Rowan Simpson just linked to this article which removes the extra step when adding feeds to Google Reader from within Firefox. Usually you’re presented with a choice to subscribe to the feed with either Google Homepage or Google Reader. If you only ever use Google Reader, this step is unnecessary and can be removed by following these instructions:

Type about:config in the address bar, and change the following two entries as follows:

browser.contentHandlers.types.2.title = Google Reader
browser.contentHandlers.types.2.uri = http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/%s

This is about to be huge…!

Microsoft Launches New Product Category: Surface Computing Comes to Life in Restaurants, Hotels, Retail Locations and Casino Resorts
First commercially available surface computer from Microsoft breaks down barriers and provides effortless interaction with information using touch, natural gestures and physical objects.

Surface Computing Website: www.surface.com
First look at surface computing: http://on10.net/Blogs/larry/first-look-microsoft-surfacing-computing/

Jeff Jones (Strategy Director in the Microsoft Security Technology Unit) has written a post about Server Core and how its reduced footprint increases security dramatically. The key here is “reduced attack surface area” as all of the most insecure areas of a server have been removed, such as IIS, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, etc…

However, pulling all these components out of a server have also reduced its functionality, which is why only the following roles are available: (taken from the excellent Server Core Step By Step Guide)

• Active Directory Domain Services
• Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS)
• Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) Server
• DNS Server
• File Services
• Print Server
• Streaming Media Services

I’m a big fan of this approach and I can’t wait for Server Core to be improved so that the GUI is completely removed. I also hope that the modulisation of the components is improved so that the Web Server role becomes available as a Server Core option. It would seem to me that one of the best scenarios to implement a server with a “reduced attack surface area” would be on a public-facing web server.

I’ve been running Vista Ultimate for the last couple of weeks – it’s been full of highs and lows, but I’m saving that for a future blog post.

But I ran into something interesting this morning when I went to use one of Vista’s little-known gems, the Snipping Tool. It’s a nifty little screen capture utility that I was very impressed with during the early betas. Unfortunately it was missing…

I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t have it installed, so assumed that Microsoft must have removed it from the final RTM release. But I searched the help and found lots of info about the tool with screencasts showing how it is used. But in the screencast, you see a hand dragging around a stylus on a tablet screen – which reminded me that I had uninstalled the tablet PC software from the Windows features.

Turns out the snipping tool is marked as a tablet pc optional component and you can’t get it without installing the whole tablet pc pack. This seems like a bit of bloatware to me – the snipping tool is equally as useful on a non-tablet computer, so why do I need the hand-writing recognition software and the other tablet pc components too? Does this also mean that the lower-spec Windows versions don’t include the useful snipping tool, because they don’t have the tablet pc feature pack..?

Thanks Eileen, for the nice summary of essential Exchange 2007 reading. I’ve got a bit to catch up on!

TechNet Articles

• Getting Started with Exchange Server 2007: Server Roles
• New Performance and Scalability Functionality

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Live Webcasts

• High Availability and Clustering in Exchange Server 2007 
• How Microsoft IT Designs Its 64-bit Exchange Server 2007 Infrastructure 
• Introduction to the New Exchange Server 2007 Administrator Interface 
• Exchange Server 2007 Transport and Routing Architecture 
• Introduction to Windows PowerShell Scripting in Exchange Server 2007 
• Giving Administrators More Control in Exchange Server 2007 
• Improvements to Calendaring in Exchange 2007 

Virtual Labs

• Introduction to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

Web Resources

• Exchange Server 2007 Preview Site
• All Exchange Server Webcasts
• Exchange Server 2007 TechCenter

Source: Eileen Brown’s WebLog : Exchange server 2007: loads more resources

Paull Thurrott looks at the ridiculous number of Windows Vista versions and how confusing they all are for end users.

When I first revealed that Microsoft would sell Windows Vista in an unprecedented number of product versions way back in September 2005, I questioned the reasoning behind this decision. Consumers, I felt, would be confused by the myriad of options available to them, and the diversification of the Windows product line would cause support headaches.

Clearly, I suffer from a lack of imagination because it’s way worse than I ever thought it could be now that Vista is widely available. Simply counting the number of Vista versions Microsoft is currently selling is an effort in futility. Sure, there’s Windows Vista Starter, Vista Home Basic, Vista Home Premium, Vista Business, Vista Enterprise, and Vista Ultimate. But there are also the so-called N versions of Vista Home Premium and Vista Business in the EU (where, I believe, “N” stands for “no one is interested”). There are separate Upgrade and Full versions of Vista Home Basic, Home Premium (and Home Premium N), Business (and Business N), and Ultimate. And though Vista Ultimate includes both 32-bit and 64-bit media in the retail box, Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, and Business all ship in separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions as well. Are there separate 32-bit and 64-bit Upgrade and Full versions of these products? You know, I’m not sure.

There’s been a bit of discussion recently about the merits of Vista’s UAC; Jim Allchin wrote a long blog post detailing how they tried to balance the security with usability. My personal opinion is that UAC is too strict and becomes too annoying with too many prompts for seemingly innocent tasks. Installing iTunes, for example, causes 3 or 4 UAC prompts to appear during the installation. Also, editing/deleting files which your user account does not have explicit rights to, causes UAC prompts to appear too.

In my opinion, Microsoft have not got the balance right just yet – the security outweighs the usability.

I know a lot of people that are turning off UAC as soon as they can, and are also recommending to others to turn it off too. This of course is the worse scenario as I do believe that UAC is a good thing, but if it’s too hard to work with people will just switch it off and lose out on the protection that it offers.

To prove my point that this is going to be a big problem as Vista gets released to the general public, Lifehacker have just posted a very helpful article on how to completely disable UAC and the related security warnings that pop up after it has been turned off. This obviously leaves your system in a much less-secure state. Not much progress!

Some more Exchange 2007 links to get through…

Get ready for Exchange 2007

Well, the IT’s Showtime team have products a “Get ready for Exchange 2007 roadshow” videos. You can watch your way through a set of videos discussion architecture, deployment, management and Unified Communications from the guys at corp. Here’s a list of sessions released recently…
http://blogs.technet.com/eileen_brown/archive/2007/01/22/get-ready-for-exchange-2007.aspx

Exchange Webcasts for February
http://blogs.technet.com/eileen_brown/archive/2007/01/22/exchange-webcasts-for-february.aspx

Tips for managing the Exchange Server 2007 Console views

In Exchange 2007, the Recipient Configuration node and its child nodes (Mailbox, Distribution Group, Mail Contact, Disconnected Mailbox) of the Exchange Management Console (console) are used for recipient management. By default, up to 1000 recipients in the current domain are displayed in the result pane of the Recipient Configuration node and its child nodes. For organizations with more than 1000 recipients, 1000 recipients have to be displayed by default while they may not be the specific set of recipients that you want to manage, and you may not want to wait until they are displayed. This article gives a few tips to manage and speed up the console view.
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/19/432275.aspx

RTM Exchange Server 2007 Setup GUI Walkthrough

Exchange 2007 introduces a completely rewritten Setup GUI experience, designed to match the Administrative experience you’ll get with Exchange 2007 Management Console once the installation is completed. Like the Exchange 2007 Management Console, the new Exchange Setup is written on top of the Windows PowerShell cmdlets and is therefore completely scriptable with one-liners!

In the rest of this blog post, I’ll show you the new GUI and talk about the various options available throughout the setup process.
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/18/432264.aspx

Bill Gates presented the keynote at CES a short while ago and I’m just watching the streaming video now. Lots of Windows Vista features displayed, nothing which really excites me at all. Zune mp3 player gets a bit of a push too – number 2 mp3 player in it’s segment?? Windows Live……

Most exciting announcement so far has been the addition of a new server product targeted for homes called Windows Home Server. At first glance it doesn’t seem that interesting, and nothing that couldn’t be achieved with free, open-source software. However, dig a little deeper and you’ll find a bunch of really innovative features that you won’t find anywhere else yet. The most interesting of these is the storage management features: Windows Home Server doesn’t use drive letters, instead all storage is aggregated into one large storage group, and within that storage group data is replicated among the drives to provide redundancy so that drives can be added or removed without worrying about what data is stored on them. Windows Home Server will be available as a beta within the next couple of months with a release date aimed at the second half of the year. Paul Thurrott has a more in-depth review with some screenshots. Another compelling feature is the ability to access all of your files remotely using a Windows Live address that is configured for your Windows Home Server. This also allows you to upload photos to your server over the internet from wherever you are in the world.

The Xbox 360 also gets a lot of coverage, and rightly so – the Xbox 360 really is becoming the hub of entertainment in your living room that Microsoft have been aiming towards for the last few years. Along with the TV and movie downloads that are already available, Microsoft have now added IPTV access from the Xbox 360. This is not as compelling for those of us that live in IPTV-deprived countries but the potential that this opens is huge. I’m not too sure how Sony can compete with this – the integration into the rest of Microsoft’s products may win over consumers here.

Another interesting part of the keynote was the presentation between Ford and Microsoft about the new “Sync” device that will be fitted to certain Ford models starting with the current Focus model. Sync provides connectivity between your car and all of your portable devices such as mp3 players, phones, cameras, etc. You can listen to text messages from your phone read out to you by your car’s text-to-voice system. You can be talking on your phone while getting into your car and seamlessly switch to your car phone without hanging up. You can access your mp3 player through the car stereo and create playlists using the voice-recognition software.

Bill Gates finished the keynote presentation with a demo of  a room of the future which I don’t think we’ll be seeing anytime soon. Overall it was an interesting presentation – I wasn’t overly impressed with the Wow factor of Windows Vista or Windows Live, but the Home Server product and the Xbox 360 definitely impressed me.

I’m still not sure who will come out on top in the console wars, or whether the Blu-ray disc will prevail over HD-DVD – but if you visit this site and watch the videos, you may be convinced that the PS3 has it all! 

Link to PLAYB3YOND.COM