Microsoft

Do you need to be up to date on Windows Phone 7?

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Windows Phone Logo

Image via Wikipedia

I have wmpoweruser.com in my favorites. For example today they feature:

awesome site.

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Summer is over. Time to start working again (with a new phone…and not what you might expect)

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nokia E72 bem acompanhado!

Image by bigdigo via Flickr

After some serious time off, I am now back into blogging. And I promise to start using Twitter a bit more. My daughter went abroad for a year, I started work with a 600+ inbox and am already preparing 2 whitepapers and a round table on cloud computing in the public sector. We concluded the mid-year review of the team (we did good, thank you) and I read Rick Merrifield’s book “Re-Think”.

And…I dumped my HTC Touch Pro. Instead I bought a Nokia E72 (and I could not resist putting a nice picture of it on my blog).

You will probably understand why I moved away from Windows Mobile 6.x; It is an awkward and certainly not finger friendly operating environment. I already enhanced it with SPB Mobile Shell 3.5 (very nice by the way – I can recommend it to all Windows Mobile 6.x users), but after almost 2 years the phone and battery were seriously worn out.

I have thought about waiting for Windows Phone 7, but who knows when that will launch in my region? Signs are not good.

So I spend some time looking at other possibilities. After almost 2 years of experience, I feel that a touch screen keyboard does not do it for me, I wanted a real qwerty keyboard and not a slide out keyboard. The phone had to be reliable in business use and the software had to be either awesome or very reliable. Given the current situation with trolling on intellectual property (think Oracle and Java), I had some doubts on Symbian; but you might think that I am completly missing the point here.

I have chosen Nokia, and specifically the E72, because I expect it to fits my needs. The verdict after 1 week of usage:

  1. Battery life is great. Without Bluetooth I get about 60 hours of usage during the week, with Bluetooth it is about 48 hours – that is 6 times more than my HTC!
  2. Very clever connectivity intelligence, automatically switching between different WLAN’s and 3G depending on availability and priority settings.
  3. App store is providing the right apps and tools.
  4. Free (turn by turn) navigation for car and walking. Excellent GPS receiver with quick response.
  5. Intermittent success in syncing email, contact and calendar with Hotmail and the corporate Exchange environment. I have not yet figured out if I am doing something wrong or if it is really unreliable. Manual sync works flawlessly, automatic sync only when it feels up to it…
  6. Terrible menu-logic. Nokia tried to make it simple. It is not. period.
  7. Keyboard. I think I can get accustomed to it – very nice to have tactile feedback.
  8. Voice quality. Excellent.
  9. Mini USB connectivity – off course Nokia has a different type of mini USB connector so I could not use my HTC loader.
  10. Phone Quality – not a single dropped call yet.

Now I just need to stop trying to tap on the screen – it is not a touch phone….

Your thoughts?

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Integrating PC, Browser and Phone in Office 2010

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Today I was reviewing al the great material associated with the announcement of the SharePoint and Office 2010 software by Microsoft. The presentation below showed perfectly the integration of the PC, a browser and a Windows Phone 7.

The video starts showing the collaboration between two users on a spreadsheet in SharePoint, but really kicks off when the presenter shows the PowerPoint publication technology, including the usage of Windows Phone 7 in that scenario. Very cool and very useful also.

This technology uses much of the capabilities of ‘the cloud’ and really shows the integration possible between the three platforms (I must get me a production copy of Office 2010 very soon).

For a good first impression of Office Mobile, I recommend the link to ars technica (below). Office Mobile is available as a free upgrade to Windows Mobil 6.5 users.

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I had a meeting with Bob Muglia today

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IMG_0693

Today I had the privilege to spend 1.5 hour in a 1-on-1 meeting with Bob Muglia from Microsoft.

We talked a lot about BPOS, the Microsoft Azure services and the relationship to the Atos Origin business model. Some of the conversation was under NDA, so it cannot be shared here.

But I must say that Microsoft has a clear vision with their online portfolio and there are significant opportunities for partners.

Bob Muglia is a member of Microsoft’s Senior Leadership Team that is responsible for shaping the company’s business and technology strategy, so you can imagine I felt pretty inspired by this conversation.

(thx to Peter Paul de Heer and Michel N’guettia for inviting me) 

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MMC for Windows Azure Available

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Azure Services Platform Slide

Image by D.Begley via Flickr

“The Windows Azure Management Tool was created to manage your hosted services and storage accounts in Windows Azure.”

Based on the provided information, the MMC plug-in provides capabilities to remotely manage your Hosted Services, Storage Services, Blob Storage, Queues and Tables. It also provides a way to manage your certificates that are associated with your services.

It was recently published by Ryan Dunn from Microsoft.

The interface is still crude and built on top of the Azure Power-Shell Backend. That may be disappointing if you expected a full flesh systems management tooling with all the nice parts, but is actually very good news because it means that (at least in theory) anybody can build a ‘decent’ interface to the exposed API.

What I found impressive is the hook into the Azure diagnostics capabilities and work with a variety of diagnostic data. The data is downloadable so make sure you define the correct set in order to mistakenly download gigabytes of information.

Also interesting is the fact that access to the viewers (of the diagnostic data) is based on MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) so you can build your own set of viewers and add them to the MMC interface.

The information page contains a 15-min screen-cast, introducing the capabilities. Ryan also has a blog entry on this MMC.

The full set of features (I copied this from his blog entry):

Hosted Services
Upload / configure / control / upgrade / swap / remove Windows Azure application deployments
Diagnostics Configure instrumentation for Windows Azure applications (diagnostics) per source (perf counters, file based, app logs, infrastructure logs, event logs).   Transfer the diagnostic data on-demand or scheduled. View / Analyze / Export to Excel and Clear instrumentation results.
 Certificates Upload / manage certificates for Windows Azure applications
Storage Services Configure Storage Services for Windows Azure applications
BLOBs and Containers Add / Upload / Download / Remove BLOBs and Containers and connect to multiple storage accounts
Queues Add / Purge / Delete Windows Azure Queues
Tables Query and delete Windows Azure Tables
Extensibility Create plugins for rich diagnostics data visualization (e.g. add your own visualizer for performance counters). Create plugins for table viewers and editors or add completely new modules!  Plug-in Engine uses MEF (extensibility framework) to easily add functionality.
PowerShell-based backend The backend is based on PowerShell cmdlets. If you don’t like our UI, you can still use the underlying cmdlets and script out anything we do.

(Table content by Ryan Dunn, published on may 10, 2010. Source: dunnry.com/blog/)

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