Paul's Down-Home Page

My partners at 3sharp have been involved in a huge project over the last few months: building credible enterprise-level sample applications using Office as a development platform. Behold: Fabrikam, a Microsoft Office System Solutions Learning Platform! Hats off to Peter, John, Anup, Kevin, David, Chris, Greg, and Phil.

Now this is pretty slick: the Visio 2003 Connector for MBSA turns an MBSA scan into a color-coded Visio network diagram. (Actually, you have to create the network diagram first, but that’s trivial with Visio 2003 Professional). What a great add-on to MBSA’s built-in scanning functionality. Get it here.

Greg Hughes has a great dissection of his recent search for a replacement for his BlackBerry. In the end, he went back to the old familiar BlackBerry, but not until after he tried the Audiovox 5600, the SX66/XV6600, the Treo 650, and the BlackBerry 7100 series. He started with a BlackBerry device and tried the others to see how they compared as mobile email devices and as phones. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he ended up with his same preferred device. It’s fascinating to see how big a role inertia plays in PDA/smartphone selection, compared to the larger mobile phone market. Of course, device cost (and the cost of installed software) make a huge difference. I considered the BlackBerry 7100s, but since I can’t run any of my stable of useful Palm apps, that wasn’t going to happen. (I still have to post a longer review of the XV6600, besides my initial thoughts).

Huge news from the Real-Time Communications product team at Microsoft. First, we’ll be getting a Live Communications Server client for Windows Mobile devices sometime in the second half of this year. I’ve been happy using the MSN Messenger client that comes with the Windows Mobile-powered Audiovox XV6600, but being able to communicate with other corporate LCS users will be a huge win– right now, if I want to IM with someone inside Microsoft’s perimeter, I have to dig out the ol’ laptop. MS hasn’t yet announced pricing or functionality; I think it’s safe to assume that the Windows Mobile client will have a subset of Office Communicator’s functionality, in the same way that Pocket Outlook is a subset of desktop Outlook.

The other news astonished me: Research In Motion, producers of the BlackBerry line, have signed an agreement with MS to produce a Live Communications Server client for the BlackBerry platform. This is terrific news for the LCS team, and great news for BlackBerry users who want to combine their existing mobile e-mail service with IM and presence. Of course, it raises the bar for the Windows Mobile team, who now have to contend with the loss of what would otherwise have been a significant capability advantage. With Magneto around the corner, though, I bet they have some other tricks up their sleeve.

Update: looks like RIM’s been busy; yesterday they also announced an agreement with IBM Lotus to provide a native Sametime client for BlackBerry. The plot thickens…

Amazon has a new feature with which they do various kinds of analysis on (many of) the books in their catalog. One of these analyses is the “statistically improbably phrase” test; this shows phrases for a given book that appear much more often in one book than in the whole corpus of books in their Search Inside program. For my book, here are the SIPs Amazon found:

relaying configuration, antivirus product vendors, relaying settings, archive sink, htr files, perimeter scanner, constrained delegation, check pox, default response rule, mailbox database, key archival, attachment access, perimeter network, message tracking, mailbox administrators, messaging security, retention categories, smart card enrollment station, machine certificates, delegate access, dialog hox, segmentation value, privilege escalation, inbound mail, event sink

Note “check pox” and “dialog hox”; those are probably my favorites. I can’t wait to see what the list for the Cookbook looks like!

There’s a fascinating thread of comments over at Ed Brill’s blog on this post. Ed and Alan Lepofsky, along with various other luminaries in the Notes communities, have been having a generally professional discussion with Cliff Reeves of Microsoft. David Madison of Microsoft may have gotten the last word, though, as Ed has promised to turn off comments on the post. It’s his blog, and so of course it’s his right to do so, but I’m sorry to see it, since I think the exchange has been very illuminating– particularly since Ed has (quite fairly) criticized Microsoft in the past for not taking part in strategy debates at various public conferences.

If Cliff, David, or any of the other participants in the thread who don’t have their own blogs want to carry this on, I’ll be happy to guest-post their comments here.