I was recently invited (for the third year in a row) to be filmed in a promotional testimonial for Microsoft TechEd Australia 2008. It was recently put online on the TechEd testimonials page, but I have uploaded a YouTube version to save everyone downloading Silverlight. Let me know what you think!
Tag: Microsoft Page 3 of 6
Ok I don’t want to sound like an MS Fanboi, but there are actually a few cool things Microsoft related happening with me at the moment.
Skydrive
Skydrive is a very cool new file storage service from Microsoft. Really simple, you get 5GB of storage space and can upload any file smaller than 50MB. Sounds perfect for a “My Docs” backup system? The only catch is that there is no shell extension or decent folder upload tool yet. They do however have a nice drag+drop multi-file upload tool, which I guess will do for now. I would love to see a more integrated tool that actually backed your “My Docs” up for you, but my guess that is hidden somewhere in the greater Windows Live skunkworks for now.
Windows Server 2008 + Exchange 2007
Yes, I am migrating my servers at home to the latest and greatest MS enterprise offerings. This also means going to Windows 2008 x64, which is fine since I have been an AMD fanboi for some time, but it would have been nice of them to make the migration a little easier! I know hardware is cheaper than software these days, but it would be nice to be able to easily upgrade Exchange from 2003 to 2007 without having to have a spare x64 machine lying around. Anyway it is all underway, so keep an eye on my Netcraft page.
Now that Office 2007 is upon us with a new file format, how is everyone else going to cope? Well Microsoft has freely released a file format converter which can be downloaded here. Esteemed authorities such as Gartner have warned companies to deploy Office 2007 file converters NOW, but how can you do that on a corporate network? Microsoft only distribute the converters in an executable, how can I deploy that using Group Policy?
Well Mr M Keadle provided the solution for me. When you run the exe it extracts an MSI (as well as a bunch of other files) into the C:\Program Files\MSECache\O2007Cnv\1033 directory. If you copy these files to a network deployment location you can then use Group
Policy! What I don’t understand is why Microsoft themselves wouldn’t publish such a solution (or even a single MSI)?