20070222
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ready for a new day
Today the class took a field trip to attend the Microsoft event at the convention center.
IP Pro Track
In the morning we got to hear from Viral Tarpara. His blog is at http://blogs.technet.com/vacuumtube/default.aspx. He gave a nice demo of Office 2007 and several sysadmin tools that can be used to push Vista and Office 2007 to users. He also demoed a couple of tools that the sysadmin can use to enforce policies over the network.
The ones I took notes on were:
Desktop Deployment Wizard
Allows the sysadmin to push updates across the network. The invite to update arrives in the user's email. When updating to Vista, you get to choose the version and locale. You also get to choose "Refresh" which wipes the local hard drive or "Upgrade" which keeps your local docs. The process takes about 30 min on a real computer or about 90 on a Virtual Machine.
Office 2007
Office 2007 has a bunch of stuff that is supposed to increase productivity. One impressive freature is "Live Preview" which lets the user interactively adjust font sizes and so on. It is a big improvement over the old system where you have to click back and forth to get the look you want.
The file format for office is an open-standard XML and promises to solve several problems and open up some development opportunities. See below. There is a free download for some older versions of Office that allows it to read the new XML-formatted files. As in the past, Office 2007 gives you the option of writing file in a format compatible with earlier versions of the software. Another benifit of the XML format is that it is usually about one-third the size of the older format.
The is also an "Office Migration Planning Manager" that automatically converts older Office formats to the new XML equivalents. I wanted to ask if it would convert really antique formats like Works and non-Microsoft formats like OpenOffice, but I didn't get the chance.
Exchange Server 2007
See: http://blogs.technet.com/haroldwong/ Viral demoed the migration process for us. He also showed us some very nice GUI tools for the exchange admin. and a little bit of PowerShell. One of the GUI tools was the "Exchange Best Practices Analyzer". I wanted to ask what kind of benchmarking/testing tools are availble for exchange.
PowerShell
PowerShell has more tab completion than the Shell in XP. When you make scipt files, use the .pls extension. PowerShell has the pipe (|) thingie, like Unix. See: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/default.mspx I wonder if it will work with the 2003 Server evaluation copies we are using in class.
Forefront
Forefront is a GUI app that lets the sysadmin regulate security settings in his Exchange server.
My Rant!
Some people seemed to be unhappy that Exchange requires 64-bit hardware and OS. I say, get over it! Who cares if the hardware cost a few hundred dollars more? The expense is lost in the noise compared to the sysadmin's salries, etc. If you want a toy computer, get a SBC like Soekris an install Linux on it! Good grief!
Zoomit
Zoomit is a little program thingie that is a free download from Microsoft. See http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Miscellaneous/ZoomIt.mspx It lets you zoom into a portion of your screen and mark it up white board fashion -- very useful for presentations. If it works with VNC it will also be good for distance learning.
Developer Track
The presenters were Lynn Langit, Mithun Dhar and Woody Pewitt. Lynn's blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/socaldevgal/
I wanted to ask for some claification about the different kinds of SharePoint that are available. I think there are at least two versions that run on 2003 server and a third version that is built into Vista or maybe Office 2007. Maybe I can find a page on microsoft.com that explains it.
One thing Lynn pointed out is that you can use metadata in SharePoint. What you want to do is make different views of the file you upload, instead of a hierarchy of folders. I'll have to tell Joe he's doing it all wrong. :)
Lynn pointed us to the Channel 9 "feature montage" and demoed otto.de. otto.de in app that, I think, uses the presentation manager in Vista and DirectX 10. If makes a pretty nice virtual store.
Other demos were AllScripts Patient Monitoring and DinnerNow.net.
Overall, I think most of us were left confused and dazed by the variety and quantity of material presented. Microsoft develops (or buys) a lot of software. But sometimes I get the feeling that they have too much money to spend and that they are trying everything the has a minute chance of being accepted by its customers. I wonder what parts of what we saw today will be around and appreciated in five years.
From my perspective, the biggest disappointments for the day were that the sharepoint presentation was cut somewhat short and got only got a superficial presentation of PowerShell. My other suggestion would be to have some sort of question screening. It was pretty obvious that some of the questioners hadn't been paying much attention or didn't have the background necessary to understand the presentation.
The biggest highlight for me was seeing how to manipulate .docx files. They are zipped files that have some xml and other content. If you rename them from a .docx suffix to .zip, you can unzip them and see the contents. Then you can edit the xml and change the text. The allows a whole new way for applicatons to interoperate. Very, very nice.
2007 Office Professional Downloads
The downloads are a http://www.launchtour2007.com/download
You need to get three files:
For Office:
388M X12-30196.exe
385M X13-40150.exe
For Groove:
177M X12-30093.exe
