Aidan Finn, IT Pro

As expected, Microsoft launched, this morning in Barcelona, Windows Mobile 6.  There’s plenty of blurb going around.  Here’s a sample:

"Users of the Microsoft Office system on the PC — of which there are nearly 400 million worldwide — will feel right at home with the new mobile versions of Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint available for Windows Mobile 6 powered devices. Windows Mobile 6 addresses extensive user feedback and makes information management easier and more convenient through the following improvements:

• Better-looking e-mail. Users view e-mail the way it was intended with its original pictures, tables and formatting, whether from a corporate e-mail server such as Exchange Server 2007, Web-based accounts such as Windows Live Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail, or a wide range of other service providers.
• Ease of viewing and editing of Office system documents. The new Office Mobile suite, built for all Windows Mobile powered devices, gives users a truly familiar and powerful experience with rich viewing and editing capabilities, without having to worry about the deletion of critical formatting and images.
• E-mail management and setup with fewer clicks. Nine new one-click options have been added, including Reply All, setting a flag, moving a message to a subfolder, and, of course, Delete. Users can set an automatic out-of-office reply while on the road when using a Windows Mobile 6 powered device and Exchange Server 2007.
• Synchronization with Windows Vista. Windows Vista™ and the Windows Mobile Device Center take the guesswork out of managing a device and swapping music, pictures, movies and Outlook information between PC and the device.
• Smart calendar bar. This innovative new feature gives users the ability to understand at a glance the day or week ahead and quickly determine open time on their schedules. With Exchange Server 2007, they can see who is attending a meeting and forward or reply to meeting requests.
• Web search, e-mail, instant messaging (IM) and blogging all together. Windows Live for Windows Mobile will provide customers with a rich set of services including Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, Live Search and Windows Live Spaces, uniquely designed to work with Windows Mobile software. Users can also find all their contacts in one unified list and see presence information on their Windows Live Messenger contacts.
• Contacts with context. Call history is now placed where it belongs, in each individual contact card, so people spend less time searching and more time communicating.

Windows Mobile efficiently works with existing Microsoft business technology investments and offers users a familiar software experience, making it the smartest mobile solution for businesses to deploy:

• Security options. The platform offers a variety of security options, giving IT departments ways to help secure a device, including new Exchange Server policies and certificate options, storage card encryption, and continued support for remote and local device wipe.
• Protected content. Organizations using Information Rights Management (IRM) technology to help control the viewing, storing and printing of confidential information on PCs can now extend those capabilities to Windows Mobile 6 powered devices, a feature not available on any other mobile phone platform.
• Line-of-business applications. Powerful, new mobile versions of the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework and Microsoft SQL Server™ are built into Windows Mobile 6, making it even easier to create and access sales tools, inventory tracking and many other applications from a Windows Mobile 6 powered smartphone.
• Internet sharing. A new built-in application makes using a Windows Mobile 6 powered smartphone as a laptop’s high-speed modem “one-click easy” with either a Bluetooth wireless or cable connection.
• Communication alternatives. Windows Mobile 6 makes it easier for operators and device-makers to integrate a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) solution into devices they are building. British Telecom in Europe, as well as HP, will be among the first to provide smartphones with new VoIP offerings for their business customers".

There is a fact sheet on how Windows Mobile can be used to offer better performance and value.

Microsoft also launched some Windows Live products for Windows Mobile including Maps, Mail, Messenger, Spaces and Search. 

Office 2007 should now be appearing as a category on your WSUS servers.

And to add to the confusion over time zone updates for North American customers, a new replacement rollup update will be released as an "Update Rollup" this Tuesday.

Microsoft has released a troubleshooting guide for the beta release of Forefront Client Security.  It covers the deployment and administration of the product.  Be sure to also check out my whitepaper on Forefront Client Security.

MS has released a VM disk image that contains an laready installed copy of the Exchange Calendar Update Tool.  This tool will be needed by people with North American Exchange servers that are affected the the DST update.  There’s instructions on how to use the VM disk image on the MS site.

Get your test lab ready …. it looks like there’s going to be 12 updates released by Microsoft next Tuesday affecting:

• Windows
• Office
• Visual Studio
• Step-by-Step Interactive Training
• MDAC
• OneCare, Antigen, Defender, Forefront Security for Exchange Server and Forefront Security for SharePoint

I just saw an article on BetaNews that said Microsoft will launch the next version of their version of Windows for PDA’s and phones, Windows Mobile 6.0, at the 3GSM Conference in Barcelona.  The conference starts on Monday (Feb 12th) and runs through until Thrursday.

It appears that v6.0 will be an incremental upgrade, i.e. the kernal hasn’t changed much if at all.  There will be greater USB support, support for the 2007 product releases (e.g. Exchange 2007) and there will be user optional integration with Microsoft’s Live services.  There’s a pre-release review on Mobile-Review.

Credit: BetaNews & Mobile-Review.

It’s been announced that EMC is to sell 10% of their wholey owned subsidiary, VMware.  Apparently, this announcement has been "welcomed" by EMC shareholders due to disappointment.  There is concern that there is a move by competitors, i.e. Xen and Microsoft, into free virtualisation solutions which has force Vmware to respond and will hit revenue.  VMware will have to focus sales ont heir flagship ESX product and virtualisation management solutions.

Wow!

We’ve seen a boom in the acceptance and deployment of virtualisation in the last year.  On the desktop end, Microsoft woul have the advantage with their free Virtual PC.  At the mid level, it”s fairly even but VMware’s "Server" product has the slightest of edges (due to state saving vs disk ifferencing, IMO).  Certainly, everyone I talk to and deal with still sees VMware as the market leader in the enterprise/high-end market.  Maybe this will change in the future and maybe not.  But VMware ESX was the product of choice for usually conservative CIO’s.  I don’t think that’s going to change very quickly, no matter how good the Microsoft "Longhorn" solution will be (partnered by Xen).

VMware has the technology lead right now, but in the future, we will have closer competition between the alternative players and VMware.   VMware will have to continue to differentiate themselves and compete by increasing integration with other operating systems and ensuring that their accompnaying technologies rovide a superior overall solution than that provided by their copetitors.

An Operations Guide for the IMF that is included in Exchaneg 2003 Service Pack 2 has been released.  You may or may not know, but there is a basic anti-spam defence built into all E2003 servers that have had service pack 2 installed.  Many SOHO’s cannot afford to use a third party solution for a comprehensive defense so this solution can give them the ability to cut out a lot of spam.  I use it myselft and very little spam actually gets through.

I’ve never heard of this tool until I saw it was available this morning.  The blurb is that it will help SOHO’s by saving "time on everyday tasks, work the way they want, and grow their business through online sales, online invoicing, and payment processes".

System Requirements are:

• Supported Operating Systems: Windows Vista; Windows XP
• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
• Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager Update or higher is required to share financial data with the Microsoft Outlook messaging and collaboration client.  Third party services, including Credit Card Processing, ADP payroll, eBay Online Sales, Equifax Credit reporting services, Office Live services are available for additional fees
• Microsoft Office Accounting Professional 2007 and Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager.
• Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 or higher is required to export to Microsoft Office Excel as well as create, email, or print customized invoices, sales orders, quotes, customer credit memos, customer statements, and purchase orders using Microsoft Office Word.

There’s a dedicated website for Office Accounting Express 2007.  You can also download a datasheet.

As you may know, Microsoft is pretty streict about all nodes in a Windows Cluster being identical.  As such, companies such as HP offer "cluster packages" that include 2 identical servers and an MSA 1500.  Without any automation, you are relying on manual checks to verify the servers are identical, from model number right down to service pack and driver version level.

Microsoft released a new wizrd tool last night.  The Cluster Configuration Validation Wizard promises that it:

"… does a complete system inventory and runs focused tests on servers that are configured and ready for Microsoft Server Cluster installation (in other words, before the servers are a cluster). ClusPrep will also run the inventory and many of these same tests after clustering is installed, however, because of their potentially disruptive nature, most storage tests are not run if the servers are already a cluster.

ClusPrep will validate that your system is configured properly by taking inventory of your system configuration and highlighting discrepancies in service pack levels, driver versions, etc.; evaluating and testing your network and storage configuration.

If the results of your ClusPrep execution do not show errors (viewable in detail from the XML report) then you can have a high level of confidence that your subsequent cluster installation and/or operation will be successful.
ClusPrep is a “client/server” tool: you install it on one machine (must be installed on a 32-bit architecture machine), and it drives tests on a collection of server machines (can be any architecture). All drivers and test agents are automatically installed on the servers as part of ClusPrep operation. In other words, the only install you do is on the machine from which you initiate the testing".