Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Most corporate entities have large file shares.  Folks with some level of sophistication have transcended the file share paradigm and have developed Sharepoint Server infrastructures to provide context sensitive file storage as well as build collaborative workspaces around.

Huh?  What’s a collaborative workspace?  Well, usually when people are working with files, those files are constantly revised, shared with other people, discussed in the context of the document’s subject or topic.  Sharepoint Server provides this.

But what about the public?  Well, have you ever wanted:

• A method of securely sharing documents with others over the Internet?
• A way to converge changes from multiple people into a single document?
• A technology that will easily allow two people to work on the same document at the same time using Shared View?
• Publish your Outlook contacts, tasks, and even Scheduled events for others to see?
• Save documents directly from Word/Excel/Powerpoint to an Internet drive?
  (Requires Office Live Workspace Plugin for Office 2007:
  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c12a0e47-c3eb-4286-85e7-f9d8c5fd4618&DisplayLang=en)

These are aspects of a collaborative workspace on the Internet, and Microsoft is making this available for free through "Office Live Workspace", an online service that enables people to share, revise, and publish content directly to the Internet like a virtual drive that you or others can access.

It’s like having your own personal Sharepoint Server.

• DESCRIPTION & BETA SIGNUP:  http://workspace.officelive.com/ 
• DISCUSSION COMMUNITY:  http://officeliveworkspacecommunity.com/

I’m something of a privacy advocate these days being that I’m not too wild about some of the things that certain companies are doing in the way of tracking my activities on the Internet without telling me – all in the name of making a buck through advertising.  It’s all very cloak-and-dagger:  Figuring out the profile of someone on the basis of the web sites and transactions that they engage in. 

Well, a customer of mine reminded me about this little doozy and I thought it was worth writing about.

Q:  Did you know that Macromedia Flash is tracking you?

Wait – how can Flash be tracking us?  After all, we have cookies turned off on our browser and we all aggressively wipe our Internet caches frequently using CCLEANER.EXE or some tool like it, right? 

FLASH HAS IT’S OWN SEPARATELY MANAGED COOKIES
Well, remember that innocuous little Flash player you installed so that you could see those "snazzy animations" and "YouTube videos"?  Well, it turns out it has its own cookies – completely separate from traditional standards-based cookies.  And, no, nothing you do within Internet Explorer’s configuration can stop it from storing those Flash cookies on your system. 

This is because Flash is actually a binary application unto itself and it can do whatever it pleases while it’s on the Internet regardless of what you’ve set within Internet Explorer.  It has its own configuration, its own rules and guidelines, its own directory, and operating system configuration settings be damned.

HOW TO GET RID OF FLASH COOKIES
There’s a number of ways to get rid of them or block them:

1. Clear the C:Documents and Settings[your user name]Application DataMacromediaFlash Player directory.
2. Go to the Macromedia Website Privacy Settings Panel and change the cookie settings for Flash.
3. Download CCLEANER.EXE for free and have it clear Adobe Flash Player content.  Better yet, set CCLEANER to run at boot up and automatically clear out your Internet cache, your temp directories, and your Adobe Flash Player cookies.

E.P.I.C.’S WRITE UP ABOUT FLASH COOKIES & PRIVACY
For more information visit:
http://www.epic.org/privacy/cookies/flash.html

WHOA.  I think I finally have a reason to subscribe to XM Radio.

Apparently, XM Radio allows you to listen to their content without actually using an XM Radio receiver.  Sure it makes sense most of the time, but if you don’t feel like carrying around a receiver all the time or maybe you’re indoors and out of line-of-sight… and you’ve got your Windows Mobile phone with you, why not tune it through a Windows Media stream on your cellular network?

• Go to:  http://www.xstreamxm.com/mobile/
• Login with your normal XM crednentials.
• Tune in to the station you want and tune the bandwidth you get on your phone.
• Listen away through Mobile Windows Media Player.

BTW:  Woot.com has major deals on standalone XM receivers all the time.  They just had a deal for $30 just the other day on refurbished handheld receivers.

After several months of work and very little sleep in between we are pleased to announce general availability of the SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool (Beta).

The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool (Beta) provides a wealth of helpful information when planning a SharePoint Products and Technologies deployment; helping administrators, consultants, and IT Pros determine the potential required hardware investment(s) and topologies to support and meet requirements for availability and performance or even the affect of introducing additonal offices with their own unique bandwidth and latency constraints. 

Using the SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool (Beta) you can build topology models, run simulations, and generate reports that will help you evaluate and identify alternative solutions considering profile-based usage variations, content size and scope, networking technology, and availability requirements.

The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool (Beta) provides both Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 models allowing you to explore the unique characteristics of each platform and more effectively and efficiently plan topologies based on their respective infrastructure requirements.

To enroll in the Beta, visit:
https://connect.microsoft.com/programdetails.aspx?ProgramDetailsID=1602

[taken from the Sharepoint Blog]

Here’s an interesting article that’s been making the rounds by Ed Bott.  Apparently, in the interest of fairness, Ed did a benchmark of his own that reflected actual day-to-day usage of Windows Vista with SP1 and discovered to his surprise a massive boost in network performance after the application of SP1.  The results applied to both small files and large files.

In its original release, Vista had some design problems with its networking stack, resulting in slow file transfers, especially when connecting to computers running Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Home Server (all three of these products share a great deal of their code base, including core networking components). In Vista SP1, file transfer speeds are dramatically improved. In this post, I’ll describe what I saw.

I did two sets of file-transfer tests using two separate systems configured to dual boot between Vista RTM and the new Vista SP1 release candidate. Both systems have dual- or quad-core processors (both in the Intel Core 2 Duo family) The first group of files consisted of two large DVD images in ISO format, totaling 4.2 GB. The second group of files was a folder filled with more than 3,000 files of all types, in 299 subfolders, totaling roughly 6.5 GB.

LINK:  http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=336

The SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit helps you manage Microsoft® SharePoint® environments of all sizes with two new management packs for System Center Operations Manager 2007:

• Windows® SharePoint Services 3.0 Management Pack
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Management Pack

These packs monitor the health state of the components in your SharePoint environment that affect performance and availability. When there is an issue that may cause service or performance degradation, Operations Manager 2007 uses the management packs to detect the issue, alert you to its existence, and facilitate diagnosis and corrective actions.
The management packs monitor:

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 related services (Timer, Tracing and Search)
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 related Events
• Web server applications such as Internet Information Services (IIS)
• IIS-related Events
• Microsoft SQL Server® database-related events
• WSS Server performance

The SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit Management Packs have been rewritten from the ground up to take advantage of the latest features of System Center Operations Manager 2007. Major improvements from previous packs include:

• Extended rules
• New and improved reports
• Additional actions
• New views
• Elimination of backward compatibility dependencies
• Increased reliability
• Noise reduction through tuning and event suppression
• Thoroughly tested compatibility of management packs with:
  • System Center Operations Manager 2007
  • System Center Essentials
  • Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SP1

DOWNLOAD:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e4600fd9-f53d-4ded-88bf-6bb1932794f9&displaylang=en&tm

These guides will assist IT Professionals in evaluating and deploying Windows Vista SP1 and are downloadable versions of the SP1 guides found in the Windows Vista Technical Library. (http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/90a564b9-34af-4a6b-937f-324e1862244b1033.mspx)

• Deployment_Guide_for_the_RC1_Version_of_Windows_Vista_SP1.doc
• Enterprise_Guidance_for_Application_Compatibility_Testing _and_Windows_Vista_SP1.doc
• Hotfixes_and_Security_Updates_in_Windows_Vista_SP1.doc
• Notable_Changes_in_Windows_Vista_SP1_ Release _Candidate.doc
• Overview_of_Windows_Vista_SP1.doc

DOWNLOAD:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e71f0083-1013-4f9c-a3f9-c56e7120a5e9&displaylang=en&tm

So Gartner "speaks" about the topic of "skipping Windows Vista".  So far no financial services customer of mine is seriously considering this option, however for what it’s worth, here’s the article.  There’s some positive and some negative in here about us and about our track record but if it helps you and your organization move forward go ahead and use it to help whatever your efforts are.

Here’s a few short key quotes:

Planning to skip Windows Vista altogether, waiting for Microsoft’s next operating system?

For some companies, it’s a tempting option, but they need to consider it carefully, or they could end up feeling some pain down the line, according to analyst group Gartner…

…Gartner research vice president Michael Silver has warned that the next version of Windows, code-named "Windows 7," may also suffer from the delays that dogged Vista and be just as difficult to adopt.

"Organizations that tried to skip Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP often had ISV (independent software vendor) support issues, and a difficult and rushed or forced migration. Organizations that try to skip Windows Vista are likely to undergo the same perils," the Gartner research warned.

For example, while Microsoft will support business versions of Windows for at least 10 years, and Windows XP is expected to be supported with security fixes until 2014, many software vendors won’t support their products on Windows XP for that long, nor will they support new versions of their software on older operating systems.

For Windows XP, software suppliers will probably start dropping support in early 2010 and, by 2012, it will be common for software vendors not to support Windows XP for their new versions or applications.

LINK:  Gartner: Large businesses shouldn’t skip Vista
http://www.news.com/Gartner-Large-businesses-shouldnt-skip-Vista/2100-1016_3-6221925.html?tag=html.alert.comp

Gartner’s newest Unified Communications Magic Quadrant shows Microsoft strongly positioned in the “Leaders” quadrant, while Cisco has slipped from its 2006 “Leader” position into the “Challengers” quadrant for 2007.

The respective write-ups emphasize the strengths of our software-centric approach vs. the limitations of Cisco’s network-centric approach.  Our ICA partner Nortel is also in the “Leaders” quadrant, based heavily on their shared vision of UC.

I’d show you the chart itself in this blog entry but I’m hearing that Gartner doesn’t want that and that you’ll need to visit their page in order to see the Magic Quandrant.  So here is Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications in it’s entirety.

LINK:  http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/article3/article3.html

We released a 166MB module that you can install into a Sharepoint Server 2007 installation that provides Sharepoint Training for folks that want Computer-based Training available online.  The following are the downloadables:

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training Portal Edition Datasheet.docx
• Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training Install Guide.docx
• SharePointTraining.msi

DOWNLOAD:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=673dc932-626a-4e59-9dca-16d685600a51&displaylang=en&tm

See below for the boilerplate description.

————

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers a rich set of features that allow you to build and maintain powerful intranets and Internets for your company. You can manage workflow, maintain version control, connect to business intelligence applications, track key performance indicators for your business, add blogs and wikis to improve knowledge transfer and enhance collaboration, and more.

The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training Portal Edition, built on the Microsoft SharePoint Learning Kit, is designed for server administrators who want to help their end-users learn how to use the features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The Training topics lead the learner step-by-step through beginning to advanced features, including Collaboration, Business Processes and Forms, Portals and Personalization, Search, Business Intelligence and Enterprise Content Management.

The Training includes videos, interactive tutorials, and articles. In addition, the material is SCORM compliant. You can easily add or remove training topics to fit your business needs. The Training also includes a reporting function that allows an administrator/trainer to track learners’ completed training topics. You can customize the Training to fit the look and feel of your own Office SharePoint Server site.

If you are an end-user, or want to view the training without installing it on an Office SharePoint Server site, please click here for the Standalone Edition.

Notes:

• Please check the system requirements before downloading this Training
• A Standalone Edition is available if your system is not compatible with the Training
• Follow each step in the Install Guide for a successful deployment