Archive for the ‘microsoft’ Category

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Oh. My God. Social Integration on Windows Live is on steroids.


2011
02.19

Posted in facebook, internet, microsoft, social, windows live | No Comments »

Do you have a Windows Live account? Chances are the answer is yes – most of us have – at some point – used a hotmail account, messenger, a “passport” site, MSN service or Windows Live ID.

In my case the answer is yes to all of the above – I’ve also used a bunch of other Microsoft services over the years, including Xbox Live, Office Live Small Business, Live Mesh, Live Spaces, BPOS etc. And as part of work of course I have a Windows Live ID that is associated with our Microsoft Partner Network account that gives me to access the plethora of Microsoft services that come with being a Certified Partner, MCP & SBSC.

That said – I generally ignore Windows Live for the most part. WL is a fairly irrelevant service as far as I’m concerned. That may seem to be a contradiction given the above paragraph but what I mean is that the WL aspect is just a sign-in mechanism for other services that I use, not something I think about in and of itself. When I play Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit online using Xbox Live, I’m not really thinking about my WL account. It is purely a saved credential that auto-signs in and I never really notice it – you get my drift.

So, the only time I really notice my WL account is if I’m signing into messenger – and I can’t remember the last time I did that. Messenger is obtrusive and distracting and I avoid it as much as possible. In my case there are a couple of other times I use a WL account. I sign into a few  Microsoft websites regularly –  the Partner Network, the Volume Licensing Service Centre etc. And of course when I was using a Windows Phone 7 device I had that associated with my Live account.

Anyway to get to the point – a friend (yes, he’s a bit of a geek)  just pointed out to me that Windows Live now integrates with a bunch of other online services. When they said “a lot” of services, I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw when I signed in to take a look for myself. The breadth of integration is insane, and even more so given that I didn’t even know about this! Do Microsoft spend all this time developing integration like this only to hide it away from everyone? Or do they only talk about them on sites like msn.com and hotmail.com – that I never visit?

Anyway, here’s a peek at a  panel you see when you sign in to your live account at www.live.com:

And if you click the link to add more services, you’re presented with the following page listing the “featured” services you can connect to Windows Live:

Yes, this is just the featured list. If you go an get the full listing today there are fully eighty separate services that you can connect with your WL account. A lot of the services are well known – Facebook, WordPress, MySpace, Flickr, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Qype, Picasa, DailyMotion, YouTube etc. But then there’s also  a raft of services that I’ve certainly never heard of. Have you ever heard of 11870.com, Biip.no, Azbuz, Hyves, sevenload, Tabelog, wat.tv???? Insane!

So I’m giving in – I’m curious, after all – so I decided to go ahead and link with Facebook. This is another surprise to me – not just the breadth of integration options as above – but the depth of integration within a single option. Here are the various things that tie together when you connect Messenger to Facebook:

And the various bits of information that Messenger requests access to from Facebook:

Now of course there’s a second set of privacy settings you need to manage – and another list of “friends” you need to consider when publishing information out to Facebook. In a lot of cases people use Messenger for work – to stay in easy IM contact with customers, suppliers etc. They often have their messenger ID on their email signature and encourage folks to use that as a channel of communication. To them my advice is – don’t connect with Facebook, keep it simple! Unless you already use Facebook for work (and I question the wisdom of this) and are already in the habit of being very careful about what you post and allow to be seen on Facebook, I’d say it’s probably best to avoid linking the two.

Right – now I’m off to push the limits and check my Messenger contact list & privacy settings to see if I can afford for Messenger and Facebook to meet. Wish me luck, because right after that I’m going to be connecting Messenger to LinkedIn, Picasa, WordPress, YouTube….

;-)

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Windows Phone 7 – the quick & dirty review


2010
12.29

Posted in Android, microsoft, mobile, smartphones, technology, WP7 | No Comments »

Why?
So… a number of people have asked me what my opinion on Windows Phone 7 is. Here’s what I think. If you’re looking for a balanced, comprehensive review of the platform or device – look elsewhere quick. This is my point of view and is basically an HTC Desire vs Samsung Omnia head-to-head from my own daily usage perspective. In short if you’re me and are considering switching from the Desire to the Omnia –  you (I) will find this very useful. Others less so!

NOTE: I wrote some of this on-device and I’m too lazy to edit so excuse the incomplete sentences and shorthand!

Performance
It is MUCH faster than the desire. Shutdown on the Omnia takes 7 seconds, on the Desire it takes 30. It finishes uploading a photo to facebook while the desire is still thinking about starting to upload.

Interface
The interface is ummm “swishy”. Nice transitions (they take time so they may get annoying) but at the same time the UI elements are really minimalist, for example the tiles are all flat with square corners. Compared with HTC sense that looks a little dull- but functional.

Browser
Browsing is quick and painless but I’m not a fan of this IE either. The Android browser re-flows page on zoom MUCH better. This incarnation of IE Mobile is like the iPhone – so not great.

Phone
There is currently no smart dial and no speed dial. Major boo. All that speed in other areas and it takes me twice as long to call somebody as it did on any of my previous phones of the last 5 years. Voice dial isn’t bad though, so I may finally start using it after years of ignoring its existence. *PAIN POINT*

Additionally, I couldn’t see a way to get call timers. In fact AFAIK you can’t even see call duration for a call from call history. This was a surprise and is also a major pain – I routinely want to know how long a call was and I had come to rely on my phone to be able to tell me. *PAIN POINT*

Text Input
Typing is surprisingly good & quick. More so than on the stock android / HTC keyboards. I do miss swype though and find myself waving my finger all over the keyboard from time to time! It’s really easy to type double handed in landscape (and to a lesser extent in portrait). Auto correction is good and speed is excellent. Shame that when you backspace it stops auto-correcting.

Battery
Battery life is a lot better than on the Desire. I’ve caned it all day and it still has about a quarter. My Desire would have died by lunch time.

Screen & Size
The screen on the Omnia is VERY nice. It’s a great size and colours are extremely vibrant. A couple of the stock wallpapers that ship with the device manage to do a great of showcasing the screen’s capabilities. That said, I don’t do much (read any) movie watching on my phone (the benefits of not taking public transport very much) and not much gaming either. Most videos you end up watching are the short YouTube variety and the quality you watch those in isn’t limited by the screen on your device anyway. I initially thought the Omnia was too big but got used to it very quickly – so much so that when I picked up a Desire after a couple of days it felt positively small. To hold in the hand the Omnia feels more slippery and prone to accidental drops. It’s also just a bigger slab so you end up holding it differently. The touch sensitive buttons on the bottom don’t encourage a firm grip around (you accidentally end up hitting the search button).

Email
Email support is fine, email has become a bit of a non-feature nowadays I think. This does take away the one pain point I had on the Desire which was the way it handled subfolders in my Exchange mailbox. Here you get to choose which ones to sync. Search server has disappeared (lost from 6.5) but then Android doesn’t have it either.

Storage
Skydrive integration is good, you can auto-upload all pics you take plus access docs from skydrive and sharepoint so those are nice features. This means that in the event of a lost phone pretty much the ONLY things I’ll lose are my texts and call histories. I’m sure there is / will be an app that lets you back up texts to the cloud so that probably means all you lose is your call history.

This phone is an 8GB model so not massive but all the space is usable for everything, unlike the annoying Android on which I was constantly running out of space and unable to have the apps that I wanted. This one actually lets me have a lot of my desired content on the same device so that’s definitely a win!

Marketplace
Not foolproof. Couldn’t download a bunch of apps, no real reason why (try again later).

Not commenting on variety since the marketplace is still new and will catch up in time.
Apps look more expensive, don’t recall seeing many £5 apps on android market whereas there are quite a few here.
Browser
IE still sucks. Still slow and most importantly doesn’t re-flow well at all. Need to keep panning or zooming on web pages.
Other browsers are available but I couldn’t download metrobrowser and can’t trial browser+ for free.

Calendar
Works fine but I find it annoying that I can’t adjust how long to snooze a reminder for. WM6 could do this just fine, I could decide to snooze a reminder for a few minutes or a few hours or a day. Now on WP7 you get a standard snooze which I think is about 5 minutes.

Email
Works well as expected from an Exchange integration point of view. Folder handling is good. Seem to have lost search server option from 6.5. Also not a huge fan of the minimalist I terrace with no colours. I like seeing overdue flagged items in red.

Also just discovered that I can’t edit the original message when forwarding an email. Or when replying. *PAIN POINT*

Tasks
Don’t exist – why, Microsoft, why? Have you decided on behalf of all your customers (like the uber-CEO over at the fruit factory) that we no longer want / need / should have access to our tasks? I can’t say I’m overjoyed about this. That said I’m used to life without tasks so this isn’t as big a deal as it was a while ago. I’m confused by this lack of support for task sync on all modern smartphone platforms. The iPhone was the first to drop tasks and everyone else seems to have followed suit. I can only guess that tasks just don’t have a high degree of importance in the consumer space (which most of these devices seem to be aimed squarely at).

Apps
No TWEETDECK!!! But I’ve got Seesmic so maybe I’ll survive :)  I have been seeing some nice apps in the marketplace that I didn’t have on Android so that is nice. Every single WP7 review has banged on endlessly with stats and figures about how few apps are available on the WP7 marketplace so all I have to say is that it’s early days and it appears to that Microsoft are playing the long game here. As more and more users are making their handhelds their primary information-access devices Microsoft must see this platform as a key element of their overall strategy going forward. So there will likely be a huge amount of cash and effort thrown into WP7 (& 8 & 9)  over the next few years. Doubtless the marketplace will develop.

My biggest problem by far is the lack of support for third party apps. Every time I’m browsing a twitter client and click on links it takes forever to get back to the tweet and I need to scroll all the way down the timeline again to get back to where I was. On android tweetdeck data persists even through a reboot. *PAIN POINT*

App marketplace is less mature (as widely reported) but that will change. It isn’t a huge limitation as there are plenty of apps on there including every kind of chalisa (think hanuman, durga etc etc) known to man!!! :-) It looks like apps are more expensive in general, about £5 is a common price.

Camera
Quick to start (and you don’t need to unlock the phone to get the camera working – nice trick!). Good quality pictures but once again for me the camera on a phone is a bit of a non-feature. As long as it does the basics reasonably well, I’m not hugely fussed about any bells or whistles. This camera works fine.

Random Bits

Also very cool how you can log in to the Windows Live account associated with the phone, see all your photos, locate your phone on a map, make it ring, display a message on the screen or remote wipe it!

The lack of proper turn-by-turn satnav seems like a glaring omission. Microsoft should really make this a Bing feature rather than letting mobile providers choose whether to bundle 3rd-party apps (as Orange are doing with the LG Optimus 7 in the UK). Especially given the fact that 3rd-party apps don’t multi-task I expect any WP7 satnav to be a major pain, enough to make you switch to a different phone or a dedicated satnav. Android IMHO scores highest here – the already excellent Google maps now has layers (satellite view, traffic, latitude etc), turn-by-turn voice guidance and just works. And is free.

Conclusion
There is lots to like about WP7  and the Omnia 7 but there are several things I really don’t want to deal with, lack of 3rd-party multi-tasking being chief amongst those. My normal usage of the phones involves frequent switching apps (like back and forth between a browser and twitter client) and having to start from scratch each time was enough to drive me around the bend.

Lack of smart dial and proper call histories is another major pain. For a  phone that’s supposed to help you get in and get out quickly, this is a strange omission. I guess the getting and getting back to life doesn’t involve calling anyone anymore. I recently had a conversation with a friend who said the iPad had pretty much replaced his iPhone, so maybe I’m old-fashioned but I’m definitely part of the minority that still uses a phone for voice comms.

So… I wrote most of this post a long while ago and since then I’ve switched back to Android. I’ll be looking in on Wp7 in six months or whenever the next wave of devices (including an OS update) comes around. Until then it’s time to re-familiarise myself with the “low disk space” icon in my Android’s notification area :-)

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Dell Latitude XT / Windows 7 / UPEK Fingerprint reader / Wave Embassy Suite


2010
10.02

Posted in Dell, microsoft, windows 7 | 2 Comments »

This is a late post on this topic but I was recently reminded of the hassle I had trying to get this to work so figured I’d put this here for anyone else who may have a similar issue.

Some time ago I installed Windows 7 on my Dell Latitude XT (which had originally shipped with Vista), and found that getting the UPEK fingerprint reader to work with the Wave Embassy Suite to provide fingerprint enrollment was a right pain. Even though the fingerprint reader showed up as installed and functioning ok in device manager the Wave software refused to detect it when trying to enroll fingerprints for pre-boot authentication. I managed to get it working but had to do this again recently (due to a hard drive replacement) and remembered how it wasn’t a straightforward process until you figure out why it doesn’t work -at which point getting it to work is trivial.

The crux of the problem is that there are two separate drivers available for the UPEK fingerprint reader. One is what they call the common driver package, and the other is the Windows Biometric Framework package. Driver downloads are linked from this page.

It turns out that the driver installed by default is the WBF driver, which doesn’t support enrollment, multi-factor auth etc (this page talks about the differences). So the answer to the problem is now easy- download and install the right driver for your system and magically the Wave Suite will recognise the fingerprint reader and allow you to enroll your fingerprints.

Click here for the direct link to the driver package zip file.

As an aside – using this driver instead of the WBF one will only solve the specific problem that I experienced so don’t expect it to magically pay off your mortgage!

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Windows Home Server (beta)


2007
05.01

Posted in beta, computers, microsoft, technology, windows home server | No Comments »

So, Windows Home Server Build 06.00.1371 has officially been signed off and is publicly available… which means we are allowed to talk about it, show it and everything else…

This is good news :-) The WHS Beta is something that I signed up for on the spur of the moment, kind of excited but also unsure how much I’d like the product itself. I expected some kind of scaled-up & more polished version of Windows XP Media Center Edition.

Boy was I wrong! So what is it if not a scaled version of XP MCE? To start with, it’s built on Windows Server 2003 – yes, the same server OS that runs the worlds servers in all their various flavours, whether standard, enterprise, web, etc etc. So that was the first surprise.

In fact, for the most part that surprise was a pleasant one.. except for one little thing. I was planning to use a spare PC to trial WHS. In fact, while signing up for the beta program I remember the questionnaire mentioning something about having a spare old PC lying around. Check. Except that since the core OS is WinSvr2k3, it expects server hardware. Which my spare PC was NOT. It’s a reasonable P4 1.7 with 1Gb of memory, but it’s not server class hardware. Most of this stuff doesn’t create a problem, since the board & chipset are pretty standard and installed fine. However, the audio & video are a different story. Now as it turns out I don’t need audio OR video capability, but it bugs me to have yellow exclamations in my device manager. It just does.

That apart, the fact that Microsoft have chosen to build this “home” product on the same tested & stable core that powers their most mission-critical servers and applications around the world is a really nice thing.

OK so apart from the warnings about the hardware, this was probably among the easiest OS installs I’ve ever done (installing Vista on my new PC set the speed standard). Hardly any choices, and when it’s done you’re told to shut down, disconnect and never log into the console again. My kind of server :-) . No, really that’s what it says! Apparently many of the native Server 2003 tools will break WHS, so one is advised to steer clear. I did. At first. And then I messed around, and I have not yet managed to break it - this is a first, since most things normally break even when I’m trying to NOT break them :-)

Ok so basically you install the OS, turn it off, disconnect keyboard mouse + monitor, just plug it into power & ethernet under the stairs or something and let it live there quietly. You only need to touch it to perform hardware changes (like adding lots of big fat drives :-) ).

From there on, you’ll drive WHS via the WHS console, which you can install onto a PC from the Connector disc. The Connector disc is installed on each of your home PCs, so that they can access the WHS unit “the way it’s meant to be seen”. I have some comments on this methodology which I will reserve for a later post.

Basically at that stage, fire up the console, set a few options on how much space to allocate to what, set up a user or two and decide backup options.

Huh? What was that? Yes, backup. Another nice touch. By default, WHS will want to take nightly backups of each of your home PCs. I like! I didn’t turn this feature on of course, since my main PC has 400Gb of storage, whereas my beta WHS box has 120. So maybe next time, eh?
It also comes with a home computer restore CD (which I am yet to try), which hopefully does what it says on the tin.

So the 2 other things that got me fired up about WHS?? First, getting rid of nasty partitioning, volumes, file system choices etc. WHS is a bit dictatorial but I agree with the rationale and choices, so I don’t mind at all. I think this is a very significant step. So when the Joneses need more space, they pop out to PC World, buy a 1600 terabyte ;-) drive, just plug in a drive and don’t worry about partitioning it, formatting it, choosing a filesystem etc etc.
Allocate storage to your media and that should about cover it…

The final one may well be the killer app for WHS. Naturally you expect to be able to access your movies, music and pictures from all your home PCs and media extenders etc. But what’s really cool here is the ability to access all your media over the internet from anywhere in the world free of charge, permanently.

Various painful jargon-ish marketing-speak cliches start here about the “endless possibilities” “imagine what you could do” “where do you want to ..” etc etc, but the fact is that it’s very very cool. Giving the average user this level of access to their media (in both directions – to view or save content from the office / hotel / holiday / whatever) is pretty nice. Except of course the fact that this will then mean that apart from credit cards used in TK Maxx, everyone’s personal documents, family photos, dodgy home movies & the world’s private music collections will be available from your friendly neighbourhood call centre ;-) Actually forget the bit about the music, since that’s already available :-)

Granted that early WHS adopters aren’t exactly likely to be “average” users, but given the right price point, the right hardware / software and sufficient UAT to make it truly idiot-proof, a WHS box under the stairs could well become as ubiquitous as a PC and broadband connection…