Interact2009 Berlin

 

Well its great to be helping out in an area of TechEd that I know really well, and I know lots of experts in UC so it’s good to catch up with old friends from around Europe.

I’m also pleased to be helping out at Interact09 as this will be my third Interact event and my second this year.

The sessions are really up close and personal, the conversations are amazing and the swag is nice.

But the really great thing about Interact is the opportunity to influence the Product team directly.  The techy part of the team too.  The guys who actually write the stuff.

And I think that’s the main value in my opinion.

 

We invite people who are influencers in their own UC circles.  Bloggers, Tweeters, customers who look after UC installations – and people who work with UC, whether in Support or Sales will all have really good interactions with the UC product team.  And they listen to you, your concerns, your comments and your questions.  

And that feedback goes into the pot for the next version of the product.

And that’s why you need to attend.  Hopefully there’ll be Interact sessions at a place near you soon.  I’ll let you know if there are…

 

Technorati Tags: Teched Europe,Interact2009

Ian Hameroff talks to me about Exchange 2010 features

Last week at Interact2009, I grabbed some time with Ian Hameroff (@hameroff) to talk about the features of Exchange 2010 that we’ve announced.

We snuck into the  filming room where they were filming the Windows 7 videos during a coffee break and captured some of the key features of Exchange – straight from the product team…

Thanks Ian for missing lunch to do this – and well done for getting it all filmed in one take too

and the URL for you to click is: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010

Outlook Thread Compressor – now available externally

Ewan has finally gone ahead and posted this amazing tool externally.  Thousands of us have been using this internally at Microsoft for years.  I make no apologies for reproducing his post (for those of you who don’t click links to other blogs)

Included in the v5 beta (which is a real pain to install nowadays – the previous v4.2.030 version has nearly the same feature set and is a lot more self contained), was a piece of logic which captured stats on TC usage and emailed them back to me.

Since many people at MS are still running that beta (it’s a long story, but the source code went south so it’ll never get out of “beta” state), I still get maybe 20-30 statistics mails a day…

Since August 2003 when the first statistics email arrived – from me, kind-of naturally – until 24th April 2007 (when I last did an analysis of the stats), TC v5 beta had scanned over 400m email messages and had compressed over 30m, worth nearly half a terabyte of email data.

I can honestly say that the Thread Compressor has been great for my productivity and is the first thing i install on my PC after a rebuild… It’s small, neat, efficient – and cuts the mail down in your Inbox dramatically – allowing you to have lots more coffee!

Do read the warnings though that Ewan blogs about.  This DELETES your mail  So of course there are disclaimers over on the site .  But it will save you a heck of a lot of time too…

Great stuff mate – Forgiveness, not permission

Technorati Tags: Thread Compressor,Outook

Lovelace colloquium at Leeds university

Long day yesterday.  I travelled up to Leeds for the day to present a session on Unified Communications for the Lovelace colloquium.  The audience consisted of mainly female Engineers and doc and post doc students in computer science.  Very intimidating for me, who left school without a degree and went out to travel the world in the navy, see the sights  and earn some money.

The day kicked off with Alan Pollard, president of the BCS, welcoming everyone to the day and talking about the need for the recognition of the IT profession (something I feel really strongly about).  Julie Greensmith  (Dr. Thrill) from Nottingham Uni talked about measuring emotion (and terror!) on fairground rides (and enjoying most of the rides she went on in the course of her research).  Gillian from IBM talked about being an inspiration to other women – here’s part of her keynote session:

 

After lunch – my session on UC, RoundTable Exchange UM, and then a really interesting session on UX design for the mobile phone by Karen Groenink at Google before the 4.5 hour train journey home.

A huge thanks to @handee, for organising all of this, and especially to @ChristineBurns for being so diligent with her amazing Flip Video recorder (just like the one I carry around in my bag) , and capturing so many soundbites from the day along with Kate, who blogged about the day.  i was inspired to be amongst so many amazing women…

 

By the way:  I got my BSc (hons) degree eventually after 7 years study with the Open University so I’ve finally caught up

 

Technorati Tags: Lovelace colloquium

OCS R2: A really easy way to share your desktop

I didn’t know just how simple and easy this was.  I was chatting to Jane who is onsite at a customer and showed her how to share your desktop and to transfer control.

All you need to do is click the sharing icon – the one with the hand under it… which sends an invite to the other party in the conversation.  Here’s the notification that Jane sent me:

Here’s Jane’s desktop with her in control:

It’s easy enough to give control to the other person click on the drop down box and decide who to give control to.  in the box below – Jane has given me control of her desktop

So this is fine if you just want to have a 1:1 peer to peer conversation – but what if you want to include someone else in the conversation?  Easy.  just use the invite button as normal.  Notice that Ewan, who has just joined the conference has automatically been added to the sharing session.

And now I have the option who I choose to give control to.  All, or just one of the participants.  Great for collaboration.  Great ad hoc way for working together..

  and all from a button on the Office Communicator R2 client. 

Magic…

Technorati Tags: OCS R2

Pretending to work : Office for the Mac

Working? or Pretending to work?  Do either with Office for the Mac.   Nice video posted to YouTube…

 

 

Thanks to Frank for the link

Interact09: Exclusive invitation only event MS UK Campus:

Yes, that’s right.  Invitation only to Interact 09.  on April 14th.  That’s unusual enough.  Usually we open the event up to everyone in the hope that we can inspire you to see some new products and learn about the products you already have installed.

But Interact is an exclusive event, open to invited guests only.  This gives you a much better ratio of audience to MS staff.  At Interact 08 we found that the conversations flowed much more readily, with enough MS staff on hand to make sure your question got answered – sometimes by the person that actually wrote the component! We’re streaming a live keynote over from Redmond (which will be at the end of the day on the UK to allow for time differences), and we’ll have someone over from Redmond (both on the OCS and Exchange sides) to answer your roadmap questions.

Interact09 is an event focused entirely on Communications – OCS, OC and Exchange so it’s not the sort of event that anyone would want to come to.  if you’ve been around a while you may remember the old MEC – well its different – but similar in theme. Lots of insider information, lots of “extra” knowledge, lots of ideas.

So what if you really needed to go but haven’t received your personal invitation from us?  What if your company is just planning your UM infrastructure and you haven’t told your Microsoft account manager yet? What if you don’t have a Microsoft account manager but really really need to get to this event. What if you talk about UC all the time to anyone who will listen?

Well you can persuade me.  I’ve had clearance from corp to accept requests from people who really want to come along to this event and are not already on our invite list.  I can send you an invitation code  – but you need to mail me and convince me first

How could you convince me to invite you?

Perhaps you could tell me about your active unified communications blogging habit. Or you might tell me about the local community activities you support – speaking engagements and user group meetings. Or perhaps you’ve got a tremendous amount of UC expertise.

If that’s you – and you want an invite.  mail me (email address can be found here) and  I’ll allocate the few remaining invitations based on your mail. 

and I hope to see you there…

 

Technorati Tags: UC,unified communications,OCS R2,OC,Exchange 2007,Interact09

Technet Virtual conference. Vote for your sessions

We’re planning a Virtual conference in May this year as we’re not going out on the road this summer with the TechNet roadshow.  Alex, who writes the TechNet Newsletter,  has created an online poll so you can vote for the sessions that you’d really like us to deliver.

We’ll be creating the Virtual Conference based on your answers to this Poll so please can you vote for the sessions that you’d most like us to deliver and we’ll schedule the day round your responses.

George has the information about all of the sessions on her blog if you’d like to see what the sessions are all about before you vote.

 

I’ll share more information about the sessions when we have a decent number of votes to make a good choice of sessions…

Technorati Tags: Virtual conference,Technet

OCS resources

Brett has some amazing resources about OCS in one neat list over on his blog which deserve a wider audience – especially if you’re planning a deployment of OCS in the near future.  OCSR2, with the ability to embed rich content and HTML directly into messages like screenshots and ink , this release is certainly worth evaluating

www.microsoft.com/ocs

Microsoft Unified Communications Open Interoperability Program

PBX Configuration Notes Tested by Microsoft or IP Gateway Vendor Partners

Certified OCS Devices

Certified OCS Load Balancers

SVVP Virtualisation Program

UC Success

UC OCS R2 Trial

 

And if you don’t want to try the on premise solution – why don’t you try Office Communicator Online to use with Office Online.  the online Services team blog has the information you need

Exchange Online White paper

With all of the announcements for Exchange online (and SharePoint online), I thought I’d do a little digging and find out where our documents are which talk about it in a general way (an earlier post has some links to techy documents )Here are the features that a subscriber would get with for Exchange Online – Standard

Exchange Online subscribers benefit from a set of features that are common to all Microsoft Online Services offerings:

Secure access: 28-bit Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. Anyone who intercepts a communication sees only encrypted text.

Business continuity: Geographically dispersed Microsoft data centres which act as backups for each other

Intrusion monitoring: Systems are monitored for unusual or suspicious activity, notifying the customer if necessary.

Security audits: compliance policies, antivirus signatures, configuration and security updates.

High availability: 99.9 percent scheduled uptime. 

Support: Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the service administrator.

Administration Centre: For managing all Microsoft Online Services.  You can add and delete users, add contacts and distribution lists, and create and configure SharePoint Online sites.

My Company Portal: Access services such as e-mail, create a SharePoint site etc.

Sign In application: Sign in once and access all services without being prompted repeatedly for their password.

Virus filtering: Automatically removes viruses and spam.  Also scans for viruses in intracompany e-mail and in all documents that reside in SharePoint Online sites.

Directory Synchronization tool: Keep your on-premises Active Directory and the Microsoft Online Services directory in sync.

 

A similar white paper is available for Sharepoint online here: