greg hughes - dot net

For those who administer or work in the guts of Windows systems an networks, and perhaps those who set up and maintain applications on Windows, the Script Center over at TechNet is a truly valuable resource.

The TechNet Script Center provides one-stop shopping for system administrators wanting to manage their Windows computers using Microsoft's scripting technologies.

There's the script repository, which has lots of samples, as well as a number of good tools and utilities you can grab and start using right away.

And the scripting guys have a sense of humor. Check out the WMI Scriptomatic and its readme file, and then generate WMI scripts to your heart's content. Need ADSI scripts instead? Use the ADSI Scriptomatic. Read the accompanying text. It's worth the eye strain, trust me.

(Ok, fine, here you go: WMI stands for Windows Management Instrumentation and ADSI stands for Active Directory Services Interfaces)

Oh - and webcasts - so many good webcasts. This week is Scripting Week (believe it or not) and here are the webcasts for that celebration. And there are a number of very good archived webcasts, too. All network administrators are now on notice that you have to know how to do this stuff. Go learn. Now. TYVM.

Google now owns Picasa. It's am imaging tool - and it's really very good. Oh yeah - and it's FREE.

It provides a timeline- and album-based view of all your images and lets you sort through them, print them, edit them, transfer them from your camera, share them with others, make slideshows, and more.

It's cool - check out the flash demo here, and download here.

My evil twin is twitching with anticipation and excitement...

Muuuuaaahahahahahahahhhh!

Mike Nash is responsible for security at Microsoft. He will be speaking during the newly-established monthly webcast briefing on July 28th:

Date: Wednesday, July 28, 2004
Time: 8:30AM-9:30AM Pacific Time (GMT-7, US & Canada)
(Click here to register for the webcast)

Description: Join Mike Nash, Microsoft's senior executive in charge of security, for his monthly security update. Mike will provide the latest details on Microsoft's security enhancements and offer tips and insights into key security strategies for customers.  This month, learn more about Microsoft's security strategy and the key focus of improving software updating.  Mike will provide details on what Microsoft is doing to reduce the cost, complexity, downtime and risk associated with deploying software updates. Learn how these improvements can help you with patch management in your environment.

Well, no more dual telephone service for me. Last week, I made the decision to cancel my old-skool standard land-line (POTS) phone service with Qwest, after signing up for and trying out Vonage's IP phone service, which works over my Internet connection.

The LEC's (that's "local exchange carriers") better think fast. They're going to lose this game.

For a lot less money each month, I can now take my phone number wherever I want with a soft-phone that runs on my laptop and/or a portable IP phone device that I can plug into any Internet connection. I can make all the long distance calls I want. I get my voice mail messages as nice little email attachments as soon as someone leaves one for me. I am spending less money each month. It costs less. I get more features for less cash. Oh, by the way - did I mention it's cheaper than the land-line service?

I made one small adjustment to the service on the Vonage web site under my account settings that set my IP phone bridge device to max quality, and the service is great.

This is the future of home telephony, not to mention business service. Hey Baby-Bell's - wake up and make some coffee - your customers are waiting...

UPDATE/SHAMELESS-PLUG:

I just noticed - if you want to sign up for Vonage service, they have a referral program where I can send you an invitation and you'll get the first month free, and I'll get an equal service credit - good for everyone! Just email me here:  and I will send you the invite - be sure to send your name and the email address you want the invite to go to.

Their web site: http://www.vonage.com/

It's nice when people use Flash for good purposes, instead of doing so just so they can say they did it. Remember intro movies? Sheez...

But, I digress... Along the lines of good use of Flash to get the point across, check out the Microsoft Innovation site/flash movie. Not only is it effective use of the medium, it's also good and interesting information.

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/innovation/yourpotential

I don't post about polittics here for the most part, but if I see something that that makes me laugh, it's fair game for blodge-chunking (I'll explain that term some other time).

Download: This Land is Your Land

If you don't laugh, there's something wrong with you.

Now, how did I miss this???

http://portal.sharepointsolutions.com/default.aspx

Tons of well-organized information for users/administrators/implementors of SharePoint 2003 technologies. Now all we need to do is convince the owners to provide their content (especially news and categories/topics) via RSS!

I spent some time today trying to figure out why PowerPoint 2003 was throwing errors when trying to open a file that was created on a PPT 2003 system, edited by a consultant off-site, and emailed back to a staff member, where it conveniently and immediately broke.

The error displayed when trying to open the PowerPoint file indicated that a part of the file appeared to be missing. I had seen this error before, back when PowerPoint XP was brand new and in beta, when trying to open a file that was generated in the new version of the application but then edited in an older version (like PPT2000 for example) and shipped back to the original owner.

The knowledge base didn't really get me any further than my memory did, but it turns out there was a patch released for Office 2003 that puts functionality in place to work around the fact that the consultant had edited the PPT 2003 file in PPT 2000. It's available from Office Online in the downloads section.

Now, it's nice to have the patch/fix, but since it's more of a high-quality band-aid than a true solution, we will be upgrading the consultant's computer the next time he's in the office.

Remember one thing: It's never considered to be in keeping with best practices to edit files in multiple/different versions of Office programs, especially when it can be avoided, and especially in those programs that do a lot of multimedia and embedded content (PowerPoint, Word, Excel). You may not always know the problem exists (like in this case where the consultant is using their own computer system and working off-site), but if you do know it's just not worth the risk or the software savings to use the older version: It costs more in lost time to report, troubleshoot and fix the problem than it costs to install the right software.

Lesson learned: When a consultant comes on site, be proactive and make the time to ask them briefly about what they will be doing with any shared computer files and what programs they will be using while they work. Had I done that in the first place, the problem would have been resolved before it ever happened.

By way of KC Lemson, RSS feeds for all of you Exchange pro's with information you can't help but need:

• RSS Feed that points at the root of all the blogs registered for Exchange [i.e. a notification of newly registered Exchange bloggers]
• RSS feed for links to recent posts on the Exchange blogs
• RSS feed for Exchange KB articles
• RSS feed for KB articles authored by Exchange MVPs
• RSS feed for Exchange downloads

I wonder how many Exchange admins use RSS readers and feeds - if you think about it, there's some competing technology there. Or maybe it's a high percentage. I wonder if my Exchange admin is on the RSS bandwagon? ;)

No sooner had AOL and Yahoo announced they were bowing out of the corporate instant messaging game, Microsoft announced that when it releases Live Communication Sever 2005, the product's ability to support other external instant messaging servers will extend to hook up with the AOL (AIM/ICQ) and Yahoo IM networks.

This is great news for business users and IT implementers. Finally instant messaging has real, broad possibilities in the enterprise for multiple forms of communication among a broad and differentiated set of users. Communication outside the firewall will become a real and worthwhile pursuit. The limits that have prevented effective use of instant messaging are slipping away, and in today's collaborative world that's a real plus.

The current version of the Microsoft's business IM server, LCS2003, can already be connected to the MSN public instant messaging network (for an additional service fee). The next version of the platform, dubbed Live Communication Server 2005, is now in beta, and it already supports a technology concept called "federation," which allows different companies (for example partner companies, or service providers and their customers) to securely interconnect their LCS servers across the Internet. LCS uses the SIP protocol (Session Initiation Protocol), which is an established public standard for initiating and conducting communications between nodes on a network.

Okay, but then what?

Of course there will need to be even more to offer in this product down the road, and once can guess at what that might mean. I like to guess because I eat this stuff and have dreams of grandeur about where these products could go and how they could grow. My bet is on better collaboration and meetings. Microsoft's recent meeting-related investments in SharePoint (meeting workspaces) and the relatively limited but growing functionality in the current IM product seem to point that way (IP phone integration, as well as white-boarding and application sharing with clients on the LAN). Recent additions and improvements are terrific, but there is certainly room for improvement on these recent advances.

In the past there was NetMeeting. More recently, Microsoft has invested heavily in building and acquiring new communication technologies, not only on the IM front, but also with its purchase of a company called Placeware, which is the technology platform driving the company's popular LiveMeeting service. Much of the same collaborative functionality you get from LiveMeeting is available in a more rudimentary way in LCS and separately on the public instant messaging networks. But, until the unified IM clients are available, the newer technologies are limited in their reach between organizations.

But services live LiveMeeting and conferencing competitors like WebEx, Genesys and others offer much more robust and powerful capabilities that could - should someone make the bold move - be made available to the corporate IT crowd behind the firewall as a part of a server such as LCS 200x, sometime in the future. It's a logical next step - by that time, more advanced services will undoubtedly be available and locating that functionality in the server behind the corporate firewall will be a logical move. Business would benefit from self-hosting a voice and data conferencing system based on IP voice and collaborative IM technology that federates with other corporate systems privately, as well as with the public networks recently announced.

At least we can hope!

If you're an MSDN subscriber and use RSS to stay informed of things, you'll almost certainly want to add this feed to your OPML list:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/rss.xml

Updated as new subscriber downloads are made available.

KC Lemson relates a story about how imprecise terminology can lead to mistakes, and points out in the end that such mistakes can be avoided with a little proactive thought. I know I have been tripped up in conversations where I assumed the terminology being used meant the same thing to the person I was speaking to as it did to me, only to find out how wrong I was later. KC has a good lesson and story: 

"... To him, this was basic vocabulary. He knew that registry keys are on the left-hand side of regedit and have folder icons, whereas registry values are on the right-hand side of regedit and have different icons depending on their type. To me, “registry key” was just a part of the vernacular I'd learned and there were different types of registry keys, such as DWORDs, strings, etc."

Hi, my name is Greg, and I can't type to save my life.

It's been five minutes since my last typo. I have been typing since before I can remember. I've always had troubles getting the words right, and from an early age I knew I was just different than the others. I guess I just never learned. I can spell just fine, I just can't type.

That's why I love ieSpell, a program I discovered accidentally when I started using dasBlog for my web log a while back.

This is a great Internet Explorer add-in. It's free for personal use, it works well, and it helps me fix my typos so I look less stupid (note that I won't place full responsibility for whether or not I look smart on a computer program - that would be unfair, after all).

My blog software's web interface has a rich-text editor that does some simple HTML formatting and takes advantage of ieSpell if you download and install it, which is cool. But once I have it installed, I get to use ieSpell anyplace in IE where I might need it. For example, what if I am writing a comment in a HTML text box on someone else's web log? I can use ieSpell to check my prose in the form text box before I click the submit button on the page. So, as long as I'm not saying anything completely idiotic from a opinion or factual standpoint, it makes me look smart(er). I like that.

Update: ATTWS/Cingular customers with newer model RIM devices (like the 7290 for example) may find this method does not work. If so, call your service number and tell them you want them to activate your HTML browser on your device. It will be like wireless magic, and you'll be all set.

WAP browsing not working well for you? Feel the need to see the Google graphic when you go to do a search? Are the sites you're trying to browse simply broken when you try to view them on your RIM device in WAP mode? If you have a RIM Blackberry with the newer software, do this (mine's a RIM 7280 on AT&T Wireless, your mileage may vary):

1. Go to the M-mode web browser.
2. Choose Options.
3. On the keypad, type “RBRO” (without the quotes). An additional five or so menu items will appear.
4. Click on “Browser Configuration.”
5. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and look for the “Constrained Content Mode” field. Change this from “WML Only” to “Unconstrained.”
6. Click the wheel and choose “Save Options.”
7. Again, go to “Browser Configuration.”
8. Scroll down a few lines from the top to “Content Mode.” Change it from “WML only” to either “WML & HTML” or “HTML only” (your choice).
9. Click the wheel and chose “Save options.”
10. That's it. You can now browse HTML, graphics and all - just make sure your bandwidth allocations won't mean a big bill at the end of your billing month!