June 2006 - David Overton's Blog

So we have great documents, but as soon as often they are shares, they get out of date. Examples of this are price lists product information shared resources list To get over this we are going to look at Document Workspaces in CompanyWeb and Office 2003. Let’s start at the beginning, no matter what I tell people, they do not like going to a web site to load, upload a file etc. Also, setting user permissions is a nightmare and they might even just start passing round usernames and passwords. The most obvious answer for most people is to use e-mail. The very process of creating an e-mail with an attachment and marking it as a live attachment creates a document workspace. It is secured to only those people that the e-mail goes to and the document knows where it came from, so will try ot update the site or get updates from the site when saved and loaded. This ensures that any document sent this way, or using a document work group will auto-update. Documents stored on SharePoint sites like to auto update. Each time...

I read this CRN article that Jo sent me earlier today and it makes me wonder about why people choose SBS. I love it because it is an action packed package in the size of a matchbox and a price to match. Others love it because it has a bunch of cool features and plays to their Windows experience. One thing the article said, which I think applies not just to those Linux folks, but also to us SBS folks is: Another partner said Linux rivals should worry less about the 800-lb. gorilla they are competing with and focus on making customers aware of their products and their benefits . "The smallest companies with one to 20 employees often don't understand the benefits of server technology or don't trust the ROI projections," Fogg said. "Those companies often elect to stay with peer-to-peer networks I think we can all learn more on how to do this. ttfn David

Hello everyone, just a quick note to say that today Lizzy May was born into this world at 2:24am GMT. She is happy and health, as is her mum and the rest of us. She weighs 6lbs 15 1/2 ounces and was 54cms long. If you want to see some lovely pictures, go to http://uksbsguy.com/photos/doverton/category1018.aspx obviously this will slow down some of the posts over the next few days or weeks. ttfn David

Terminal Services (TS) was a feature people liked in SBS 2000, but the performance and security issues meant that many people broke their solutions by overuse of TS. The answer with SBS 2003 was no TS – which solved both the support issue, but also the fact that you could not run Outlook on the same machine as one with Exchange, thus meaning users of TS on an SBS system could not do e-mail except by browser. There is a very simple whitepaper on how to do TS on SBS located at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sbs/2003/deploy/adstrmsr.mspx . Now, using Virtual Server, which is a no charge add-on to Windows, you can have a single server with SBS and providing Terminal Services as you run a mini-machine inside your SBS box. The thing to be aware of is the need to buy the right OS licenses for the virtual machines, so while you can save money on the hardware, currently, you need to buy OS licenses. Once this is all done, using the power of Virtual Server you can be away – either for Terminal Services or...

One of the reasons I picked Microsoft to work for was that I felt the company had a goal stronger than "to make money for the shareholders", but also to actually do some good in the world. Bill Gates has announced that he is planning to slowly transisition to a part time role in Microsoft over the next two years to dedicate his time to the Bill and Melinda Foundation who have already given away billions to help those in need. (See http://www.gatesfoundation.com/AboutUs/Announcements/Announce-060615.htm for Bill's transition. For some astounding stats, look at http://www.gatesfoundation.com/MediaCenter/FactSheet/ - snipped from it: Number of employees: 241 Endowment: $29.2 billion Total grant commitments since inception: $10.5 billion Total 2005 grant payments: $1.36 billion Illustrative Grant Commitments United Negro College Fund , Gates Millennium Scholars Program - $1 billion The GAVI Alliance - $1.5 billion Malaria Vaccine Initiative - $258 million Save the Children , Saving Newborn Lives - $110 million United...

Hello again, I have now been running Beta 2 of Office 2007 for a while and still love the product. It is still toooooo memory hungry - don't try running it on a 256MB machine, but it is still a product I constantly find myself missing when I have to go back to older versions. Search and the new UI are both godsends, as is the ability to make something more visually impactful. OK, so the blogs - there is this guy Jensen Harris - his blog is amazing. I would just like to point out two of his posts. The 1st includes a bunch of links for information - go get them if you want to know more about Office: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/05/24/605678.aspx - snippet of most interest: Office User Interface Video Tour : This is a live action movie in which Julie Larson-Green and I give you a quick tour of the UI and some of the thinking that went into it. The build we were using for the video is a lot older than Beta 2, so you might notice some rough spots. Nonetheless, a number of people have said that they found...

While browsing Sean's Blog I came across this article on how to get PDFs to have a PDF icon in [WSS] and how to re-index the companyweb site to ensure they are properly indexed (as in the content too). I know some of the links go to older versions of tools, but I am sure you are all very clever, so can work out what to do. Bear in mind that for this to work, you need to be running SBS Premium so the SharePoint database is stored in SQL. I have not blogged on this yet, but will do so next week. ttfn David

I recently created a FTP site to enable uploading of pictures for my blog entries by Word 2007 and suddenly I started getting lots of errors on my system. They took the form of: Event Type: Failure Audit Event Source: Security Event Category: Logon/Logoff Event ID: 529 Date: 09/06/2006 Time: 08:01:31 User: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM Computer: SERVER Description: Logon Failure: Reason: Unknown user name or bad password User Name: calvin Domain: XXXXXXXXXX Logon Type: 8 Logon Process: IIS Authentication Package: MICROSOFT_AUTHENTICATION_PACKAGE_V1_0 Workstation Name: SERVER Caller User Name: SERVER$ Caller Domain: OVERTONHOME Caller Logon ID: (0x0,0x3E7) Caller Process ID: 564 Transited Services: - Source Network Address: - The reason why this error log scared me so much was because the security login was coming from my server. This made me think that someone had put something nasty on my box. It turned out with very little digging that this was actually the FTP service trying to authenticate, failing and therefore failing...

Blogging as a Microsoft Employee is always a tricky decision as what to tell or not tell. I personally feel that it is very important that the true is always told and that information if not confidential should be disclosed as desired. A recent post has caused lots of controversy as it discussed from one managers point of view the reason why Vista slipped in the 1 st place. Some may find the contents of the posting quite damning, yet the reality is that in a complex project, some things are not perfect, or even fixable. The things that Philip has highlighted are often based on human characteristics, such as trust, friendship and self protection. Great in some circumstance and bad in others. Vista is still a great product, and when it does ship will significantly move the bar for quality operating systems, but this is not to say that it won’t have had a hurdle or two to jump or lost a few pounds during this marathon race. For now, enjoy Philip’s blog and perhaps reflect what you might do to protect yourself when...

This is such a simple concept and such a great way to offer feedback. Simply press the faces if you are happy or sad with Office and a screenshot and your comments. How easy is that? You can download the tool or read more at http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/05/26/607768.aspx . If you want a deeper discussion, you can find out more at http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx Ttfn David

If you laughed at my exploits on PTS-TV - and even if you did not, go to PTS-TV and see DAve Sayers talk about Virtualisation. http://www.microsoft.com/uk/partner/blog/pts-tv ttfn David

I found some amazing site themes at http://japan.communityserver.info/ and have updated the default site with this. If you wish to change it back, click http://uksbsguy.com/user/EditProfile.aspx and select the site theme of "default for CS2.0". You might also notice the Posts on this site Zoom Cloud showing you a cloud of the keywords mentioned on the site. See the site in it's full glory at http://uksbsguy.com ttfn David