David Overton's Blog

I’m really sorry that everything has been so very quiet on the blog front – work has just been maxing out and I even took some personal time out – I’ve now been married for just over ten years and to celebrate Mrs Overton and I visited Niagara Falls for the weekend.  It was a wonderful time and worth the break, however I now need to get my skates on.

Niagara Falls from our hotel room	American and Honeymoon Falls from hotel room

Before that I was planning and helping an ”EBC” or Enterprise Briefing Center with a number of UK ISVs.  The trip gave insight to these Partners and an opportunity to discuss next steps on working together.  It certainly helped me in my conversations with COA Solutions:

This week I will be working on SBS 2008 materials for publishing when the technology preview becomes available.  I also have a back log of other information to share about Microsoft, SaaS, ISVs, partners and more.

ttfn

David

My blog has been quiet recently – think of it as a the quiet before the storm (or I’ve been maxed around quarter and year end  business, family and partner visits to the US).  Anyway, this has crept up on me before I re-installed my server, so I thought I would just share the love.

Microsoft Announces Public Preview and Pricing for Windows Essential Server Solutions

Today Microsoft announced the following prices for the Windows Essential Server Solutions family:

• Windows Small Business Server 2008 Standard Edition software, including five CALs, $1,089 (U.S.); additional CALs $77 each (U.S.)
• Windows Small Business Server 2008 Premium Edition software, including five CALs, $1,899 (U.S.); additional CALs $189 each (U.S.)
• Windows Essential Business Server 2008 Standard Edition software, including five CALs, $5,472 (U.S.); additional CALs $81 each (U.S.)
• Windows Essential Business Server 2008 Premium Edition software, including five CALs, $7,163 (U.S.); additional CALs $195 each (U.S.)

We also announced availability of the public beta, which is available here: http://www.MultiplyYourPower.com

Since I know this will raise some eyebrows I thought I would jump in early:

1. Yes the price has gone up, but so has the value of what is in the box.
2. In many scenarios, due to the single CAL purchases and reduction in Standard CAL prices, the solution will cost less for a customer than SBS 2003 today
3. The Premium product now has a copy of Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition in it to enable SQL on a 2nd server, Terminal Server solutions and more.  The Exchange and management components need to stay on the 1st server
4. You ONLY need a Premium CAL for users who are accessing SQL, so if you don’t access SQL, then you can use the Premium product without having to move to Premium CALs, saving you money

Happy to hear more about this – I will be discussing the product at the London and Liverpool group meetings over the next month.

ttfn

David

There is a great web site out from Microsoft called OfficeLabs and one of the 1st great things published is:

Project: Search Commands



Search Commands helps you find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Just type what you’re looking for in your own words and click the command you need. Search Commands also includes Guided Help, which acts as a tour guide for specific tasks.

Crave more info?
FAQ - get answers to frequently asked questions
Blog - read the latest news from the team
Discussions - connect with other users



Click here to download.

Requirements:
32 bit Windows XP or Windows Vista. Office 2007.

Limitations:
English only. Works with Word, Excel and PowerPoint only.

Give it a try!!

ttfn

David

[updated with contact details at 16:38]

I have a partners or two that are looking to implement CRM internally and through the conversations about how they could do this came to know of the guys at Increase CRM.  The good folks at Increase CRM seem to understand how SBSC partners think because the offerings they have for referral and resellers seem to be quite good to me.  if you want the brochure on the subject, let me know, but here is the important piece for partners:

What is the Referral Program?

Partners in the Referral Program refer their customers to Increase CRM and we offer hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM and support services directly to the customer. Typically, the partner will provide implementation consulting services and may choose to provide first and second line support.

Referral Partner Commissions

The Referral Program guarantees partners commissions from any customers referred to Increase CRM:

Subscribers	Commission
5-10	100% of the first month’s subscription fees
11-50	200% of the first month’s subscription fees
51+	300% of the first month’s subscription fees

 

What is the Reseller Program?

Partners in the Reseller Program resell Increase CRM’s hosted services under their own brand and Increase CRM does not contract with their partner’s customer. Typically, the partner will provide all the implementation consulting, user support, system administration and billing services to the customer

Reseller Wholesale Fees

The Reseller Program guarantees partners a low wholesale fee for hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM that partners can mark-up and offer to their customers, as described in the table below:

No. of Users	Reseller Partner User Subscription Fee
1 to 250	£30 per user per month
250+	Available on request

 

Comparison of the Partner Programs

The table below compares the two partner programs:

Responsibility	Referral Partner Program	Reseller Partner Program
Marketing	Partner	Partner
Sales	Partner	Partner
Setup	Increase CRM	Increase CRM
Implementation	Partner	Partner
First line support	Increase CRM or partner	Partner
Second line support	Increase CRM or partner	Partner
Third line support	Increase CRM	Increase CRM
Billing	Increase CRM	Partner

I just saw this from Chris Parks and thought I would share with a wider audience:

Folks, Just a quick reminder of the meeting this Wednesday at One Central Park, Manchester M40 5WW, 18:30... Attending from Microsoft are David Overton, Danny Ovens and myself.

Hope to see you there :) Also, a huge thanks to those who’ve either joined the online network or sent me back their profiles so far...some of them have been enlightening and some of them downright intentionally hilarious!!! (Please feel free to send through today if you get chance and haven’t done so yet :)

Regards,

Chris Parkes

Technology Adoption & Solutions Specialist

thanks

David

One of my heroes and guiding lights for all things Windows “internals” is Mark Russinovich.  He has his blog at http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich.  Before being a Microsoft person Mark ran the very successful WinInternals / SysInternals businesses until he moved across.  His tools can still be accessed by http://www.sysinternals.com or are part of the MDOP Software Assurance option.

The Case of the System Process CPU Spikes

As you’ve probably surmised by my blog posts and other writings, I like knowing exactly what my systems are doing. I want to know if a process is running away with the CPU, causing memory pressure, or hitting the disk. Besides keeping my computers running smoothly, my vigilance sometimes helps me spot performance and reliability problems in Windows and third-party code.

The main way I keep tabs on things is to configure Process Explorer to run automatically when I log in. Whenever I configure a new computer, I add a shortcut to Process Explorer to my profile’s Start directory that includes the /t (minimize) switch. Process Explorer runs otherwise hidden with tray icon that shows a small historical view of CPU activity level. Because I want access to detailed information about system processes, as well as my own, I also specify the /e option on Vista, which causes Windows to present a UAC prompt on logon that allows me to grant Process Explorer administrative rights.

Because I keep an eye out for CPU spikes in Process Explorer’s tray icon, which show up as green or red for user-mode (application) and kernel-mode (operating system and drivers) CPU usage, respectively, I’ve identified several application bugs over the last few months. In this post, I’ll share how I used both Process Explorer and another tool, Kernrate, to identify a problem with a third-party driver and followed the problem through to a fix by the vendor.

Not long after I got a new laptop several months ago, I noticed that the system sometimes felt sluggish. Process Explorer’s tray icon corroborated my perception by displaying a mini-graph of red CPU activity. The icon opens a tooltip that reports the name of the process consuming the most CPU when you move the mouse over it, and in this case the tooltip showed the System process as being responsible:

The first few times I noticed the problem, it resolved itself shortly after and I didn’t have a chance to troubleshoot. However, I could see by opening Process Explorer’s System Information dialog that the CPU spikes were significant:

Mark's Blog : The Case of the System Process CPU Spikes

I’m writing about diagnosing performance problems at the moment and this blog starts the process off for me.  XPerf is an amazing tool that was internal to Microsoft only.  You can now use this yourself!!  One quick update, have a look at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/perftools.mspx for an update to just the xperf tools and you don’t need to download the rest of the SDK either :-).

The SDK team just shipped the latest version of the Windows SDK which supports Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1.  The SDK now includes an important new tool; the Windows Performance Tool Kit from the Windows performance team (we call them the xperf tools for short...)

This is the first article in the xperf series, the next one is
Xperf Tools Landing Page and Update

The xperf tools have long been an internal tool used by our team, and widely throughout Windows, for system-wide performance analysis.  Xperf got its start many years ago as a set of command-line tools that produce reports based off the ETW instrumentation in the kernel[1]. Many other components and applications in Windows are instrumented with ETW and xperf can enable these events, dump them, and analyze them.

Xperf is an important tool for anyone doing system performance work on Windows because it's specifically designed to give you a complete system-wide view of performance over long periods of time (10's of seconds, to minutes)[2].  It's also the only tool that knows how to fully process all the events from the kernel and correlate them into something that makes sense.

For example, here is a detail graph of all the disk I/O to the system drive on my laptop for opening this post, editing it a bit, and then closing Live Writer. 

Pigs Can Fly : Xperf, a new tool in the Windows SDK

Enjoy,

David

I saw this and it made me smile – looks like building a desktop OS for consumers is harder than people thought :-) And I thought consumers were more willing to put in time to fiddle too, so that makes the enterprise play even less likely for me!!

Red Hat skips consumer Linux desktop

Red Hat has no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market, but will continue to place its bets on a desktop for commercial markets.

"We are focused on infrastructure software for the enterprise market, and to that market we are offering the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop," said Michael Chen, vice president of corporate marketing at Red Hat.

"You need a different support ecosystem and applications for the consumer desktop," Chen added.

Among the company's desktop goals for 2008 and 2009 is to ensure that its desktop products complement its server and middleware products, Red Hat said in a company blog post Wednesday.

Red Hat's strategy is similar to that of Novell , which is currently focusing on Linux for enterprise desktops. The market for Suse Linux on the consumer desktop is taking time to develop, and the market for the desktop for the next three to five years is mainly enterprise-related, Novell President and CEO Ronald Hovsepian said Wednesday.

Red Hat skip