Microsoft Corporate Vice President Chris Capossela announced a new search product developed in partnership with consulting giant BearingPoint at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver on July 10. The product, called SingleView, is built on top of Microsoft’s SharePoint 2007 collaboration portal and is already being used by dozens of large enterprise customers.
You can read the entire article here in eWeek.
Here is a question for you: when was the last time you backed up your home’s digital files? Maybe never? Bad answer.
Microsoft has been working on a solution, and it went into its final production throes this past week. The product is called Windows Home Server, and it is a stripped-down version of its Windows Server 2003 that normally costs a thousand bucks or so. For the time being, you can download a timed-version (it will work until December) freely from this link. You do need to sign up and answer a few questions to join the Connect service, which also has other pre-release software from Microsoft.
You need to install the software on a new machine: it will wipe your disk clean and boot up automatically with the Home Server running. The software is designed to run “headless” which means that you don’t need to attach a monitor or a keyboard, once you get beyond certain basics that I will talk about in a moment. It will install the operating system, split your hard disk into two partitions (one for system files, one for data), and set up a bunch of shared drives for pictures, videos, files, and so forth. Think of this as layering a simple set of controls on top of the standard Windows server platform.
To access these shares, you will need to run another piece of software called Home Server Connector Software from each computer to set up the network connection. There are basically two different levels of access – “remote control” for the administrators that gives them access to the server control console, and ordinary file and printer shares for everyone else.
I tried it out on my home office network to mixed results. I liked a few things:
First, getting to the reason for this column, it is very easy to backup your PCs with this product, provided you have a big enough disk on the server’s PC. You can choose what you want to backup, and it automagically does it in the middle of the night, when traffic is lightest (and presumably your PC that is to be backed up is still powered on). You can set up a different schedule if you are pickier.
Second, Home Server can also automatically synchronize its shared folders with ones on your local PC – that is a neat trick and something you might consider for say sharing your pictures or videos across the network, and something that has been standard with the Windows server line for some time.
Finally, you can control the server from outside your home, if it can figure out how to open up your home gateway ports. It uses UPnP to do this. Sadly, my 2Wire DSL gateway doesn’t support this (it doesn’t support a lot of other things, but that discussion will have to wait for another day). It would be nice if there were another alternative to UPnP, but there isn’t.
Here are some things that I didn’t like about the software.
First, you initially need complex passwords to set the darn thing up, meaning something with seven characters, upper and lower case and numbers too. That seems a bit onerous for the average home network. This can be loosened up once you get the first user going.
Second, when the install was done, it didn’t recognize the Intel network adapter that was in a fairly recent Dell. Once I installed the right driver, I was good to go. Third, despite its headless installation, you will still need to be sitting in front of the server to set up a shared printer. Next, the only clients for this server are Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Vista – if you have got anything older on your home network, and chances are good you do – then don’t even bother with the product.
Is this a good deal? It is hard to tell until Microsoft sets pricing. There is still talk that it will be available both as a bundled piece of hardware from the usual suspects and as a software download, but we’ll see.
If it does come as low-cost software and you have an older PC and can upgrade the storage, it might be worth it. But if you have older Windows and Macs, then no: you are better off buying either a Mac mini or a network-attached storage box and saving yourself the trouble.
While it will take almost as long to download the 90 min. iTunes video movie as to watch, it is well worth the time. Mossberg and Swisher of the Wall Street Journal interview Gates and Jobs at their D5 conference last month. The two long-time computer veterans talk about some of their significant decisions down thru PC history, banter back and forth about things that both companies do well and do poorly, and other insights about where we are going in our industry. Gates is looking a bit shopworn, I have to say — maybe being influenced by Jobs’ reality distortion field? It is worth seeing the body language and dynamics during the session too.
In any event, download the movie here.
Let’s say you are trying to develop a new Windows application, say a new kind streaming media player. You want to find all the possible places, interfaces, and settings in both XP and Vista that your application will touch and interact with. You want to write your code so that your customers can install your software and have it work without interfering with Windows Media Player or other Microsoft-supplied applications that come with Windows by default.
So you go to Microsoft’s Developer Network Web site and spend a couple of hours digging around, and you come back with a pile of documentation that is confusing and conflicting. What you would really like is a single authoritative source for this information, presented in a way that you as a developer can understand and use. Thankfully, there is a solution, called the ISV Settings Manager that is found in an odd place.
The problem is that Windows these days is very complicated. While it is easy for anyone to install software –- you just click on the link on a Web site and download to your desktop –- getting this software to work reliably isn’t so easy. Where does the software go: on the quick launch toolbar, as a desktop icon, under a particular menu? What happens when the application depends on automatic preferences in Windows, such as the function that plays a music CD with the preferred music player? Does your application need to modify the existing file associations settings? Which registry keys are needed to be modified so that your application won’t step on something else? These are not simple questions, and the more you want your independent application to work smoothly with these various experiences, the harder it is to write the right code.
The ISV Settings Manager tools that are available from the link above manage all of these issues, and put in one place everything that is needed for a new application to work on both Vista and XP. It has been up on The Technical Committee’s Web site for several months and was written so “that developers have an easier job finding and selecting registry settings for their applications,” according to the site explanation. There are several files available for downloading, include the entire source code listing.
So who is The Technical Committee, and why did they do this? It sounds like something from a bad Bond film (one can argue if this is redundant), but they are a small group of people that are responsible for keeping Microsoft on the straight and narrow path after the US Justice Department won their monopoly case against Microsoft back in 2002. The TC was created to monitor Microsoft’s compliance to the final ruling, have access to Microsoft source code, and obtain documentation from Microsoft when it needs to.
Apparently, when TC members tried to find all of this documentation for Windows interfaces, they found the mass of conflicting MSDN notes and set out to write their own. It is a great resource, and no Windows developer should be without this tool.
I have a report from a usually reliable correspondent about DRM issues with Vista and Windows Media 11 issues caused by this week’s automatic update. After the update is applied, when you try to play any of your MP3 files — whether they have DRM or not — you get a strange error COOD11B1 code with little information about what is wrong. There is a Microsoft website that checks the DRM components on your machine and then upgrades them: http://drmlicense.one.microsoft.com/Indivsite/en/indivit.asp . Mind you, this is after running Microsoft/Windows Update which reports back that “Windows is up to date”. You need to download this patch to remove the error code and get everything working again.
Another nail in the DRM coffin. But at least now you know how to fix the problem.
Here are some addition thoughts on Microsoft’s Technology Summit (MTS07). I wanted to jot down some thoughts, what I learned, and what the role of Microsoft will be in the coming years for the evolution of the Web and open source. (This essay was also posted to Techweb here.)
Microsoft still has this love/hate relationship with the Mac. Some of the presenters deliberately brought Macs, including one who ran Vista under Parallels. Yet when someone asked if anyone had tested interop of Vista with Mac OS X, it was clear that this wasn’t a focus. (And for those of us that have both, a continuing frustration.) For Microsoft to succeed, the Mac has to move from being a poster child OS, a necessary evil and some annoying relative to be tolerated to an actual strategic direction and integral to the company’s success. The people that have moved to Mac desktops are canaries in the coal mine. They aren’t happy with Windows for very real reasons (blue screen and security sinkholes come to mind). It continues to be a platform that is used by many developers.
There is a growing emphasis on interoperability at Microsoft, and they are clearly spending a lot of resources on projects (such as Windows and other OSs, new versions of Windows networking protocols, and new programming languages with older ones) but there is still room for improvement. You can never do too much interop testing. Interop is getting more attention, but still isn’t infused into the core culture yet.
Microsoft is a company of coders, and they respond best to an audience full of coders too. Coders are the heart and soul of what drives this place. They have always understood what developers do and think and eat and drink. Speaking of which, during one of the presentations, an Outlook reminder popped up on screen that listed as overdue the items “eat dinner” and “go home.” That resonated amongst the geeks in attendance.
But let’s face it — in the past several years, developers have moved away from writing code for single-PC applications and Microsoft still doesn’t quite get this whole Internet thing. “We didn’t understand open source and didn’t use the correct words back in 2005,” said Bill Hilf, one of their head open source advocates. During the meetings, the audience took them to task about lack of enthusiasm for various open source projects. I found it interesting that most – not all, but most — of the presenters still were viewing open source as competing with some Microsoft product offering. They need to realize that people are going to use both, and want not only choice but also the ability to freely code in both MS and open source projects. Don Box, one of the developer evangelists, semi-seriously said, “I humbly apologize on behalf of the 70,000 owner operators of Microsoft for the statements our CEO makes to scare all the open source people.” But there was an element of truth of course behind it.
The more that Microsoft can make this ambidexterity possible and successful, the more software they will sell. Some of the presenters clearly understood this, but others still characterize things as “us” versus “them”. Because Microsoft is a big company, it is hard sometimes to identify when or how a particular program or project will ultimately drive bottom-line revenue. Is getting more people to write .Net code going to bring in more bucks than getting more people to buy more Windows servers? Is getting Windows better at running PHP going to drive more revenue than getting Windows to become a more secure Internet-facing OS? I dare say that these aren’t easy or simple decisions, and sometimes they don’t get it right the first time.
What is clear is that Microsoft “is the most fanatically self-critical company that I have ever worked for,” says Hilf. They spend time even examining other people’s code, just so they can learn from their mistakes, at least according to Michael Howard, their security czar. “But I don’t want you to love me, I just want you to buy more of my software, ” says Hilf. Note in that statement is the assumption that we are already buying their stuff. But not enough: “We have failed to convey the power of our platform with the elite,” said Sanjay Parthasarathy, the uber-evalengist and programming manager.
They are trying to regain Web thought leadership with IE7 and IIS7, but the open source group (or at least the group that was assembled) has moved on to Firefox and LAMP. “Seventy percent of the Web sites are scripted with PHP and under 20% of those are deployed on IIS,” says Sam Ramji, the director of their open source labs. “We are losing these developers and doing something wrong.” Many of the attendees that I spoke to had a “nothing to see, let’s move along” attitude about IE and IIS: they haven’t used the new versions, didn’t really care, and weren’t interested. I surprisingly learned that a full copy of IIS7 has been shipping in Vista – did I miss that memo? Gotta wonder with all the stuff that I read (and wrote) about Vista, why this key factoid eluded me until now.
Part of the problem (for Microsoft) with Web development today is that it is too pluralistic. Microsoft thrives best when it can focus on a single competitor – Don Box mentioned how they are laser focused on Google, made even more ironic by a developer who works for Google sitting right next to me. “We are a lot of little companies inside here and one of them will figure out a way to crush Google. Still, they are the best thing that happened to us, and are going to make us better.” But focusing on Google isn’t the only answer, and the problem with open source is that a thousand flowers are growing out there, and maybe ten or a hundred of them will bloom and blossom into something useful. It is getting harder to keep track.
A corollary to this is that the c2007 world of programming is all about being able to teach new programmers how to learn new languages. This is somewhat of a challenge for the compsci departments of today, who are trying to find a new curriculum and state of purpose for their students. No one knows this better than Microsoft. Kevin Schofield, who runs Microsoft Research, called Microsoft “the world’s largest compsci department.” They have published almost a paper a day for the past 15 years.
It was quite a learning experience this week. I apologize if these are more like notes than a coherent essay, but I am still digesting what I heard, and reading the various blogs of the attendees and presenters. I have posted links to all of these discussions (Ben and Travis have the most complete coverage of the MTS meetings) on my strominator.com blog here:
http://tinyurl.com/267muy
Paul Gillin and I have begun a series of podcasts for tech PR types. I talk this week about a Microsoft developer’s conference. Some attendees are complaining about how Microsoft treats them, and they’re blogging openly about it. Paul and David discuss the issue of openness and the emerging PR paradigm of embracing the bad with the good. What’s important is the conversation, they agree, not controlling the message. In Cheers & Jeers, David has no problem with Amanda Congdon’s promotional video for DuPont, while Paul grimaces at the memory of a CEO’s PowerPoint from hell.
Download the podcast here, 13:17 (right click to save)
It isn’t often that I get to spend several days listening to the people that are creating the software products at Microsoft. In the past, when I have been to Redmond it was usually on a press junket with colleagues from mainstream IT and business media, listening to spin doctors and marcom folks who were trying to get “coverage”. This week I am in the company of people who write code, and have a deep knowledge of the tools, software, and applications, as part of the company’s Technology Summit.
It is an interesting mix of both attendees and speakers. They come from all corners of the world, and from various parts of our industry: corporate IT development group managers who have dozens of coders working for them, consultants that also develop their own applications, academics who run compsci departments, and so forth.
To give you an idea, I am posting links to many of their blogs, many of whom are so multi-tasking that they are coding while they are listening (or half-listening) to the presentations, and posting to their blogs in near real-time. So we have this new phenomenon, where everyone is typing at their tabletops. The speakers are also posting to their own blogs too and reading the attendee blog postings. The ones who have yet to give their speech can thereby self-correct their presentations, or refute what the audience has posted. It is so introspective and self-absorbed, all part of the new world of social media.
(Click here for a podcast commentary on MTS.)
Attendees
Travis' blog: http://www.travisswicegood.com/
Dianne's blog: http://www.srtsolutions.com/public/blog/60881
Michael Wise http://blogs.omnieffect.com
Bryan Hansen http://ldsarchitect.org/ Scott Preston http://codegin.com/blog/
Ben Galbraith http://galbraiths.org/blog
Dion Almaer http://www.almaer.com/blog/
Channy Yun, Korea Crunch http://koreacrunch.com
Microsoft presentor blogs
Michael Howard, security http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_howard
Sam Ramji, open source labs
Don Box http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/dbox/
John Lam http://www.iunknown.com
Joe Stagner http://www.joeon.net
Bill Staples (IIS) http://blogs.iis.net/bills/default.aspx
I don’t like to toot my own horn (much) but back in 1998, I wrote about how Microsoft was making it so easy to develop Web applications that soon most corporate development shops would think of the Web as something that originated in Redmond. Well, I was reminded of that realization this week when surfing around on my Mac, and finding out that I can’t get to certain parts of the Internet. I now live in a Mac ghetto as far as the Web is concerned, and like most ghettos, it isn’t easy getting out of it – unless you happen to have a Windows PC nearby.
I couldn’t connect to the Web site of my doctor’s office to make any appointment, because their site only wants patients to enter on IE and Windows. I am testing some security appliances for Information Security magazine, and some of their configuration pages also expect to see IE and Windows. I thought I would upgrade to QuickBooks online rather than buy some new software — but guess what? It only runs on IE and Windows! And the OfficeLive service from Microsoft – which by the way is very cool and is an absolutely free Web hosting solution – only runs on IE and Windows. The list goes on and on.
Fortunately, I run both MacOS and Windows here, so it is more of an annoyance than a showstopper. But still, the message is clear: if you use anything other than Windows, you are not worthy. Go the store and buy a real OS.
The Microsoft Web has been happening for some time. As I wrote several years ago, developers are building Web-based applications using tools and servers from Microsoft. They run on IIS with ASP, and use Visual Studio and of course assume that Internet Explorer is the intended browser so they write these apps accordingly. And if they dabble in Java, they use the Windows version of Java that doesn’t quite work on non-Windows platforms.
Microsoft’s tools certainly can deliver the richest, coolest Web stuff in the shortest time. Of course! That is their not-so-secret plan. They get what makes developers tick and then they supply the Microsoft-flavored crack that keeps their programming mojo pumped. It is a wonderful thing, no? Sun, bless them, still can’t figure this out. IBM with all of its Eclipse and open-this-and-that, can’t figure this out.
Well, there are some bumps in the road, especially with the latest version of IE, version 7. Some of the IE faithful are finding out that things can be painful under the Microsoft Web. IE7 breaks a lot of stuff, and not everyone has tested – or adjusted — their apps for the new browser. Eventually, we will all work out the bugs, I am sure, because we have no choice.
Remember the days when the Web was “browser-agnostic” – meaning that you could run anybody’s browser to view any Web page? That’s so over, so quaint. Now we can’t even build a Web that is “IE agnostic” to run on any two IE versions, let alone versions of IE back to say, v5, which seems like ancient history but is still pretty much in active use on many desktops today. That is one of the problems of the Microsoft Web: it flies in the face of what the Internet used to be all about: writing to internationally accepted standards that actually meant something.
Oh, come off it, Strom. (You might be saying.) So what? Look at what happened to Netscape, who took the standards high road? They got AOLized, and then sank after a cameo appearance at the Microsoft monopoly trial. Who needs standards when Uncle Bill can take care of all of us? Aren’t we better off with just running Windows?
Not really. The Web deserves better than to become yet another Microsoft business unit. There is a reason why I still use my Mac as my main business computer, so I can save the countless hours that I would have spent fixing spyware attacks and redoing my OS when it gets messed up with somebody’s idea of a good joke. But it means that I have to live in my Mac ghetto, and that’s a shame. Because it means that now we are locked into the Microsoft Web.