Cobweb

Smog in the cloud?

The general internet buzz surrounding cloud and grid computing suggests that we are seeing a dramatic rise in the adoption of such technologies globally and this is set to increase. How does this leave users grasping for a wayward 747 or comfortable carrier pigeon during such an exponential period of technological evolution on the internet?

Gartner's 'Three Phases of Evolution' predicted back in Feburary that a cache of trailblazing Cloud Computing providers would be battling for business in an overcrowded market come 2010 and I would be inclined to agree; investors (perhaps) more willing to ply angelic upstarts and confused customers would arrive aplenty.

An eloqently devised 'three stage' reassessment (Luttinger on Sys-Con) may become clearer in the eyes of all Hosted customers in an era of remote and inaccesible technology that is set to get more confusing. Our on-demand Managed Services collating Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint and CRM allow direct administration through our Control Panels, our agents seek to work with you to integrate existing systems and one of our primary aims at Cobweb is to demystify (or should that be demistify?) what the Cloud may come to mean. Behind your email, intranet and mobile phone are a team of highly experienced, established people who have been supporters (not simply providers!) of your communication mediums for years. We are advocates for your ability to work without anonymous support structures and without jargon; we are excited about and love what we do!

Pete Baughan
Level 3 Service Desk Administrator

Office 2008 for Mac Sp2 and Document Connection for SharePoint

Microsoft's MacBU today released Office 2008 for Mac SP2. Try it by downloading from here, http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx. It's listed in the right hand pane titled 'Newest' as of today (20 July 2009).

Along with the usual performance boosts Microsoft have added much requested features, one being Document Connection to improve working with SharePoint and Live WorkSpace.

The press release is here, http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-20MacOfficeSP2PR.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases.
The Register have a piece on it here, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/20/mac_office_service_pack_two/

Oh, don't touch this if you are doing anything with Entourage EWS Beta or you’ll have to use OWA.

Daniel Noakes

Technorati Tags: Daniel Noakes,Office 2008,Mac

Sharepoint, Twitter and Joining the Conversation....

All users of Hosted Exchange and Sharepoint will be pleased to find another avenue of integration with everyone's top blog medium - Twitter. As well as being able to manage your threads and posts directly from within Outlook using TwInbox, users can integrate their Twitter pages with SharePoint using Javascript badges pasted directly into Content Web Parts on any page in Sharepoint.

For the badge link (in the Sharepoint Web Part editor), you will need to change the blog thread url to 'https://' to circumvent WSS display issues.

You can, for example monitor multiple Twitter blogs using one List on Sharepoint and connect them to Outlook as well as your Windows Mobile :) keep posted for a Cobweb Twitter coming soon......

 

Pete Baughan

Level 3 Service Desk Administrator

 

 

 

A new data centre for Cobweb and some new technology to go in it...

Friday was a big day for us technical guys at Cobweb as we hit the first milestone in a project that will deliver the next generation of technical platform for us.

We've just signed the deal to take some data centre space in a leading data centre that's not in central/east London. Good data centres are hard to come by outside of Docklands, but we found one in the Equinix LD4 facility. It's a leading data centre, one of the latest generation (with which only opened fully in 2008. Importantly for Cobweb, this location has connectivity to the internet and peering networks that is diverse from the data centre hub of Docklands, giving independence and resilience from any major London DC incident.

Also on Friday, we announced that the BIG-IP solutions from F5 Networks will become our platform of choice for load-balancing and application management. This is a big step forward for us and we'll develop beyond simple load-balancing of HTTP/S connection to improve performance and responsiveness for our Managed Services, especially for connection-critical applications such as Hosted Exchange and Hosted SharePoint

All in all, this is a very significant investment by Cobweb and one we are certainly going to make the most of!

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

Mobile Twitter – Twikini out now

I’m hooked on Windows Mobile and Twitter, the mobile browser interface wasn’t working well for me so I started looking at the mobile apps available. The best app for me has been Twikini. It’s clean, simple and best of all it makes a bird tweet noise when new updates are received.

Try it free, http://www.trinketsoftware.com/Twikini.

It integrates with Twitpic and services like TinyURL. You can add location information using GPS, or by entering a place name. I added my location to tweets the other week and so far I haven’t noticed any new stalkers.

I’m undecided whether to use “Tweet song info” about songs playing in Windows Media, it could generate a lot of updates and be a bit embarrassing when I’m listening Kylie.

If you update multiple Twitter accounts there is a “Switch account” option, which is proving pretty handy especially if you have personal and company accounts to update.

Try it for free from http://www.trinketsoftware.com/Twikini and follow me from your Windows Mobile.

Daniel
http://twitter.com/dannoakes

Technorati Tags: Windows Mobile,Twikini,Twitter,Trinket Software

ActiveSync (beta) for Andriod HTC Magic

If you have bought a HTC Magic or HTC Dream you can get a free beta ActiveSync client from http://www.dataviz.com/products/roadsync/android/.

You get Push email with HTML formatting, calendarand contact synchronisation including caller photo ID integration.

For the security conscious a remote wipe can be initiated from Exchange Server should the device go missing.

The beta ends on 30 May 2009

Daniel
twitter.com/dannoakes

Tags: ActiveSync, Exchange, Anroid, HTC

Pay Once BlackBerry from T-mobile

If you use a BlackBerry for email and web T-mobile could have the deal for you. For £179 you get unlimited data (Pay as you Go talk/text) for 12 months and a BlackBerry Perl, that is less than £15 per month.

More details here, http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/shop/mobile-phones/phones/blackberry/

Daniel - twitter.com/dannoakes

Next up... Microsoft also announced Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010

As expected, it was a busy week for the Microsoft product teams this week with "Wave 14" announcements. Exchange 2010 is leading the way with a public beta release out already, and a final release to market (aka RTM) in the second half of 2009. Now Microsoft has announced Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 with a technical preview expected in late 2009 and release in 2010 for both products.

There was a press release from Chris Capossela of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group, which included some talk about Ray Ozzie's vision of the Wave 14 releases. It's worth a quick read, but here are the key announcements

• Using Office Web applications, customers will be able to create, edit and collaborate on Office documents through a browser. Office Web Applications is a set of lightweight version of Office applications that run from the web, like Google Docs. These include Word Web, Excel Web, PowerPoint Web, and OneNote Web. Office Web Applications will allow you to view, edit, and collaborate on Office docs in a web browser.
• SharePoint 2010 can be deployed and managed on-premise as a server, or hosted as a service
• For developers, Microsoft are working on Open APIs, deep support for industry standards and developer tool support with Visual Studio 2010. This will further enhance the Office Web experience and uptake.

As you can see, there's a name change for SharePoint. They've dropped the Office tag from Microsoft SharePoint 2010 to give clearer brand distinction. While there's no specific mention of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), the SharePoint Team are definitely working on a v4 release of the product. There's some more info about this on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog

 

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

Microsoft announces the next-gen messaging platform – Exchange 2010

Today, Microsoft have publicly released details of the next generation of Exchange server - Exchange 2010, formally known to Cobweb and the TAP programme by code-name "E14"

Yesterday at Interact2009 in Reading, I heard from Rajesh Jha the Corporate Vice President for Exchange in a live keynote from Microsoft Corp in Redmond, Seattle. He was asked to describe his top 3 or 4 features in Exchange 2010, and here they are for you;

1. A clear focus on the user experience and end-user productivity. $650 billion is lost in productivity due to poor/unreliable/inefficient email systems.
   1. With Exchange 2010, there is support for any browser and any mobile device.
   2. Outlook Web Access really does replicate the Outlook experience, including presence information (just like Messenger with online, offline, busy status etc.), instant messaging, and (working) built-in support for Rights Management to fully protect your company confidential emails. There are some good example screenshots here
   3. Mail Tips. These are information bar messages, just like the pop-up blocker in Internet Explorer, that warns you if you're about to email an internal document to internal recipients, or are going to spam a distribution list with 2000 recipients, or if the recipient has their Out of Office set.
   4. Ignore Conversation button (as a VP in Microsoft, this was Rajesh's favourite feature) - when you're CC'd in an email conversation that's never ending and you've done your time, just hit the Ignore button and it's consigned to Deleted Items forever more.
2. Mail Archiving & discovery. Big mailboxes, retention of items including deleted mail and mailboxes, plus the tools to provide email discovery for compliance purposes. It will be interesting to see how this stacks up against the tried and tested (and trusted) third-party archival & compliance products from the likes of Autonomy ZANTAZ and Symantec EnterpriseVault
3. Further performance gains. Once again, big claims of disk I/O reductions, and there's support for big capacity SATA disks which are less costly than traditional fibre-channel SAN arrays. There are availability and replication improvements that are providing ways to improve service delivery that were previously very expensive to enter into.
4. Exchange 2010 will run as a Server or as a Service, i.e. on-premise or hosted.

All cool, exciting stuff. Cobweb are already running a build of Exchange 2010 internally so we will be able to go into more depth on these features and we will share our experiences to date on our Exchange blog site www.exchange2007.com

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

Hosted Services – no assembly required

Microsoft has worked hard over the years to simplify the installation and configuration of their software... Next-Next-Finish - Job done, server is working, the boss is happy. Microsoft has also worked hard to provide supporting documentation and tools to assist with the design of systems. That's what I'm going to talk about here...

There's a great article from Neil Hobson, an Exchange MVP, on the sizing of Exchange solutions which pulls together a number of these tools to analyse, calculate, plan, design, stress-test, load-test and finalise your system design. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of technical documentation is available for download if you want it.

What's most worrisome though is the massive possible variance in the results from these tools – first up, you need to estimate the profile of your users; light, average or heavy-user, based on the number and size of emails they typically send. Some wrong numbers here or some increases in mail usage can throw those results out of the window. Why do I say this? Because we know how easy it is to get this wrong. Take a look at the article – have you got you CPU-core and storage group ratios right for the RAM you have in your servers?

Capacity planning, which includes performance planning too as an over-capacity platform equals performance issues for sure, is the biggest single challenge for any hosting company. If you don't get this right it goes very wrong, very quickly. My teams spend a lot of time working with these tools modelling and re-modelling our system designs using actual production user profile data, and despite our best efforts the resulting designs vary in more ways that you'd imagine. We overcome this issue with an N+1 model for redundancy with an additional +1 added for capacity, i.e. we always have at least 1 more server or cluster than we need in the already redundant solution.

Using a hosted service completely removes the unpredictability of capacity management. There are no issues with increasing or decreasing user numbers, no worries about the impact of increased usage profiles, more traffic, email volumes or variables which are out of your control.

So don't read those documents and don't download the storage stressing tools – you don't need the stress!

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain