Posted by eileenb on February 29, 2008
So every time I demonstrate Office Communicator, and browse to find Ewan’s name during my demo, I get questions about how the heck he manages to change his status to something like “Fine and Dandy” or “Presenting and projecting”.
He’d actually blogged about how to find the deployment guide a while ago, with an excellent follow up post detailing some of the errors that you’ll encounter.
So if you want to amuse and amaze your friends at work with some custom settings – or you want to set a corporate wide policy for one of your presence settings (out to lunch for example), then have a look at the Deployment guide on the Download centre.
I haven’t got around to it yet as whenever I try to think of something witty to put onto my custom presence – I can’t think of anything to use.
Any ideas…?
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Posted by eileenb on February 28, 2008
I really love American muscle cars and have driven several big powerful beasties for years now. My current car is a 2000 Pontiac Trans Am (4th generation GM F-body if you’re interested – one of the last ones to roll off the line in Ste Therese, before they stopped 
making them).
This is me driving at my last track day with my foot down hard…
I love the fact that there’s no digital climate control – there’s just a knob to turn from the blue bit to the red bit. The radio is desperately simple. There’s no RDS, no traffic announcements, just a seek button for the stations (imagine driving through the US trying to find a good radio station to listen to…). There’s no bells, whistles, anything fancy at all. It’s even got a manual gearbox – a rarity in these automatic days.
But it’s really fast off the mark and that’s why I love driving it. There’s a map on the back seat that I use to get to TechNet and other venues. The problem is that my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be and I can’t see the maps – even with my reading glasses on in the dim light. So I normally call my husband to guide me to the location I need to get to – a bit like air traffic control talk planes in 
Well, I got horribly lost in Manchester getting to the last roadshow and James and Steve had to drive out and find me. Oh the shame. They’ve been rumbling about me getting a SatNav for a while now, but I’ve been resistant as I don’t want any gadgetry to spoil the sleek dashboard lines inside the car.
Well, it was my birthday a couple of weeks ago and I’m now fully SatNaved up with a neat little device that does far more than I actually want it to. I’ve managed to stop the bleeping, change the default voice and colour, and get myself to my destination yesterday.
And I’m now hooked. My road atlas is forgotten in the back seat and I’m watching the 3D display with utter fascination as I drive around.
What the heck,
It may look totally out of place in the car, and it lights up my face ghoulishly at night. But today I wonder why on earth I waited so damn long to get one.
I’m such a technophobe sometimes…
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Posted by eileenb on February 27, 2008
I’m off on my travels for the ebusiness group, on my second part of my tour. This week I’m in Lincolnshire and Derby talking about blogging for business (I did a couple of sessions in January). I spent 4 hours getting to Louth, in Lincolnshire, arriving tired, hungry and thirsty in a small family run hotel. The restaurant had closed of course (It was 10pm after all) and I checked in feeling frazzled and miserable.
The receptionist offered to make me something to eat. All I wanted was a BLT and a large glass of wine. I stomped off to my room, dumped my stuff and went to the bar – which was empty – save for a very decent glass of lovely red wine sitting on the bar on its own. So I took it, and slumped into a chair feeling sorry for myself. 5 minutes later, a wonderful toasted Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato sandwich with a side salad (the size you’d make if you were on your own at home) arrived. Instant mood lifter. Small hotels are wonderful when you’re travelling alone aren’t they? I chatted to the barman / receptionist / cook for an hour whilst eating my sandwich and went to bed…
Only to be woken at 1am and feeling the bed shaking wildly – the sort of feeling that you would get if someone jiggled your water bed whilst you were in it (I’m guessing about the water bed experience by the way!). I thought that the hotel was haunted and I’d experienced the ghost, and immediately went back to sleep (I told you the wine was lovely!)
So to see the news this morning, and to discover I’d been 15 miles away from the epicentre of the largest earthquake in the UK for over 25 years was quite a surprise. Of course the British public are very stoic. “Bit of a wobble eh”, ” Thought a lorry was going past” and lots and lots of “Did the earth move for you” comments. All understated, nothing dramatic., How British of us to have such a mild earthquake (See Nick’s blog post for an explanation of how mild as he knows a heck of a lot more about it than me)
My event was actually in Market Rasen so I instantly had a blogging topic to talk about to the audience about instant news generation and how Technorati enables you to find other bloggers who are blogging about the same topic as you are. Like Philip and Aimee for example.
So I left Market Rasen (and was disappointed not to see any quake damage at all – not even a fallen brick) and drove to Derby where the next session is due to take place tomorrow. I checked in, got a wireless access voucher, sat down and…
The power went out. not just in the hotel, but across a large part of Derby. So I’m sitting here, typing this in my freezing cold room before the battery dies on my laptop wondering what else is going to happen around me.
Well they say things happen in 3’s don’t they?…
Posted in General musings | 1 Comment »
Posted by eileenb on February 25, 2008
Well I’ve been wading through my emails and trying to catch up with things since I got back, not daring to hit the delete key in case I need it later.
In addition to all the stuff I need to do for my day job, i also need to get myself sorted out for Interact08. I’ve managed to persuade Nino (who runs the really popular Exchange team blog) to come up on stage during the bloggers lunch and tell you about the process that the Exchange team uses to get articles up onto the blog. The messaging team is fairly large, with lots of articles, white papers, anecdotes and information to submit, and he needs to manage the flood of information alongside the structured product releases and PR stuff that we do. Quite a task. Unlike me, who blogs about stuff that interests me whenever the stuff goes live.
Well here’s some information about Unified Communications that was released last week. Microsoft IT has released a Technical White Paper and a PowerPoint Presentation about how they deployed OCS 2007.
It’s a good read and the presentation is useful if you’re planning a similar deployment- or want to talk to your decision makers about UC and VOIP
I got this from the IT showcase site which has a few other deployment documents if you feel the need to discover how we implement stuff internally. Certainly worth a read…
Posted in General musings, Office, collaboration | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on February 21, 2008
Well I really wish I’d had a little bit more time to do some research into all of these announcements that we’ve made today about interoperability. Unfortunately I’m sitting at my hotel in Banff waiting for the bus to take me back to Calgary and my flight home. It’s a shame, as this is a really significant announcement, and really important to the enterprise.
I mean, the worldwide telescope that TechCrunch talks about is a great tool that I shall spend qhute a while playing with, but Ray and Steve’s goals on data portability and open connections will ease the technical lives of so many It professionals working to keep everything running smoothly.
A brilliant idea…
Posted in General musings, Office, collaboration | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on February 20, 2008
Brett has blogged about the resources from the Unified Communications launch to save me a job
This one is a particularly useful deck if you’re trying to get Unified Communications into your organisation and the boss just doesn’t see the benefits of UC:
Unified communications and the end user
(PPT 2003, 8.66 MB) | (PPTX 2007, 2.43 MB)
Of course you could always try to get him a ticket to Interact08 where we’ll share vision and out thoughts on what’s coming up in the UC world of the future (tickets are limited though so you may get rejected)
Thanks Brett…
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Posted by eileenb on February 19, 2008
TechNet Webcast: Installation and Management Pack Migration of Operations Manager 2007 (Level 200)
Friday, March 07, 2008 – 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM Pacific Time
Blain Barton, TechNet Presenter, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032369729&Culture=en-US
TechNet Webcast: System Center Advanced Application Management (Level 300)
Monday, March 10, 2008 – 9:30 AM – 11:00 AM Pacific Time
Jeff Wettlaufer, Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032369059&Culture=en-US
TechNet Webcast: Deploying Operating Systems with Configuration Manager 2007 (Part 1 of 2) (Level 300)
Friday, March 14, 2008 – 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM Pacific Time
John Baker, TechNet Presenter, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032369732&Culture=en-US
TechNet Webcast: Deploying Operating Systems with Configuration Manager 2007 (Part 2 of 2) (Level 300)
Friday, March 21, 2008 – 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM Pacific Time
John Baker, TechNet Presenter, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032369734&Culture=en-US
TechNet Webcast: Advanced Operating System Deployment with Configuration Manager 2007 (Level 300)
Monday, March 24, 2008 – 9:30 AM – 11:00 AM Pacific Time
Jeff Wettlaufer, Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032369061&Culture=en-US
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Posted by eileenb on February 19, 2008
Posted in General musings | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on February 19, 2008
TechNet Webcast: Assure the Availability and Performance of Your SharePoint Environments (Level 300)
Monday, March 10, 2008 – 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM Pacific Time
Sacha Dawe, Senior Technical Product Manage, Microsoft Corporation
Luis Camara Manoel, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation
Oleg Glubochansky, Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032368297&Culture=en-US
IT Manager Webcast: Deploying SharePoint Server with Project Server 2007 (Level 200)
Thursday, March 20, 2008 – 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific Time
Christophe Fiessinger, Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032369247&Culture=en-US
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Posted by eileenb on February 18, 2008
Brett has been busy with Exchange and PowerShell recently and has written this storming post about the new features you get when you install CCR onto a WS2008 cluster instead of WS2003.
There’s some great stuff here Brett – and the PowerShell look really neat and tidy too Keep it up…
Posted in Exchange, collaboration, messaging | Comments Off
