Innovative Technology Weblog

This is a shameless plug for myself to invite you to come to a session I will be doing with Microsoft’s Mark Ryan at Microsoft IT-Forum 2007 in Barcelona. Look for OFF201 Groove 2007: Real World Infrastructure Challanges.  The time slot is November the 14th form 15.45 till 17:00.

There will also be a Chalk-Talk  “OFF06-IS Groove 2007: Security and Communications Groove” so look out for that to and the 15th of November at 09:00 

We are working on something special about Groove on the Sunday before IT-Forum starts but I that is still a bit hush hush. So look out for more information on that here on Buit.org.

During IT-Forum Erik Luppes, Stefan Stranger and myself will blog new stuff from IT-Forum here. My job will be talking about the party’s, drinks and diners off-course. The serious stuff will come from my friends.

Hope to see you there and please give us good ratings

See ya

Jeroen Jansen

Good news,

Just got the word the from my Canadian friends that the Groove Exam is live in Beta.
The exam will test the Client, Management Server, Relay Server and Databridge Server.
Monday 27 of august at 10 AM in the morning I will take the test. I got a feeling I will pass. Maybe because I had some doing developing this Exam as an Subject Matter Expert for Groove. I’m really excited to see if the input we gave is in the exam.

I’m not sure how long the exam will run in Beta and when it will be for the general public. I do not know how you could register for that. But they sent me a promo code and I registered with that. That worked for me.

I will let you know on Monday how I did. I won’t see the result just yet. It will take about 6 weeks to process the exam.

UPDATE:

Today I took the beta exam, I hope I passed LOL. It was fun to see how things you come up with during developing the exam get back into the final exam. I thought all questions where compelling and some questions are even mind breakers. But the exam is fair in my opinion and you will pass if you prepare for it and take a training, especially if I’m the trainer……

Now I have to wait 8 weeks for the result. I will keep you posted. 

See ya

Jeroen Jansen
TS Groove 2007 to be!!!!

Ok I must admit i might be a bit of a geek/nerd/freak (choose one). But now that i have a leave of work and going on a holiday my wife told me that i must leave my laptop(s) for a rest the next 1,5 weeks. They should have a holiday too she stated and yes it’s true laptop(s) need a holiday too. To much keystrokes makes them cranky. But let’s not go that way or else i start talking about traveling agency’s for laptops

What my problem is that is still need to manage our Groove Server environment at the office. So i thought let’s use the Nintendo WII. It has a web browser inside so that should work. But what do you think after the logon screen it just give me a blank screen and I get this error message:

So now i have a big problem here. I might just email Abbott L. at Microsoft to ask him to patch this problem and make the pages accessible for WII users because I don’t think I’m the only one with this problem. I know for sure that a colleague of mine want’s to do the same thing. Think about it managing you Groove environment by moving your arms, what better way to lose those love handles than managing Groove on your WII. It is an Opera Browser what’s inside my WII, so Abbott would you please help me. Or maybe Microsoft could give me an IE version for the WII.
I think that would be a great solution (all i favor press the left shift key 5 times).

So now what do i do, well nothing else to do then flying to Mallorca, hanging out at the beach, drinking cocktails and beer(in what order i don’t mind). And all that because I cannot manage my Groove Environment on my WII. Aint life a B…..

Have to go now, kids are in the car and the sun is waiting and i know for sure that Abbott’s Groove team will fix this for me when i get back because they will face the same problems soon !!!!!

For what its worth see you guys in a 1,5 weeks. (feels like forever)

Jeroen 

One of the things that keeps coming back in talks with Groove customers is the ability to scan the Groove Encrypted files before the are being opened inside the workspace.

Last week in learned that Microsoft OneCare has this ability to do this. It has it own MSVAPI running that can scan inside the Groove User and Systems directory. If you need this functionality that’s another question because if you have an on access virus scanner it will pick up a the virus file when it’s being opened. But ok, if you want to do virus scanning before it will be in your workspace then it can be done with OneCare.

I also heard some rumors that there a thoughts to use a ForeFront solution for Groove. So I think this will mean that the Relay server may have a ForeFront application running on it.

We just have to wait and see.

See Ya

Jeroen Jansen

This year I’m asked to give a Groove Infrastructure Training together with Abbott Lowell (Microsoft) at The Microsoft TR4 Event. You can see this event as a Microsoft Internal IT-Forum.
Saturday the third of February will be the day that the training will be held. I will try to post the latest information about Groove 2007 on BUIT.org.

All the new things Groove 2007 has to offer will be presented at the TR4 event. And off course here you will here all the inside information here on this blog site
Tomorrow (Feb the second) we will start the make sure the 150 64 bit machines are all running as they suppose to do.
Here we will run on physical hardware but we also have a Groove training scheduled on the 15 and the 16 of February in Berlin right after the SharePoint Conference. And there we will use Virtual Machines (VMware Server 1.0.1) to support the 50 machines with the Groove Infrastructure.

So stay tuned for more on Groove 2007.

see ya,

Jeroen.

PS. can I have another White Chocolate Mocha at StarBucks

On the 10th of January Microsoft released a new beta build of there Real Time Communications Platform.
The name changed to Office Communications Server 2007. So maybe this will be the new name.

I just starting installing it and there are some nice new features.

New Features in This Release:
Beta 3 includes many improvements over Beta 2 and introduces additions to the Microsoft Unified Communications infrastructure. With the release of Beta 3, you will have access to the following components:

· Introducing Voice!  Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 Beta 3 now offers Enterprise Voice, the IP telephony component of the Unified Communications solution.

· Expanded Presence Offerings!  More granular presence options debut in Beta 3, along with the transitioning of presence from Active to Inactive to Away. 

· Communicator Web Access (CWA)!  CWA offers a consistent user experience across desktops (Windows, Solaris, Mac) and web browsers (IE, FireFox, Safari). XML based (AJAX) APIs: availability of Web UI controls to quickly integrate presence and IM capabilities into an existing web portal.

It will not be a public released Beta but here on BUIT.org you will find all the information about all these new features.

see ya,

Jeroen Jansen

Now that we are talking about BitLocker I just want to share something Steve Riley “showed” at Tech-ED IT-Forum 2006

Well this a bit of a little secret because it not supported by Microsoft but it works nicely. If you want to use BitLocker on another partition then your partition where the OS resides on you can do this. So no GUI what so ever just plane old school command line kicking stuff. There is no GUI supporting this feature.

To run it:

1. Open an elevated command prompt
2. Change to %WINDIR%\System32
3. Enter cscript manage-bde.wsf

For the curious, “bde” expands to “BitLocker drive encryption.”

With no parameters, the output is:

Description:
    Configures BitLocker Drive Encryption on disk volumes.

Parameter List:
    -status     Provides information about BitLocker-capable volumes.
    -on         Encrypts the volume and turns BitLocker protection on.
    -off        Decrypts the volume and turns BitLocker protection off.
    -pause      Pauses encryption or decryption.
    -resume     Resumes encryption or decryption.
    -lock       Prevents access to BitLocker-encrypted data.
    -unlock     Allows access to BitLocker-encrypted data.
    -autounlock Manages automatic unlocking of data volumes.
    -protectors Manages protection methods for the encryption key.
    -tpm        Configures the computer’s Trusted Platform Module (TPM).
    -ForceRecovery or -fr
                Forces a BitLocker-protected OS to recover on restarts.
    -ComputerName or -cn
                Runs on another computer. Examples: “ComputerX”, “127.0.0.1″
    -? or /?    Displays brief help. Example: “-ParameterSet -?”
    -Help or -h Displays complete help. Example: “-ParameterSet -h”

Examples:
    manage-bde -status
    manage-bde -on C: -RecoveryPassword -RecoveryKey F:\
    manage-bde -unlock E: -RecoveryKey F:\84E151C1…7A62067A512.bek

So thanks Steve R. for this information.

See ya,

Jeroen

Ok, I know that this for the most of you not so interesting but for me as an Dutch man its interesting to see that Groove is in my native language.

What was called workspaces are now called “werkruimte” in Dutch. So I see that Microsoft has changed al the terms that we were used to.

But i’m happy to see that the troubleshooting functionality are still in English.  So a home relay device is still a home relay device and not a “thuis doorstuur apparaat”(see below)

see ya,

Jeroen

It’s a rainy night here in Amersfoort. Watching footy on the telly, but something tells me to open my Inbox. And there it is.Time: 20:42, Sender: KC Lemson Subject: Exchange 2007 RTM has Arrived!

 I call out to my wife. I’m getting the kids out of bed. These are the moments they are going to tell there children and grand children about. The landing on the moon, The fall of the Berlin Wall and now its Exchange 2007 RTM is here. My daughter(3 years old) starts to cry out, we are going to mis you daddy, because she knows daddy has to work a lot , daddy has to work in the middle of the night to migrate mailboxes. But I tell here that this is not the case with Exchange 2007 and that migrating mailboxes is only moving mailboxes now. So she gets back into bed and has a smile on here face from ear to ear. I open up my BeerTender (c).

I started to call my friends and co-workers. They are just as excited as I am. We make a appointment to meet at the nearest bar to have an RTM drink fest.
My good friend Kevin is just as excited as me and tells me that he won’t sleep this night and will wait for the RTM on the TAP site. Stefan is wondering if there is an Management Pack for MOM 2005. We tell him there is and he buys the next round of drinks because he is so excited about this news. The night is getting longer and there finaly is Rob, our BDD/RDX hero. He is just here for the drinks.

The end of this story is that we are getting ready to go live with this RTM. We got our servers spinning with Windows Server 2003 R2, ADAM for the edge, ASP.NET 2.0 installed. Is it already monday?? I want to start.

UPDATE:

Kevin just got home and is downloading

See ya,

Jeroen

Well today i got an email from the RTC TAP with an url to a LiveMeeting site for testing purposes.

Its looks nice and easy to use.

I love the audio and video with this versions. Its works like great. Its really good in sync. Also publishing youre apps or desktop works great.

Hopefully it will get public soon.

see ya

Jeroen