beta @ amanzi

A new Technet blog has just been started for the upcoming Server Core release. Server Core will be a stripped down version of Longhorn server that will not install a GUI and will be designed for basic server tasks such as DHCP and DNS, File serving, and Active Directory – although I’m not sure if that means it can run as a domain controller.

It’s good to finally start getting some details about this, I knew that it would be possible to install Longhorn without the GUI but had heard very little about it up till now. I’m not sure if this will be released as a stand-alone product or whether it’s just an option in the installation of Longhorn?

I’m assuming that all management of the server will be done using PowerShell as that is the way that Microsoft is heading now. Keep track of the blog for more details.

Links:

• Server Core blog

Chris Pirillo has undertaken the mammoth task of pointing out all of the faults with Windows Vista in two, very long blog posts. This is great stuff from Chris, lots of fanboys would just ignore this stuff and sing praises to the ‘innovative’ UI. I hope that Microsoft takes a good, long look at all these faults (Scoble already has) and fixes them for the final release. There’s a reason why people take these problems so personally, and that’s because most of us will be running Vista for the next five, six, or seven years.

Links:

• Windows Vista Feedback
• 65 More Windows Vista Mistakes
• Channel 9 post with some fanboys writing off what Chris highlights as nitpicking.
• Scoble’s post

Outlook 2007 now allows you to subscribe to feeds within Outlook and read them as if they were emails. This at first seems like a really cool feature and it can import an OPML file containing all your feeds. But the biggest let-down is that it doesn’t retain the folder structure of the OPML file. You can get around this by importing all the feeds and then manually recreating your folder strucutre, and then drag-and-drop the feeds in the folder you want. But for over a 100 feeds this isn’t feasible so I won’t be using Outlook for it’s feed capabilities just yet.

Anyway, this wouldn’t come close to the features offered by a dedicated feed reader like FeedDemon.

Update: An interesting side effect of using Outlook 2007 for reading feeds, is that they become accessible through older versions of Outlook and Outlook Web Access. But this has limited use as these older versions can’t actually do any of the syncing.

One of the cool new features in Outlook 2007 (or is it 2007 Outlook) is the ability to publish your calendar to Microsoft’s Office Online. From the Calendar view, you select the “Publish My Calendar” shortcut and follow the simple wizard to choose whether you want full or limited details available, or just free/busy information. You can also choose whether to publish it publicly or privately so that only those you invite can see it.

I chose to publish limited details publicly so that I can let others see my upcoming schedule. I can then also subscribe to my Outlook calendar through any client that accepts the iCal format, like GMail, or my Netvibes home page.

News from WinHEC has been pouring in this morning – I love using keyword search feeds in FeedDemon! As expected, Office 2007 Beta 2 has been released, I’ve downloaded and installed this already and will posting some articles on the new features shortly. Windows Vista Beta 2 has also been released but is not yet available for download so I’ll have to wait a bit for that.

Downloading the software was a nightmare – Microsoft provided an ultimately useless tool called SmartSource to help the download process, but this was a really bad idea! First, the software required the 1.1 version of the .Net framework – any beta tester worth their salt will be running version 2, and Windows Vista can’t install version 1.1, so that ruled out the use of the download tool for them. I managed to get it running after allowing it to install the .net 1.1, but then the software kept crashing as I tried to configure proxy settings. This was a ridiculous idea, and I ended up just downloading it directly from the links on the Office site.

There’s also a bit of confusion on the name of the new Office suite. All of the download links and software installers seem to indicate that it is called Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007, but Microsoft employee, Mark Talkington, is insisting that the software is actually called the “2007 Microsoft Office system” (small ’s’). I personally don’t like the name, it’s much easier just to say Office 2007, but the ridiculous Microsoft branding machine has kicked into action again and given another product another useless name.

On a more positive note though, Office 2007 2007 Office looks really good and performs really well on my machine. I haven’t been able to get the blogging functionality working in Word yet, but it does look promising. More to come…

Links:

• Get the 2007 Office beta
• What’s in a name?

The Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) happens this week and is set to announce the arrivals of the important Windows Vista Beta 2, Office 2007 Beta 2, and possibly Longhorn Beta releases.

There should be lots of exciting news over the next few days, and I’ll attempt to cover it as closely as possible.

Microsoft recently released a major update to their Windows Media Player bringing it up to version 11. Also announced was the launch of a new online music service called Urge from MTV. Urge means nothing to me because it’s not available in New Zealand, just like most other online music services (there’s also no iTunes here.)

The interface looks really good, and has a definite Vista feel about it. Navigating around the library is a bit tricky at first because there is no tree interface like there was in WMP10. Navigation is provided by drop down menus which appear by clicking on the level above where you want to go. This is the same navigational method that Vista uses in Windows Explorer and I don’t like it there either – it takes a lot of clicks to get anywhere.

Once you’re in the library you can see that WMP11 places a huge focus on browsing albums and artists by visually looking through the album art pictures. This works well if all your albums have album art but if they don’t it gets a bit confusing as all albums have the same grey cover.

I’m not normally a Windows Media Player user because I’ve been using iTunes for the last year or so after purchasing my first iPod. One of the things I initially liked about WMP over iTunes was the way it could sort out my media library, rename all the files correctly, and download the album art from the internet automatically. The biggest problem with this is that it would sometimes get it wrong and rename all the songs of a particular album completely out of order. And once it got into this state, it was almost impossible to rename them as they should.

This new version of WMP suffers from the same problem – if the feature works, it works well… but if it gets it wrong it causes you all sorts of issues. Some albums work well – the songs get updated perfectly and the album art is downloaded and everything is great. But then you run into issues like this, for example.

As you can see in the image, the first track of the 50 Cent album hasn’t been picked up by the online service, and shows up as a single track on it’s own album. Even though the album name is the same as the correct one and everything else matches up, it appears to be impossible to move this track into the correct album. Drag and drop doesn’t work and there’s also no way to manually fix it up.

These issues ruin the experience for me and I would rather spend the extra time managing my music manually with iTunes than have to put up with the software messing things up for me.

Joe Friend has just published a blog post describing the new blog publishing feature in Word 2007. Yes, that’s right – you’ll be able to blog directly from Word without needing to install any additional plugins or tools. And from what I can tell, the HTML code that is generated should be reasonably good too, for example <strong> tags are used for bold text, <em> for italics, and <h1> and <blockquote> for headings and block quotes respectively. This looks like a really cool feature.

Link here.

An update build of Windows Live Messenger has been released bringing the version number up to build 689. There seems to be mostly GUI changes and the WLM team are saying that this is the last beta version before the final version is released shortly.

The interface has a bit of a Vista look to it, which takes a while to grow on you but is actually quite nice. But in keeping with the tradition of all the Live applications, there is still the horrible, rotating, banner advert. This takes up the bottom portion of the window and makes it look very untidy.

Read more about the release on the WLM blog: Inside Windows Live Messenger.

I’ve still got 5 invites to give away, so leave a comment on this post if you want one. The first 5 comments will get the invites.

A new blog search engine called Sphere that has been in private testing for some time, is finally being launched. This looks like a really useful tool – I ran a search on Altiris and it brought up heaps of articles on their software virtualisation tool which I only recently discovered (and blogged about here.)

If you check it out soon, you’ll see some really odd things being searched for in the “Top Searches This Hour” section. I guess this is because there’s only a few people testing it out and searching for all the important things like “sex” or “marijuana growing“!!

One of the coolest features of the site is the ability to only display blog posts for specific dates. The site uses a nifty Flash app to allow you to drag along a timeline to select the date range. You have to test this yourself to appreciate how cool it is. All searches can be subscribed to through RSS which is useful if you want to monitor a particular topic.

The media searches are interesting too – these searches display news items, photos, books, and podcasts for whatever your searching for. You can also setup a bookmarklet that will let you search for related items for any web page you’re currently viewing.

Links:

• Sphere search page