from the databases you manage, affects how well your enterprise runs.

Business Intelligence improves performance by driving better decisions, but when business users experience slow performance, inability to view data in a form of their choice, incomplete, stale and/or non-integrated databases they end up with confusing and conflicting results. Learn how to design your BI solution right the first time.

You are invited to attend an exclusive, free training workshop at a location near you.

Coming to Irvine, May 20th

LEARN HOW TO:

• · Design a BI Solution for Performance
• · Design a Scalable BI Infrastructure
• · Implement and Tune Your BI Solution

Join BI expert Erik Veerman for a half-day, hands-on workshop as he discusses Microsoft Business Intelligence Solutions for enterprise-level organizations, the necessity of designing a robust, scalable and enterprise-ready Business Intelligence infrastructure leveraging reference configurations from Dell and AMD to support rich reporting and analytics that keeps your users focused on making decisions and not waiting on answers.

Who Should Attend:

• BI architects
• SQL Server architects
• SQL Server DBAs
• IT architects and IT planners
• IT directors/managers responsible for SQL Server/BI deployments

 What You Will Get:

• Information-packed technical content
• Take-home CDs with valuable labs and resources including:
• Key white paper – End to End Microsoft Business Intelligence installation, deployment and configuration
• Data Warehousing Best Practices and Techniques
• White papers "Deploying SQL Server 2008 & Windows Server 2008/2003 and Windows Server on Dell Opteron™Servers
• Latest SQL Server 2008 Community Technology Preview (CTP)
• End-to-End Microsoft Business Intelligence virtual machine
• Dell Opteron BI Reference Configurations
• Other valuable best practices
• Opportunity to ask questions of the experts from Microsoft, Dell, AMD, and Solid Quality Mentors

Click here to RSVP today!

If you’re registered for the upcoming invite-only class we’ve coordinated called “Microsoft Applications Development & Notes Domino integration for Lotus Notes Developers &Admins”, this is important reading.  People that are not registered will be turned away, as we do not have food, machines, or materials for people that aren’t registered, so if you have co-workers that wish to attend, they need to contact me ASAP.

————————–

ARRIVAL TIME
Please plan on being there at 8:30AM. Keep in mind that once parked, it will require walking a little more than a block or so to get to our building and get past security.

LUNCH:
Microsoft will be catering lunch for this event.

PARKING:
We’ll pay for parking at Joe’s Parking around the corner from the building. We will not pay for parking in 333 S. GRAND AVE (WELLS FARGO) BUILDING so do not park underground, otherwise you’ll find yourself paying upwards of $38 for the day.

Parking is available at Joe’s located on the corner of Hope and Gen Thaddeus Kosciuszko Way (lot address: 220 S. Hope Los Angeles CA 90071). Please note that Joe’s Auto Park is an unaffiliated, independent vendor and that Microsoft is in no way liable for any negligence or any damage that may be incurred by attendees who utilize this parking facility.

WINDOWS LIVE MAP:
http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCC&cp=34.053755~-118.251686&style=r&lvl=18&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=6953956&phx=0&phy=0&phscl=1&cid=DA410C7F7E038D!2873&encType=1

Microsoft’s  made available a demo of a game called "Invasion" for Windows Mobile, available for free off of WindowsMobile.com.  Originally an Amiga product, this game leverages Amiga Anywhere emulation.

DOWNLOAD: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/
domore/mobile/games.mspx

Full game available at:
http://www.clickgamer.com/moreinfo.htm?b=POCKETGAMER&pid=2285

Invasion is compatible for the following:

Pocket PC Windows Mobile 6.0
Pocket PC Windows Mobile 5.0
Pocket PC Square QVGA resolution (240×240)
Pocket PC QVGA resolution (320×240)
Pocket PC QVGA resolution (240×320)