Tomislav Bronzin [RD&MVP]

Mobility Day Conference, September 9th 2008, Zargeb, Croatia

Because I was involved in several project that were havily use Windows Mobile platform, I have being awarded with Mobile Architect MVP status.

Being Microsoft MVP Mobile Architect, my dear collegue Andrej Radinger and I decided last year to re-start annual regional Mobility Day Conference that will be starting in 10 days in Zagreb!

Conference is organized by companies Mobendo and Citus, aimed at decision makers and ICT professionals that are involved in envisioning, developing and implementing mobile solutions using Microsoft mobile technologies. Sessions will be delivered by leading Microsoft (Redmond;UK), local and regional experts in mobile development and mobile business.

Visual Studio & .NET Framework Service Pack 1 is out!

Visual Studio & .NET Framework Service Pack 1 is finally out!

You can find them here:
1. VS SP1: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FBEE1648-7106-44A7-9649-6D9F6D58056E&displaylang=en
2. .NET Fx 3.5 SP1: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=AB99342F-5D1A-413D-8319-81DA479AB0D7&displaylang=en

IMPORTANT
- If you previously installed a Visual Studio 2008 Hotfix or Visual Studio 2008 SP1 pre-release, you must run the Service Pack Preparation tool before installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1.
- If you have multiple Visual Studio products installed, you must upgrade all of them to SP1. If you have Visual Studio 2008 and one or more 2008 Express Editions, you cannot upgrade the Express Editions until you have upgraded Visual Studio.
- Sometimes installation of VS SP1 RTM will require that you provide VS 2008 Installation DVD media (if you have installed some hotfixes or SP1 pre-release)

Comparing Office Live Workspace features with Google Docs ...

Windows Live Services, MS Partner Community Builder, Live@Edu

Hello!

Recently I started to use Live Services through MS Partner „Community Builder“, that should be very similar to the Live@Edu, and after 2 months of experimenting with it (several domains, primarily my Community domain: www.mscommunit.net) and writing the “user manual” with “scenarios of usage” I come up with following:

I think that Live@Edu (Community Builder: http://domains.live.com) idea is excellent:

1. Free services
2. Lots of services: E-mail, spaces (blogs, photo gallery, events, Skydrive …)
3. Lots of services 2: workspace.office.live.com, video.msn.com
4. Easy to setup (guide that enables system engineers to setup domain forwards in a few seconds)
5. There is possibility to develop your own “look and feel”
6. There is some possibility to pick what Live services one wants to integrate
   - When opening the new domain – you can pick not to opt for e-mail support - Some of the education authorities have their own e-mail and they are not willing to give it up-but would like to use other Live functionalities
7. Excellent desktop client apps (Live Writer, Photo Gallery, Live Messenger) that are accompanying services (translated!)
8. You can enter the users using admin module or from application using SDK
9. Lot of possibilities for ISV’s, consulting etc. to develop their own solutions based on the Live platform
10. References:
    • http://www.windowslive.com
    • http://dev.live.com/
    • http://get.liveatedu.com/
    • http://my.liveatedu.com

But, I can also identify some of the problems (I will address each of them in separate post):

1. Cryptic and not very understandable access to lot of services
   • Because of different branding (for example video.msn.com, workspace.office.live.com)
   • Different look of “dashboard” (for example http://spaces.mscommunity.net/ does not look the same/not the same options/ when I choose English or Croatian – Skydrive is missing, even it is available in Croatia)
   • Authentication: (BIG ISSUE!)
     • Requires NEW Live ID for every domain that user wants to join!
       • Joining Live ID accounts helps a little)
       • Identity Federation – I did not find support to
         • Open ID integration
         • Any other kind of identity integration – Croatian Academic Research Network (www.carnet.hr) have its own authentication for every pupil/student/academic citizen that is provided by the institution that person belongs. Authorization is done by administrators of that institution.
     • Not enough granularity in authorization system
       • for example – in SkyDrive you cannot enable somebody only to upload and delete their files, but NOT the files that were uploaded by someone else!
     • Not enough flexible “sigin-in” module
       • You can only open it for all to join or close it
       • Of course you can enter the users using admin module or from application using SDK
   • Lack of some functionality, examples:
     • if you put video or photo on Skydrive – you cannot reference it from your Blog
     • you cannot reference photo galleries from the Events, you must create new one bounded to Events
     • you can embed video in blog, but after a lot of investigation
2. Not all of the services are completely translated in a lot of languages (I am interested in Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Macedonian ….)
   • People from education (as well from governments) is very sensitive to this!
   • No translation of web mail and some other services or partial translations or inadequate translation
     • Inadequate translation: for example: friends should be translated in education to “contacts” because not all of your contacts are your friends.
   • I will try to investigate if there possibility to “help” in translation of Live Services Team to do that “right” :-)
3. Branding
   • Yes, there is possibility to do the branding – but is a so small and inadequate that it is not worth mentioning
     • You can add your (very, very small) logo in upper-left corner on the “menu line”
   • There is possibility to develop your own “look and feel”
     • But, there is NO possibility to pick your (new user) default theme – that was (possibly) developed by you
4. Not a lot of information about availability of Live@Edu in some European countries (or it is not obvious to the local MS offices how to offer this to the Education)
5. Development: Missing SDK-s
   • There is no adequate SDKs for every service or even API (Web services) to be used to manage Live Services!
   • Still hard development, mostly based on using RSS and XSLT to transform the look (one example is here: http://pil2test.mscommunity.net/RSSfeeds/tabid/54/Default.aspx)
   • Not easy to understand terms of usage (license and fee)
   • Question still to be answered: how to develop modules for http://spaces.live.com and add it to the?
     • Not talking about gadgets that you can add at your 1^st page or events – but spaces!

All, at all this is very exciting (NEW!) platform and I will be investigating the platform and possible scenarios of usage further!

If you have any experience of using this platform and building solutions on it, I would like to hear about it and exchange experience!

INETA Europe launched http://community.ineta-europe.org/

Join us in discussions, publish articles on blogs and make this site alive :-)!

Live Meeting - great tool for the User Groups

I am not writing that because I am an Unified Communication Fan (especially if we are talking about development of UC applications), but I really think that Microsoft is doing great job by developing services like Live Meeting and offering it - to the INETA and Culminis User Groups!

Some of the best usage of the generous offer by the User Groups can be find here: http://www.developers.ie/webcasts.aspx 
Colleagues from the Ireland INDA User Group have used Live Meeting to deliver “.NET Coffee Break Show” which is short form of a web cast to: deliver and record presentation from the interesting speakers – some of them from the Redmond.
By using the Live Meeting technology User Groups can not only bridge distributed membership (especially when it is summer time and most of the people are on holidays outside of their place of residence) but also enable membership to hear what some interesting speakers or experts have to say directly from  them, without need to travel long distances.
And they can record it for latter use!
If you are the User Group member – ask your User Group leader if he/she can provide such service for you!
If you are User Group Leader – and you do not have (yet) Live Meeting account – ask INETA (Developers) or Culminis (ITPro) to provide you with the one account!
Happy (live) meetings!

Microsoft Innovation Center initiative announced in Armenia!

On the request of the Microsoft Armenia, I delivered session about what are Microsoft Innovation Centers (MIC's) and how they can help ISVs to get technical and business advantage at the USAD RCI Conference on Regional Competitiveness Initiative in Yerevan, Armenia. Session explained how ISV's were helped by MIC in Croatia (http://www.microsoft.com/croatia/msptc/en/about.mspx), who are stakeholders beside the Microsoft and what are steps to found the Center.

If you would like more information about the Microsoft Innovation Center in Varazdin, watch the video here.

KulenDayz Regional Community Conference

 Microsoft Community Osijek together with Microsoft Croatia® with support from INETA are organizing the first regional community conference KulenDayz 2008. Conference is bringing together leading IT Experts from the region with local IT Community and giving them a chance to spend a weekend filled with 18 attractive sessions presented by top speakers and relaxing at  Kopacki Rit Nature Park and enjoying unspoiled nature.

Content:
Sessions in conference are organized in 3 parallel tracks: 
♦ Advanced Development
♦ Databases
♦ System Infrastructure

The idea is to make a conference "a little different", so together with traditional sessions presented in conference halls there will be a number of unplugged Open Space/Chalk & Talk sessions presented at Gazebos in Ethno-Village. In Open Space sessions all participants are invited to co-create the agenda and pick the discussion topics. Chalk & Talk sessions are "unplugged", so without PowerPoint/laptops/beamers but with good-old flipcharts!

As a part of HEROS happen {here} events,  sessions at the KulenDayz 2008 will be mostly technically oriented, level 300+, with highligt on the new products and technologies (Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, ASP.NET MVC)

The conference schedule is subject to change. New sessions are currently being added to the program. Check back regularly for updates.

KulenDayz 2008 Agenda...
 

Unified Communication METRO Training delivered in Italy!

I just finished my 4th training, so I must be a "veterean" in UC Development :-).

I am starting to collect not just a knoledgebase about UC development (you always find something that is representing Catch 22), but also I am "collecting" the people who are pioniers in the field - first of the kind that will do new generation Unified Communication development!

After Denmark, The Netherlands, Czech Republic and Italy, I hope that I will "bring the good news" to the developers in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria - by delivering the training in the Microsoft Innovation Center in Varazdin, Croatia http://www.msbtc.net

Unified Communications (UC) Metro Training Content

I was asked by several collegues to provide brief content of Unified Communications (UC) Metro Training and here it is!

Topics covered in the training are:
• Unified Communications (UC): Behind the Scenes with Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007, Office Communicator (OC) 2007 and Exchange 2007
• Driving Contextual Collaboration with Office Communicator 2007
• Building Contextual Collaboration Clients for the Web using the UC AJAX SDK
• Building Asynchronous Contextual Collaboration with Exchange Web Services
• Business Process Communication with the UCMA (UC Managed API)
• Anywhere Information Access with OCS 2007 Speech Server

Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison

If you are interesting what options are included in each particular version of last Microsoft development tool, Visual Studio 2008, you can find info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc149003.aspx

For reference what is new in Visual Studio 2008 go to this URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386063.aspx

Microsoft Office Labs - testing field for ideas!

Several Microsoft employees and interns formed a group and decided to publish ideas in form of prototypes and offer them for (free) use to the general public. Of course, the general idea of letting people use this prototypes is to gather some metrics that can help (for example) to decide if some of this ideas, in one form or another, will be used in new version of Office.
If you like these prototypes you can help the team by provide data/feedback, but you can use them even if you do not want to share any data with Microsoft, just be careful – there are prototypes and they are not supported by Microsoft or MS official products!
If you like the idea so much that you want to join this team within the Microsoft – you can do that just read the page regarding the jobs within the group: http://www.officelabs.com/Pages/Jobs.aspx

There are (currently) two very interesting project:
Community Clips – represents collection of "how-to" videos about Microsoft Office products made by ordinary users. It is also interesting because it includes a screen recording application to easily create and share your own videos to help others.
Search Commnads – Are you Office 2003 expert user that have found yourself in a “hot spot” when wanted to find a command in Office 2007? I am! So I tried this Office add-in and it helped me to search for commands in my own words and get the button to do it, instantly. Works with Microsoft Office 2007 - Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

There are several other interesting projects like: SharePointPedia – use Share Point as a some kind of WikiPedia, InkSeine – better Tablet PC interface, Task Market - an online marketplace where businesses can connect.

If you would like to share your comments or ideas with Office Labs team – you can do it online – just sign in for account!

I have just one, small, objection to the whole story: “Hey people, please use Silverlight Streaming instead Flesh supported SoapBox J”, otherwise, good work people!

Photosynth - Create virtual reality from your photos!

A lot of people asked me from where they can download preview. So the answer is - you can not :-(

But, you can download viewer for the Photosynth showcase here: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/installer/sysreq.aspx?collection=sanmarco/index1.sxs&st=coll and try to look at several predefined collections of pictures.

What is Photosynth?

Photosynth is an amazing new technology from Microsoft Live Labs that takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space so you can:

• Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
• Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it's megapixels or gigapixels in size.
• See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
• Find similar photos to the one you're currently viewing.
• Send a collection - or a particular view of one - to a friend.

Microsoft offers COFEE to law-enforcement agencies

It seems that Microsoft is working not just on security of it's products, but also developing solutions, like COFEE (which stands for: Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor - a prototype "thumb drive") to help forensic all over the world to examine PC's that was possible used in crime.

Original article can be found here: http://www.stuff.co.nz/4507443a28.html

Microsoft does not want Yahoo anymore!

Frankly, I was a little disappointed when Microsoft started a pursuit of Yahoo stocks, because I do not know a single MVP that is using Yahoo, and offering such a high price for something that is not in focus of most of the people that are influencers in their communities was for me questionable.

But Microsoft decided to give up and you can find more info here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/may08/05-03letter.mspx