Putting the cat amongst the pigeons

I wasn’t going to comment on this but i’ve changed my mind

Susanne blogged a while back asking about Microsoft’s strategy for Office & Vista in the small business marketplace and why they should make the move.(This was also followed up by a post by Vijay)

At the time i agreed with many of her points so i started a post of my own but struggled to add anything extra to what she had already said so it stayed in my drafts.

I’ve just been going through my backlog after my holiday and noticed a few posts in reply to Susanne

The one i was most interested in was David Overton’s response.

Couple of things of interested to me:

[Susanne] The gadget toolbar that shows me the time (I can do that already thanks), RSS feeds (that’s what Outlook 2007 or IE7 or even Firefox** is for), and other applications that most Small Business Specialists would ban because they could potentially encourage time wasting – 2.5hrs a day is spent searching for information (I told you I listen Microsoft!) so why swap one problem for another?

[David] The gadget tool bar might look like a “toy holder”, but we are beginning to see people building gadgets that return business value.  CRM can put out an RSS feed, having the top 5 issues appear there, or the latest actions to worry about has some value.  People spend serious time and money chasing information that if presented in a glancable way on the gadget bar would show business value in terms of productivity.  People also need to feel that their computer is personalisable to be useful to them.  Want to know the cricket scores – you can either have a gadget, repeatedly open a web browser to see, or make your staff unhappy by banning the cricket results from the business.  There will be more of these coming along, but Key Performance Indicator gadgets will be a boon, and worst case, you can have one written – isn’t that the value proposition for Open Source??

[Me] Nice reply. I complety agree with him on this. We all push SharePoint to businesses so that they can get quick access to important business data. Moving some of this to the desktop would be really useful. At the moment all the gadgets that are available to seem like “toys” but as Vista gets deployed i think lots of partners will get creative and develop gadgets that have lots of business use

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[Susanne] BitLocker – great! but oh wait… Enterprise version only

[David] This is one of the features that some customers are willing to spend money on (or even already do on 3rd party solutions).  How can you get it for your customers – Open Value licensing, including my favourite of Open Value Subscription, which has a lower cost of acquisition due to the fact that you don’t own the software, but means it is quicker to obtain and some customers would much rather rent software – which means you then have an ongoing relationship over the years as to how you enable them to get the most from the latest software, which is part of the rental agreement (as is training, home usage right, staff purchase etc etc)

[Me] Sorry i’m with Susanne on this one. Why should we have to get Enterprise edition just for this? I have lots of customers that runs SBS. Have between 10-25 PCs and a couple of laptops for sales and management staff to take off site. Bitlocker would be great here for if (when!) laptops get stolen/lost. This is one of those features that small businesses really could do with and dont want it to be complicated and dont want to spend a lot of money on (thats small business for you!). This generally rules out most third party offerings. Licensing for a couple of laptops seems a step too far

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[Susanne]

OneNote 2007 – great! but oh wait… Student and Teacher versions only (I’m seeing a trend here)

Exchange 2007 is great but the voice messages via email is already available as an add-on

Can the American Exchange Lady have a domestic accent instead please? You may tut at this but as a telephone specialist we always get asked to change the American voice to English.

As much as Exchange has a ‘wow’ factor – I think small business clients CAN afford not to talk to their server

[David] I will agree with the comments about Exchange – it is not a great fit in the SBS small business world due to it’s x64 server requirement, which is not something that SBS 2003 can do, so a 2nd server is required.  Having said that, for those where unified communication (or the lack of) is a problem then this is something to consider for them!!

[Me] Ok you have agreed about Exchange. But you completely missed out her question about OneNote. Tons of people in business use OneNote as it’s so damn useful and i know from reading Susanne’s blog there is a reason she asked that question ahead of the Exchange question! She also brings it up again a bit later but it never gets mentioned. So is the solution here we should all be buying Enterprise and Ultimate edition? I dont think so..

I have a similar bug bear with InfoPath to be honest. Even in the Office 2003 unless you buy Office 2003 Pro/Enterprise InfoPath never gets seen in the small business environment as it’s too expensive as a stand alone product. When we sell SBS2003 and show customers SharePoint and how well InfoPath works with it our customers are really interested. But they only want Office Small Business Edition so InfoPath never happens. Terrible shame in my opinion

That’ll do! Any more comments and this post will take longer to read than the SharePoint resource kit

Dont get me wrong. I really like Vista and Office and i’m looking forward to using them more fully in the new year. The way i see it working with our customers is that they wont be making the upgrade until they need to. Vista wont appear until new or replacement PCs are installed and apart from a few exceptions Office 2007 will be pretty much the same. However, as most office politics determine once one user has it everyone wants it!

I’m glad that David went to the effort of replying in the first place because it means that Microsoft do listen!

Post Christmas Presents!

My RSS reader is on it’s last legs.

I use RSS Bandit and have been quite impressed by it since i started using it

I do have a big problem with it at the moment. Posts have started appearing in other feeds

A few days ago i clicked on Amanda Murphy’s Xbox & SharePoint blog only be treated to someone’s comments on the previous weekends games in the Premiership! A futher scout around has found other instances of this.

Normally i’d either try and figure out what the problem is, start again from scratch or find another application to use but since i’m planning on giving the RSS features in Outlook 2007 a go i thought i’d wait until we got our copy of it here.

So imagine how pleased i was to learn the January action pack will have a copy!

I found this out reading Steve Clayton’s blog and says the action pack is out on January 11th and will contain the following

The Connected Home

When i first moved into my house i had a romantic view of my “connected home”

I had all sorts of plans and ideas of how my 21st century home would work.

I wanted to have a PC in the living room that would be connected to the television and display pictures, videos and music from another computer acting as a central store where my other devices (laptop, pocket pc) could all receive these media delights

I wanted X10 modules that could control my lights, heating system, even my curtains!

I wanted music being played to follow me around the house

I thought this is actually quite feasible (and after some research it i think i could have done it) but some events in my life took away the main factors to realising my dream….TIME & MONEY

So my plans were put on hold

Fast forward and i actually realised that i have actually put part of this in place without realising

My XBOX 360 sits downstairs in the living room where it recieves images, videos and music from my PC upstairs.

The PC currently dual boots between Windows XP and one of the Vista BETAs

At the weekend i also purchased a set of cordless headphones. The original idea behind this was so that i could play Xbox in the evenings as loud as i like without disturbing my other half or my daughter. The added bonus is that they are FM headphones (as opposed to infrared) so i could listen to music and have it “follow”me around the house.

I know this is cheating a little but the great thing about this i have all this functionality and it didn’t cost me awful lot of money and was setup in no time at all

Now all i need are some freebie X10 modules!

Multiple Monitors with Windows Vista

*-* Update *-* I’ve posted about this again here

I’m a big fan of multiple monitors. Even since i first tried it in Windows 2000 i haven’t looked back.

I struggle when going back to a single screen as it’s so convenient to be able to view more than one window at a time.

For example, If im on a support call i can remotely control a server and view a knowledge base article at the same time

Even now while i’m writing this i have someone elses blog post for me to refer to.

Anyway the point of this post is something i saw on Download Squad talking about support for multiple cards in Vista

After reading the post i was a little concerned as couldn’t bear to “downgrade”. The worry is about using cards from different manufacturers as the full Aero interface requires that they have the same drivers. The post says that the Aero interface wont be available. I don’t think this is the case. From what i can gather one of the graphics cards will actually be disabled. You’ll still get your Aero interface….only on one screen though

The original post that Download Squad links to has a link to an article on the Microsoft site that tries to explain the situation. It’s not immediately clear what the situation is but my take on it is:

Dual View – One graphics adapter, multiple screens

The article quite rightly points out most modern graphics cards have multiple outputs so their wont be an issue.

This is the setup i have. My PC has a standard VGA output and a DVI output which runs my two screens. This wouldn’t cause any issues in Vista as it’s only a single driver.

Homogeneous Multi-adapter – Multiple adapters, one graphics driver.

This is where you have two cards that use the same driver. The cards don’t have to be identical. As long as they are running the same driver.So you could use for example:for example,  NVIDIA GeForce 7600 NVIDIA GeForce 6600 with no issues. Slot types are not important either

Heterogeneous Multi-adapter – Multiple adapters, multiple drivers.

This is where you use two cards from different companies. An NVIDIA and an ATI card for example. In this situation you would be forced to use the driver model for which ever card was the “POST” adapter (generally VGA)

In Conclusion 

I only think this is going to give a problem to people who use LOTS of screens (i.e 4+). As detailed above you can use a single adapter for two screens so the issue doesn’t arise. The cards DONT have to be identical. Just the drivers. So the situation isn’t as restrictive as i first thought!

Also if you were building/buying a new system then you would just need to think a little more carefully about what your using to drive the screens.