Category: Microsoft

Microsoft News Summary – 1 September 2014

Frak! It’s September already!?!?!?! Here’s my first update in a since last Wednesday – travel and events took priority.

The big news broke late on Friday and Saturday. The moron judge presiding over the FBI/Microsoft case cancelled the stay on the order to force Microsoft to turn over data from the Dublin data centre to the US feds, thus breaching privacy and violating Irish and European laws. Microsoft is refusing to comply and is appealing to a higher court in the USA.

Hyper-V

Legal

Azure

Windows Intune

PowerShell

Surface

  • What’s the Future for Surface Tablets? IMO, doom. It’s impossible to sell a business machine to business users if you don’t give businesses a way to buy the device and an SLA-enforced mechanism to support it. First of you to say "BYOD" gets a kick in the groin for drinking 2-year old Gartner KoolAid.

Licensing

VMware

Consumer

An Old Post Of Mine On Ballmer That Makes Interesting Reading

I’ve just re-read a post I wrote in 2010 about the future of Steve Ballmer. My two topics of focus were Windows Phone 7 (released that day) and the lack of a Windows tablet at the time.

I thought WinPho would struggle behind iOS and Android, mainly because of apps. I was not wrong. Things have improved, but there’s still issues with app quality and availability.

We now know that Ballmer bought into the Sinofsky plan (sounds like some dodgy French plan to keep out invading forces, and we know how those tend to work out). Windows 8 came, Windows 8.1 came, Windows 8.1 Update 1 came, and still Microsoft struggles in the tablet market. I thought (and I was not along) that, despite everything, Microsoft should get WinPho working on tablet devices. Instead we got the confusing and failed Windows RT, which is now being killed off through a merger with Windows Phone for ARM devices.

Fun times!

Oh yeah, I completely underestimated the impact of smartphones and tablets on the consumer market.

Microsoft News Summary – 27 August 2014

The rumours on “Threshold” are swirling through the Ethernets. Take nothing seriously until you see it for yourself on your own monitor.

Windows Server

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System Center Operations Manager

Windows 9

Azure

Microsoft News Summary – 26 August 2014

I know very few businesses deployed Windows 8, but any "upgrade" that requires a wipe & replace is not a service pack. However, that’s what Microsoft now thinks, and that’s had an impact on the Windows 8 support policy. Someone in Redmond needs a quick kick in the nether region, because coffee clearly won’t be strong enough.

And in other news on this slow morning, Steve Ballmer binged on a TV show featuring one of Hollyweird’s plastic surgery victims. Yeah; it’s always a slow period in the build up to big announcements.

Microsoft News Summary – 25 August 2014

Not much has happened since last Friday morning. VMworld is on this week in San Francisco – maybe it’s no coincidence that there have been earthquakes nearby?

Azure

  • AzureConf, free online Azure conference: On September 25th, 2014, Microsoft will be hosting AzureConf, another free event for the Azure community. This event will feature a keynote presentation by Scott Guthrie, along with numerous sessions executed by Azure community members.

PowerShell

Intune

  • The Windows Intune Team will be performing scheduled maintenance at the end of August: All service functions and operations are expected to perform normally during this maintenance window. Once the upgrade to the Windows Intune service is complete, a number of mandatory agent updates will be pushed out to all PC client machines connected to the service. In most cases, these updates will not require a reboot after being applied.

Office 365

  • Matter Centric Legal Document Management: MSFT has launched a limited pilot program for an industry vertical O365 solution to improve the way law firms and attorneys work together by making it easier to organize files by client and matter, review documents, and find information when needed without ever leaving Microsoft Word or Outlook. < I wonder, if like some other verticals, this only applies to the USA … try set the URL to be non-US.

Microsoft News Summary – 22 August 2014

Here’s the latest news from the Microsoft wires. More new services have popped up on Azure, mostly for devs, but the SQL AlwaysOn template should be a massive time saver.

Hyper-V

Azure

Security

OS Deployment

Office 365

Microsoft News Summary – 20 August 2014

The headline news from yesterday is that Steve Ballmer has resigned his new position from the Microsoft board to focus on “teaching” and his duties as the new owner of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA basketball franchise. He’s still the largest independent owner of MSFT stock.

Microsoft

Virtual Machine Manager

  • VMM 2012 Self-Service users cannot open a console session to a virtual machine: When you try to connect to the console session of a virtual machine (VM) that is running in Windows Server 2012 by using Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager or Microsoft System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager Service Pack 1 (SP1), the connection fails, and you receive the following error message – Virtual Machine Manager lost the connection to the virtual machine for one of the following reasons.

Azure

Office 365

Microsoft News Summary – 19 August 2014

Does “fail fast” = “fail predictably often”? Automated testing of software for cloud services needs to be investigated and questioned. First we had the clusterfrak August updates for Windows. Then a significant chunk of Azure went offline.

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Microsoft News Summary – 18 August 2014

The big news this morning is that Microsoft has had to withdraw 4 of last weeks automatic updates. But in other news:

Microsoft Fraks Up Patches AGAIN

I’m sick of this BS.

Microsoft is investigating behavior in which systems may crash with a 0x50 Stop error message (bugcheck) after any of the following updates are installed:

2982791 MS14-045: Description of the security update for kernel-mode drivers: August 12, 2014
2970228 Update to support the new currency symbol for the Russian ruble in Windows
2975719 August 2014 update rollup for Windows RT 8.1, Windows 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2
2975331 August 2014 update rollup for Windows RT, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2012

This condition may be persistent and may prevent the system from starting correctly.

If you are affected by any of the above then the repair process (see Known Issue 3) is an ungodly nightmare.

This is exactly why I tell people to delay deploying updates for 1 month. That’s easy using SCCM (an approval rule will do the delaying and supersede for you). WSUS – not so easy and that requires manual approval, which sadly we know almost never works.

Feedback, private and public from MVPs hasn’t worked. Negative press from the tech media hasn’t worked. What will, Microsoft? Nadella oversaw this clusterfrak of un-testing before he was promoted. Is sh1te quality the rule from now on across all of Microsoft? Should we tell our customers to remain un-patched, because catching malware is cheaper than being secure and up-to-date? Really? Does Microsoft need to be the defendant of a class action suit to wake up and smell the coffee? Microsoft has already lost the consumer war to Android. They’re doing their damndest to lose the cloud and enterprise market to their competition with this bolloxology.