Microsoft News – 19 October 2015

It turns out that Microsoft has been doing some things that are not Surface-related. Here’s a summary of what’s been happening in the last while …

Hyper-V

image

Windows Server

Windows Client

Azure

Office 356

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 30 September 2015

Microsoft announced a lot of stuff at AzureCon last night so there’s lots of “launch” posts to describe the features. I also found a glut of 2012 R2 Hyper-V related KB articles & hotfixes from the last month or so.

Hyper-V

Windows Server

Azure

Office 365

EMS

Microsoft News – 28 September 2015

Wow, the year is flying by fast. There’s a bunch of stuff to read here. Microsoft has stepped up the amount of information being released on WS2016 Hyper-V (and related) features. EMS is growing in terms of features and functionality. And Azure IaaS continues to release lots of new features.

Hyper-V

Windows Client

Azure

System Center

Office 365

EMS

Security

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News 13-August-2015

Hi folks, it’s been a while since I’ve posted but there’s a great reason for that – I got married and was away on honeymoon 🙂 We’re back and trying to get back into the normal swing of things. I was away for the Windows 10 launch, happily ignoring the world. Windows 10 in the businesses is not a big deal yet – Microsoft needs to clear up licensing and activation for businesses before they’ll deliberately touch the great new OS – I’ve already had customers say “love it, but not until we get clarification”.

Hyper-V

Windows Server

Windows

Azure

System Center

Office 365

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 16 July 2015

It’s been a busy week with WPC driving announcements that affect partners.

Hyper-V

Windows Server

Windows Client

Azure

clip_image001

System Center

  • Datazen Enterprise Server: Datazen Enterprise Server is a collection of web applications and Windows services. Acts as a repository for storing and sharing dashboards and KPIs.

Office 365

Licensing

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News–13 July 2015

I don’t have all that much for you, but the big news is the Azure Site Recovery (ASR, Microsoft’s DR site in the cloud) now supports VMware virtual machines and physical servers, without using System Center. You do need to run some stuff on-prem and in the cloud to make it work though, so there will be a tipping point where the solution becomes affordable.

Azure

clip_image001

System Center

Office 365

My First Blog Post Written & Posted Using OneNote

Hey genius, I know that the text of this article is clipped. Why don’t you read why before commenting?

Late yesterday afternoon, Microsoft announced that they had released a OneNote Publisher plug-in for WordPress that allows you to:

  1. Write your blog post using OneNote on any device of your choosing
  2. Log into your WordPress admin page and directly import your post from your online OneNote account to publish it, formatting and all.

How well does it work? I’ll let you be the judge of that because this is the very first post that I’ve written for AidanFinn.com that wasn’t written using Microsoft Live Writer.

You install the plugin as normal in WordPress. Then follow the help to configure a link to your OneNote account. The plug-in adds a button to the Add New Post page in WordPress. Click that button to connect to OneNote and select your article.

A pop-up window opens. This requires you to log into your Microsoft Account, and the very first access will require you to link your site with your OneNote account. Give it a few seconds, and the window will populate with all your notebooks, sections, and pages. Select the page that is your article and click OK.

It takes about 20 seconds for the article to appear in the Add New Post window, with most of your formatting – text formatting is fine but image location (centre) is lost, and more bad things happen which become apparent after clicking Publish (see later).

At this point, format your images, and sort out the metadata and SEO stuff in wp-admin and you can publish your article.

What do I think of this integration? I love the ability to write on any device, even offline, and have my work available on any other device. I’ve often started a post in place A and finished it in place B on a different device, requiring me to either remember to “post draft to blog” or use remote connectivity to get to the first machine.

What do I not like? I am losing some of the metadata stuff that Live Writer makes easy, but the silver lining on that cloud is that it would force me to do that stuff better in wp-admin. Formatting of line spacing is poor. And if your text box in OneNote is too wide then the article line width gets messed up. You should see some of that here.

Am I going to try use this new method of writing and posting? I’ve actually changed my mind about this. I originally posted “absolutely”. Now I have to say “absolutely; when Microsoft sorts out some of the bugs”. The potential for a GREAT solution is there, but right now, it’s just potential.

Microsoft News – 23 April 2015

I’ve been really busy either preparing training, delivering training, on customer sites, or prepping my two sessions for Ignite. Here’s the roundup of recent Microsoft news for infrastructure IT pros:

Hyper-V

Windows Server

Windows 10

Azure

Office 365

Intune

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 27 March 2015

Welcome to the Azure Times! Or so it seems. Lots of Azure developments since I posted one of these news aggregations.

Windows Client

Azure

Office

Office 365

Microsoft News – 19 February 2015

Here’s the latest in the Microsoft world. Shame on Lenovo for pre-installing adware that is a man-in-the-middle attack. Crapware must die!

Hyper-V

System Center

Azure

Office 365

Microsoft Partners

Miscellaneous