Vista When the Sun Goes Down…

After hours – is Vista a Jekyll and Hyde character, would James Senior and Matt McSpirit reveal hidden depths to our new best friend in the OS world? or would Vista turn out to be an Ovaltine and slippers type?

Well…compared to the earlier presenters during the virtualisation day (see my earlier post), James and Matt were more Colin and Justin. As with their gig on the EVO tour, this was straight-forward stuff revealing very little, if anything, which was not fairly well-known. Particularly disappointing was the gratuitous injection of Photosynth and Virtual Earth (the fly around 3d New York) which is all sooooo old.

The one interesting item was the Windows Home Server. This was presented on a TranquilPC fan-less box around 2/3 the size of an XBox360 – very cute. WHS is 2003-based and seems to be spawning system add-ins like wake-on-LAN, DHCP, web photo hosting – very open and ‘community’ but I wonder though how this sits with Microsoft’s trustworthy computing – I suppose the SDK probably shields the system from anything dodgy??? Hmmmm….

I am looking forward to James’ presentation in Edinburgh later this year to hopefully see something more substantial.

Evan-jelly-call…

I’m sure Microsoft probably didn’t have any input into the specifics of the content of the brown-bags. However, the busy-busy day of virtualisation was only slightly dislocated by the sheer incongruity of finding a bag of Jelly Tots in my lunch bag.

That brought a smile…..thanks.

Geektosterone…

…is that special hormone which emanates when a group of geeks get together at a technical event. Earnest-face suits rub shoulders with the pierced and bearded, shiny leather shoes shuffle next to trainers and chrome-accessorised platform boots. The Macdonald Inchyra Grange Hotel reeked of geektosterone yesterday.

This was a Microsoft Technet event on Virtualisation – but an event with a big difference. Minimal PPT (from Steve’s blog), maximum hands-on demo. James and Steve are like Morcambe and Wise crossed with the Chuckle Brothers.

But the combination of real in-your-face doing-it-on-the-fly techno show supported with deep knowledge delivered with rapid-fire (if contrived but slick) presentation made it like a day-long, 300 level, on-demand webcast played at 1.5x speed without a pause button. The content was excellent, kind of ‘everything you need to know to start messing with Windows Deployment Services, virtualisation and some baby-steps clustering thrown in for good measure’. Great stuff.

They can now do us a big favour by providing a suite of VMs a la Demo Showcase with what they showed pre-configured for us to play with. Given how fast they showed it being out together, this shouldn’t be a big task. Thanks in advance guys

Given what they provided in content it could be a bit mean-spirited to bitch about the logistics – not enough places to sit during the breaks, not getting back into the presentation room to sit down during the breaks (I can live with the brown bag lunch).

Groove/Sharepoint – Hmmmm…

This brief Microsoft article puts and answers some When/Why type questions on Groove and Sharepoint. While this is a slightly longer article (in English) from a French partner.

Because You Need the Answer…

After lots of years working for a Microsoft Gold Partner, I’m not often stumped when launching into a new software product but Groove is New-to-Me. I’m looking forward to it doing interesting and marvelous things for me but…I couldn’t immediately figure is it peer-to-peer or is it a server-based product.

It is both, or either – suit yourself. However, you won’t find this question (Do I need Microsoft Office Groove Server-) asked (or answered) on the Microsoft Groove Server product site.