Microsoft – Page 8 – Absoblogginlutely!

Windows Live Writer to MovableType

By Andy on Tuesday, June 26, 2007

For some reason, my installation of Windows Liver Writer will not allow me to select any of my other MT blogs (apart from the main one) when I go to set up an account. Instead I get the not useful error message “An error occurred while attempting to connect to your weblog: Blog Server Error – Server Error 1 Occurred Invalid Login You must correct this error before proceeding.”

I know the password is correct as I’ve just used it to log into the system.

Another annoyance is the version number of WLW. Help/About displays the following version – 1.0 (12.0.1183.516) – nowhere does it mention that this is beta2. As the WLW website also doesn’t tell you which build Beta2 is, it is pretty hard to tell whether you are on the latest version or not.

Initial SharedView thoughts

By Andy on Friday, May 11, 2007

Kevin Devin asked how SharedView fits with Netmeeting and Livemeeting – my first thought when I was using this product was that it appeared to provide similar functionality to netmeeting. This product is actually the Tahiti product that Microsoft purchased, rebranded and re-released as a new beta product.
I’ve not used netmeeting for several years so the statements may not be entirely accurate.
However the differences I see are as follows

Looks a lot nicer than the netmeeting did.
You can share your desktop with up to 15 people – netmeeting was limited to 1.
Works much better through firewalls – I’m guessing it is http based so no firewall tweaking needed.
No directory support included – netmeeting had the ability to join a directory of available chats – this needs an email address to connect to the original host (but there must be a directory on MS’s servers somewhere but it is just not viewable to the public)

I didn’t find the performance to be that great, with my two pc’s connected the screen refresh was pretty slow and artifacts would often be left behind on the screen. I did like the fact that you could see the guests cursors (but this would be pretty hectic with 15 guests) but you can turn this feature off.
If another program was moved over the top of the shared application, a grey box would appear on the guest screen where the application was – this almost looks like screen corruption but it isn’t.
The host computer will only share one monitor, spreading the shared application over 2 screens will only share the portion of the application on the hosted screen
It takes a small part of the desktop as the controls get placed at the very top of the screen – a nice feature would be to merge this into the title bar of the application to recover a little more screen estate.
File sharing worked nicely and I was easily able to share files between the two computers. It would be nice to have the downloaded file appear in a most recently downloaded window or have the option to open the file once it was downloaded in the same manner ie/firefox does.
I’ll be adding my feature notes to the Sharedview forums shortly.

Microsoft

Microsoft SharedView

By Andy on Thursday, May 10, 2007

Microsoft have just released SharedView – a program that looks like it can be used to present your screen to multiple (up to 15) computers. Not sure how it works yet as it doesn’t work with Lotus Notes (see my posts on the Microsoft forums). These forums are brand new – I was the first to post (2) posts for support/product feedback. I’ll be testing this out on the home pc tonight, and it will be interesting to see if gmail is supported as a mail client.
It uses a Live ID for the presenter (but it is not needed for the clients watching the screen) and as yet does not support audio (but neither does webex that I’m aware of). I think it will take some time for users to get used to getting SharedView installed on their computer and running it – it doesn’t seem to be deployed via a web applet/activex component like WebMeeting.
More later after I’ve got it working…..

Microsoft

Zoomit updated

By Andy on Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Zoomit has been updated, the tool that allows you to zoom into part of the screen, annotate the screen or have a break countdown timer displayed on the screen when doing presentations. I went to a presentation last week on Microsoft’s Forefront Technology software (which seems to have promise but doesn’t seem to be anywhere near capable as a replacement for Mcafee, Symantec etc due to the lack of functionality) which was in dire need of a zoom tool as the presenter even commented that he was having difficulty seeing the screenshots on his screen (so why on earth they were included in the powerpoint presentation I don’t know). At the end of the presentation I fired my laptop up, loaded zoomit and took it to the (Microsoft) presenter to show it to him and suggested he downloaded it and uses it in the future.
Update You can the presentation and virtual machines for Forefront by downloading the Microsoft Forefront and System Center Demonstration Toolkit. I intend to write up my thoughts from the meeting into a blog post later (as I have to provide feedback to the rest of the office anyway)

Exchange / Outlook Hotfixes ie7 Microsoft

Tiny emails printed in outlook with ie7

By Andy on Saturday, April 14, 2007

If you have outlook and try to print an email and the font is incredibly small, then you will need the hotfix from kb932538 referenced in the article on Sandy’s page. I would link to the Microsoft site but the knowledge base article is not published which explains why you can’t find any details on this problem when you search in technet (sigh).
I’ll be requesting this one for my customers on Monday morning as I have at least two desktops that are having this problem. The interim solution is to hit reply or forward and then print the email.
Update I installed this patch on a customer site this morning and it approximately doubles the size of the font so the printout is now just about readable – still nowhere near the size of the printout if I hit forward (or reply) and then hit print. I’m not sure how to go about sending feedback to Microsoft that this doesn’t solve the problem.

Microsoft Windows 2000 Windows 2003

Using CNAME for server alias’s may not work as expected

By Andy on Friday, March 30, 2007

If you are decomissioning an old server and moving the data to a new server, an easy way to let all the hosts still connect to the old server is to create a cname alias in dns such that oldserver points to newserver.domain This way, any software coded to use unc names will still find the share but on the new server.
Unfortunately, by default the new server does not expect to get requests for the oldname so it ignores them and the client receives an error message. This is apparently fixed by following the instructions in KB281308.

Microsoft

Business Critical Support

By Andy on Wednesday, March 7, 2007

I had to invoke Business critical support tonight (and I’m still working!) after a SBS2003 server would not complete the Internet Connectivity Wizard, complaining on the network configuration and website configuration. Microsoft give their partners free “Server Down” support if the problem is business critical affecting production. They will work with you 24/7 until the problem is solved. After 3 hours on the phone with remote desktop support we ended up rebooting the server and starting a repair installation of the server. For those of you who are Microsoft Partners and didn’t know about the support, then go to Business Critical Support on partner.microsoft.com, a registered passport account is required that is joined to a Microsoft partner.
I’ll update more on the patch problem when we get a resolution, but so far it’s been a long 7.5 hours working on this – dst can wait.

Beta Testing Microsoft WHS

WHS Beta signup.

By Andy on Monday, February 12, 2007

You can sign up for the Windows Home Server Beta. Looking forward to this one.

Microsoft

Microsoft Exam Insurance

By Andy on Thursday, December 14, 2006

Microsoft have just announced their Exam Insurance package where you get a free retake if you fail, 25% off your next exam if you pass and a years subscription to technet plus (which contains full versions of a lot of microsoft software) – I’ve requested details on pricing as their website doesn’t mention it and unfortunately nobody is answering the phone at the nearest exam office.

Geotagging Google GPS Microsoft Photos Real Life Zooomr

Geotagging photo’s made very easy

By Andy on Tuesday, October 10, 2006

I’ve been trying to use Microsoft’s WWMX application to geotag some of the photos that we took on holiday ready to upload to zooomr, but the level of mapping detail for Jamaica and Grand Cayman Islands was pretty awful However I have found that by using Garmin’s mapsource to load the track data from the gps and then saving the tracks to a gpx I can then use wwmx to automatically tag the photos if I had the gps on at the time the photos were taken.

However, for the rest of the photos that were taken without the gps I needed a better way of marking where they are taken. A combination of picassa and google earth makes the job very easy. First the photo’s need to be loaded into Picassa – this will probably be done automatically (although for some reason Picassa doesn’t like to find my cruise photos and they disappear from the folder view even though I can see them being scanned). Anyway, once the photos have been loaded, select the photos that need to be geotagged and then go to the tools menu, geotag, geotag with google earth. Then use Google Earth to navigate to the spot that the photos were taken -the satellite view does an outstanding job for this. Then just hit geotag, select the next picture and repeat (or do geotag all if they are all in the same place. At this point, the locations are written to the picture (exif data I presume) and can then be uploaded to flickr or zooomr already geotagged for you.

As it will take some time to load the cruise photo’s, I took some pictures of the Pumpkin Festival at Oakland Nursery including the Worlds Fastest Pumpkin Carver and entries for the Worlds biggest pumpkin.