Hi All,

Now that Office Communication Server R2 is out, there are a heap of customers piloting and indeed deploying OCS. I thought I’d share a few thoughts around why you should consider federating with your business partners and other IM service providers. I work in the support part of our organisation, and for me, encouraging my customers to federate with Microsoft makes perfect sense both from a business partner (being able to engage directly with your account team) perspective as well enabling us to support our customers better.

Here are a few reasons why you should consider federation:

· The ability to see if business partners are online, their presence, availability

· Share information easily via Instant Messaging – share documents, URLS, quick questions/responses/escalations

· Ability for 3^rd parties to see application/environmental issues via shared desktops which should drive down response/incident resolution times

· Reduce phone costs by calling peer to peer instead of traditional POTS

· Ability to quickly and easily setup a conference call/Live meeting session for collaboration

· Ability to manage IM, audit, monitor and manage IM traffic

· Ability to build virtual teams across organisations or with 3^rd parties with a common goal – e.g.: Universities or companies working on joint projects or teams that are geographically separated.

Federation is an important goal for the Office Communications Server team and they are excited to announce several changes to public IM federation between Office Communications Server and public IM networks, effective July 1, 2009:

· The Live Communications Sever Public IM Connectivity (LCS PIC) license will be renamed Office Communications Server Public IM Connectivity (OCS PIC) license.

· Customers with Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Standard CAL or Office Communications Server 2007/Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 Standard CAL with Software Assurance will no longer require an additional license to federate with Windows Live.  (A license will still be required for federation with AOL & Yahoo!.)

· With Windows Live federation, customers will be able to add Windows Live contacts to their Office Communicator contact list, view presence and send and receive instant messages.

Microsoft will continue to work with our partners to enable more options that allow you to communicate seamlessly with customers, partners, friends and family on different networks. For more information on public IM connectivity with Office Communications Server, please go to http://www.microsoft.com/communicationsserver/en/us/public-im-connectivity.aspx.

Our Unified Communications Product team are also on Twitter http://twitter.com/ucteam.

Federation provides your organization with the ability to communicate with other organizations Access Edge Server to share IM and presence. You can also federate with an audio conferencing provider using either of the two following methods. The process of configuring federation with an organization or an audio conferencing provider is identical. For a list of supported ACPs, see http://r.office.microsoft.com/r/rlidOCS?clid=1033&p1=ACP.

If you have enabled federation on the Access Edge Server, access by federated partners, including audio conferencing providers (ACPs), is controlled using one of the following methods:

• Allow automatic discovery of federated partners. This is the default option during initial configuration of an Access Edge Server because it balances security with ease of configuration and management. For example, when you enable automatic discovery of federated partners on your Access Edge Server, Office Communications Server 2007 allows any federated domain to send communications with you and automatically evaluates incoming traffic from federation partners and limits or blocks that traffic based on trust level, amount of traffic, and administrator settings.
• Allow discovery of federated partners, but grant a higher level of trust to specific domains or Access Edge Servers that you specify on the Allow list. For example, if you want to grant a higher level of trust to partners using the SIP domain contoso.com and fabrikam.com, you would add these two domains on the Allow tab. Restricting discovery in this way establishes a higher level of trust for connections with the domains or Access Edge Servers that you add to your Allow list, but still provides the ease of management that is possible by discovering other federation partners that are not listed on the Allow tab.
• Do not allow discovery of federation partners and limit access of federated partners to only the domains or Access Edge Servers for which you want to enable connections. Connections with federated partners are then allowed only with the specific domains or Access Edge Servers you add to the Allow tab. This method offers the highest level of security, but does not offer ease of management. For example, if an FQDN of an Access Edge Server changes, you must manually change the FQDN of the server in the Allow list.

How Federated Traffic Is Evaluated When Using Automatic Discovery

If you choose to use automatic discovery of federated partners, the Access Edge Server automatically evaluates incoming federated traffic in the following way:

If a federated party has sent requests to more than 1000 URIs (valid or invalid) in the local domain, the connection first placed on the Watch list. Any additional requests are then blocked by the Access Edge Server. If the Access Edge Server detects suspicious traffic on a connection, it will limit the federation partner to a low message rate of 1 message per second. The Access Edge Server detects suspicious traffic by calculating the ratio of successful to failed responses. The Access Edge server also limits legitimate federated partner connections (unless added to the allow list) to 20 messages/sec.

If you know that you will have more than 1000 requests sent by a legitimate federated partner or a volume of over 20 messages per second sent to your organization, to allow these volumes, you must add the federated partner to the Allow tab.

After configuring federation, you can use Office Communications Server 2007 administrative tools to monitor and manage federated partner access on an ongoing basis. For more information, see the

Introduction to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Administration Guide.
Enabling discovery of federated partners

If you did not enable discovery of federated partners when you configured your Access Edge Server, you can use the Computer Management snap-in to do so. If you already selected this option during setup, you do not need to perform this step.

To enable discovery of federated partners

1. Log on to the Access Edge Server as a member of the RCT Local Administrators group or a group with equivalent user rights.

2. Open Computer Management. Click Start, click All Programs, click Administrative Tools, and then click Computer Management.

3. In the console tree, expand Services and Applications, right-click Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, and then click Properties.

4. On the Access Methods tab, select the Allow discovery of federated partners check box.

Add a Trusted Federated Partner

Use the following procedure to add a trusted federated partner domain and optionally the FQDN of its Access Edge Server, use the following procedure.

To add a trusted federated partners

1. Log on to the Access Edge Server as a member of the RTC Local Administrators group or a group with equivalent user rights.

2. Open Computer Management. Click Start, click All Programs, click Administrative Tools, and then click Computer Management.

3. On the Allow tab, click Add.

4. In the Add Federated Partner dialog box, do the following:

• In the Federated partner domain name box, type the domain of each federated partner domain.
• In the Federated partner Access Edge Server box, optionally type the FQDN of each Access Edge Server that you want to add to your Allow list. Remember if you configure the FQDN of a partner's Access Edge Server and the FQDN changes, you must manually update your configuration for this partner.
• Click OK.

5. Repeat this procedure for each federated partner you want to add to your Allow list, and then click OK.

For more information, please check out this link - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb663635.aspx

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 gives organisations the features and tools they need to streamline communications while increasing operational control, all without expensive infrastructure and network upgrades.

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Nick.

Today marks both a sad and exciting opportunity for me and the team. We are in the process of interviewing for a new manager, and it’s clear to me the impact an individual can make on the team (personally and professionally), the business and our customers.

For those that know me well, know I’m persistent, tenacious and focused on delivering strong results for our customers and our business. The attitude and success of our team has been a reflection of the leadership, guidance and persistence of our now former manager. We all deal with change in a variety of ways - a change in leadership is an opportunity for us to grow more as individuals (look inward) as well as a team and to re-evaluate the way we’ve worked in the past, and consider how we should/could work in the present and future. I’m always extremely excited for those MSFTers that move off shore, and somewhat envious of the opportunity ahead for them. Kiwis always punch well above their weight and this is largely driven by our passion and enthusiasm for the company and our customers as well as our diverse skill sets in terms of being jack of all trades, master of none. The challenge is always the threat of becoming disconnected from reality (the field); however there are plenty of people around to keep you grounded with the continuous cycle of feedback.

As we work through this current economic climate, we need to be focused more than ever on doing the right thing by our customers by delivering high value solutions, services, products and making sure we listen to what is really important. So the page has turned for the team, onto the next chapter. :-)

Hi All,

We’re living in an interesting time from a technology perspective - where staff are beginning to demand more and more the functionality they consume at home, whilst in the office. As the generation y population join the workforce after being exposed to technology for most of their lives, it creates an interesting intersection in how we can get the best out of our workers. It’s unusual for gen-y citizens not to be connected. They are either online via TXTing, social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo, Twitter or at the end of a broadband connection. How can businesses take advantage of technology to increase productivity and profitability, while at the same time protect company assets/IP and allow consumer choice of devices, hardware, operating systems and connectivity options?

The answer isn’t clear cut, and there are trade-offs with these options. If a business has invested wisely in the backend infrastructure, then serving up applications can be delivered in a variety of ways: e.g.:

1. Virtual Desktops - Client-hosted desktop virtualization creates a separate OS environment on the desktop, allowing non-compatible legacy or line-of-business applications to operate within their native environment on top of a more current operating system, or enabling two IT environments (for example, personal and corporate) to run concurrently on the same physical device. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is a desktop delivery model, which allows client desktop workloads (operating system, application, user data) to be hosted and executed on servers in the data centre. Users can communicate with their virtual desktops through a client device that supports remote desktop protocols such as RDP.

Key benefits include:

• Offers improved flexibility and desktop location independence, enhancing work scenarios such as work from home and hot-desking
• Facilitates improved business continuity through data centralization
• Provides integrated management of physical, virtual and session-based desktops, including non-Microsoft infrastructure

2. Virtual Applications - transforms applications into centrally-managed virtual services that are never installed and don’t conflict with other applications.

Key benefits include:

• Streams applications on-demand over the internet or via the corporate network to desktops, Terminal servers and laptops
• Automates and simplifies the application management lifecycle by significantly reducing regression and application interoperability testing
• Accelerates OS and application deployments by reducing the image footprint
• Reduces the end user impacts associated with application upgrades/patching and terminations. No reboots required; no waiting for applications to install; and no need to uninstall when retiring an application
• Enables controlled application use when users are completely disconnected

3. Delivering applications via a web browser

Key benefits include:

• Minimal software installation if any or via plug-ins/controls
• Minimal client upgrades required as updates are typically applied to backend applications/servers & services
• A wide selection of devices that have browsers - fat clients, thin clients, PDAs, mobile devices

Traditional IT delivers line of business applications on a company supplied piece of hardware, standardised OS and applications for a specific range of desktops, laptops and terminal services devices. With the introduction of netbooks and cheaper notebooks, as well as our evolving work /lifestyle patterns – there are some interesting dynamics to consider.

I travel a bit for work, and have my own set of favourite/useful applications, as well as a desire to have access to my own personal documents, files, web favourites and email whenever I need them. I’m not keen to carry more than one device, so my question is – should employers offer the choice of allowing staff to supply their own device which can be used for accessing the corporate network and resources via wired, wireless, VPN , Direct Access technologies?

There are clearly things to consider:

• Cost
• Industry Standards /Cross Platform
• Potential financing options of acquisition of device – should the company offer something to help?
• Security of personal and corporate data – how do you separate, keep it safe, ensure it’s accessible to others as well as backed up etc
• Reliability, performance, manageability – ensuring the device you have allows you to perform the required tasks/duties your employer needs and expects
• Support, Warranty costs – If your device fails, how do you deal with this, and whose responsibility is it?
• Virtualised Desktop/Applications – is this infrastructure there, fault tolerant and available when it’s needed?

All of the above (plus the many that I’ve missed out) is addressable with the technologies we have available today – Should we be exploring this as a viable option for tech savvy employees? I’m not sold either way, however in my opinion this is definitely something I think IT departments will continue to receive feedback about for some time. The days of traditional IT being a NO shop, with answers like “this is the only approved corporate standard device available” will be short lived – We need to move with the times and enable the business, whilst at the same time empowering the individual with choices. We are living in the digital decade, the cultural change is happening right in front of us.

Nick.

Hi All,

Today started like most others, with my daily dose of humour and news watching Breakfast on TV One. Over the past few days, there have been a number of articles online in New Zealand suggesting that 1000 people join the unemployment benefit weekly with a projection of 60,000 people being restructured over the next 12 months. Alot of the initiatives that where floated at the February job summit seemed to have stalled, or appear to have had little impact at this stage.

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is having a major impact on the way we do business, the way we look at new opportunities and as well as the social implications on how we live our daily lives.

The requirement to be fiscally responsible can be interpreted as ‘stop spending all money, reduce staff, cut back anything that looks large or complex’, I question whether that is the right thing to do?

Information Technology is in a strong place to add real business value and be a real asset in driving costs out of the business to help cushion the impact of this global recession. Core infrastructure is often neglected and overlooked by organizations - it is the foundation that we build our business on and around. This can be either a strategic asset and enabler, or a noose around our neck in terms of our ability to move with the times, be supported, supportable, secure, reliable, as well as enhancing our ability to interoperate with other systems, applications and vendors. If you have leaky pipes, do you want to spend your time and money fixing leaks or laying new pipes that give your business increased profitability and a competitive advantage?

As times get tougher, businesses look at ways of driving costs out of the business, often it’s going through a P&L and looking for large items of expenditure and asking/confirming do we really need these and making the call. e.g.: Maintenance agreements / Support Agreements can be expensive, however they provide a level of insurance in the event of failure. This could be seen as a quick win in terms of immediate cost savings; however the longer term implications of terminating such things need to be taken into consideration. Like all discussions with vendors, it’s wise to evaluate the level of service you need and receive for the level of money you pay. If you aren’t receiving the level of value you believe you should be, then it’s time to have that conversation and keep parties honest. Finding large cost items to remove is generally given to the budget owner, but IT must understand that they are employed by the business to provide services – the platform for the business to make money. We need to bare this in mind when we look at cost savings and the flow on effect of these decisions for today and tomorrow.

IT departments have come a long way from a place where the ‘geeks’ are, where they have the latest and greatest toys, deploy new versions of software just because it’s a new version, however I’m not certain we are as business aligned as we can and should be. We need to get closer to the business, become part of their vital business functions and enable them to achieve the business outcomes they need. I come from a background in infrastructure and understand how it’s very easy to become siloed and focused on the task at hand, rather than taking a step back and understanding, listening and delivering to the businesses requirements.

With shrinking budgets, headcount, time and resources, we need to look at the ways we can make a difference to the organisation. There’s no rocket science here –

Business Alignment - Understanding what is important to the business, what they see as the money earners this financial year and beyond, understanding their challenges, what they deem as critical and must have services. We need to continue to build strong relationships with key stake holders so that we are included in and assist with decisions made for the business. By doing this, we can align IT projects and look for quick win opportunities and drive project consolidation. Focus on risks and how IT can mitigate against them by reducing the likelihood of things happening. Understand your competitors, their weaknesses and where you can focus to grow market share and increase your competitive advantage. In order for businesses to make well informed decisions, they need to have decent information. This clearly falls in the realms of IT, business analysts and finance departments.

Virtualization – Looking at opportunities to reduce cost in terms of power consumption, platform consolidation, floor footprint, retiring older/non-supported hardware and software, maximise hardware capability, automation, smarter disaster recovery options, lab, testing and development environments, fault tolerance - all to improve availability/reliability/maintainability/manageability and remove longer term costs.

Business Automation – Work with the business to understand opportunities to leverage technology to automate and drive costs out of the business through smart automation – align to the businesses 1, 3, 5 year strategic plan. IT will never be anything other than a cost centre unless we align to the desired business outcomes.

Realising the value of the software you own – Customers buy software in a variety of ways from vendors. Some of these options include maintenance which may entitle you to newer versions of the software once it becomes available. IT are in the best position to interpret the business requirements, understand how and what the organisation are licensed for, and therefore potentially save money through smart deployment. Alot of purchased software sits on the shelf un-installed, this can be due to the fire fighting nature of the organisation/IT, changed or different business priorities, or a disconnect between procurement and IT and the business. Newer versions of software typically offer more features and functionality and therefore value if deployed. It’s also an opportunity to understand and explore the alternative options for purchasing/deploying software. There are now a variety of purchasing options available that include software for on premise (traditional), off premise (in the cloud) and a hybrid via subscription as well as vendors also offering attractive financing options.

Consolidation of technologies and platforms – When I visit customers, it’s not uncommon for them to have multiple versions of operating systems and applications, some are within support and others clearly are not. It can be hard to turn off old machines as new systems are introduced due to lack of documentation, understanding of the flow on affect, hard coding in custom written applications etc, so we need to leverage technologies such as virtualization to overcome some of these hurdles. We need to look at the toolsets the organisation need and use and why different business units have different tools for the same/similar job.

Proactive Engagement – We need to have the right tools to understand how our environment is behaving, and why. History teaches those who listen, and monitoring your environment and having the right tools to take action is a must. We need businesses to understand that in order to have a healthy car, it needs to be regularly serviced (health checks) as well as maintained. Best practice at the point of deployment don’t mean its best practice long term – Technology, learning’s, and operational tasks should be reviewed regularly and amended as it makes sense.

Unified Communications – Telephony and collaboration costs can be significantly reduced by smarter delivery options. The ability to take your phone extension with you while you travel adds huge value, as well as being able to reduce toll calls by dialling out of local points of presence. UC is an enabler for driving costs out, as well as reducing the requirement to travel by using the right conferencing technologies.

The Team – We need to look after the people that oil the cogs, continue to develop and grow their capabilities, and provide opportunities as well as helping them to have a balanced work and home life.

By understanding business processes, and aligning IT to increase efficiencies, availability, reliability and performance, you can have a large impact on profitability as well as delivering greater value and more choices to your customers.

As I reflect on the past few months, and the number of phone calls I’ve had from people affected by restructures, it’s fantastic to see companies investing in people and doing the right thing as much as possible through employee assistance programs (assistance with preparing CV’s, helping understand alternative career options, counselling) and putting staff and their families affected in the forefront as they go through very tough times.

The point I’m trying to make is, that in order to move forward, become agile, increase profitability and retain skilled staff, we need to build tighter relationships with the business, understand what they want to achieve and when they need to achieve it. We need to advise them on what is technically possible; everything has a cost, even if you choose to do nothing. Through communication, technology and a bit of hard work, we can better use the assets we have today and deliver for the needs for tomorrow.

Nick.

Hi All,

For those of you who have installed Windows 7 RC on one these netbooks and couldn’t figure out what the two unknown devices are in device manager, then I have the solution for you.

Visit the HP website here and install the following downloads:

Nick.

Hi All,

Now that Windows 7 has hit release candidate, people are asking me how to create a bootable USB stick so they can quickly install Windows 7 RC1.

You will need the following to create the bootable USB flash drive:

• USB Flash Drive (>2GB+) - 4GB minimum recommended
• Microsoft Windows 7 Disk
• A computer running Windows 7 or Windows Vista

Step 1: Format the USB Drive

The steps below describe how to use the command line to format a USB disk correctly using the diskpart utility.

**** This will erase/delete/nuke/remove/junk everything on your drive. Be careful to select the right drive!  ****

Plug in your USB Flash Drive

Open a command prompt as administrator (Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt (right click and select “Run as administrator”)

Find the drive number of your USB Drive by typing the following into the Command Prompt window:

diskpart

list disk

The number of your USB drive will be listed, write it down - I’ll assume for this tutorial that the USB flash drive number is disk 2.

Format the drive by typing the following instructions into the same window. Replace the number “2” with the number of your disk below.

select disk 2

clean

create partition primary

select partition 1

active

format fs=NTFS

assign

exit

When that is done, you’ll have a formatted USB flash drive that is ready to be made bootable - don't close this Command Prompt, as you'll need it again soon.

Step 2: Make the USB Drive Bootable 

Now we’ll use the bootsect utility that comes on the Windows 7 or Window Vista to make the USB flash drive bootable.  

Insert your Windows 7 or Windows Vista DVD into your  drive - I’ll assume the drive letter is d:

Using the same Command Prompt window that you used in Step 1, change directory to the boot folder located on the root of the media.

d:

cd d:\boot

Use bootsect to set the USB Flash drive as a bootable NTFS drive prepared for a Windows 7 image. I’m assuming that your USB flash drive has been labelled as drive  f:\ by the Computer:

bootsect /nt60 f:

You can now close the command prompt window as this is no longer required.

Step 3: Copy the installation DVD to the USB drive

Using Windows Explorer, copy all of the files from your DVD to the formatted flash drive, once completed, this USB flash drive is ready to boot. The final thing you need to do is to enable your computer to boot via USB in the BIOS and then you’re away.

To request a valid key for the beta and release candidate, please go here - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx.

Nick.

Hi All,

I’ve given myself a project of synth’ing Liam’s school (Halswell) for them – It’s a wicked technology from Microsoft Live Labs which has a whole heap of potential uses.. So if you’ve got some photos of Halswell School, ping me an email and i’ll happily add them in the collection as I progress...

NB: You can zoom in/out on the photos by using the + and – buttons as well as navigate around using the arrows.

Nick.

Hi All,

I've been working a bit with Nigel Parker in our developer evangelist team on some projects and he's always doing cool stuff with our new technologies, so I wanted to see how hard it was for mere mortals to synth photos - It's surprisingly very very easy - I took a few photos of my office at work.. and put this together (or you can view the embedded version below). For more info check out http://photosynth.net/. 

Nick.

Hi All,

We moved Microsoft offices last week here in Christchurch, and as such we needed some additional wiring and electrical work to be done as there wasn’t enough wiring to cater for our needs. One of the ports in my office wasn’t working (it didn’t pass the cabling test with my tester) so I asked the cablers to test all ports in the rooms to ensure they were working as expected. When we pulled the jack off the wall, this is what we found…..

So from the look of it (and from testing) the original cabler/sparky decided that the jackpoints on this wall maybe better suited on the other wall, so daisy chained it to the new jackpoint rather than running another cable from the patch panel… Both jackpoints are 26 and 28.. truely cowboy-ish for a new building install!

Nick.

Today Microsoft announced on the back of its 2^nd quarter earnings, that it plans to cut 5,000 jobs over the next 18 months - starting with 1400. I found myself today reflecting on the organisation I work for, the job I do, and what I/the company needs to focus on to weather the storm moving forward in the current economic climate. I’ve often joke with colleagues and friends that for me, working for Microsoft is an addiction. I’m never far away from email, a laptop or my cellphone, and I find myself fortunate to be paid to do my hobby. So my sincere thoughts are with those that were let go today and their families.

We had a company meeting in New Zealand today, and it’s clear to me that the company wants to look after it’s strongest assets (the people) while ensuring we meet our shareholders expectations by increasing market share and profitability. Our leadership team did an excellent job in relaying the facts as they currently stand, installing confidence in the job that we do, our contribution as a subsidiary to the corporation as well as New Zealand and how we can play a positive hand in our destiny by the way we engage with our customers and partners and focus on the job at hand.

We can’t be successful unless our customers and partners are, so now is the time more than ever, for us to help identify opportunities to drive costs out of organisations through automation, process improvement, and smart adoption and deployment of technology.

We aren’t a faceless US Corporation, we are Microsoft New Zealand. If you need to drive costs of your business, make sure you are realising the value of the software you currently own, talk to us about the challenges you face - you maybe surprised where we can help.

Nick.