According to various sources, including the San Francisco Chronicle, a soon-to-be former network admin has locked everyon out of the San Francisco "FiberWAN" network. From the article, "records such as officials' e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates' bookings" are stored on this network. Terry Childs is currently in jail on $5 million bail.
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Like most in the technology industry I work well over 40 hours per week. Also like most, rarely am I compensated for all the ad hoc work done off hours. We just accept it as a matter of course based on the industry we're in. However, some legal eagles are saying employees may be entitled to overtime pay for using their iPhone, BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device for business use after hours.
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A colleague of mine (my boss) at Convergent Computing, Rand Morimoto, is the head judge for the 2008 Imagine Cup competition. His 4th year running. He’ll be blogging live from the competition with regular round the clock updates. As he mentioned to me today,
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Hyper-V will kill VMWare.
That's a bold statement, especially in a market where VMWare rules with greater than 85% share. However, as Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols from PCWorld put it, "there was a company that had 85% of the buggy-whip market... just before Henry Ford decided that Americans wanted a cheap, dependable car in any color they wanted so long as it was black." Microsoft is in the Henry Ford seat currently. Sure VMWare has a more mature product and a huge headstart. So did Netscape in the browser market and IBM Lotus in the enterprise mail/collaboation market. Where are they now? Rusting junk heaps in a land Microsoft long since conquered.
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There's a great discussion going on over at BroadDev around the various skills gaps when deploying a unified communications solution. John Furrier jumped in to outline the technical challenges in deploying UC "in the trenches". I countered with what I think it a more pervasive issue, the IT/business alignment around UC.
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According to the Wall Street Journal the Gphone has been delayed again. I'm starting to get the feeling it will be launched concurrently with Duke Nukem Forever.
Google has pushed back from their initial estimate of Summer 2008 to 2nd half 2008 to Q4 2008. And, according to the same story carriers and manufacturers believe that date to be unrealistic as well. China Mobile, long thought to be the frontrunner for the first Android device, will likely push into 2009 before coming to market.
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As Windows Server 2008 adoption becomes more widespread many of my clients are asking me about the Windows Server Backup tool and the differences between it and old school NTBackup. The most obvious is that it's a simple backup tool and not at all application aware. In other words when you set it to backup an Exchange server it won't know to truncate logs or create a restorable backup of an Exchange database. According to a recent post by the Microsoft Exchange team this is by design.
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Are there a different set of rules for replying to email from your pda or smartphone? Microsoft says yes. Here's the lowdown on Wireless Email Etiquette from Microsoft.com.
Here's a summary of the article with some added thoughts:
1. Determine if you're sending to a mobile device - This seems to be mostly a guessing game save for those that still use the "Sent from my XXX device" footer. However the article says replied to a known mobile device should be shorter than to those using a PC.
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Thanks for all the great feedback on the iPhone launch post yesterday. Don't worry, I won't abandon any new gadget news, but I stumbled across this really cool OCS appliance at a friend's blog this morning.
Update: As expected, Apple revealed the new iPhone 2.0 today. Here is the official Apple promotion shot:
Also of note is they will ship with the new 2.0 software including Exchange ActiveSync, Cisco VPN and A-GPS. The App Store will be available next month. Finally, Apple & AT&T also confirmed the US $199 price point with a 2-year commitment.
The new iPhone launches in exactly one week and the buzz is well, inconsistent. It's certainly not the mobscene that it was during the initial launch, but this time it's a different group of people talking. At the initial launch all the Apple diehards came with kool-aid by the jug to pray at the AppleStore/iPhone altar. Recently business folks and power users have begun to take the iPhone seriously as a business tool, not just a toy that's capable of also making phone calls. Kevin Rose, of digg.com fame, talks about the launch and the rumored $200 price point here.
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SIP over UDP is the accepted standard but there is also SIP over TCP and SIP over TLS (over TCP). Choosing a compatible solution is a key and often overlooked step in selecting a UC platform. According to the current spec, RFC 3261, "all SIP elements must implement UDP and TCP. SIP elements may implement other protocols." Let's dive a little deeper.
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Yesterday Yahoo moved their servers that provide IM federation for OCS & LCS. MSN also made a similiar change. I wish they would have notified the community at large in advance. I've received almost a dozen calls this morning from customers yelping that PIC is broken. Yes I realize that the recommended config is to allow "any" access to port 5061, but many customers like to lock it down to a select group of IPs. Here's a the KB article on the Yahoo change and a rundown of the changes from the OCS Team Blog:
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My buddy Zep found a cool tool that integrates FireGPG seamlessly with Gmail and posted a great description on his blog. As if there weren't enough reasons to move your personal account to Gmail, for many of us this is something we've been clamoring for for awhile. In an age where identity theft is an everyday occurrence there's no reason not to encrypt your email. Personally, I send most client correspondence encrypted for obvious privacy reasons.
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After over a year of speculation, The One Laptop Per Child foundation announced they will begin to offer Microsoft Windows XP on the OLPC. Limited trials will begin immediately with general availability to follow.
There has been a rumor prevalent over the UCStrategies UC Summit since the first evening keynote. Mark Straton, an exec from Siemens, let slip that the OpenScape UC division might be sold and subtly hinted that Nortel might be the prospective buyer. There's more info and a full video of the keynote from my take on the event and John Furrier's opinion.
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In about 2 hours I'm headed to the airport and jumping on a plane to Arizona. Even though I printed my boarding pass last night I'm stuck in the 6th boarding group! Grrr, that sucks.
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Microsoft has been taking a beating in the press lately. In the spirit of lightening things up I thought I'd mention a fun new product that launched today.
I've been pretty busy lately. The good news is I've been up to mostly technical endeavors. I missed my buddy Tyson at the RSA Conference by two days. I've also been working on the outline for a new book, tentatively titled OCS 2009 Unleashed.
As most of you know, I also write for Hyperconnectivity.com and I've started a personal blog and begun twittering.
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The Office Communicator team announced they've released Mac Messenger 7. Finally, an OCS 2007 compatible solution for Mac users! I can't say this has been a roadblock to any deployments I've done, Mac users have to be used to limited software availability, but it was a definite annoyance. We all know how Mac users are notoriously squeaky wheels.
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Nortel announced the SCS500 open source IP PBX this week. It's an open source solution based on the SIPFoundry SipXecs project. It offers a lower price point than other Nortel offerings, the flexibility of an open source platform and most of the enterprise integration features of their larger platforms. That makes it pretty compelling.
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A few days ago I noted that Microsoft's MSN group would be stopping support for Outlook Express for hotmail users. In a similiar end of support announcement Microsoft will be decomissioning the DRM servers used to authorize playback of music from the dead MSN Music store in September. This means no new computers will be able to be authorized after September. What happend to all that music you purchased? You can still listen to it on authorized computers but when you upgrade systems you're out of luck.
As noted by ComputerWorld's Eric Lai, Microsoft will be discontinuing Outlook express access for Hotmail users.
Scott Hammer mentioned the reasons why in a blogpost here. In short, Microsoft doesn't believe the DAV protocol used by outlook express is efficient for larger mailbox sizes. They are offering two alternatives. Users can upgrade the full Microsoft Office Outlook Client or the new Windows Live Mail client that uses "DeltaSync". The best I can see from the limited detail is it's similiar to way outlook saves to PST files in cached mode.
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Last month I did the first post in a series on various third party tools for use with OCS. Here's the second...
You may remember my initial post on IPEvo's PoV webcam. I've had a chance to dive a little deeper into playing with it and posted another article here.
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Microsoft is often cast in a poor light in the security world. In the last few years Microsoft has had a very visible presence at most security conferences in an effort to "fix" that perception.
Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie discussed Microsoft's commitment to trusted computing and challenged the overall Internet community to extend Trustworthy Computing across the Internet. Core to this initiative are the recent controversial hotpoints of privacy and identity. To discuss in more detail Microsoft has published a whitepaper on their vision.
It's still a little rough but Michael Dunn has developed a great little tool! Microsoft markets Office Communicator as the singular dashboard for all communications. It is, but not for email. That's an awfully big "but". Michael's tool creates an Office Communicator pane in Outlook 2007 turning Outlook into a full dashboard for communications.
According to Michael's post it's a work in progress, but it looks great so far!
Cemaphore's MailShadowG make an interesting proposition, replace Exchange with Gmail. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it claims to "synchronize Microsoft Outlook with a trusted Internet email provider like Google, by mapping the repository that exists in Exchange (for email, calendaring and contacts) to [Gmail]". That statement alone is certainly compelling, but it asks as many questions as it answers.
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It's no secret I'm a big fan of Microsoft Office Communications Server. It does a lot of things very well. However, in my experience over the last 3+ years there's at least one it doesn't: Voice. This was brought up by customers repeatedly and Microsoft's answer was always that they planned to partner with the best in the voice world. We've seen many of those partnerships happen since the launch last October. Microsoft has announced strategic partnerships with Nortel, Avaya, Polycom and other established powers in the voice world. However, we haven't seen Microsoft offer anything compelling themselves in the voice arena.
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Microsoft announced that through its partnership with Tandberg they will deliver $300 high definition video cameras aimed at video conferencing; a concept aptly called HDVC. Microsoft's partnership with Polycom and Nortel will allow it to reach nearly three-fourths of the market with a budget solution. Polycom's least expensive HD option is $1000+. That's great for large conference rooms, but the Microsoft/Tandberg solution is driving to the desktop and into the SMB market. At the $300 pricepoint anyone can afford to do HDVC and I believe that will drive innovation and adoption all the way up the chain.
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Last week Apple announced they have licensed the ActiveSync Exchange Push technology from Microsoft. I had to read the article twice before I believed it. Steve Jobs swore up and down he'd never license MS technology for the iPhone. Maybe he finally realized there's a lot of money to be made in competing with RIM and Windows Mobile in the enterprise.
Personally, I think this is great. This may be the final nudge I needed to get an iPhone. Okay, maybe not. First I'd need it to run on a real network, not the slower-than-molasses-in-February AT&T data network. At least activesync represents the last technological barrier, the carrier issue is just financial/political.
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Alex Lewis has been involved in the high tech industry for more than 15 years, from satellite antenna design to to executive IT management. He has been a co-author or contributing author for books on Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, Windows 2003 R2 and Microsoft Technical Specialist Exam Guides. Alex is a senior consultant at Convergent Computing, an IT consulting firm specializing in Microsoft technologies. Alex is involved in many early adopter and TAP programs, working with new technology often 2-3 years before public release. Alex is also a CISSP and leads Convergent's Security and Unified Messaging practices in the field.
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