EUT on Tour

Done and dusted!

2010-04-23T17:36:00.000-07:00

I hope you have enjoyed the posts, Colin and I enjoyed writing them as it 'locks' in what you are learning so much better.

(We did also complain it was an additional 5 hours on our day each day, so you better like them ;-) )

If you have any comments/questions let us know. I'm more than happy to present further at any meetings if something was particularly of interest.

If you have any tips for how we could improve our posts for you for next time, please let us know too!

So its goodbye from him -

And its goodbye from me!

Server Quarium

2010-04-23T17:17:00.001-07:00

I said I'd try to get some pics of the Server Quarium that was running the labs so you could see some of the plasma screens. Some of these are examples of Configuration Manager Dashboards too. I think you can click through to see them larger.

Not sure how well these have come out -

Centralising and managing user data

2010-04-23T16:52:00.000-07:00

Just after 8am on the morning after the attendee party and as you can guess this session was not well attended. That was a shame as it was very good.

The two presenters are part of the Windows File team and had done some work internally at MS to centralise and manage data of users on this pilot.

Aims:

99.99% availability (less than 5 mins a year downtime in their environment)
Near local access times, regardless of the location of user/data
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of zero data loss for the central location
Single backup server
Selective file/folder restore by end user.
Same view of files wherever the user logs on

Technologies leveraged:

10Gb quota per user
Folder redirection and offline file cache
Backups via SCDPM
Windows 7 - when user logs on first time, files are moved to local offline cache then synced with server transparently. This is better than previous versions of Windows which blocked access to desktop until files copied up to server and then back to local offline cache.
Slowlink mode in Windows 7 - detects when link is slow and makes user work locally then syncs when Lan/Wan is better
SMB 2.1 - better Oplock model so client can sleep (Office uses oplocks and would stop computers sleeping unnecessarily.
File System Resource Manager (FSRM) - quotas, allowed file types, periodic or on demand reporting to see storage trends etc
File Classification Infrastructure - assesses how files are used long term, can choose to compress, or tie into Hierarchial Storage Management (HSM)
Shadow copy for shared folders - allows users to be self sufficient in restoring previous file versions (they have to be online to recover).
Policies/GPO

All the demos worked smoothly to prove it. We are doing some similar things with our solution, such as shadow copy, backups in data centre. Here is a great example of how we can take this forward, particularly for roaming users - why should my data be tied to ISB, if MTO can provide a much better service in every location; rather than good service in ISB but shocking elsewhere?

Again one to consider for the roadmap.

Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset

2010-04-23T16:29:00.002-07:00

The Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DART), is another great tool in the MDOP suite.

The MDOP suite typically saves $70-80 net per pc per year (WIPRO reseach). DART can be $10 dollars of that.

DART is basically a bootable CD/DVD (USB and WIM work but are not supported) that runs on WinRE (Windows Recovery Environment) and is used to troubleshoot/repair a client machine before just rebuilding.
It Can:

Recover an unbootable PC
Detect and remove malware (whilst the PC is booted in WinRE)
Delete, recover, save off files
Reset local Admin password
Manipulate services
etc

Benefits:

- Accelerates TCO savings by minimising recovery time and preventing data loss.

- Recover instead of rebuild - saves user time and allows root cause analysis

Rebuilding a unbootable PC guarantees data loss, this tool gives you the option to do data recovery at worst case and full system recovery at best. This way the user does not lose data or their time waiting on a rebuild and then their time setting things up just right.

Case study of a company called Ultrasonic Precision Inc they saw Help desk costs decrease 27% and end user downtime decrease between 50-60%.

Demo's were very effective is providing the crash analysis of a blue screen, and restoring data that had been accidentally deleted.

Tools included in DART:

ERD Regedit - similar to normal one
Locksmith - local admin PW reset
Crash analysis - assesses BSOD and gives reasons/help
File restore - will scan for all deleted files and give you a likelihood of recovery
Disk commander - repair MBR, recover volumes/partition table
Disk wipe - secure DoD level wipe to prevent data recovery
Computer management - similar to normal
Explorer - Gui based, not command prompt as normal WinRE, USB active to save files off or copy them back to restore service
Solution Wizard - Wizard to help you choose the right tool to fix the problem (I would think if you need the wizard, you maybe are not the right person to be doing the work - ironically the presenter just said that too)
TCP/IP config - if you want to get onto LAN or ensure you can get to internet for System sweeper toget updates.
Hotfix uninstall
System sweeper - malware/rootkit detection tool,
SFC Scan - system file check can be used in Windows (assuming it boots), great to see it here at WinRE level (I have used SFC successfully a few times - correctly restore corrupt system files).

You can add DART tools to a hidden system partition of your builds to ensure they are a F8 option for troubleshooting (probably should not include locksmith).

Whilst it is a MDOP feature, once you are licensed for MDOP on your desktops, you can use it on servers too.

You can create a DART cd/dvd from within a virtual machine - very cool.

Find out more here

Desktop Error Reporting

2010-04-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

I was also in this session and agree with what Colin has written, Microsoft Desktop Optimisation Pack, is a great tool. DEM is a great feature of it and the presenter demonstrated these well.

Something we should definitely look further into to understand the cost impact of getting MDOP into our environment and using these tools.

Find out more about it here (Pdf will open)

MMS 2010

2010-04-23T16:03:00.000-07:00

Done!

Desktop Error Monitoring

2010-04-23T15:49:00.000-07:00

This was an excellent session which covered a component of the MDOP suite called Desktop Error Monitoring (DEM). I was extremely impressed with this product demonstration and can see immediate use for it in both our current and future environments. The tool would assist primarily the tier 3 teams (EUT), in strategic problem solving, but would also be useful to tier 2 teams in terms of published problem management, and statistical information. I understand that the tool itself is free, however because we don't have desktop OS enterprise licensing, there will be some commercial issues which would need to be ironed out prior to us deploying - I certainly intend to pursue this investigation, and if necessary raise a business case to implement MDOP as the benefits are clear and immediate.

In order to describe the product, the speakers first talked about why the product exists - this was mainly user need driven:

• Provide an immediate ROI
• Deliver end to end solutions
• Better TCO on desktops/laptops
• Requirement for low cost monitoring for knowledge and productivity issues
• Requirement for better visibility of desktop issues (users automatically reboot, often overwriting error data in the process)

DEM offers the following to help with the above:

• Crash monitoring
• Application and System crash/hang data captured and stored centrally
• Direct access to troubleshooting & solutions
• Agentless deployment (via group policy)
• Lower helpdesk volume calls
• Engagement with support partners
• Internal 'Watson' back-end
• Patch and update tracking
• Easy analysis of captured data reports

The requirements for a DEM deployment are pretty standard:

• A management server
• A reporting server
• An SQL server
• Active Directory
• Global Policies in use in the environment

It's worth noting that DEM is a separate product to SCCM, although SCCM does effectively do the same job albeit on a much bigger scale. DEM is focussed directly on the desktop/laptop environment.

DEM also offered such features as customisable web pages displayed on the desktop when a crash occurs - which means that if we have a solution or workaround already, the user is notified straightaway. This has an obvious effect of reducing helpdesk calls. DEM can also suppress the "Send details to Microsoft" dialog, which users as often as not will click "No" on - once deployed, DEM automatically sends the error data to the central server, and then can display the kind of web page as described above.

Along with application issues, DEM also records system errors such as the dreaded BSOD. One of the issues EUT has faced recently is the issue of collecting BSOD error data - our environment is such that this is not easy on all devices and the user was usually forced to reboot prior to the full error log completing - this could be negated with the DEM system. It is often essential for our vendors that we provide complete error logging so that they can quickly resolve these types of issues, so anything that can help with this will be invaluable to us.

In addition to error data, DEM also captures the CAB file associated with application issues and bundles this in with the reporting - this would help Satyam with issues in packaging and us with patching and update problems. When use in conjunction with crash analysis tools, this is a very powerful way of identifying issues in applications.

In terms of UI, DEM looks very much like SCCM. It has facilities groups similar issues together, but in granular detail (ie by revision/version of individual DLLs) so things like video driver errors etc are clearly visible, even on a cursory glance at the logs.

As I said in the beginning of this article, I intend to follow this up with a serious intent to raising a business case to implement this technology in our environment as soon as possible. It can be used very soon - as soon as the new AD is in production to be exact, and I think the support teams will see the practical benefits immediately. Management should also see benefits from this too - apart from the obvious potential to improve our problem management, quicker and more proactive issue resolution and the potential for ticket reduction; they will also enjoy both the high level reporting available, with the options to produce highly granular reporting if required as well.

Best practices from Microsoft IT on Config Manager 2007

2010-04-22T21:03:00.000-07:00

This was a nice wrap up to the day - the internal MS IT department team lead gave a presentation on how they handle the normal everyday jobs that all users of their products need to do.

The thing that surprised me was that they do not seem to be early adopters of their own technology...obviously they are heavily involved in the Alpha, Beta and QA for their new products (a process they delightfully call "Dogfooding", but in their own environment, they have only recently implemented some of the things I just assumed they would use from day one of it going gold. To give you a couple of highlighted examples, they only began to deploy O/S images six months ago using MDT, and only use one App-V based application throughout the entire organisation.

The other surprise was the size of their team - although the speaker did admit they outsourced for some tasks, their core team is only 13 people. This team services 274,000 clients based at six HQ and client sites globally.

Their SLAs are quite impressive too - for software compliancy (patching etc) they adhere to a 95% compliancy within 3 business days for active exploit patching. For critical updating the SLA is 95% within nine business days.

A large portion of the presentation was around performance monitoring - with such a large organisation which such a high data throughput, they needed to develop their own type of custom reporting, which they achieved with the LogMan tool, and a bundle of custom scripting.

One last point which was quite interesting - they stated that their DC operational costs had reduced by 75% using a virtualisation strategy - they have defined an 8-1 virtual to physical server ratio. They claim that most of the 75% savings are down to power and physical server cost savings, along with standardising the builds for easy and fast provisioning.

Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010

2010-04-22T21:02:00.000-07:00

As is becoming very routine now in these sessions, the speakers started off by extolling the virtues of the 'single pane of glass' approach to SCCM and it's components, and Forefront is no exception. Again with this product, we would be able to manage a major portion of our infrastructure seamlessly from a single user interface.

Forefront, for those not familiar, is Microsoft's answer to antivirus, malware, spyware and firewall for enterprise customers. I had my reservations, previous consumer products have been eh....not great, only offering basic protection at best. Forefront however, has been designed from the ground up to be industry class, and my first impressions are that it may well become best of breed.

Of course, being an SCCM component, deployment of policy, updates and signature files are simple and managed in the same way as any other deployment.

In terms of provisioning Forefront to an environment, Microsoft have pushed the boat out somewhat to make it an admins dream. All that is required is for the installation to be completed on a root site, and it's automatically provisioned across the hierarchy, automatically creating additionally required components such as distribution packages. Another good feature is that when deployed to clients, Forefront will (again!) automatically remove/uninstall and other protection software you have installed, although I'm guessing our heavily scripted installations may cause it some issues.

Some of the other benefits mentioned were:

• Protects clients without complexity
• Admin control of protection level
• Protects apps, file systems and network layers
• Template driven policy creation
• SCCM distribution
• Option to control via legacy group policy if required
• Ability to limit the clients apps CPU utilisation of the PC, so as not to slow down the users during mandatory scans
• By leveraging SCCM and WOL (Wake up on LAN), updating and scans can be scheduled out of hours
• Centralised monitoring, alerting and reporting on protection levels, signature and update compliance across the environment via SCCM

Zero Touch Installation using MDT 2010 & SCCM 2007

2010-04-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

This lab session went though the steps to configure SCCM/MDT2010 up to the deployment phase for deploying a Windows 7 workstation image. The steps included:

• Configuration of the deployment environment
• Configuration of offline installation of language packs and updates
• Configuration of a new computer PXE environment installation of Windows 7
• A refresh install of Windows 7

The lab was fairly routine, but it was good to go through the steps as I suspect my team will be involved in this heavily in the future.

Configuration Manager v.Next: Device management

2010-04-22T20:56:00.000-07:00

Just my 2p's worth....

This session was the best of the week for me - as you know, one of my passions is mobile devices, and especially finding ways to integrate them into the Mars environment to enhance the user experience by giving more choice and flexibility. I've previously reviewed the current crop of Mobile Device Management tools in my blog entries from TechEd 2008, and am very excited to see the new developments and functionality that will be available in SCCM v.Next, particularly as this may well be something we can implement our new environment.

The speakers gave a few interesting statistics which I recorded:

• By 2013, there will be more smartphones than PCs in enterprise level business today
• Devices are trending away from platform conformance (ie iPhone, Android etc are becoming more common)
• 75% of smartphones are consumer bought, but still used for business (guilty as charged m'lord...)

In Mars, this is particularly worth noting due to tight control over business supported mobile devices - associates and contractors who don't qualify will often look for alternatives ways to access their corporate data, and in our environment this could pose a risk to us in terms of data security and corporate privacy as we have no control over these devices currently.

Using the tools available today, we have the following opportunities to take control:

• SMS 2003 - Windows Mobile / CE devices only
• SCCM 2007 - CE 4.2 / Pocket PC 2003 - basic control and provisioning
• MDM 2008 SP1 - Windows Mobile 6.1, mobile VPN, Rich Device Management (remote wipe etc)

When v.Next is available, we can look forward to:

• Management integration in the same UI for desktop, server and mobile devices
• Over the air enrolment (using AD credentials)
• Mobile application deployment (this is cool, see below)
• Monitoring and remediation of non compliant devices
• Support for WinCE 5+, Windows Mobile 5/6/6.1 and Windows Phone 6.5
• Additional platform support (ie Nokia Symbian)
• Over the air inventory and setting management including software and patch deployment, remote device lock/unlock and wipe

The topology v.Next includes the following key server roles for device management:

• Enrolment web proxy point
• Enrolment service point
• Software catalog roles
• Management point
• Distribution point

The speakers went over some enrolment and deployment scenarios, describing the process for establishing mutual trust between the mobile device and the enrolment web proxy, which demonstrated the over the air provisioning. This can be invoked either by the admin in the console in a few easy steps, or by the remote user, using the web based software catalogue which is part of SCCM's standard services. Whichever method is chosen , the end result is the user receiving a notification with instructions specific to their device type, and includes a one time PIN number which is valid for 8 hours by default. Once the user initiates the enrolment process on the device using the PIN, a secure session is initiated and enrolment is completed in the background on the device. Once the process is complete (which can either be bound to the users AD credentials, or specific credentials to the device), you're ready to deploy software, policy and patching to the device, along with being able to over the air inventory, status report (ie memory, CPU, free storage etc) & remote control in the same way as any other domain device. Specifically for mobile devices, you may lock/unlock or wipe the device.

Settings management for mobile devices direct from the console was also covered, and includes:

• Integrated mobile settings
• Support for monitoring and enforcement of policies
• Standard settings and simple UI which will be familiar to any SCCM admin
• Administrator defined settings via mobile registry or omni-uri (configuration via web link)
• All evaluation and remediation is done by the server so that the device isn't slowed by any processes required.

Alongside this, another great thing about this product is that you don't need to create separate security policies for mobile devices - rather you use your baseline desktop/laptop policy and add a supplement configuration item for mobile devices. This will save time for admins and security teams, and also ensure that sweeping security changes, for example a change to the 8/90 password policy, would be affected for all device types at once without the need for many policy changes to encompass all devices. The configuration item contains control for such things as bluetooth networking and sharing, camera use etc, specific to smartphones, along with and password lock policies etc.

Software distribution to mobile devices works in the same way as with any other SCCM deployment, so I won't go into detail here, however one point worth mentioning is that once a mobile device application or patch is packaged, it can be grouped into software collections along with the same applications for other devices on the DP servers, using the same requirement rules (for example device type, available memory and storage etc), and SCCM automatically works out which version to deploy to which device. Also, packages can be signed with a corporate certificate, so that the user can have confidence in the source, and the enterprise maintains continuity of the packages.

So to try and make this clear, if user Colin requires Adobe Reader and had a desktop PC and a smartphone, all the admin needs to do is deploy Adobe Reader once - it will appear on all devices if available and required. The only thing which isn't clear to me at this stage is how license constrains are observed here, user Colin may well own the application on his desktop, but may not be licensed on the mobile device - so I'm not currently clear on how this is handled. I am sure there will be a way though, it's not like Microsoft to miss something as fundamental to their business model as licensing!

Software distribution packages can be in several flavours, including MSI, App-V and mobile CAB. Software can be deployed either via SCCM or user initiated web based self service. The beauty of all this for admins, is that now, mobile devices can be treated pretty much in the same way as desktops and laptops all from the same UI, using the same packaging, monitoring and reporting functionality - giving us control of the devices in our environment finally!

Troubleshooting Windows 7 Deployments

2010-04-22T18:43:00.000-07:00

This lecture was a little dry albeit very informative. The synopsis is: Windows 7 deployments can have problems, check the multitude of log files for help and RTFM before hand.

For those that would like some more tech detail:

Setupact.log - setup actions during process
setuperr.log - only the error messages - both these need to be read together, and depending at what poitn the failure was, they may be in different locations!
KB927521 has more
cbs.log - DISM commands - drivers, languages, security updates
setupapi.dev.log - %windir%\inf - driver install
netsetup.log - %windir%\Debug - Domain join errors
Windowsupdate.log - %windir% - Windows update, WSUS or SCCM (SUP) errors
wpeinit.log - startup issues in WinPE - gets deleted after reboot
wdsserver.log - WDS - logging is off by default - KB936625
usmtestimate.log - estimation of space errors
usmtcapture.log or scanstate.log - capturing the data
usmtrestore.log - restore errors
smsts.log - task sequence failures (another log that moves)
drivercatalog.log - inport drivers
tasksequenceprovider.log - save or import task sequences
smspxe.log - pxe issues
smsprov.log - save or import task sequences too.

In SCCM you can enable a checkbox for enable command support, if you then hold F8 during winPE you can get a command prompt to go find these logs. If you have got as far as windows setup Shift+F10. Having the command prompt window open, holds any reboot too.

Common issues:

Bad computer name - more than 15 characters
Mismatched product key to image file
Broken domain join - KB944353
Deploying with a KMS key! (KMS keys are for machines that provide keys to rest of org)
Crashes - check for stop errors, you may need to turn off auto reboot.
WinPE - generally networking related
SCCM - task sequences, hash mismatch (refresh DP - it is a bug MS cannot reproduce so far)
Make sure you test all task sequences at least one before deploying
Make sure packages are present (if not push them out)

Finally he mentioned a tool called SMStrace, which has the option to enter error codes, this can be very helpful.

App-V Overview

2010-04-22T18:22:00.000-07:00

This session was to give a brief overview of App-v, it's benefits and some demos.

Application deployments are costly (as we know), App-v enables a desktop virtualisation solution by virtualising applications. (This is often known as presentation virtualisation - think traditional Citrix, however this has evolved slightly and now MS and Citrix include app streaming too)

A couple of customer examples: One cut app deployment from 3 months to 3 days, another reduced packaging costs by 50% and finally one reduced the amount pf PC images they needed.

The App-v sequencer was demonstrated with the app packaged in a matter of minutes. Obviously this package can then be deployed to any hardware, quickly and managed centrally. You can choose to stream (allow user to start the app before it is installed locally) or just do the deployment - streaming would be great for a large app.

Obviously it all ties into the one infrastructure, one management product suite tools message and helps you become user centric.

The recent 4.6 release of App-v is 64bit on servers/apps/infrastructure - so making the best use of what you have in terms of performance, CPU/Ram usage. There are specific things that allow for better Office 2010 virtualisation. They have managed to create a shared cache for apps between VDI and Terminal Services saving on diskspace significantly - often you would have previously had a package for each. Best of all, each app operates independently, so an app crash does not take down the whole OS.

It is still a good product (as it was when it was Softricity Softgrid), and may well be worth some investigation, we would need to contrast this with our existing investment in Citrix technologies.

Client of the Future: Capabilities, Considerations and Costs

2010-04-22T18:09:00.000-07:00

This was a really good session and one that will be hard to illustrate without the slide desk. Once I have it, am happy to take people through it in more detail.

The session was run by one of the Strategists from the 'War on Costs' team internal to MS. It covered how previously the aim was to get standardised and locked down and make one size fits all. However now and into the future this is no longer true. We are shifting to being more user centric from device centric and should be looking at multiple ways to address their needs rather than the one size fits all approach.

This is good as it is what I have been pitching for a couple of years. One problem you have when trying to justify this is TCO, having a cost based model is not great for:
- emerging technologies which start off more expensive but give you competitive advantage
- solutions with a high upfront cost (typically we will have this problem for premium services in our software catalog - how do we make it fair to the sites that take the higher cost early on?)
- where value is only for a subset of users (e.g. VDI for our business partners)

TCO also does not measure, agility, efficiency, flexibility and productivity.

The presenter stated that a new model is needed which provide the 4 pillars of business value:

Direct cost
Agility
Quality of Service
Governance, risk, management and compliance

By building your cost models with these themes in mind you will get a more balanced view of what will work.

Next steps are to assess the various solutions against these and see what will be a good fit for your portfolio. Again there was a number of steps to go through before having a user centric environment.

I'll leave the recap here, but hopefully it was enough to give you a taste. Once I get the slides I can elaborate further, but the detail on them and the pace he was going was more than I could get good notes down for and I'd like to do it justice.

To give a bit more background, this was the abstract:

Application virtualization? Workspace virtualization? Desktop virtualization? Composite desktops? Desktops-as-a-service? In an ever-more-complex game of "buzzword bingo" it has become very difficult to compare vendor offerings and choose the client-computing technologies and capabilities that will help you succeed as a business. This session leverages the "War on Cost" team's most recent research into client computing, and provides a framework for comparing the capabilities and considerations of emerging client models.

We'll compare the costs, benefits, and optimal use-cases for application virtualization, desktop virtualization and more; we'll discuss the impacts of each model on desktop deployment and management, datacenter workloads, application delivery, user productivity and business agility; and we'll highlight the key factors and best practices that must be considered when aligning your desktop strategy with business priorities. This session will equip you to make well-informed choices as you work to implement an agile and effective next-generation client-computing environment that meets your business needs.

Best practices from MS IT - SCCM 2007

2010-04-22T18:05:00.000-07:00

Both Colin and I were in this session and as it was more relevant for him I'll let him add the details.

Key things I noted - MS IT manage 275k clients with their SCCM infrastructure, so we don't need to worry about scale!
They have 13 people globally to manage all: servers and clients, patching, software updates, App-v, OS deployments and two of these are permanent packagers. The rest of the packaging they outsource.

13 people, 275k machines - pretty impressive!

Does this make me a proper geek?

2010-04-22T13:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I queued up to get a free SCOM 2007 R2 book, and the authors signed it for me.

In my defence I only went because it was free, don't judge me!

Mobile Device Managment

2010-04-22T13:29:00.000-07:00

So day 4 starts, its cold, rainy and windy. Fortunately I get to spend all my time in a conference center ;-)

However it does mean the attendee pool party has been moved to the underground car park - not quite going to be the same atmosphere methinks!

First session today was about Device Management and they mean specifically mobiles.

Fact roll:

Smartphones have increased significantly in importance to businesses
2013 will see more smartphones in the enterprise than PC/Laptops
Trend is away from platform conformance (irritatingly for us)
Often consumer purchased but used for business (as an example all the pics here are with my personal smartphone)
Customers want 'a single pane of glass' view over their infrastructure from Servers to phones, not multiple consoles/infrastructures, and certainly not an infrastructure per vendor!

Microsoft have decided to invest more in this areas and thus have rolled their System Center Mobile Device Manager product into Configuration Manager v.Next. They have already announced that they will support Nokia/Symbian platforms at RTM and are stating that they are working with other vendors, no time lines committed yet.

This is interesting as when I was at MMS in 2008, they were saying then that they were in discussions with Apple and Rim, so either these discussions a)take a really really long time, b)are not going well or c)lost focus... Might be worth getting a more formal roadmap under NDA to understand what is really happening.

Apart from Symbian, MS will also support WinCE 5.0+ WM6.1+. These devices will be able to do over the air enrollment, inventory, settings management, software distribution and remote wipe. WinCE devices wont be able to remote wipe or do over the air.

Over the air enrollment ties into SCCM and your EA Certificate infrastructure (PKI - which we will have as part of Connex). Demo'd well and worked flawlessly.

Admins can register users, or they will be able to self register.

They are working to make the user experience the same on all platforms, so things like offloading compliance check/remediation assessment to the SCCM server will ensure the user is not impacted regardless of how powerful their device is or what OS it runs.

Demo's of settings management and software distribution were equally impressive, and tie into the new Software catalog with v.Next - i.e user can choose to register their phone in it, or what software they want installed.

Public beta will be available by end May 2010

Really interesting session and I'm very hopeful it can be a good solution. I would want to see some firm commitments on timelines and platforms. Again though as we have Software Assurance on SCCM, we will be entitled to the product in the future anyway. Definitely one worth investigating!.

Operating System deployment for ordinary admins

2010-04-21T23:54:00.000-07:00

"Operating System deployment for ordinary admins" focussed on two free MS tools for Windows 7 deployment, namely MAP and ACT (MS Assessment & Planning and "Application Compatibility Toolkit).

Both toolkits should be in use (especially ACT Stan!) in Mars already, and I enjoyed the overview. If anybody wants an overview on them, let me know.

Software updates for smart admins

2010-04-21T23:51:00.000-07:00

"Software updates for smart admins" consisted of two admins, one from a 50k user strong company, the other with barely 2k users. The point was to show best practices on software updating from different perspectives, with often diverse methods, but ultimately achieving the same end result of software compliance. The session was lively and obviously both admins had very different views on achieving their goal, and although they didn't quite argue about it on stage, they did agree to disagree. The only things they did agree on was that WSUS was old and SCCM was infinitely easier to manage. That and don't sync drivers, which seemed pretty obvious....who wants to download 70gb+ a month?

I will be getting the slide deck from this one though, as some of the methods described looked like they could save quite a bit of time for any admin - please let me know if you'd like a copy.

Monitoring Networks with Operations Manager 2007 R2

2010-04-21T23:47:00.001-07:00

Next session was "Monitoring Networks with Operations Manager 2007 R2" I took a lot of notes on this one as I can see the benefits to an ops team, in that we often need to go to the Central Processing or Enterprise Networks teams and say dumb things like "My application is running bad", whereas "Server 51 is connected to Switch ABC on port 1, and we're seeing a lot of dropped packets between 9-11am" would be a bit more useful.

As you'll already doubtless know, R2 supports SNMP (V1 & v2) and can create either SNMP or SysLog workflows. What I didn't know is that it will also integrate with other monitoring solutions such as Solarwinds via a connector so that we can see the outputs of that alerting system right in the SCCM console. Pretty cool eh?

The larger part of the session was devoted (of course!) to v.Next, and how this offers more functionality. Please note this is all work in progress so subject to change before it goes gold.

The key points I noted are:

* Out of the box monitoring/discovery and reporting
* Server to network dependency discovery
* Multi Vendor/Multi Protocol support (SNMP v1/2/3 & IP v4/6 (note that discovery is IP4 ONLY!)
* Better scalability

Discovery can be manual or automatic (auto only needs one router IP address to discover the entire network!) and can be scheduled, via SMNP trigger or used on demand. This will support layer 2 & 3, VLAN memberships and HSRP (Cisco). Key monitor components by default are memory, CPU, Port, Interface card, PSU, temperature and voltage.

Monitoring defaults out of the box include port/interface up/down, traffic volume, CPU % utilisation, data drop and broadcast rates, memory counters (inc total and free RAM), PSU temperature and voltage and connection health end to end.

Final point was on inbuilt visualisation, which comes in either Dashboard or Diagram flavours - both looked common sense and useful, and of course were configurable ad infinitum.

SCCM 2007 - Configuration Manager v.Next migration

2010-04-21T23:47:00.000-07:00

A lot of things here have been covered already, secondly this is based on the migration to the beta without full functionality yet.

Having said that, here's the deets:

Migration Console is in the Administartion tab of the v.Next console

Goal of migration: flatten hierachy, minimise WAN impact, Maximise reusability of x64 hw, assist migration of clients and objects

Plan - asses current environment, POC, Design.
Requires SCCM 2007 R2 SP2, 64bit hw, SQL server 2008 SP1 cumulative update 6.

Deploy -

Setup initial v.Next primary/Cas
Configure software update point and sync updates
Setup server roles
Make sure hierarchy is operating and software deployment works

Migrate - Map v.Next to existing 2007, migrate objects/clients/DP, Uninstall 2007 sites

All sounds so simple doesn't it ;-)

Enable migration in v.Next, specify hierachy - v.Next gathers info from 2007 for baseline, info is retained for reporting and displaying progress. I have some more details for those interested.

Concern for me is that it seems to be a side by side migration, not an in place - does this mean we will potentially need to buy new hardware to do an upgrade not long after we have finished our migration?

Config Manager v.Next Admin UI

2010-04-21T23:45:00.000-07:00

First up today (after the keynote) was "Config Manager v.Next Admin UI" and as you can imagine, was focussed on the improvements of the user interface, compared with previous/current versions. This will only be interesting to existing users of SCCM, new users will just expect the "wunderbar" and ribbon approach, which is delivered. The UI changes are more than just cosmetic of course - of particular note are the very fast and easy sorting and filtering options, both of which are very configurable. Tagging makes grouping very easy and is available on virtually all objects - so for example, you could tie this in with the Role Based Management, and allow site admins to only view objects, policies and devices on their own turf - for example an EU deployment manager could be configured to only see the relevent tasks, devices and functions that he required. Even if we didn't use this kind of restriction, the technology would still be useful to just to simplify views, reports and workflows for any admin working in the environment.

Speaking of reports, they showed an overview of the new graphical functionality built into v.Next - this looked very Spectrum like, and was of course dynamic, allowing you to drill down through the environment, for example down to server certificates and application issues reported by the internal alerting engine.

Also of mention was the automatic deployment statistic reporting options, which by default right out of the box show performance and failure alerting.

Protecting Windows Clients with Data Protection Manager

2010-04-21T23:27:00.000-07:00

Good session presented by two clearly passionate product managers. Quick survey of the room showed 50% were trying to backup up laptops/desktops but not one person was happy with their solution. Why?

Mobile users cause problems
Sheer volume of machines - how manage that data and scale policies across it?
Each user has different needs.

DPM 2010 released his week addresses these! They have removed any reliance on the end user and support user roaming and customisation. You can still enforce Admin defined restrictions.

Basics - first backup is a full backup, every future is the disk block changes - in essence allowing you to have a full backup each time, whilst only moving small amounts of data from the device to the DPM server. You can do multiple backups during the day to allow users to restore previous versions of files as they work. If they are offsite it backs up locally, sure if a disk fails you are stuck, but if they just want to restore any earlier version, they can still do this. Once back on network/vpn/directaccess it will sync with the DPM server.

Policy can configure backup locations, you can allow the users to add their own (or not). For example I have a bad habit of saving in progress files to my desktop and typically My Documents would be the location backed up - I could add my desktop to the locations to protect.

User can also choose to sync just before they go offsite, and do self recovery. If they lose their laptop you can restore to a new machine with their login, or if they just need a file, they can login to any machine and get what they need. I.e someone forgets their USB stick with their powerpoint.

The agent can be installed as part of a standard build, you only pay license costs when you start to do backups. This would be great as a premium service on top of SDS. Or a direct replacement for SDS backup.

A couple of flaws, each DPM server can only cater to 1000 clients, so assuming we need to run this from the datacenter, we would need significant server investment. Lets hope this becomes a cloud offering in the future!

2nd Keynote

2010-04-21T22:05:00.000-07:00

Today Brad Anderson got to be the main man, as is tradition, first some stats:

Windows 7 is the fastest selling OS in history

In March 90 million Win7 machines were patched via Windows Update.

Windows Update patches 725million PCs each month - bear in mind most corporates wont point to Windows Update.

SCCM 2007 R3 - will include more power management features. You can enable it in a data gathering mode first and understand how your estate is used, and understand the savings you could make. Typically Windows 7 has saved between $30-60 per machine by tweaking the power options from Windows XP. You will also be able to configure wake up for out of band patch/app distribution.

With the reports you can show CO2 savings as you implement the policies, therefore we could quantify the savings back to the sites. This helps as site power is obviously a different budget so whilst Mars IS wont see the benefit we can show the site what benefit they are getting because of our service.

SCCM 2007 R3 beta is available from today.

Brad says there are 5 things you need to build the core of your desktop strategy.

1) You must have one infrastructure to manage all your types of desktop - physical, vdi, app-v, etc. It must have comprehensive management tools for all the things you manage. Guess what? The system center suite does this ;-) In all seriousness it is a good point, for so long we have tried to go for best of breed and often suffered, there is a lot to be said for the one throat to choke approach.

2)Common way of integrating and managing all versions of virtualisation - vdi, VMs, App-v, Med-v Hyper-v, vmware, Citrix etc. Speaking of Citrix, XenApp can now be managed by the System Center suite (available in 60 days). Configuration Manager will allow for increased automation/management of XenApp and its server infrastructure - so delivery of apps to the server, through to publishing them to end users. Using Citrix Dazzle home users can gets apps delivered via Citrix and SCCM.

Some Hyper-V tweaks - Remote effects (fx?) and Dynamic memory, the first allows you to use a high end graphics card in your hyper-v server and provide full windows aero effects to end users with VDI - the GPU takes the workload so performance is not affected. Other VM providers cannot do this - this would mean the user experience is seamless from physical desktop to virtual - sounds insignificant but is very impressive - they demo'd it running 720p HD video in a virtual machine with all Aero feature on. Dynamic memory essentially allows you to define a range of RAM for your VM machines - this way as the user runs an intense app, they can dynamically grow their RAM usage, and when they close it, it will reduce. This allows for much more efficient RAM usage and again a significantly improved user experience. These tools will be available in SP1 for W2k8 R2 (I cant wait for my home server ;-) ).

3) Convergence of security and management - lower cost, simplified management and enhanced protection. Forefront product will now run off System Center infrastructure (no additional servers required). It will be built into Configuration Manager so you will get anti virus/malware/spyware. This also ties into the one infrastructure theme. RTM by end of year. As we consistently seem to have problems with our Symantec tools, maybe this would be worth a look! In fact the install package it includes in SCCM will auto uninstall other vendors security problems to avoid headaches (almost like a virus itself!) This combination will tie into the SQL reporting services and provide very rich reports to see overall status, any detections and so on. Tied into the Dashboard (see previous blog) a great addition to the office plasma!

4) Cloud based client management or as they define it, 'route to the cloud'. I have blogged about Windows Intune, so see this post for more.My view is that 2-5 years this product set will have developed enough to rival the on premise solutions, so by the time we come to look at the desktop management infrastructure again, this may be a viable solution.

Then Brad went off on a bit of a detour from the Cloud to the System Center Service Manager tool. This tool had 2 main design principles, simplicity and tight integration with AD and System Center. As blogged previously this tool will do compliance, incident/change and problem management. They gave an example of a customer having a meaningful CMDB within 2 hours of install, it is that simple.

In terms of compliance, it will do PCI, SOX, records management and one other I didn't catch. Service Manager can automate the discovery to assess compliance, demo'd in 3-4 clicks. If you already have VISA compliance and now you want to check for AMEX it will assess the delta that AMEX may require that VISA does not, but not duplicate the work already covered. It can even auto remediate to gain compliance. The integrated reporting can allow you to check compliance, or even generate the report direct for the auditor. Non compliance can auto generate a ticket for items it is unable to remediate. Microsoft will update the tool as regulations are updated.

Beta 2 available in June RTM later in the year.

5) User focused - enabling productivity anywhere on any device (sounds familiar!) - reiteration of much of what I have already written about SCCM, Configuration Manager v.Next. Talked about auto remediation of DCM/Settings management which is pretty cool, even to the extent of reinstalling apps a user may mistakenly remove.

There was a roadmap slide

Image credit: Hans Vredevoort - click the pic for his site.

Next years MMS will be at Mandalay Bay March 21st-25th 2011

Preview of one of tomorrow's sessions

2010-04-21T22:03:00.000-07:00

The System Center Team blog have a write up of whats coming tomorrow around device management. Take a read here

I'll write up the session once I have attended tomorrow afternoon.

Misled

2010-04-21T13:43:00.000-07:00

My next session was SCCM 2007 on steroids - real life experiences.

What it actually was was a company called Adaptiva using three of its customers to do a sales pitch on its products - Client health, One site and Green IT with companion.

Worst of all the presenters skipped the slides, so I had to guess at was was being demo'd!

Client health all the demo's failed - they stated typically 5-10% of all SCCM clients have errors - (I'd be interested to hear in the comments if Mark/Raitis you think this is about right, and what you do about it, as this product does not work!)
Tool seemed overly complex, needed an additional admin console, I was not impressed and neither was anyone else as half the audience left.

Other two products the demo's worked but again just not great products - if we wanted to invest in these areas, 1E have what appear to be better working products (Nomad, Nightwatchman and the Power and Patch pack).

Overall an appalling session.

Windows Intune

2010-04-21T13:18:00.000-07:00

Hello again! I'm skipping the keynote write up until tonight as I have skipped lunch to do some quick updates. I love my audience that much! To show you appreciate it, add some comments or tick the rating boxes!

After being launched on Monday as a beta (admittedly Beta3), Windows Intune has already closed to new participants, what they thought would take a week, filled up in matter of hours, so you can see people are pretty excited.

Reminder of what it is - desktop management via a cloud service. Why MS think it is needed:

Many customers struggle with non standard, multi version environments.
Workers are in many locations
Lack of insight into PC estate
Cannot afford a huge infrastructure investment

By using Windows Intune you can avoid the above and deliver many additional features that small companies typically couldn't or don't do. Such as:

Protect PCs from Malware
Standardise on a version of Windows
Upgrade to Win7 or downgrade to run a version of choice
Automatic upgrades to new versions of the service
Diagnostics and recovery toolset (which can recover even a non bootable PC)
Access to all MDOP functionality (this is a great feature)
Bitlocker to go (another great feature)
No infrastructure required (so no hardware/OS/license costs or power etc)
Predictable monthly billing

Signing up is via the MS Business Online services website, and you get access to the Cloud based admin console. From here you use a simple wizard to do some customisations and configuration which gets saved as a .MSI - this can then be installed on your pc estate and voila - you are managing you estate via the cloud!

I can see a niche use for Mars - Royal Canin currently have a series of startup companies whilst the enter a new market - each company has to manage its own IT - this would be a great solution to at least ensure they were patched, had anti virus, were licence compliant and so on. It can even manage non Domain joined machines the same as you would configure your traditional estate - this would ensure a consistent look and feel and user experience one the startup joins the Mars network fully.

The admin interface was very intuitive, and very immediate - I was impressed with this being a beta product. There is context sensitive help so someone with basic IT skills should be able to manage the PCs via this platform - again great for small companies where the focus is on the business not managing the IT. The PC agent even has some self healing built in to make it as simple as possible to remediate.

You can do things like export the hw or software inventories - great for Commercial to check compliance.

It does include basic remote control but the user has to make a request. Further versions will see this expanded.

Whilst it is only for client machines now, I did notice it had some server things listed so it may well be on the roadmap ;-) Another thing on the roadmap is software distribution - again this would be superb functionality to add.

Release should be within 12 months to NA/EU/Asia and Brasil

If you want to track the progress, the team at MS have a blog here

CIO.com review

2010-04-21T07:49:00.000-07:00

CIO have added their views on the MS view of the cloud here

I'm off for Keynote 2, check back later for my thoughts, or watch it live here

More details...

2010-04-20T23:44:00.000-07:00

I was going to bed when I thought I'd just check my RSS feeds and some relevant info popped up.

I mentioned Infrastructure Planning Guides for the Dynamic datacenter - just seen it is now available, see here

Mary Jo Foley on MS bridging Public/Private clouds here

RTM of System Center Essentials (SCE) and SCDPM here

Windows Intune (Cloud based desktop management) was showcased yesterday

There will be some Configuration Manager v.Next announcments tomorrow so stay tuned!

Configuration Manager v.Next - Hierarchy Design

2010-04-20T23:18:00.000-07:00

This presentation build on the previous Configuration Manager v.Next talks and is around designing your architecture. For those non techies, skip to the next post now!

You should have a Central Administration Site, 1 Primary and Secondary's as required.

Central Admin Site - Location for all admin and reporting. No client data processing, no clients assigned and limited site roles.

Primary Site - services clients in well connected network. No tiered primaries, only add more for scale out; not needed for data segmentation, client agent settings or network bandwidth control.

Secondary - services clients in remote locations where network control is needed. Bundle Proxy MP and DP fr install. Tiered content routing via Secondary SQL replication.

Advanced features (multicast/streaming) are not available on file share only DPs (or W2k3 ones).

You can throttle and/or schedule to remote DPs

Branch DPs - can be run on a workstation, 100 or fewer clients, BITS gives you enough network control.
Utilise branche cache if you have W2k8 R2 (Mars traditional will) - they have seen a 71% drop in network utilisation at one customer.

Replication stays file based for content, but is SQL for global and site data.
SQL reporting services is the only reporting tool that can be used.

Topology views in Sites tab rather than event viewer - this will greatly aid troubleshooting replicating as the picture will show the alert and the link state.

Configuration Manager v.Next Overview - Mat's additions

2010-04-20T22:27:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in both my and Col's previous posts, it is all about the User Centric Client Management and its 3 pillars:

Empower the end user
Unify the infrastructure/admin consoles, consolidate the separate tools (Mobile Device Manager is rolled into SCCM)
Control via improved feature sets and simplified processes.

This is based on a new definition of an end user - more tech savvy, used to the consumerisation of IT, Digital native. IDC predicts that there will be 1Billion mobile workers by 2011 - 75% of US workforce will be mobile by end of this year and 80% of Japanese.

Consequently demand for IT specialists will shrink(40% this year), there will be an increase in balanced versatilists (definite consultant speak - IT Pro's will need more all round knowledge and adaptability.

v.Next will embrace the user and move away from the device. It will provide a web based software catalog that users can pick from.

Tech details:

Can deploy apps to DP group
Role based security in admin consoles (which can be customised)- allows you to show only the items that role needs.
Can set a security scope, e.g. a EU admin would only see EU relevant data.
Should be able to reduce infrastructure - primarys are needed for scale only with them as an option for content distribution
Data segmentation for users - so they only see software catalog items relevant to them.
Using SQL transation replication rather than file replication services (for some data)
Lots of work on client health to help troubleshooting and auto remediation.
Mobile Device manager merged into v.Next. This will include cross platform support, ability to deploy apps to devices or user.DCM to devices, secure over the air enrollment, monitor and remediate out of compliance devices, app allow/deny.
DCM (Desired configuration management) is now called Settings management.
Patching - auto deployment of specific things based on rules - e.g. windows defender definition updates (and a very simple interface to configure these rules, audible gasps of joy in the audience).
OSD (Operating System Deployment) offline servicing of images based on update baseline you set for the live environment - means new builds don't need to go through a patch process once built, they are build to the latest environment update level by default.
Boot media updates - hierarchy wide boot media, unattended boot media with pre execution hooks to auto select task sequences.
USMT 4.0 - hard link offline and shadow copy features, UI integration.
Remote control - send CTRL+ALT+Del to remote device is back.
Settings Management - v.Next can 'set' registry, wmi, scripts. Unified across servers, PCs and mobiles. Audit tracking.
Configuration Item revision history - version control in packages so you can see what has changed over time.

Cloud Computing in the Enterprise: Enabling the Foundation with the Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center

2010-04-20T21:56:00.000-07:00

This lecture was about the Dynamic Infrastructure toolkit for System Center, basically providing the tools to allow an enterprise to build their own private cloud and manage it. Deliver the service, manage the fabric.

They went through a lot of the same background that had been covered in the keynote which was a bit of a waste of time.

The toolkit is designed to help with:

Self service (provisioning, not pw)
Greater failure resilience
Greater scale
Consumption based charging
Service catalog
Service orientated (faster delivery)

They plotted the journey from traditional data centre <15%>50% utilised (moving from physical to virtual machines) to private cloud - IT as a service, Chargeback and significant decrease in management costs to public cloud - capacity on demand, global reach.

They envision public/private clouds co-existing which I agree with. I cannot see this changing in the next few years whilst we have limiting legal regulation around data/user accounts or suspicion around the solutions. Once vendors have built up trust in the marketplace I can see the swing beginning where feasible.

The stage stage of data centers is IT PAC (Pre assembled components) this is a modular data center built as needs dictate, think of examples like the World Cup or Olympics, significant need that ramps up until the launch of the event, then suddenly not needed.

The toolkit derives from their learning from managing their environments (Azure/Bing etc). System Center v.Next suite will cover all aspects of private cloud management.

Azure is PAAS (Platform as a service)

BPOS is SAAS (Software as a service)

New for the Cloud is IAAS - Infrastructure as a service, the foundation the cloud is built on.

The toolkit is available from Summer 2010 and will contain:

Architecture roadmap, Infrastructure planning guides (these are generally great), best practices
Out of the box capability for self service portal, provisioning engine.

Then a few demo's.

The licensing question was bugging me - how do you manage licensing or costs when anyone can self provision and scale up an environment. Unfortunately the answer was not great - that's down to another product SCVMM, which a)isn't quite true and b)not good enough.

I have a feeling the truth is that it has not really been thought about yet, so will be interesting to see if it gets documented/included at release or a later stage.

SCCM - State of the Union - Mat's view

2010-04-20T21:27:00.000-07:00

As Colin said, the presenters were great - the best of the event so far!

They started off with a run down of the top 10 codenames they came up with before Configuration Manager v.Next. As it is now focused on User Centric Client Management, UCCM was a candidate, before they considered what would happen if the Forefront brand was added (say it out loud), and then even worse, 'Enterprise' at the end. It got a good laugh and bought the audience in.

In the last 3 months Asset Intelligence has grown 30%, they are learning the gaps and adapting. They encouraged us to use MS Asset and Planning toolkit.

As Colin mentioned they have worked with Adobe to ensure product updates are being rolled into SCCM/SCUP - this is a user feedback driven product enhancement. They talked about a partner product Shavlik Scupdate which does many more 3rd party products and integrates with SCCM. (I have used this in a previous job with Windows Software Update Services and it is a good product)

They talked about some of the stats they have gathered from those customers that enrolled in the feedback service and then showed the changes they have made based on that knowledge.
They also use forums both external to MS as well as technet. The top issues commonly are down to admins not reading the documents or superflows or fail to fully configure the products. Good to see RTFM is still key advice!

Over the next 12 months -
Configuration Manager Information Experience team will be writing more superflow, as well as a web based help module.

v.Next will be able to deploy apps not just to end users but also to Citrix XenApp, this would allow a scenario where the full application is deployed to a users primary machine, but when they roam - they get their app via Citrix. A great solution for some key users.

SCCM R3 - more power management and reporting, scales to 300k machines, oem media will work better, MDM licensing will be rolled in.

Lots of research has been done with customers and their end users. From this they have developed the v.Next marketing, all around 3 pillars - Empower, Unify and Control. I'll define these more in another post.

Their research from end users was useful but not often in the way expected. An example given was that if a generic notification popped up asking the user to take an action, they would generally ignore it, if it had the company logo, people would do what it said, even if the text was to format their pc! It will be interesting to see what middle ground they get to ;-)

v.Next is currently being piloted within MS IT on beta 1 with 50k machines. The TAP (Technical Access program) has 14 other customers, 6 have more than 100k machines, 7 more than 10 primary sites, 6 more than 100 secondary sites, 8 more than 100 distribution points (DPs) so pretty big/complex environments.

They then did 3 demos of things that may or may not make it into the final product and got the audience to vote. I actually think all 3 should be in, but wont list them here just in case.

Key things to prepare for v.Next:

Flatten your hierarchy
Use AD sites and services for site boundaries
Break up collections that contain users/computers
Use Branche Cache
UNC paths for source content
Use App CI - will help with state based apps and detection methods.
Use DCM

Keynote - Detail

2010-04-20T20:17:00.000-07:00

As Colin has said I took lots of Notes. I also took some pics of the empty stage, to give an idea of the size

These were from the 1/3 nearest the stage - I reckon about 6k attendees could be accommodated.

You could really see the impact the flight ban has had on attendance as it was maybe 3/5s full at most. Hopefully there will be more attendees tomorrow now flight restrictions have eased.

Anyhoo back to the details...

Brad Anderson started off as the warmup for his boss Bob Muglia, Brad took us through some stats -
3 out of 4 attendees use SCCM, 80% of which are already on R2
2 out of 3 use SCOM, again 80% at R2
50% of SCOM users, take advantage of its hetergenous features to manage Unix/Linux
50% of attendees use System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)
25% use App-V
10% are beta'ing System Center Service Manager

7 years ago MS first announced the Dynamic Systems Initiative, the first step on the path to Dynamic IT now they are making it a reality, the vision will continue to evolve.

He talked about things like the Lab management tool in Visual Studio 2010 which allows you to deploy your own test lab using Hyper-V and SCVMM.

Brad talked about Opalis, a recent acquisition, which has a Orchestration feature, which automates moving (virtual) Dev environments into production, with the whole environment available at once - no more multiple changes/over time.(Opalis is something we may own but is outside of scope of Connex - something for EUT to investigate further I think).

Next up was a demo and a pretty impressive one. There is a feature within Hyper-V which allows you to do a long distance live migration. This would allow failover between say ISB and MTO, with no user impact as the servers would migrate in a live state even over the huge distance.

Obviously MS are keen to push new parts of the System Center suite, they talked about the human workflow of change and how it can slow the process, System Center Service Manager (SCSM) can now do a change automation based on ITIL. System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) has better functionality for backing up (Hyper-V) based virtual machines, down to individual files on VMs, not just a snapshot. Multi site clustering with Hyper-V and System Center products....and so on.

Actually they are making some significant improvements, I could well see it being time for Mars to assess Hyper-V certainly for Dev/QA environments as it is much cheaper than VMware and seems to be catching up in functionality and adding features VMware does not have.

Further areas of improvement will be including more Compliance management in SCSM and SCDPM. All about proving how they have and continue to deliver on their vision of Dynamic IT.

So Microsoft asks, "What next?"

The Cloud.

All the attributes MS have defined as Dynamic IT apply to the cloud. The Cloud they defined as just in time provisioning and scaling of services on shared hardware.

Why Cloud? Accelerates the speed and lowers the cost of IT. Brief definitions of Public/Private clouds (hosted/in house) and Shared/Dedicated (Shared with other customers/Service dedicated to you).

Microsoft is working to provide dedicated clouds with Azure in the future (Shared only now).

They are looking to deliver one platform, one application model and one management solution across all of - customer premise, partner cloud, MS clouds.

There are a few key enablers -

Hardware Model - Windows server is now 75% of all servers globally. MS now buy servers in 2000 server containers, they just plug in power, network and water. This is 10x more efficient than the process of provisioning individual/racks of servers. They are working with hardware partners on the learnings and expect to see smaller containers offered to end users in the future.

Application Model - This is a set of services delivered as part of the cloud - this reduces dev time, has increased scalability, higher high availability and greater flexibility. Again a 10x improvement over current methodologies to be faster to market. We need to understand that servers will fail, however, applications should not, the service should continue. MS are developing a new model language currently code named 'M' this allows a developer to build apps based on a model rather than traditional methods.

Operating Model - They have learnt a lot from running Bing! as a service with a small number of admins. They have taken this knowledge and built it into Azure and System Center to improve their products. They can now have 1 admin managing 1000's of servers! They suggest that IT jobs in this sector will evolve to provide a higher service, faster delivery etc. The underlying operating model enables this. They have seen (you guessed it), a 10x reduction in the cost of operations.

New features coming -
SCVMM v.Next will have the ability to manage OS/Apps that run across multiple machines (1 OS, multiple VMs - this I have not explained well, I'll try to find more info over the rest of the week). Applications are referred to as 'fabric layers'.#

Service Designer feature - allows you to deploy new services based on your templates (Customer logs call for more Oracle capacity - admin clicks on deploy Oracle service and the capacity is provisioned) basically you can draw the picture of your service in Visio and then SCVMM will deploy it....SCVMM will also scale up/down as the load increases/decreases as per your requirements. Great for end users, a nightmare for licensing compliance!

Server App-V use multiple apps on the one OS independently, SCVMM manages the underlying application fabric.

Greater control of offline patching - remember the app service must stay up, gives greater control and automation.

SQL Azure - running SQL as a service across 6 datacenters and 1000's of servers, provision of a new DB is as simple as clicking on a web page.

Finally, integrated monitoring between on premise and cloud - a SCOM management pack shipping later this year for Azure. The demo showed a diagram of the environment with hw onsite and cloud based, a simulated problem in the cloud alerted via SCOM allowed the admin to run a task to provision more capacity in the cloud. Again very impressive, but how do you manage the cost of this up/down scaling and the capacity required on standby? I think contracts will be very interesting!

My takeaways - we probably need to look at all the features of the products we have bought as part of Connex, not just focus on the immediate need (I think a common mistake in Mars and industry wide). There is much more to many of the tools that could allow for greater automation and much slicker operations just with a bit more upfront effort.

Secondly, we need to think more holistically and not just in our GIST silo's, products EUT are using will be more than useful to other teams, we need to ensure we highlight these to our colleagues (as we have done with SCCM and SCOM to Processing). This is probably a great example of where an Enterprise Architect function would be particularly useful - I think Chris Lane is going to be busy ;-)

I'll leave it here as I have another 4 sessions to blog, but you can find more info below.

For those that would like to watch today's keynote, it is now available here

Finally, tomorrow's keynote will be streamed live here from 8.30am Pacific

v.Next overview

2010-04-20T20:07:00.000-07:00

Day 2, session 4 was a very good presentation. This one focussed on the upcoming Config Manager v.Next, and the benefits it will offer. The main points I recorded were:

User Centric Client Management - allowing users to connect from anywhere, embracing mobile technologies and central control of assets. v.Next still focuses on system management as with previous versions, but will allow such enhancements as highly configurable deployment options for applications, O/S and patching, for example allowing deployment only for the primary user of a device, out of hours and user selectable download and installation of apps and patches, advanced application management (but with considerably less scripting) and the facility to setup system requirement and dependency checks prior to app deployment, including available memory, disk space and CPU type.

Other points include integration of RBS with templates, a better admin interface and distribution point grouping, cross platform mobile management, including a cute feature which would allow an administrator to package for example Acrobat reader for several device types, and only need to add the user once to the distribution list - v.Next would then deploy to all the users devices as appropriate without the need for separate processes. Also, remote control is integrated into the console for easy multi platform control of devices.

Please check my previous post for the O/S deployment options available with v.Next.

Automating windows

2010-04-20T20:06:00.000-07:00

Day 2, session 3 was "Automating windows"- details were pretty sketchy, but I though it sounded interesting...This presentation focussed on manipulating WMI and CIM using Powershell 2, and showed the benefits of replicating changes to single or multiple PCs, even those outside of a DMZ in a secure manner. I must admit, not being a Powershell/WMI wizard myself, I got somewhat lost in the detail on this session, although the benefits of automation were quite clear for task like client monitoring and configuration. Currently we manage this type of activity in the Zen environment, however going forward I can see this technology will be commonly used in the new Mars environment.

Configuration Manager: State of the union

2010-04-20T19:42:00.000-07:00

Day 2, Session 2 was entitled "Configuration Manager: State of the union" and was easily the most entertaining session of the day. The hosts started off the presentation showing the various name ideas that the team went through before settling on v.Next, which was amusing if not entirely useful.
They did of course get serious in the presentation, and covered some very slick ideas including integrated Adobe updates in SCCM by the end of 2010, and other 3rd party updates via a third party add-on for SCCM called SCUPdate. The big demo for me was centred around Citrix XenApps deployment of applications via thin client, were the application itself remains on the server, and is seamlessly delivered to the client over either network or internet connection. This seemed to me to be an idea way to deploy and provision applications, and I'm surprised that we haven't seen this technology in Mars as yet.

The rough release timeline for Config Manager v.Next for those interested:

Beta 1 - May 2010
Beta 2 - Q1 2011
RTM - Q3 2011

Day 2 - Keynote from Bob Muglia

2010-04-20T19:29:00.000-07:00

Today's event kicked off with a keynote speech from Bob Muglia, president of MS Server and Tools Business. The kenote was quite lively and well presented as you would expect. I didn't take notes during the keynote, but I know Mat will blog heavily about this, so I just robbed some highlights and will let him add the detail.

1) Official releases of both System Centre Data Protection Manager 2010 and System Centre Service Manager 2010.
2) Demonstration of a Distributed Application (DA) with components which were locally monitored and available from the cloud using MS Azure. Demonstration of a task to “Add Web Rule Instances” for the cloud resources. Demonstration of performance information gathered via the web front-end components in Azure. These functions were provided via a management pack that was stated to be publicly available “later this year”.
3) SCVMM 2011 Tech Preview version – The ribbon concept (Microsoft Office, etc) was integrated with SCVMM which implies that this is a technical direction for the UI for the System Centre product line.
4) First sighting of an Opalis workflow within a Operations Manager 2007 R2 console.
5) SCVMM 2010 Tech Preview version – Demonstrated scans for compliance of the image offline, patching offline, and orchestrating deployment of the image. SCVMM was stated to communicate with WSUS for patches.
6) OpsMgr v10 screenshot – displaying changes to the console including the removal of the “Authoring” section and the addition of the “Modelling Configuration”.

Day one wrap

2010-04-20T00:04:00.001-07:00

To wrap up the day, I attended an orientation session (better late than never) and then hit the expo hall with Mat to do the tat run. I'm now fully loaded with product brochures, silly putty, badge holders, t-shirts and a rubber duck. Mission accomplished.

Operations Manager 2007 R2: An Introduction

2010-04-20T00:01:00.000-07:00

Next up was "Ops Manager 2007 R2: An introduction", which was not what I'd hoped for - the monitoring and alerting processes described where efficient and relatively easy to configure, however the focus in this session was for monitoring Unix/Linux servers, and although I can see the benefits, I didn't feel they were very relevant. I'm looking forward to later sessions on SCOM which will outline the dashboard functions, which I can see will be very useful. Most of the alerting described in this session is adequately covered in our present Spectrum system, and I didn't see much in the way of additional benefits.

Deploying Windows 7 with Config Manager 2007

2010-04-19T23:41:00.000-07:00

The next session was "Deploying Windows 7 with Config Manager 2007", a subject which will become dear to the hearts of the ops team. The lab ran through creating a Win7 image, processing for DVD/Server based distribution, scripting (read wizarding, no programming required) the migration from a Windows XP SP3 workstation up to Windows 7 using a customised PXE build process, and verification of the build, complete with re-partitioning if required, all from within the config manager console. The process was quite lengthy, and took all of the available time that I had in the lab (80 minutes), but was ultimately successful, which is very encouraging for our future use. Most of the time was spent creating the Win7 image, which of course only needs to be done once and would be done long before production deployment. The actual migration/deployment portion was pretty quick even on a VM, but I'd love to try the process on metal to see what the performance is like. Methinks I'll be building a nice little environment in STU before long.....

SCCM

2010-04-19T23:37:00.000-07:00

My first session today was entitled "Basic Software Distribution in Config Manager v.Next"
v.Next seems to be the latest incarnation of the SCCM software suite for 2010, perhaps Mat can clarify as it wasn't very clear to me, but no matter, it pretty much rocked whatever it's called.
I was really pleased to see that the "Basic" in the title didn't mean simple or beginner - for me basic in this context means that all of the everyday stuff I'd want to do with software distribution was easy to find and very easy to manipulate. The interface is different to what I remember, but they seem to have made simple tasks much easier to manage. The tasks in this lab centred around taking an application which had been previously packaged, and sending it to the distribution points. Once set there, a simple policy change pushed the package out to my virtual clients, and based on my selected settings installed the package automatically. The process was flawless, and monitoring both the distribution points, the clients and the install status was very clear. The lab built in a deliberate error so that you could demonstrate a remote package fix and re-install from the console - very slick. This technology will make both client package and client enforced security updates a doddle to manage centrally.

M&Ms Store

2010-04-19T22:41:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately the M&Ms store had run out of Coconut and peanut butter M&Ms, however we did get some pics -

How big is this hotel? It's more like a small city...

2010-04-19T22:34:00.000-07:00

The MMS event is being held at The Venetian hotel in the heart of the Las Vegas strip, and is quite simply immense. I had thought that Treasure Island, the hotel where Mat & I are staying was huge, but I think it would fit 3 times over in The Venetian. Anywhere that takes 10 minutes from the front entrance just to the start of the conference area is big in my books. The conference centre is pretty huge too, comprising of several ballrooms, ante rooms and chambers on two floors, and is easily accommodating the 3500 or so attendees.

Mat and I arrived bright and early for registration, and I was amazed to see several hundred people already queuing up. I have to say though, the MS conferencing staff are pretty organised, and we got through registration in less than 20 minutes, which was a relief as I'd had visions of standing around for a couple of hours when I initially saw the queues.

One of the very best things about the MS events are the labs, either instructor led, or self paced. They give you the opportunity to properly play with the software in a virtual production environment which include everything you could possibly need: multiple servers and clients, and several disparate environments mixing Windows, Unix, Linux (sadly no Macs yet, can't think why...), and they provide this setup individually for up to 100 users at a time, in no less than 10 separate labs - simultaneously! Lets put that into perspective...at any one time, 1000 users can be individually rocking two or three servers, 2 workstations of multiple flavours, doing heavy duty system admin tasks and if anything goes bad for a user or you simply want to start from scratch, the whole setup can be re-provisioned in around 2 minutes. This is a real testament to how impressive virtual environments are these days, and I can't say just how impressed I am with it. I wonder how long it will be before Mars starts taking full advantage of what this technology could offer us? Dev' team, let me know, 'cause it'd make the ops and site teams jobs sooooo much easier!

Windows 7 Deployment with MDT 2010 - A demo extravaganza

2010-04-19T19:58:00.000-07:00

This session was interesting in the fact it's presenter was stuck in the UK due to the Icelandic Volcano, however, he had done a superb job with Camtasia and audio recordings to produce a 1 hour demo that worked as well without him being there.

I did not make many notes due to it being a long demo but it is clear to see MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit) is much improved over the version I saw last time I was here. Having said that, whilst is is not a strong GUI based tool, it is still not ideal for a large enterprise. Yes it helps you deliver some customisations, Yes it is free, Yes it needs some very in depth skill, Yes it is very manual.

Can you see where I am going? I think MDT could be used very well by some of our manufacturing teams to customise a standard office build but at this stage it is not suitable for our needs. We have spent some time discussing MDT vs. Intrinsic Swimage and now having had a good look at both, I am comfortable with Mars spending money for the right tool. I see MDT as very similar to where MS started with Terminal Services, constantly they would aim at Citrix and try to catch up but always falling slightly short (due to contractual agreements). I see MDT (a personally developed tool by a few MS employees for free, for fun) in this approach. Give it a couple more years and lets see where they are then!

Configuration Manager Dashboards

2010-04-19T19:44:00.001-07:00

This lecture was much more interesting, it involved a brief discussion about Dashboards for SCCM and how Microsoft IT use them, with some demos chucked in.

Dashboards have been developed for two key personas - firstly, the business user who needs to make decisions without too much information overloads, and secondly, the IT professional, who needs 'at a glance' management, customisation and create your own abilities, as well as having a dashboard that can fit on an office plasma screen.

The dashboard itself is a freely downloadable Microsoft Solution Accelerator, and is near real time (configurable amount of minutes between refreshes). You can create lots of individual tailored dashboards (GTS might want problems, Commercial would want license compliance, IMPACT deployment %ages and so on). By default it comes with six reports - Software Update management, OS deployment, Software Distribution, Client health and OS overview. Furthermore as we deploy Sharepoint, teams can add a relevant dashboard to their team site, you don't have to always go to a dashboard. For example, GTS may have a patch deployment screen on their website to relate to calls logged.

The demo was literally less than two minutes to set up a new dashboard, the only part we may struggle with, is that it uses SQL queries (however MS provide many examples free). MS IT manage almost 261k machines via their dashboards, so an obvious improvement they took was to add a filter, this way a dashboard could be broken by site, machine model, patch etc.

(As a side note, I noticed their stats showed they manage 224k physical machines and 37k virtual, that is more virtual PCs than all of 'traditional' Mars, secondly they are 50/50 split between 32 and 64bit computing - I think this is a good suggestion of our future!)

Finally they showed the dashboard configured to suit a plasma screen, I think this would be a great addition to the Mars IS hub site screens, very simple but very rewarding!

Virtualisation Scenarios for MS Business Critical Apps

2010-04-19T19:31:00.000-07:00

This session was about how to virtualise SQL, Exchange and Sharepoint using Hyper-V.
There were some interesting bits:

All MS apps are built to have Hyper-V support and work well (not VMware)
50% of the room were planning on virtualising SQL (hands in the air poll)
In future, we should buy SLAT compatible processors (SLAT = Second Level Address translation), basically CPU targeted at reducing the overhead virtualisation causes and helping scale more virtual machines on a physical host. AMD and Intel have versions
Other new CPU features - AMD Hyper Transport and Intel Snoop Feature, mean that running virtual is almost as good performance wise as physical now.
Sharepoint can be easily virtualised, unless it is a database or index server, when you need to test first.
SQL too is now a good candidate (on Hyper-V) especially the BI components
Exchange again is similar to Sharepoint - based on specific roles. Albeit Exchange itself as an application is not virtualisation aware.

Apart from that it was the dullest 1.5hrs of my life, not a great presenter, slides off the screen and the guy next to me snoring. I think this is one of those lectures where the title was misleading, as it was originally pitched MS Virtualisation for business critical apps and I thought it would beinteresting to see how Hyper-V is trying to address VMware, but the title in the room was different to make it application specific.

I was bored enough, I wont bore you anymore!

Welcome to Vegas!

2010-04-19T19:27:00.001-07:00

This is my first visit to Las Vegas, so Mat & I spent the weekend 'chillaxing' wandering up and down the strip. Mat's obviously been before, and pointed out some of the attractions - to be honest for a poor country boy like me, it's all a bit overwhelming - the noise is deafening 24/7 and it's constantly busy everywhere. What doesn't help is that you can walk down to the lobby at 4am and it's as busy and loud in the perpetual twilight casinos as it is at 2pm. Trust me when I say that this does not help with jet lag! All in all though, it's pretty exciting to be here, and I'm really looking forward to the MMS .

This week, I'll be concentrating predominantly on SCCM (Systems Centre Config Manager), packaging deployment, desktop deployment and migration, with a fair smattering of SCOM (Systems Centre Operations Manager). If there is anything that you want me to investigate on your behalf, be it attending sessions or gathering information from vendors, please let me know.

The summit's content overview is here so please take a look and tell me if you need me to focus on anything I didn't mention above.

Balance

2010-04-19T19:27:00.000-07:00

Every time we have a workshop with the Microsoft team, one of them comments on my I love Vmware sticker (which I got at MMS 2 years ago, see here), so for balance, today I found>

Tat Tour

2010-04-19T19:11:00.000-07:00

So the vendor expo opened....

Silly putty from NetApp - they had some components bought by MS a few years back which became MOM (MS Operations manager) and now SCOM (Systems Center Operations Manager), so maybe its because they are malleable? Or flexible and adaptive? ;-)

For those that get sore lips proselytising Windows 7

Randomly a fruit peeler....I had to ask what it was. I'm sure the Daily Mail would be outraged...

I'll let Processing know (just kidding!)

Is your head in the clouds? I like the tshirt, not sure the message is right!

Sustainability

2010-04-19T10:44:00.001-07:00

Last time I was here I was asked about the Sustainability of the event, this year they have a poster -

The Server-Quarium mentioned basically has lots of plasma's telling you about the efficiency of the temporary datacenter, what bandwidth is used and so on. All good things until you factor in the power for the 8 or so screens ;-)

I'll try to get some pics later, but was a bit self conscious doing it with the couple of thousand attendeees waiting to register right next to me!

Registration Complete!

2010-04-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

Today Colin and I arrived bright and early for registration at 8am, as did a couple of other thousand people. I have to say they did a good job of getting people queued and processed quickly. I'm sure an English person must have been involved to make the queue just right ;-)

For the morning, there are no lecture type sessions planned, so I did some self paced labs, I have spent some time in the next version of System Center Configuration Manager, currently branded v.Next. It has a completely new interface which reminds me of Outlook/MoM consoles in its layout but is no longer based on the MMC, which has been the MS admin console basis for a number of years.

A couple of interesting notes I made during the lab was that there seems to be a lot more around asset management and compliance - this seems to allow you to configure your own rules. Furthermore it has the ability to import software licenses(XML or CSV format) so I'll try to find out a bit more about that during the week. Currently we partner with a vendor called Concorde to help us with our compliance, it may be the next version of SCCM can provide more in house.

Second thing I found whilst browsing around the admin console is that they have formally introduced pre-staged media as a build option. This would allow us to provide HP/Dell with a pre-built image of a desktop/laptop/server which they can install and ship. Once on the network it would receive any changes in the meantime. This would be a pretty rapid way to deploy servers and clients and again I'll listen out for more details in the lectures.

Unfortunately due to the Icelandic Volcano many EU based attendees, vendors and speakers have not made it here, so sessions are being juggled. Today I'll be attending - Virtualisation scenarios for business critical apps, Win7 deployment with MDT and Configuration Manager Dashboard.
The Vendor Expo opens at 17.30 so I'll take a first look around and see if I can meet some of the new vendors we will be introducing to our environment with the Connex project. (Intrinsic and SCCM Expert).

Dawn in Vegas

2010-04-17T06:24:00.000-07:00

So Colin and I arrived late last night, with local time as we ate a burger being 22.30, Philly time where we had been for the Connex Workshop last week being 01.30 and UK 06.30. Stupino for Colin was 09.30.

As you can guess the jet lag is a bit of a killer ;-)

It's safe to say I'm disappointed that I woke at 04.57 local time but I did get to see dawn break and take the pictures above from my window.

Nish will be pleased too, as I'm sat here working on my actions from the workshop. I'm 'only' on the 18th floor, Colin is 34th so we'll try to get some pics of his view which should be pretty good.

Today the plan is to take it easy, finish off as much 'normal work' as possible which will allow us to focus on MMS. We should be able to get to the huge M&Ms world (Mark I'll look out for coconut M&MS for you) and I was going to show Colin the Ethels shop in the Mall.

Don't forget any questions/comments you have, please post!

Mat's Agenda Sessions

2010-04-09T03:58:00.000-07:00

These will be the sessions I am attending at MMS:

Deploying Windows 7 with MDT 2010

Configuration Manager: State of the Union

Cloud Computing in the Enterprise: Enabling the foundation with the Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center

Configuration Manager v.Next: Overview

Configuration Manager v.Next: Hierarchy Design

Birds of a Feather session (Similar to a Tif event in UK)

Online services for PC management

Configuration Manager x.Next Software Distribution Parts 1 and 2

Protecting Windows Clients with Data Protection Manager 2010 (Potential SDS Backup replacement)

Configuration Manager v.Next: Device Management

Troubleshooting Windows 7 Deployments

Leveraging System Center to manage your Citrix environment from desktop to data center

Best Practice's From Microsoft IT's use of SCCM SP2/R3

Centralising and managing User Data

Desktop Error Monitoring

Keeping Windows running efficiently with the Diagnostics and recovery toolset.

Plus 2 Keynotes - User Centric Client Management and Managing Systems from the Data Center to the Cloud

If you are interested in the key themes, you can see more here: www.mms-2010.com/public/contentoverview.aspx

There is also the vendor exhibition hall and some labs, both instructor led and self paced.

So it should be a full on information overload ;-)

Last Post for this conference

2010-03-02T14:37:00.000-08:00

A year ago, both Gartner and TIF recommended that large corporations like ours should hold tight for 3-5 years and watch what's happening with the cloud market. They reckoned we could still deliver Messaging & Collaboration services more efficiently with an inhouse model because of the economies of scale we can leverage through our sheer user numbers. In 3-5 years, competition between the big players in the market will have driven down cloud services pricing and we'd then be in a good position to migrate.

However, looking at the stats, it looks like the time to act is now. More than ever, I think we made the right decision to take the risk and move now. The cloud is THE next big thing for messaging & collaboration and companies, big and small, are heading there as we speak. Yes it is still early days for the bigger end of the scale, but it definitely looks like those 50,000+ companies will be very close on our heels. And hey, doesn't it feel good to pioneer for once as opposed to follow the tested, well known and proven route?

Cheesy as it sounds, it's certainly a brilliant time to be part of EUT and I can't wait to get our first users into the cloud.

But for now, that's all folks :p

When the cloud takes over ...

2010-03-02T14:34:00.000-08:00

... speaking about the time (if it ever comes) when all of IT will be provided through the cloud and how we are in the process of destroying our own jobs, and how can we therefore convince our people that this is the way to go, there was a quote I thought you might appreciate in the current climate.

"It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." ;-)

The Chocolate Cloud

2010-03-02T14:11:00.000-08:00

James then took us through his experience with a recent "incident" involving one of our promotion websites collapsing under the weight of unexpected usage peaks. I'm sure you'll know what I'm referring to, so I won't go into the details : )

This presentation won the award for Most Post-Pres Questions for the day hands-down, there were in fact so much interest & so many questions that James also hijacked the next open Q&A session, leaving me no chance at all to boo him, pfff :D

Jokes apart however, what was really appealing and unique about James's presentation during the day was that it was a real-world use case scenario where James's team had dealt with a true business crisis by using cloud services and in doing so had generated some real value to the business. I think the audience reacted very positively to the process, the story, the learnings. So go James for audience reaction, should really have brought those pom-poms ! ; )

"Big Bangs ...

2010-03-02T14:10:00.000-08:00

... work for creating universes, they don't necessarily work for migrating to the cloud." :D

Ask the Experts session

2010-03-02T13:46:00.000-08:00

In this session, we talked about a panoply of topics surrounding cloud computing. My interpretation of the discussion(s) below.

Space to watch : Cloud ERP services. After years of madness surrounding ERP's, there seems to be a lull in the industry at the moment and indeed, we are seeing this phenomenon too. Most enterprises, just like us, are wrapping up their ERP implementation and are now in a stable state. Going back to the Keynote, it looks like ERP may be starting to become a commodity. Do any of our ERP processes add direct competitive advantage to our business? Ie, do they allow us to differentiate ourselves as an enterprise from any of our competitors? And if not, do we need to keep ERP processes inhouse? This lull might be THE opportunity for "standard", and therefore more efficient, Cloud ERP services to emerge.

On the other hand, there are few systems that map out our business processes as closely as ERPs do. And some of our business processes are indeed directly linked to what makes our business different from other businesses ie that add real competitive advantage ... and it is for this very reason that we've customised SAP and its dependent systems so much ... would we really want to re-engineer our business processes to reflect a standard set of ERP processes for the sake of efficiency ? It comes down again to the fine balance between efficiency and quality, cost savings and functionality.

There are organisations like IBM which have IT as their core business. There are organisations like ourselves which don't have IT as their core business. It is interesting to see the variation in the perceptions these 2 types of companies have of social software for the enterprise and its potential to enhance productivity. Enterprises with IT at the core of their business seem to be very eager to try anything and everything social networking, to the point that to us, they might seem like they're crossing that fine line between blue-sky-thinking and naivity. Just different worlds I guess :-)

When enterprises roll out social software eg. blogs or wikis or Facebook-type social software, we tend to mix up expectations we have of individuals vs. expectations we have of roles in the enterprise. In other words, as an enterprise, there is a distinction between wanting to empower the individual to share information/opinions versus wanting to empower a role to share information/opinions. The implications are clearly also different. Empowering a role is ultimately a way of enforcing organisation control. Conversely, empowering the individual may in some cases weaken organisational control, especially where there are value clashes between the individual and the organisation. Are we, as a company, ready to promote individual empowerment? If not, we need to be very clear that we are empowering the roles in the organisation so associates understand what is acceptable and what is not.

Federation between the clouds will be driven by business requirements. We are already seeing some forms of federation between IM clouds, but this trend will depend hugely on what cloud customers demand.

This was the last session before our very own "Chocolate" Presenter took the stage by storm ;-)

Standardisation through the Cloud is ...

2010-03-02T13:42:00.001-08:00

... now that I've got no choice, I can tell the end user that they've got no choice :-)

Lotus Live - Online Collaboration Services from IBM

2010-03-02T13:22:00.000-08:00

TIF circumvented one of their rules for this conference and invited a vendor to present : IBM's VP for Online Collaboration Services brought LotusLive to the forum, presented of course through a slide deck brought to us by Lotus Symphony, eat your heart out Powerpoint! :D

For the diehard yellow bleeding fans, you'll be pleased to know that they have now revamped LotusLive and made it, surprise surprise, yellow. Like the rest of the Domino suite we have raved on and on about, the UI is Apple-quality slick in (despite?) all its yellow glory, but my co-delegate quickly points out, is yellow really a good, credible colour for an enterprise product ?

Nevertheless, LotusLive has apparently taken the market by storm and they have signed up millions of users within the last year, Panasonic being one of the most notable ones with 90,000 users. Our presenter takes us through the unique selling point of the IBM product, its seamlessness from a user perspective. I won't bore you with the details again, I might start sounding like my own echo ;-)

However, from my perspective, it looked very much like the core of IBM's "cloud" collaboration strategy remained collaboration itself and IBM cloud services was just a wagon they've tagged onto the train, almost like an afterthought, to make sure they look as good as their competitors. My view is that IBM needs to make their "cloud" marketing more substantial. At the moment, nothing in their representation of LotusLive would convince me that it is a better product than their competitors' ... which is a pity, because in reality the IBM product IS better than their competitors' ... but then hasn't marketing always been IBM's weak link ?

PS : Although our IBM presenter promised he would not talk about the competition and would not try to sell anything (as if !), he could not help taking a dig @ ABC about the unkillability of Notes applications and how they were going to be around forever and ever and why therefore it didn't make sense to migrate ;-)

And then we had lunch ...

2010-03-02T13:10:00.000-08:00

... and the IBM VP who I was desperately hoping would not recognise me came over for a chat, which went like this :

"Hi - looked at my badge - Karoona! How are you?"
"Very good thank you, how about yourself ?" with huge fake grin
"We've met before, haven't we ?"
"Umm, yes we have" Nervous laugh, what's the best hiding place in this hotel ?
"Somewhere in Orlando ? ... LoLa ? Yes that's it"
"Yes, LoLa" Stupid nervous laugh again
"Yes I remember, we had quite a few conversations about SaaS didn't we? How did it all go? Has a decision been made yet ? "
"Umm, yes"

So as expected he didn't know, as expected I had to tell him, and as expected he threw me A look and politely avoided us through the rest of the day, except for the times when he mentioned that Panasonic had moved 90,000 users to Lotus Live, at which points he threw us meaningful, if scorching, glances.

I know nothing!

ABC & BPOS

2010-03-02T12:45:00.000-08:00

ABC (code name ;-) are currently migrating to BPOS. I had a few "informal" chats with the ABC delegates and they also presented one of the sessions. My notes so far :

About 130,000 users in about 120 countries
About 30,000 Notes apps (my heart goes out to them)
Migrating to BPOS (45,000 users moved so far)
Migrating ALL of their history across

Not unlike ourselves, ABC have "strategic" rather than cost-driven justifications for their migration to BPOS. Without going into the details, they tell us the experience so far has been good and is progressing on track. They share their lessons with us :

Do not neglect the deskless option - this can save companies significant amounts of money (up to 3/4 the cost of licences per user)
Do not assume that the existing infra will necessarily support cloud services (existing AD's, networks). They have had to spend a few millions on revamping their existing AD to suit BPOS requirements.
Rationalise the application strategy. I do not believe our friends are using any co-existence technologies and it appears from what they told us that most of their apps are based on the same template. Like us, they have not included any budget in the migration programme to migrate their Notes apps - they are leaving it up to Business Units to fund such migration as and when required, between now and 2011. However, they already know that come 2011, they will be under pressure to review the 2011 timeline and will be asked to postpone it : ) They have however already reduced SLA's on the Notes apps (eg. only broke-fixes will be attended to, no CIPs, contained env, pretty much the same as we are planning)
Consider Sharepoint carefully. We get one chance at rolling it out, one chance to get the governance right.
Personalise, do not customise. (Not that we have the option to anyway!)
Realise that this is a learning curve for our favourite people-ready vendors too. They are still learning from us customers how to deliver SERVICE vs. SOFTWARE.
It takes time to understand where the boundaries are as far as operations is concerned. Indeed, BPOS is almost a black box solution and it will be important for us to understand clearly how much control we have over ensuring minimal business disruption.
We can choose to migrate history, but remember that without history we can migrate whole sites (thousands of users) overnight. With the data migration route they have chosen, their deployment plan has stretched out over 18 months.
They recommend we have a cloud exit strategy. Their strategy is to consider another cloud vendor as a 1st option and to bring back the services inhouse as a last option - the main reason being that most of their savings have been through re-organising (rightsizing :-) their workforce around the cloud solution and should they have to bring the service back inhouse, they would need significant recruitment and reskilling.
They ran a business change programme in parallel with the technology programme. The BC programme encompassed training as well as championing of the new platform by a significant number of users in the business.

They also had a challenge getting the cloud concept past Security in their company. I think for us, it is important to realise that with the new cloud services, we also have new functionality that we will be deploying, eg. Outlook Anywhere, which will no doubt increase our security risk as an enterprise. However, as one of the Security consultants at the conference said, Security Management is not necessarily about locking down the fort completely, it's about knowing where the potential holes are so that we can mitigate the risks (eg. through training users) and if we can't mitigate the risks, at least we'll know what we need to worry about :-)

Speaking to ABC was for me the most value-added exercise of the whole day. Great advice and I have been able to secure some "offline" time with the head of migration as well as their programme manager where they will talk us through their challenges/reco's/gotchas etc. We've also been invited to join a user forum that has been set up between companies that have migrated to BPOS so far. The forum includes some big names which I will not post here otherwise I'll be told off :p Something to look forward to! (the forum, not the telling off)

"What would make cloud computing safe for business ? "

2010-03-02T12:35:00.000-08:00

... was a presentation about the top requirements that, if fulfilled, would make enterprises move to the cloud ...

The only 2 points of interest that caught my attention in between a multitude of bullet points were that :

93% of companies want an interface between their ticketing system and the cloud because they want to be able to benchmark their remaining inhouse services against their cloud services. This is likely to be an important point for us as we move to BPOS, because while our ticket numbers will still be measured through GTS & Magic, our ability to track ticket resolution times etc. will be hindered by the fact that Magic will not integrate with whatever system Microsoft uses today, not in the short term, anyway. We need to make sure we have the required processes in place as BPOS is rolled out.

78% of companies want dedicated servers. Security is the main concern here, but mostly because the correlation (or lack of) between security and server isolation is not well understood by most companies. In an ideal world, yes we would have assessed multitenant vs. dedicated in detail, but given our timescales for making THE decision, it makes sense that we have gone with dedicated rather than multitenant.

Keynote #2 - Stormy Weather

2010-03-02T12:20:00.000-08:00

The second keynote was delivered by an ex-BBC employee and was in summary an evangelist presentation of social computing and social media.

He talked us through the pervasiveness of social software and how unproductive it is for companies to ban Facebook within the corporate network. Despite the perception of inanity that enterprises may have of social software and how people use it to tell each other what they had for breakfast (do they? even I have never done that ;-), our presenter argues that in today's world, he would see inanity as a trust builder. In other words, if he cannot find somebody through a search on facebook, he is more and more inclined to mistrust that body. New concept for me, made me stop and think I have to say :-)

We also heard about how social software is a key way to enable sharing of best practice in the corporation and how everybody should have access to it, regardless of whether they are manufacturing, sales, IT ...

Overall, nothing new for us regular readers of social computing articles, and I walked out of that session still unconvinced that social software (the Facebook-type anyway) would add any significant value in a company like ours. In the BBC, where the very heart of the organisation is information and sharing of information is their bread and butter, yes I can understand how social software could enhance productivity in a significant way, but for us, I remain doubtful.

Oh and I could only stare in admiration as he got away with not answering a difficult question at the end of his presentation by looking very grave and saying "This is a point of orchestration", which totally baffled the poor guy who had asked the question.

That moment marked the beginning of BS Bingo for the day, watch the space ;-)

TIF Cloud Computing, London - KeyNote Session1 - Situation Normal, Everything Must Change

2010-03-02T11:14:00.000-08:00

Today, James M and I attended TIF's Cloud Computing Conference in London, Victoria Park Plaza, 2 floors underground.

The opening Keynote today was delivered by an enthusiastic geneticist and was very, very good. The presenter focused the opening session around the theme of commoditisation, kicking off the conference with an abstract model of how innovation turns into products which turn into commodities depending on their ubiquity vs. certainty ratio. Sounds geeky? Oh yeah ;-)

On an even geekier note, he also took us through the concept of how products, when they turn into commodities, will not only enable further innovation in their space but also accelerate the product's development itself. This is because as a product gets more stable, so does its capacity to undergo major disruption. To quote him, "the rate of evolution of a complex system is dependent on the organisation of its subsystems" eg. if we look at the computing stack (infra, platform, software) the reason software has been able to develop so fast is because infra and platform have themselves turned into commodities over the years and therefore have been able to support and accelerate development of software.

Which kind of made me think about the Domino vs. Microsoft debate again ... yes I know this is now history, but it did remind me of how IBM seem to have got to a point where they are now evolving the development of the seamlessness & usability of their technologies whereas Microsoft seems to still be focused on getting the technology itself right ... base layer stability anyone? : )

Anywho, back to the real world, it will definitely be interesting to see where innovation takes us once cloud computing becomes a commodity.

He also dispelled a couple of cloud computing myths upfront : 1) That the customer has a choice. According to our presenter, the only thing an enterprise will achieve by not moving to the cloud is to increase the competitive gap between their IT service and the market and this pressure will only keep increasing as cloud services costs go down through in-market competition. And no he was not a vendor. 2) That cloud computing is green and it will save customers money, which made me nod in agreement ; )

He wrapped up his keynote by confirming what has been our opinion in Mars all year : that the question about cloud computing is not IF, it's WHEN. Hmm, 2010, apparently :D

Overall, exceptional (if geeky) keynote.

Content Relevance : 4/5
Delivery : 4/5

Binary Tree ZAPP Design & Planning Workshop

2010-02-21T15:05:00.001-08:00

Part of EUT Team is currently on tour in Philadelphia, to conduct the BT ZAPP Design Workshop. The star cast of this episode : Malc, Martyn, PCW and Karoona.

5 days, 2 objectives.
1 - For our technical lead, to design the to-be infrastructure for Lotus Notes co-existence
2 - For our project manager, to draft the project plan

Martyn will send out official updates at the end of each day, but watch this space for the unofficial ones ;-)

We have just now arrived at the Sheraton hotel after some excellent driving and navigation, Jimmy has waved to me wildly from the bar (god please make him forget), we have checked in and our star team has disbanded to glam up before we all go out to the stylish Outback for a gourmet dinner followed by some late-night partying until 20 00. Malc (sorry!) can't wait to find out if the Blooming Onion in on the menu :D

If I'm still awake when I come back, I might even publish the agenda of the workshop.

Microsoft Virtual TechEd - Keynote

2009-06-19T01:05:00.000-07:00

The ketnote started with a general overview of the thinking behind Windows 7. Specifically mentioned was the user backlash against Vista, and a general feeling that there wasn't much end user or OEM consultation prior to it's release, and it significant performance problems.

Windows 7 was tuned to reduce a lot of the performance bottlenecks and provide a faster user experience. For high end, multi-core CPU systems the scheduling algorithms have been updated to give better performance on those systems too.

Two new tools were specifically demonstrated.

Resource Monitor is a souped-up tool from Task Manager, which can also show more details about running processes, and show which files are open on the file system and how much readings and writing is happening. It can also show what directories are locked (this is searchable too), so you can find out why you can't delete or modify a file.

Memory usage graphic is also a bit more intuitive, showing clearly how much ram is in use for apps, standby caching and spare.

Likewise, Network usage is effectively the TCPView package from SysInternals with a graphical interface, but linked to the process list so you can see which processes have network sessions open, and to where, and what ports are exposed on the machine.

As a side note, Mark Russinovich's machine he was demonstrating did show "Google Updater" as a running program. Make of that what you will. "Apple Mobile Device" was also running, so presumably he's not using a Zune.

The second tool was Problem Steps Recorder, which is designed as a troubleshooting tool for remote helpdesks (ie. you spouse rings you up and says "It's not working!"). If the problem is reproducible, the user can run PSR and reproduce the problem. PSR will capture the screen on every click and keypress, and store the information in a ZIP file which can be e-mailed through to the helpdesk person.

ILM "2" by the Oxford Computer Group at Microsoft, London.

2009-04-22T01:37:00.000-07:00

There are many notable players in the Identity Management Arena notably Sun, IBM, Novell, Oracle (now Sun) and.. well.. not really Microsoft. So I relished the opportunity to spend a day, at Microsoft's Customer Centre in London to hear and see everything there is about IDM.

Shame about the blunt and somewhat impolite staff running their venue but these people need jobs and Microsoft's "Customer" centre , 10 mins from the Houses of Parliament is as good a place to work as anywhere, I guess. Needless to say the coffee wasn't flowing (no mid morning break) and the slightly dry sandwiches were at best unimpressive which kind of set the tone although I didn't realise it at the time.

Anyway, enough of all that, it was the product and it's capabilities I went to see.

So imagine, to make a written point more graphic, a model preparing to hit the catwalk and show off a 'nearly ready' new outfit. The clothes designers have done their bit, they've designed, styled, restyled and redesigned the outfit. The model is ready, the catwalk awaits but neither the make-up artist nor the hair stylist have turned up and to make things even worse, the wrong model is wearing the outfit. The lights are wrong, the set design is wrong and the audience is... wrong. That's how I see Microsoft's latest and greatest Identity Management solution... it's VERY unfinished.

Several years ago MS acknowledged the need to connect directories, provision stuff, do ID management stuff and so on and acquired a product Zoomit VIA which became known as MMS 2.x which then became MIIS 2003 which then became ILM 2007, the abbreviations are irrelevant because ILM "2" isn't ILM! ILM stands for Identity Lifecycle Manager and (unfortunately in my view) the Marketing department has decided to include this future release with their security product set and therefore call it Forefront Identity Manager 2010. So FIM 2010 (two thousand and ten) it will be. Unofficial though the leaked name is [update: click here], like its predecessors it is largely irrelevant - but confusing all the same.

Microsoft's approach in this space has been slow and reminds me of the age when it took them 18 months to support their own new Client Operating Systems in SMS, (now SCCM). The difference here is that I know more and they appear cautious, very cautious... So what goodies do we get in the new product and why the slow delivery?

Forgotten Password - at last I cry, but my tears of joy soon fade and the cold, deflated drops of enthusiasm dry as my mind wonders to patchy, sceptical and meandering thoughts. I saw the first RC (Release Candidate) today and whilst I appreciate the extension of the much expected final product release from Q1 2009 to Q1 2010 at the earliest if I were a product manager owning this thing I'd be thinking long and hard about whether or not it's the right way to go.

So a good strategist needs to read between the lines, to see the outfit without the hair or the make-up or the model. So what is it that MS are offering in a new product that drives forward identity management in a way that others will follow, what ground breaking concepts are being introduced that CTO's will fight for and businesses will invest in? What functions and features will users love and enjoy, what processes and automation will reduce incidents whilst maximising user effectiveness? What one nugget of WOW! can I tell my team and peers about when I return, and what would I tell my industry colleagues with whom I mutually share best practice, insights and learning's.

Well, in this case, absolutely nothing.

It's a sad fact that FIM2010 is narrow in functional capability, does far less than the competition and in an enterprise, will require constant and consistent investment to maintain. YES, they do offer "codeless" policies where a web gui lets you do the basics (although its very laborious), yes, you can do forgotten password albeit with a complex process to manage languages and no option of user defined questions and yes, it will talk to SAP and - at least - some of your connected systems. The very basic foundations are there but without a dark room, lots of sandals and some hairy coders it's never going to do what I want for Mars. (no offence meant to the developer community!)

It is a simple tool, for simple organisations - that is organisations with simple needs - and for those, if it's cheap (read cheap as "Free" or "Almost Free") yeah, it'll do 80% OK. For Universities and public sector organisations functional breadth or depth is not key and where living with the knowledge that we could do more if we had the money this product will be good enough I'm sure, but given the widely accepted view that identity lies at the heart of every system nowadays I expected more from Microsoft.

Oxford Computer Group were good hosts, Microsoft were silent during the briefing but the material - and the (3 or so) other customers that were there had some interesting points, but nothing for me that couldn't be done in an hour, on webex. There was way too much technical detail and for a technologist that's hard for me to say, but if you have to start messing around in SQL databases and digging deep into batch processes to show off ILM I was either at the wrong "Introduction" to ILM"2" or there is something seriously amiss.

If you'd like the hardcore details of what I learned, let me know and I'll gladly bore you with my endless notes and scribbles. Take away from this the fact that Microsoft are great at some things - I'm the worlds biggest advocate of MS Office - but at others they just arn't even close. Next step for us is to get a view of the FIM roadmap, from Microsoft and in detail. We'll stay up to date with the product and confirm that we are NOT (as my Vision presumes) a 'simple' organisation, because if we are, this might just about do (as long as someone else implements it!), but it's a very long way down the catwalk before we show off our new identity if it's to have a Microsoft badge on it.

ILM"2" Workshop by the Oxford Computer Group in conjunction with Microsoft and Gemalto
21st April 2009 at Cardinal Place, London.

Presentor Good - I think he did what he was there to do
Content Poor - Too technical for me, or even you - unless you are an SQL Programmer
Relavance Good - Based on the agenda, Poor - based on what actually happened
Materials Poor - Poor handouts, narrow customer mix, presenter used someone else's slides
Venue Poor - Unhelpful and moody staff, no coffee.

Overall Good - Why? Because I saw what I think (hope) is the worst of the product, not the best.

Doug.

So... IBM or not IBM ?

2009-01-27T12:35:00.000-08:00

I have just read through all the posts on the blog and overall, except for a few negative or doubtful comments here and there, most of the bloggers and commentators seem rather impressed with what IBM has to offer.

We are already an IBM shop, albeit an old rusty crumbly shack of a shop. Like it or not, Lotus Notes works for us and our much hated Notes databases are a pillar for many of our units. We are very heavily dependent on Sametime and many teams, specially in Mars IS, would not be able to function without it. Imagine trying to run an Atlas upgrade without Sametime.

Now with the emergence of Enterprise 2.0, we are investing a lot of effort into leveraging other types of collaboration software to help the business work better together. Social software, blogs, wikis, forums, you name it and we want it. And we want it not only for "traditional" Mars, but also for all the organisations that Mars has and will be acquiring. The tools are out there, the question is then, who do we get them from.

Do we go start from scratch and invest in an all Microsoft environment? Sounds like a lot of work & a lot of money. However future acquisitions of Mars are likely to be in the SME area and stats show that the majority of the organisations in this space (bingo!) are on a Microsoft platform rather than an IBM one. If we were to move to Microsoft, integration or even absorption of new acquisitions would become easier and much cheaper.

Do we do Best of Breed and invest in industry-strength integration to force these different best bits into continued seamless co-existence? Hmmm. Is there a need for Best of Breed in Mars ?

Or do we stick with IBM and tap into this fully integrated seamless solution we could just naturally expand into from our current Lotus base? IBM's offerings presentation slide is almost an exact copy of the Mars requirements presentation slide that has been circulating over the past year. Donald? ;-) IBM has everything we think we need. Sticking with IBM would allow us to then focus our attention on the more difficult task which is to bring about that culture shift that will encourage our users to use these tools that we are rolling out.

To be fair though, one argument I keep hearing in favour of IBM is that traditional Mars is 2 times bigger than non-traditional Mars and therefore moving away from the traditional IBM environment in Mars will cause more user disruption than the other option. This is not strictly true : regardless of which direction we move to, we will be upgrading part of our user base and migrating the rest. Either way, the whole user base will be hit with a round of training and some inevitable disruption while they get used to their new IW.

What it all boils down to is cost vs. benefits for each of the scenarios that are open to Mars in this area. An objective and fair evaluation of what Mars would need to invest with each vendor to achieve the 1-Mars vision should help us make the right decision for Mars. This work is currently underway ... watch the space.

Still, I agree with Gartner that the whole debate about IBM/Microsoft sort of misses the point. The time is to assess the viability of checking out the cloud. But this is another blog entry for another time!

It wasn't ALL hard work

2009-01-26T19:40:00.001-08:00

(The EUT Development team, locked away in a back room, worked tirelessly to plan out the future strategy)

Some of the classic quotes that were heard:

Karoona: "Honestly, I haven't had very much to drunk."

----------------------

Dai: "It was amazing. Truly a touching moment that I don't think I'll never forget."
Mike: "What was?"
Dai: "The presidential inauguration"
Mike: "Oh.... I thought you meant SameTime."

----------------------

Greg: "Do we turn left or right here?"
Karoona: "Hmmm... I'm not sure. We might have to phone Dai"
Greg: "We're at the end of the driveway... How can we be lost already???"

How Fascinating!

2009-01-23T13:52:00.001-08:00

The last day of Lotusphere dawned, and I for one spent most of my time comparing notes with other CPG customers and also browbeating the developers on my pet Lotus Notes peeves...

So a fairly quiet day with not too much to report ... until the closing session by Benjamin Zander about leadership, which I thought was fantastic.

Rather than blather on about it here, I found two of his earlier sessions online that formed part of the hour long session. I highly recommend them! Go here (20 mins) and here (15 mins) to watch - they will help you understand "how fascinating!" and why we all keep saying it!

That's all from me on Lotusphere 2009. Many thanks to my co-bloggers for their excellent posts - I feel like I've been to all the sessions this year (yes, my head hurts!) I hope you enjoyed our coverage too!

What were they thinking? When UX Design collides with Reality

2009-01-22T16:06:00.000-08:00

This was an overall good insight into IBM's usability practices. We're told that in LS2008 IBM promised to deliver that Notes 8 would deliver a "world-class user experience" and dedicated a big team of user researchers, usability specialists, visual designers & interaction designers to the design of Notes 8 - and QuickR, Connections, Sametime 8, etc. etc. This team focuses on gathering feedback from various sources (forum, bleedyellow.com, GCPC, developers, customers, ...), prioritise and input that feedback into development.

What makes IBM's approach to usability interesting is the set of personas they have created to represent certain types of users. Meet Samantha, Mary, etc. each of whom have a very detailed profile and are taken really seriously by the IBM community. This I thought would be an approach that would work quite well for EUE, coupled with the user segmentation work that Paul Wickham's been doing - we could have our own Brad, Tom, Keanu etc ;)

Anyhow, the IBM Usability team is now focused on bringing consistency for Samantha and co. in the new technologies. We can already see elements of this in Quickr & Connections. The new Notes client and iNotes, as I believe Brian has already blogged previously, are very similar. This consistency in look-and-feel enhances seamlessness of usage for the end user, who can slide from Connections into QuickR for example without even noticing that he has done so. Very slick.

As a side note, it was good to see IBM's initiatives on gathering end user feedback and acting on it. If we do upgrade to Notes 8, we'll make sure we add to the cause!

Project Liberate :-S

2009-01-22T06:50:00.000-08:00

Using the open office source code and the eclipse framework Lotus has created Symphony; which for basic text editing / presentations / spreadsheets works great. It’s completely free too, who can complain? The majority of Microsoft Office functionality lays unused so in this context it seems ridiculous to pay for that privilege.

By the end of the year it will be compatible with the latest version of office, and by 2010 will be aimed at more than just basic users with macros and other functionality being introduced.

The other side to this story is Project Liberate: “An IBM complementary Consulting Engagement to help customers understand alternatives when negotiating a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement”. A bold move when IBM openly admits Symphony is an inferior office product, but this is a long term strategy and at least they are contributing the developments back into the openoffice.org community.

Is the world going mobile??

2009-01-22T06:26:00.000-08:00

This was an interesting session presented by a Blackberry user and a WMD user, split into two halves

Demos of phones: Nokia, Android, Blackberry....

The installation of a traveler (traveller :P) server.

At the beginning one presenter gave out his email address and requested people send him questions. Within an hour the Traveler server was set-up, a device configured and the mail could be read. Finally, the phone was remotely wiped completely. Simple but effective I thought, maybe it could be of value to associates with wi-fi phones. Traveler is bundled with domino licences too; Mobile Connect is a similar VPN solution.

LotusLive; Aka Bluehouse

2009-01-22T06:15:00.000-08:00

During the opening session LotusLive, IBM's offering for the 'cloud', was announced. For companies up to 10 000 users it may be cheaper than hosting their own email services. However for a company of Mars' size it could allow an extension of the intranet into the IBM data centre based in the US.

The idea may seem a little farfetched; but there are features such as 'Click to Cloud’ which allows documents to be shared from Domino into LotusLive and vice versa. This would allow people from other companies to collaborate with people from Mars seamlessly. There is a plug-in for the notes sidebar to allow documents to be taken offline, Skype integration and some other IBM business partner involvement.

A more realistic service is set to be released later this year, called LotusLive iNotes, which is a product aimed at boundary workers.

ID106 - Notes & Domino Archiving: Offerings and Roadmap

2009-01-21T15:29:00.000-08:00

The need for archiving is currently driven by 4 factors:

Reduce storage size of mail
Legal compliance and eDiscovery
Collection of Enterprise Content from other systems
Line of Business application optimisation

IBM currently offer 3... well, 2 methods for archiving:

Domino server based archives, which will continue to be available but are being de-emphasised;
IBM's Common Store product, which is being retired; and
IBM Context Collector, which replaces CommonStore, Email Manager and Records Crawler into one unfied system.

There are also plenty of 3rd party products out there.

Mobing forward, they intend to push more on personal (user) e-mail archiving, and support for a platform agnostic Enterprise Content Management framework that any vendor can hook into.

For the user side, they recognise that the current archiving system in Notes is difficult to use, even more difficult to find and doesn't always work. They presented a "vision" for the future of user archiving. They call it a vision, but it was really a narrated story with some concept screenshots which were literally mocked up with pencil and paper.

In summary, they're moving to have roll-over nsf file archives for the user (rollover is date or size-based, and is automatic). Archived messages will leave a stub message in the main mail interface, and the message searching window will contain a checkbox to enable searching of archived mail. Whilst archiving will continue to have a scheduled process, the user will be notified if the schedule is missed due to the machine being powered off. The user will also be able to restore the message from archives easily from a link in the message stub.

Some of the features may be available in a point release for Domino 8.5.x, but most won't be around until "Domino 9 or beyond", they say.

Notes Client on Citrix

2009-01-21T15:18:00.000-08:00

This session, far from being what I expected (a hands-on this-is-how-we-do-it) was mainly details of how version 8.0.2 runs much better on Citrix than the previous version (which, it's generally agreed, was awful)

They recommend Citrix XenApp 5.0 to get it working, and there's a few tweks with disabling Windows services and tuning the Anti-Virus software to imporve performance.

They did a lab test of server loading, and managed to get up to 145 clients connecting per (2 x quad core cpu 64 bit server with 32Gb RAM) server. They tested with 32 bit vs 64 bit servers, dual vs quad core and differing RAM and explained where the bottlenecks seemed to be on each configuration.

I did ask the question about what load each user was doing and it was only email, calendar and writing a document in embedded Symphony.

Personally, I'd think that ocne you add the other server overheads (presentation server, SQL back end, WAN accelerators, load balancing servers, etc.) that you'd need for a production level environment, 145 users on such a grunty server doesn't look like that much of an acheivement just to get mail and calendar. After all, if you gave the users the newer browser-based iNotes client, they'd get virtually the same experience of a no-footprint client and you'd scale far more users per server.

INV 102 Future Directions for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino Products

2009-01-21T15:08:00.000-08:00

I know that there are a lot of blogs around Notes 8.5 that have been posted, however, here is mine on IBM's future direction on Notes domino 8.5 and beyond. Having have chance to chat with some of the experts, I do get an impression they are investing resources into the product to make it even better. As solid as the R8.5 product, IBM is raising the bar to make it even more stable and powerful. Here are just some highlights that was taken away from the session.

Notes Focus for 2009
Cold startup time improvement from v8.0.1 to v8.0.2 > 7% improvement to 8.5
warm startup times
general responsiveness
memory improvements
Mac support with notes 8.5
Drag/Drop of text within the rich text editor
offline support activities
choose for multiple addresses for a person in type ahead
inotes improvement
forward contact as vcards
roaming user available with new file-based options
support of lotus notes id vault with lotus notes share login
mac and linex support
ability to view the views like a pim view
calendar federation

Notes Share login
notes id vault
document compression
lz1 compression inside database
domino attachment
router enhancement
domino configure tuner
DAOS I+O improvement
domino designer enhancements.
xpages

BP305 - The document format dance

2009-01-21T14:26:00.000-08:00

This session went over the various differences betweed ODF, OOXML and PDF formats.

At the heart, all three are XML driven and all are ISO standards. PDF is the clear winner for read-only content and archiving, and there's no reason why it shouldn't be adopted straight away.

For editable content, there is currently no clear choice between ODF and OOXML, and most programs do, or soon will, support both.

The speaker suggested that OOXML has a lot of support in the US, being Microsoft sponsored. ODF is the preferred format in Europe at the moment, so it could end up with ODF being the de facto standard for non-US companies.

Microsoft, of course, support the ECMA stardard OOXML, but not the later ISO standard (there were some alterations) and support for that won't come until Office 14. Interestingly Apple's iPhone editor also uses OOXML.

Lotus Symphony uses ODF, as does OpenOffice/Star Office as well as Google Docs.

So, the key take-aways from this is to use PDF for read only stuff, use XML where you can and ultimately keep your options open either way.

BP206 Domino Health Check

2009-01-21T13:20:00.000-08:00

IBM recommends that a Health checks should be done on a regular bases, but the best time to do a health check is when a new project is about to the implemented. This ensures that the environment is healthy for the new project.

Good practices that IBM recommends are all currently being used by Mars IS. Examples: Document repository, change controls, and User community acceptance.

New for Mars IS:

One great tool that was release 2 weeks ago is called Domino Configurator Tuner (DCT) that could assist EUT Operations/Development obtain gauge on the domino server health status. The DCT evaluates server settings according to a growing catalog of best practices. All servers in a single domain can be evaluated together. DCT generates reports that explain the issues DCT uncovers, suggest mitigations, and provide references to supporting publications. This free tool is like having an IBM expert at our fingertips checking the server health and providing feedback for us to fix critical issues before they occurs.

Click here to download a Full version copy now: This product will only support Notes Client 7 or higher:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24019358&rs=0&cs=utf-8&context=SWA00&dcÔ00&q1=dct

ID211 - Executing a security assessment of Domino

2009-01-21T12:55:00.000-08:00

We all know I'm not usually one to prattle on about security, so I'll make this one brief.... :-)

The majority of the session was about patterns in hacking recently and things to watch out for. They're telling us that due to the current economic climate, security is becoming more important because:

Desperate times breed desperate people, and if people need money they may see an economic incentive.
Higher rates of staff turnover/reduction at companies may lead to higher numbers of disgruntled people whom have inside knowledge of systems
Staff changeover in companies without proper change control in place may lead to an administrator leaving and their replacement thinking patches, etc. have been done when they haven't.

So, what are the hackers up to? Leaving the script kiddies aside, there's a general, iterative procedure that a professional hacker tends to follow, being:

Recon - investigate the system and find out as much as they can, determining internet points of presence.
Probe & Attack - check for open ports, WiFi sidejacks, open file shares, anonymous access
Gain toehold - get low level access as an anonymous or standard user in unobtrusive manner, social engineering attacks, etc.
Advance - use the towhold position to attempt buffer overflows, injection attacks, weak passwords
Stealth listening - consolidate their position, cover the tracks, look for further opportunities for privelige escalation, packet captures, etc.
Takeover - own the system via a rootkit, download data or use system as a launching place for attacks on other systems on the network or internet.

One of the particular things they mentioned to crack down on is open file shares. Having access to the file system would allow the attacker to download nsf files, or the address book. Having access to the ID files is a particular risk, because they can be downloaded and subjected to an offline attack. Certificate ID file too, because that could be attacked and used to certify a new admin.

INV112 - Using a Virtual Microsoft Desktop Alternative

2009-01-21T12:48:00.001-08:00

The underlying message of this session was about the stranglehold that Microsoft have on the desktops at the moment, and how it's become less necessary.

Presently, the documents people are creating are tied to Microsoft's Office suite. That, in turn is chained to the Windows operating system, which is linked to the desktop (via OEM or otherwise). A major upgrade of any one of these components usually triggers an upgrade of the others. ie. Wanting to upgrade the office suite usually means upgraded harware, and therefore an OS upgrade too.

At the Office level, the way to decouple this is to use open standards (more on that in a later blog) to store documents, so it becomes irrelevant whether you're using Office or Symphony/OpenOffice. And using Symphony means you're not tied just to Windows as the OS.

To decouple the OS from hardware upgrades, they recommend looking at VDI solutions, as you can maintain the hardware for longer, etc. etc. They showed some Gartner reports and pretty graphs, but they're the same ones we've already seen about trends and TCO of virtual desktops.

The other thing, brought in right at the end, was a move towards Desktop as a Service. Basically, like VDI but with the desktop hosted in the cloud. Nice, but not sure how practical it is for a large company.

ID405 - Sametime Advanced

2009-01-21T12:31:00.001-08:00

I'll say upfront, I was rather disappointed with this session.

Sametime Advanced seems to have some nice features is it, but I'm not really sure how much they would get used at Mars.

In addition to multi-user chats, there is a more formal "chat room" feature available, with document sharing included. The can also be accessed from a browser interface too. It's nice, but SameTime meetings gives you the same functionality.

Broadcasts are another feature - you can broadcast a message out to a group, and those that respond are joined into an n-way chat. I can see maybe ART or teams like that using this, for getting help on a problem.

Instant poll works similar to Broadcasts, but with a polling/survey message. Meh.

Skilltap is virtually identical to broadcasts, but specifically pointed to asking questions that require specialist answers. At the end of the chat, the questioner has the option of reviewing the answers and adding them to an FAQ. It's an interesting way of working, sure, but surely the last thing we need is yet another silo of information locked away somewhere else?

And then there's desktop sharing, which gives... well, desktop sharing.

The other major functional benefit, which is the main value proposition for upgrade, would be the ability to customise the look and feel and location of the Sametime notification baloons.

So, all in all, some nice stuff, but anything we'd actually use we already have perfectly good ways of doing.

Directory Independence

2009-01-21T11:57:00.000-08:00

I get all the best topics! I attended a session today about some future functionality in Domino. The idea is to provide an option to store all the person documents in an external LDAP directory, such as Active Directory. This is different to the secondary directory I talked about before (already in the product).

Initially user groups are likely to stay in the Notes NAB, but as with all early development, details are scarce and the plans are hazy. The presenters took us through some early code and it looks like the mechanisms to find the external directory servers are fairly primitive so far (basically there is a single DNS entry that defines a specific directory server), so it will be a while before this is robust and business ready. Great direction though - and if we can remove yet another directory from our environment we can start to think about less complex (and cheaper!) directory synchronisation tools

BP403 - Best practices for migrating Exchange to Domino

2009-01-21T11:54:00.000-08:00

This session revolved around 2 case studies of companies migrating from Exchange to Domino and 1 from a Unix mail system to Domino that had been assisted by IBM, and the lessons learned from those cases.

Interestingly, all the cases revolved around a highly de-centralised mail system moving to centralised Domino. No-one went for decentralised Notes, and no examples of centralised Exchange to centralised Notes were cited. One of the migrations had started, but was halted partway though at the customer request, due to the economic downturn.

Some of the problems encountered were (in my own view) basic project management issues. Failure to define standards first, risk management and training needs.

On the technical problems, a few of the challenges they faced were:

local PST files, which IT may not even know exists if they are user created.
.msg emails saved on the file system
Mail archives
Calendar/Scheduling lookups
Personal Address books
Non-Blackberry mobile clients
Blackberrys requiring a full wipe and resync as part of the migration
Recurring meetings
Outlook Journal
Outlook Notes
Unattended/Generic mailboxes
Inbox rules
Password synchronisation and distribution

IBM consulting, for one of the clients, ended up using 6 separate toolkits as well as customised scripts to manage the migtations.

All in all, there weren't any "best practices" discussed. It was probably better to say that it was a "things to watch out for" or "why you should get IBM consulting to help you" session.

ID207 - Getting the most out of DAOS

2009-01-21T11:39:00.000-08:00

This was a more in depth technical look at DAOS (Domino Attachment and Object Service) and, as I blogged previously, something we should definitely use when we move to 8.5

Aside from the obvious benefits of reducing the database size and de-duplicating attachments, another point raised was that mail attachments are typically quite static and are usually not accessed all that often. Therefore, by spinning them out to separate files on the disk, it's more cost effective to place the repository on Tier 2 storage, saving your faster disks for the databases.

It's also worth noting that DAOS is not just for mailboxes - it will work with ANY notes database. That includes mail.box, by the way, so once a message with an attachment hits the server, it's written to the disk once and once only, and the pointer stub gets routed through the server. They've seen about a 13% reduction in disk I/O, as well as a 10.5% decrease in CPU usage from this.

Of course, it's not all sunshine and roses. There are a few caveats to be aware of. These include:

The size of the attachment still counts towards the user's quota size, even though it's not stored within the nsf file.
The attachment size does NOT count towards the 64Gb size limit for an NSF file. In one case, a client has created an NSF file which is logically storing 2TB of data, but thanks to DAOS the NSF is still less than 64Gb. However, this database cannot be replicated to any non-DAOS server, because the replica would then be over the limit
Copying/duplicating an NSF file file at the OS level, or deleting an attachment file will cause the DAOS system to go out of sync. Things will still work, but files will not be deleted off the file system when the documents are deleted until after resync/verification is done. This can be automated, however.
Transaction logging must be enabled on the server, and the available space in the logs must be large enough to buffer the largest file you might want to pull out.
You need to create/upgrade the database format to 8.5 format.

So, there's a few things to note but they're fairly minor, compared to the significant savings that can be made.

ID206 5 New Tricks You Didn't Know about Lotus Notes Administrator

2009-01-21T07:56:00.000-08:00

Here are some top Domino administration tips (including some undocumented gems!) that will make Lotus Notes Administrator lives easier. These time saver tricks will shave a few hours off our daily work so that we could do more work : )
These are just some examples of what you can do. More updates to these shortcuts in the near future.

1) Connecting Remotely to a Server directly in the Admin Client:

Add to Notes.ini
Add: RemoteProgram=C:\vnc\vncviewer.exe %hostname%

2) Cataloging All Databases: This will allow you to create views that show all databases in your domain.

Select formulas for views in Catalog.nsf included: &!(DBListInCatalog = "0") to keep those databases from being displayed.

Set Catalog_Disk_Usage=1 to have percent used logged by the Catalog Task.

3) Finding Duplicate Replicas: Duplicate Replicas on a server can cause confusion and can be tricky to find.

Option 1# use SHOW DIR command in the server console.

Option 2# Tweak the by Replica ID view in the Catalog.nsf

4) File Panel Output to Printer: No more need to do screenshot and send them to the site team. Just select the databases on the server in Admin client and hit print.

This can only be done with R7.0.2 or higher clients

User : Sort on any column and then print to produce reports

Version 8.5 allows copy and paste rich data from the files panel.

5) Update Task Tuning: The Updating task can overwhelm a notes server. How to tell if the task is overloaded?

Check the following:

Update.pendinglist
Update.DeferredList
Update.FullTextList
.Max

(If the numbers are high, then request are being backed up.

Also use 'Show STAT Update" command to see them or "Statistic Tab in the admin client. Chart them over time using Stat event generators in the Events4.nsf

This is how hard Life @ Lotusphere is (Karoona's words but Brian's message)

2009-01-20T21:13:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow is going to be the 4th day since Brian and I landed. 4 days, that's 96 hours and we have not had any time at all to go shopping. Not that we are complaining, but the closest experience we have had of shopping so far was the far away massive mall we had a fleeting glimpse of through the window of the car that carried us straight from the airport to the hotel.

4 days in. No shopping. My dollar notes reside unspent, untouched, neatly folded in my purse. Dreadfully painful as you can imagine this is, I'm however amongst the least badly hit. Poor Brian brought with him only 3 watches. Tomorrow is Day 4. He only has 3 watches. Is the fashionista going to have to completely shatter his belief system and wear the same watch twice in 4 days??

This is how hard Life @ Lotusphere is. Our heart goes out to all of those people who are stranded in the desert without any water for days. We know how you feel.

-- blogged by me on Brian's behalf

Sametime Unified Telephony

2009-01-20T16:09:00.000-08:00

I attended two sessions on this, and the more I see, the more I like.

It encompasses most of the features that OCS 2007 Release 2 does (eg. Telephone/IM presence, Click-to-call, Click-to-conference, VC, embedded softphone, etc.) but with a few nice extras too.

Call routing is a good one. Users can add their own home, mobile, other numbers and establish rules on where calls will go. This goes way beyond call forwarding, though.

You can base which phone (if any) based on time of day, your Sametime status, physical location (as documented in Sametime via Location Awareness), and who the calling party is. It can try one phone, then divert to another on no answer, with different diversions based on these rules - almost the same level of functionality as an inbox rule.

The paradigm of having a personal number, that identifies YOU rather than a physical device is also a good one, which I can personally resonate with today. As my co-bloggers are aware, I ran out of mobile phone credit (mainly because I have to pay the inbound portion of international calls to the US). Sure, I could have purchased a pre-paid SIM, but then I'd have to tell everyone the new number.

With SUT (Sametime Unified Telephony), I could get a prepaid SIM here, and set that phone up in Sametime. A UK caller would call my same number, which would come in to ISB, hop over the WAN link as a VoIP and have a Mars USA PBX make a domestic call to me. So far, so good. UK calleds can reach me at my own number.

BUT.... If I wanted to make an outbound call to the UK, I can initiate that through Sametime too. Mars USA would initiate a call to my mobile, then it would route it over the WAN and the UK PBX initiates the other side of the call. Therefore, at each point it's a local call - even for outbound calls that (in theory) originate from my mobile.

Now, because the ST server is brokering the call, that means I can now seamlessly transfer the call between my mobile, desk phone, hotel phone, IP softphone, etc without hanging up the call, and the other party would never know.

The main strength of SUT over OCS is that the end user has full control over their personal call rules.

I know I have added no pictures ...

2009-01-20T15:47:00.001-08:00

... but I promise I will next time. Please don't remove my access Mat with the God Rights ; )

What's new in the Notes 8.5 client

2009-01-20T15:30:00.000-08:00

Many of the new features in the Notes 8.5 client were presented as upcoming in last year's LoLA conference and we had already blogged about them but in a nutshell the most memorable ones are :

- The inbox has been re-designed to contain fewer icons - for example, unread emails still have the sender's presence icon on the left but unread emails don't have any presence icons next to them. The assumption, and I agree, is that if it's been read, it's been dealt with.

- The calendar has been redesigned and can now import even more public cals & icals can be imported. For example, you can now choose to have your Google Cal - or other favourite personal cal - overlying your Work Cal and available offline once imported too. You can toggle this additional Calendar on and off as you please. Replication conflicts between the technologies have been addressed and we're assured now works like a dream.

- You can now put Tasks in an email and these tasks can be assigned to your favourite people from the address book directly in the email. Perfect for taking minutes and even better, when the email goes out, the recipient opens the email and if a Task was assigned to him, the Task gets added to his Task List automatically (previously known as the To-Do list).

- Drag and drop an email from your inbox into a slot in your calendar and this creates a calendar entry automatically with the recipients/senders of the email in the To field.

There were a few other useful features which would be good to show you and the best way to do this is probably to add it to Mat's showcase list ... Also worthy of mention is that the Notes 8.5 client's UI is also, like all its counterparts in the Lotus suite, uber slick!

Web-based Email ... and IM, Calendar and everything else!

2009-01-20T14:49:00.000-08:00

First it was iNotes, then DWA, and now iNotes again. The web front end to Lotus Notes, iNotes has come a long long way from the version we know and ... tolerate.

iNotes 8.5 is very very slick. There are 3 'modes' - Full, Lite and Ultralite.

The full web client is almost indistinguishable from the standard Notes 8 client - integrated Sametime, Widgets, SideShelf and all. It's fast (or 'snappy' as the devs prefer to call it) and totally useable. It has the integrated Quickr connector that Karoona talked about in the previous post, so the user experience (and the behaviour changes that this drives) are consistent. Give me this web client and I'll uninstall Notes from my machine!

Lite mode looks the same as full mode, but removes the integrated sametime, widgets and sideshelf to optimise bandwidth. Still very usable, but I might still need my Notes client...

Ultralite mode does what it says on the tin. The interface is reminiscent of an iPhone, mostly because it is designed to work on an iPhone! You can also use this mode for very low bandwidth connections on traditional PC browsers which works well if you just need email and calendar.

Of course, to actually remove the Notes client we still have some 7000 notes applications to address. Now I'm sure Greg was wittering on about some Xpage thing that might be handy here...

Not only does the current iNotes product offer a superior user experience than Microsoft's OWA (which I should confess I use at home), it is equally at home on IE, Firefox AND Safari (James, you may now rejoice). The devs wanted to know if we'd also like it on Chrome or Opera...

Lotus QuickR : winner of Karoona's Most Impressive Product Award 2009 !

2009-01-20T14:24:00.000-08:00

QuickR as you probably already know is an environment where people can create "places" to collaborate. These places are created from templates and are made up of different components - picture tabs on a page - such as wikis, blogs, document libraries, group calendars, mashups etc. Users can have temporary or team spaces but also personal spaces which they can choose to share. So what's new, you'll ask.

First and foremost, QuickR looks super shiny and glossy. The UI is slick, the tool is very user friendly. Not exactly a business case to implement QuickR, but the reason I mention this is because as an end user myself, this is a tool that I would actually want to use and promote within my team to support collaboration.

Second, and more importantly, what IBM have achieved with QuickR is to make it easy & natural to move content to a collaborative environment, which will support the change in mindset we need to make happen in our environment. Let's face it, today, if an end user has to share any information with his team, he'll send it in an email regardless of how big the information is or what its format is. We all do it. Our user community is used to staying put and ping-ponging their information around which results in large amounts of redundancy of information, version "anxiety", storage problems, da-di-dah. What we really need is for the information to stay put in one place, and for the users to access the information as required. This however will only happen if users are able to find and access whatever information they need readily, quickly and easily - ie more readily, quickly and easily than they can today in their endless stocks of email history.

Getting information in and out of QuickR is where IBM have hit gold. QuickR is accessible via its connectors from the rest of the IBM suite & also from other applications, eg.

# from the sidebar of the Notes client for people to move attachments in and out of their inbox. As soon as the user has dragged an attachment (directly from their email) to the QuickR sidebar, that attachment gets replaced automatically with a link to the uploaded document in the email. Useful eh? Also, when a user is sending out an email, if there is an attachment in the email, Notes will pop up a window to offer them the ability to move that document to QuickR.

# from iNotes (aka DWA, aka web-based Notes). Works in the same way as in the rich client.

# from Sametime. Integration with the Sametime client I found particularly exciting - users can righclick on a document in their QuickR connector in ST, start a multichat with a group of users based on that document and work together on that document real-time, all at the click of a button.

# Lotus Symphony, MS Office, MS Sharepoint, Windows Explorer, MS Outlook and more is on the way.

From the end user's perspective, all QuickR is is another folder which they can share with the people they want. Checking documents in and out of QuickR is very easy for the end user. In fact, the seamlessness with which QuickR integrates with all the other applications from an end user perspective is what I think will sell.

Overall, fantastic product. If money was no object, I would have loved to roll it out to our users next month ; ) ... o and have a medieval castle in the South of France.

Centralising our infrastructure

2009-01-20T13:47:00.001-08:00

Last year we started doing very high level work on the feasibility of centralising our Notes infrastructure with our current network. In summary, if we go central, Notes replication traffic - which represents a large part of our network traffic in Mars - will be drastically reduced. However, on the downside, Notes interactive traffic as users access their databases across the WAN would then go up - but by how much? We know the size of our pipes, we know how much bandwidth Notes takes up today. What we do not know is how much traffic would be generated once our thousands of databases have been centralised.

I spoke today to an IBM business partner, Trust Factory, who have developed an algorithm that will calculate based on #user sessions on each server, length of the user sessions & data consumption, how much traffic would be generated if that server was accessed across the WAN. This piece of analysis coupled with the information we already have on our network topology should give us some solid factual information about the feasibility of centralising our infrastructure.

Their customer list was shiny - Philips, Daimler, etc. etc., their demoes were impressive, their pitch just right. If we do decide to do anything along these lines this year, I guess I'll be talking to them.

Extending the Innovation Team

2009-01-20T09:05:00.000-08:00

I promised to post on the IBM Center for Social Software. This is a relatively recent specialisation within IBM's long standing Research Labs, and as the name suggests it is totally focussed on Social Software.

Unlike other IBM research labs, this Center uses a methodology called 'Venture Research' which basically means they experiment directly both on the internet and on IBMs internal network - giving them access to huge numbers of users. Google have been doing something similar for a while (although I don't know how they analyse and collect data from their experiments yet), so it is good to see IBM stepping up, and will be interesting to see how they balance consumer vs enterprise social software...

One very interesting offering that I've not heard before is the "residency program" from the IBM Center for Social Software. Basically it would enable specific associates to work with IBM researchers on tough design or strategy problems related to social software. IBM bring their expertise in social software, design and data visualisation - as well as experience and platforms to support the research effort. We provide people that understand the corporation and the problem to be solved.

It's not cheap, but it might be a cost effective way to address some of our 'architecture of participation' strategy questions...

Video Collaboration

2009-01-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

Why can't we capture our video conferences / web conferences? The storage and bandwidth issues are getting easier to address with modern compression. One real reason is that a recorded video file will rarely be used to collaborate because (a) it takes too long to find the right video and (b) then find the right bit of the video

Insight is another research project within the IBM Center for Social Software. It's similar to YouTube, but allows more granular text and comment markups, and also allows you to link to specific sections of a video. Comments and any captions are all searchable too, so if you needed to find that bit of the CFOs speech where he talked about 'focus', you would get straight there.

You can also imagine our marketing teams using this kind of functionality when working on TV adverts to very easily and remotely collaborate with the advertisement agencies on new campaigns.

I know that our Web CC colleagues are very interested in video. At the moment this tool is only available internally on the IBM network, but if this is of interest we've been offered a full onsite demonstration. I guess I'll be talking to James...

Connecting with Lotus Connections

2009-01-20T08:08:00.000-08:00

I heard this software described as 'the Facebook for enterprise' however that could not be further from the whole picture. The new version of Connections, version 2.5, is set to be released; this session focused on the tools added to the connections portfolio.

Some features already available are: Profiles, which are similar to facebook profiles, however they act like associate search linking people in an organisational chart. People link themselves with Blogs, Communities, Activities from there profile.

The key point to make here is that all the services are integrated; profiles can have several related blogs, blogs can be incorporated into communities, communities can containing activities to organise work. Yet even with the integration the services act in a standalone way.

A scenario within Mars could be to have a EUT Innovation Blog (to capture ideas); this is associated with the EUT innovation ‘Community’ which links the team together. Good innovations are assigned to people as activities to complete, the output from completed innovation activities could be documented in the innovation Wiki (Wikis are available in version 2.5). This is a shared Wiki between all the innovation communities within Mars IS. All of these standalone technologies could be integrated using Lotus Connections.

Even if Connections is not feasible for Mars; it could still be good to see how the different social technologies could be integrated in a similar way.

The Top 10 Ways to Guarantee Project Failure

2009-01-20T07:14:00.000-08:00

I've just come out of a session about Project Management in IT. There was not much new to learn for us Prince2 Practitioners ;-) but the presenters gave it a quirky twist by talking about what NOT to do rather than giving out the Top 10 tips.

Here we go - The 10 Ways to Guarantee Project Failure.

1. Believing the hype.
ie believing everything your suppliers (internal and external) tell you. Trust, but verify. Eg. if they say Akonix will work with Sametime like a dream, very good, but check. If possible, get the hype in writing. Of course, from experience we know that sometimes you get the hype in writing and still it's not accurate ;-)

2. Solving the wrong problem.
... or solving a problem that doesn't exist! Understanding and validating the why behind every project is crucial. In other words, a business case should lead to a project, not the other way round.

3. Using the wrong people.
More often than not, Project Managers have to work with the army they have rather than the army they want. Which makes learning how to tap into individuals' strengths and synergies in the project team a pre-requisite for the team manager. If you can, put finding the right people on your project's critical path.

4. Measuring the wrong things.
10% budget spent =/= 10% project finished !

5. Hope as a Risk Management Strategy (that was my favourite one!)

6. Round is a shape (not keeping fit!)
Train your people and have them practise project management hands-on. As the presenter put it, "watching somebody else exercise can be momentarily invigorating but doesn't work the beer belly" ;-)

7. Ignorance as a Defence.
If you don't know, ask. Do not assume.

8. Ostrichism
"I've made up my mind, don't confuse me with the facts."

9. Giving perception sway.
Communicate, communicate, communicate. Don't leave room for people to assume. And if it's ugly, don't decorate, manage it! :-)

10. A hero behind every tree. (Somebody please explain the choice of words to me!)
Plan for regular humans, not superheroes - although I wouldn't mind having Batman on my project team ;-) Good planning and project management should save you from bringing in Professor Xavier and his team of X-men at the last minute for that last all arms out weekend.

Nothing ground-breakingly fresh in this list but if you ever needed to see it all in one place. Onto the next session now!

... this felt a bit like writing a self-help book :D

Travel Socially!

2009-01-20T06:44:00.000-08:00

This morning I was at the 'glimpse of the future' session by the IBM research center. I'll cover the center in another post - here I want to discuss one specific research project - Project Sojourn.

This was a 6 week project to research how corporate travel could be improved through the use of social software. The result is an application mockup and some storyboards on how everything would work.

For those familiar with TripIt, there are a lot of parallels (if you're not familiar then go have a play!), but the IBM solution is much more geared towards enterprises, allowing users to see things like corporate rates and leveraging internal sources of information such as whereabouts, calendars, units DB, user profiles etc. Other nice enterprise features include automatic notification of other people attending the meeting if you are delayed, real-time update of travel plans etc. I can't really do it justice here so will make sure the slides get posted when I'm back in an office.

As a frequent traveller myself, I want this tool yesterday! On the other hand we do already have some parts of this functionality, such as the 'who is visiting site x' in the whereabouts DB (Christophe can now be smug as he was way ahead with this idea!)

My personal prediction? Expect to see this as a linked-value* offering with Lotus Connections v3.

*I had no idea what all these IBMers meant by 'linked value' either, so I asked! Basically it refers to anything you get when you are using multiple Lotus products. In this case you would probably get the full functionality through a combination of Sametime (to be able to seamlessly contact fellow travellers), Connections (to mine for people potentially travelling to the same events) and Lotus Notes (for the Calendar)