Read this blog post from Seth Godin a while back but I was thinking about it yesterday so had to look it up again: When to start

Too often we find too many reasons not to do something, rather than just getting stuck in.

Found this interesting article on the Computerworld site this morning about projects going bad:
The people aspect of project failure

And another interesting article here: Market for IT contractors still expanding

Microsoft’s new homepage which was previously available through a beta link is now live – www.microsoft.com. It’s very impressive from a technological point-of-view, but I don’t think it’s actually that functional. More like a case of excessive ,unnecessary AJAX that doesn’t ease the use of the site. Still it’s quite nice to look at and I do like the thumbnails feature, but thankfully they haven’t rolled it out to the whole site though.

I was told by Microsoft last week that the RTM version of Exchange would only be made available in 64bit versions – even for evaluation purposes. This came as a bit of a shock as I’ve always been under the impression that there would be a 32bit version of the software available for use in test labs and demos. Well it’s good to see that MS are actually releasing a 32bit version for evaluation purposes only, and you can download it now from this link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=444C259E-605F-4A82-96D5-A2F448C9D4FF&displaylang=en

So I guess the expected question is why there isn’t a 32bit version that’s available for production use too? Small businesses don’t need 64bit as they generally have less than 100 mailboxes. Also, why would you need to run the Edge Transport role on 64bit hardware when all it’s doing is acting as an SMTP relay? I don’t think the problem is the 64bit hardware as most recent servers support either AMD’s x64, or Intel’s EM64T platform – the problem is that you need to upgrade to 64bit Windows Server, and make sure that all software that will be running on the box is 64bit compatible. This would include backup agents, anti-virus software, management software, and anything else that needs to run on the box – don’t forget that SMBs usually don’t have dedicated Exchange boxes so there is often software running on the box too.

A new beta version of Google
’s toolbar for the Firefox browser has brought integration of Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets service to your desktop. What this means is that you can double-click on an Excel or Word document and have it open directly in your Google Docs site.

read more | digg story

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 – Learning Portal
  Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 can give your organization the messaging protection that you need, the anywhere access to e-mail you want, and the enterprise reliability that you deserve. Let Microsoft Learning help you develop your expertise in this advan
  (tags: microsoft free exchange tutorial)

Have a look at this amazing video – I’d love to know how long it took them to get this right.

 Just picked this up via the TechNet blogs feed:

Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is now available for download on Microsoft Connect http://connect.microsoft.com . BDD 2007 provides end-to-end guidance and automation for large scale deployment of Windows Vista and the 2007 Office System.

BDD 2007 RC1 is feature complete and has been updated to support the released version of the User State Migration Toolkit (USMT) 3.0. BDD 2007 RC1 includes a new version of the standalone task sequencer derived from System Center Configuration Manager 2007. Documentation is now complete and has also released to web at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/desktopdeployment/bdd/2007/default.mspx.

This release supports Windows Vista and Windows XP imaging and deployment. For more information, please see the Release Notes included with BDD 2007 RC1.

Where to Find BDD 2007 : BDD 2007 RC1 is available as an open beta download, visit http://connect.microsoft.com and navigate to the Downloads page for the “Business Desktop Deployment 2007 (RC1) for Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system” program. Dependent tools such as the Windows AIK and USMT3 are downloaded from the Workbench.

Source: BDD 2007 Release Candidate 1 disponible
Originally published on Sat, 09 Dec 2006 07:53:00 GMT by fabricem

Great news… This just in from the EHLO blog: 

This morning, we signed off Exchange 2007 for release to you!

We’ve bet the company on this product. Here at Microsoft, we have over 120,000 mailboxes running in production on Exchange 2007 – exceeding our SLA of 99.95% availability. Likewise, over 200 Technology Adoption Partners and Rapid Deployment Partners have over 55,000 mailboxes in production operating within their enterprise SLA’s.

In addition to taking the time to ensure this software was rock solid for you, we’ve invested more time in documentation and deployment guidance than we have for any other release previously. Please do check it out and let us know if we’re missing something you need.

Thank you for all of your support, feedback, and patience during this journey by our team. We are committed to working with you on successful deployments in the coming months and years.

On behalf of the entire Exchange team, thank you for choosing Exchange.

-Terry

Source: Signed off!
Originally published on Thu, 07 Dec 2006 20:32:57 GMT by Exchange