Power IT Down Day: it's a new initiative by HP, Dell and Citirx to help all of us reduce the power consumption of our workstations, computer, monitors and other electronic devices when we leave our desks at night. August 27th is the day planned to observe this "awareness holiday". Tom Simmons, area Vice President for Citrix Federal, joins me as a guest on the podcast to talk about this initiative.

On the 27th (it's not too far away), turn off all the power consuming devices when you leave your desk at night.

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Desktop virtualization concepts and benefits have already been proven out, largely through old-school remote-desktop products from companies like Citrix Systems and Microsoft. We know the benefits of standardization, managing better desktop change control, remote desktop access, desktop and data storage, and business continuity. Desktop virtualization has already begun the march to take over previous remote-desktop technologies.

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Computerworld reporter Gregg Keizer wrote today about a phishing attack which caught dazed and confused MobileMe users off balance during the disastrous .MAC to MobileMe cut over. Apparently the phishing dudes increased their take rate by timing the attack during the service transition. Apple's botched transition likely added fuel to an already burning fire. Is this the first time this has happened? Probably not (I'm only speculating) and we're likely to see this happen more frequently in the future.

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The Windows 7 team announced their new blog this week, the E7 blog, where they will keep us informed about developments with Windows 7 (W7). Er... or, will they? Seems the W7 team feels Microsoft has gotten ahead of themselves in the past by over discussing and floating trial balloons about new operating system features, implicating Windows Vista of course.

From the E7 blog:

We, as a team, definitely learned some lessons about "disclosure" and how we can all too easily get ahead of ourselves in talking about features before our understanding of them is solid.

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After the huge iPhone 3G provisioning debacle, the baffling MobileMe-upgrade morass, and now, yet another Apple e-mail outage, you have to ask yourself if Apple is really ready to deliver online software services. It's one thing if the iTunes store is down, but if e-mail or other MobileMe services are inaccessible for any length of time, users are going to scream, and they do just that on the Apple forums.

Let's face it. Running online software-as-a-service is a much different business proposition than being a software creator or consumer-products hardware company. And Apple is not the first to face this dilemma.

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At Black Hat last week, Microsoft announced both and expansion and a shift in their approach to vulnerability security information. Microsoft is releasing early information about vulnerabilities addresses in upcoming security patches through a new program called Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP). MAPP is a different kind of security information sharing program though -- it's intended for creators of security software which helps protect Microsoft products and environments. The idea is to get vulnerability information into the hands of products like intrusion prevention systems, firewalls and others, before Microsoft releases patch.

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I’ve had a lot of questions about Microsoft’s hosted Exchange and SharePoint offerings since Microsoft’s announcements at the July 08 Worldwide Partner Conference. Most of the details divulged there were just about the partner pricing, but I want to know; who owns the customer, how will support work, can anyone call Microsoft or must the partner, what if the customer switches partners, are there any SLAs, what are the differences between the deskless and full product offering? Those are just a few of the questions we get answered in this podcast interview with John Betz, Director Product Management for Microsoft Business Online Services.

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Network World writer Tim Greene has a good piece on Juniper's announcement that it can now use the Microsoft NAP client in place of Juniper's own UAC client. That makes installations using Juniper's UAC for NAC easier to deploy since they don't have to use the UAC client on machines running Windows Vista and XP SP3. But this is a one-way announcement when it comes to Microsoft NAP as it's what enables NAC client machines to participate in Juniper's UAC solution (and Trusted Computing Group's TNC architecture), not the Microsoft-based NAC product solution. Microsoft has a dual NAC strategy; expose the NAP client for 3rd party NAC solutions, and deliver its own Microsoft-centric NAC solution.

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As more of our applications migrate into the cloud, some interesting questions for development rise up. What about development? How will developer use cloud services in the development process? How do you attract developers to develop on your cloud services? How much will cloud services cost you if you use cloud services in the software development and QA testing process?

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This week I'll be attending Black Hat in Las Vegas, the annual security show that brings in security practitioners and n00bs alike from all over the world. Xen Hypervisor, Cisco gear, Wi-Fi, browsers, Google Gadgets, DNS and more, are all expected to come under the hacking microscope to expose the latest security vulnerabilities and hacking methods. I'm particularly interested in Web 2.0 and hypervisor-type attacks, given how rapidly these two areas are expanding but suffer the typical malady of security languishing as a secondary consideration.

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On the latest installment of the Converging On Microsoft podcast, Donald Lutz, CTO of Technetronic Solutions (one of a number of companies I advise), joins me to talk about building .Net applications using a SOA-based architecture and moving apps to the Software+Services model. Donald shares his views about building SOA and cloud services that don't look like typical applications. BizTalk isn't something we hear Microsoft talking about as much but it is a vital element of SOA and distributed cloud applications. If you are architecting or building SOA-based applications, you'll find this interview very interesting.

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SaaS, PaaS, Software+Services, and now Microsoft's Midori (next gen OS) all spark the debate of whether our data is secure in the cloud. In a Slashdot discussion, debate quickly switched from discussing Midori into the distrust of storing personal data in the cloud. A Business Week article sited security of your data #4 on its list of myths about SaaS. At some point, and some point soon, we're going to have to address the security concerns of cloud services, cloud storage and how customers know their data is secure.

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Microsoft announced it's working with Sony of America and Toshiba Asia Pacific to pre-install Windows OneCare on new PCs. I say yippee because I'm tried of uninstalling Symantec slow-ware from new PCs. I long ago swore off Symantec's products because of their poor performance and how they slowed down (brought to a crawl in many cases) my PCs. OneCare on the otherhand has been a pleasure to use. I've have very little problems with OneCare and the performance hit is relatively marginal compare to Symantec and McAfee.

ONECARE PLUSES

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Cuil and MobileMe, two online SaaS services that struggled to get out of the gates the past few days and weeks. Both experienced different types of problems, but they were both very visible problems for their respective companies. First, Cuil. I blogged yesterday that Cuil was returning some odd results, paring James Mitchell Ashley's old picture with some of my content. Well it turns out that if you just kept searching a bit more, you'd start to see even wackier results that just didn't make any sense. A search engine that doesn't produce accurate results won't last long once people have 1, 2 or 3 bad experiences and go back to whatever they were doing before.

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How many cool ways is there to spell "cool"? Kewl is very popular amongst chat and gamers, and now we have "cuil". Some ex-Googlers decided to give Google a run for their own money by creating YASE (yet another search engine) called www.cuil.com. Like Google, Cuil starts out with a very nondescript front page where you enter your search term, though Cuil sports a black background to differentiate it from Google right up front. That's where the differences start, and it gets better from there.

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With the new fiscal year beginning, I think we'll see Microsoft's cloud announcement sometime in the next three months, no later than the end of the year. Last week Microsoft Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie, stood in front of the 08 Financial Analysts Meeting hinting at Microsoft cloud initiatives as "progressively move to embrace the cloud", "significant announcements, significant efforts" and "broader in scope and different than our competitors". An obvious reference to Amazon EC2/S3 and Google Web App Engine.

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If you aren't using the Xobni plugin for Microsoft Outlook, then its time to upgrade from stone knives and bear skins to some new email + social networking tools. I had the pleasure of interviewing Xobni co-founder Matt Brezina earlier this year about Xobni, back when it was still in closed beta. Xobni's one of those innovative products I wish I'd thought of. It digs into your Outlook pst/ost files and pulls out valuable nuggets that help you use email more effectively. In addition to the podcast, I've also recorded a demo of Xobni and delved into some of the deeper capabilities on my personal The Converging Network blog.

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It's a marginal gain but a gain none the less. The June numbers show Microsoft's Live Search gained 0.3 percentage points, putting them at 9.2 percent. Google lost that same amount. (Yahoo also gained.) Is Microsoft's Live Search strategy working?

Frankly I'm surprised Microsoft is already at 9.2% of the U.S. Web search market. Obviously an acquisition of some or all of Yahoo by Microsoft would greatly accelerate the quest for market share but that's anything but certain these days. While 9.2% is great progress so far, gaining only three tenths of a percent each month will make Live Search's climb up a slow one. Microsoft's got to figure out new ways to pull users off the Google home page and onto Live Search.

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The Live Mesh barn door was open long enough for the guys at jkOnTheRun to give us a peak at Live Mesh running on Intel Macs. Guess what, it looks a lot like how it works on Windows Vista machines but still retains the Mac's overall look-and-feel. For the most part, the same capabilities are present on the Mac version as are in the Windows version. Remote desktop control isn't there yet but it's possible it could be added since this is still pre-beta bits.

I have to commend the Live Mesh team at Microsoft on two fronts. First, they chose to go the way of Google and offer Live Mesh services in beta form until they are ready.

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July's WPC 2008 conference was all about putting some meat on the bones of Microsoft's Software + Services strategy. Partner pricing for deskless and hosted Exchange and SharePoint was the buzz of the conference, causing many to speculate about who owns the customer and would other Microsoft software products soon follow suit to the S+S strategy (and pricing) of Exchange and SharePoint. Frankly, there's a lot of confusion out there about just what is Microsoft's Software + Services.

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In part 2 of my interview with Simon Crosby, Citrix CTO Virtualization, we delve deeper into Microsoft Hyper-V, why Simon is so excited about Microsoft's launch of Hyper-V, how Hyper-V is based on Xen as its reference model, why Simon sees Hyper-V as a good solution for SMBs, whether Red Hat's oVirt has any legs or not, and how Xen plans to be the dominant virtualization player in cloud computing. After part 1 and part 2 of this interview, I think we covered a lot of ground about virtualization.

 

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You knew the argument had to come up sometime: survive the economic downturn by using open source to help you save money. Now ComputerWorld blogger Steve Vaughan-Nichols makes that claim in his Linux Will Save Us blog post. The title almost has religious overtones. I found Steve's article thanks to blog posts by Alan Shimel and Michael Farnum. Whether it's iPhones, Linux vs. Microsoft or Macs vs. PCs, there's always a group who are so overly passionate about their favorite hammer that everything else looks like a nail.

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I managed to take a few photos while attending the Microsoft WPC conference last week. You can check out the pictures at my Windows Live Space site. Included are a few pictures of coworkers who attended with me.

If you also took pictures and have them online, send me an e-mail with a link and I'll post it here.

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Simon Crosby, CTO Virtualization at Citrix and formerly with Xen Source, joined me to record a podcast. This is a two part interview.

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Do you develop Microsoft SharePoint apps? Do you host them online via the Internet, either as extensions to business intranets or as S+S/SaaS applications?

Microsoft claims there are over 100 million SharePoint users (end users I assume). With the announcement of Microsoft Online's hosted and deskless SharePoint services at last week's WPC 2008 conference, even more businesses will have access to SharePoint for their application needs.

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Apple fans, old and new, got to experience the good side and the dark side of Apple's product launch mania during Friday's iPhone 3G release. Lines were long, though some said not as long as for the original iPhone, but the big news was all the iPhone activation problems.

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At this week's Microsoft WPC conference Steve Ballmer had to re-enforce the realities of Microsoft's move into cloud services, online Exhange and SharePoint software -- Microsoft doesn't have any other choice, and yes, they're competing with their own hosting partners. That's the reality of web 2.0, cloud services, Software + Services, SaaS, and the like. Do it or lose it. Microsoft most move to this online model to stay relevant and not let others dominate, so it's tough nougies for hosters if Microsoft competes with partners.

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It's the big news at the Microsoft WPC conference. Microsoft's selling their own hosted versions Exchange and SharePoint, dubbed the "Deskless Worker Suite", and now we know the price. I should say, the bigger news is really about what Microsoft partners will get. $3 a month per user for deskless SharePoint and Exchange. If partners resell the full boat of Online SharePoint, Exchange, Office Communications and Live Meeting, the cost is $15 a month per user. Partner's cut?

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More iPhone madness is about to descend upon the world this Friday when Apple unleashes the iPhone 3G.

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