May 2007 - Posts
Well, the first (note the 'FIRST' part) IT Pro Conference in New Orleans has come to an end. I am now in Chicago doing CRM training (don't get me started on my flights from NOLA to here!), and I have a minute to give a wrap up of the conference.
Saturday night we were on our own to enjoy the experience of the great resturants in the New Orleans French Quarter. I joined Handy Andy and Kevin Royalty along with David Page of San Antonio and conference coordinator Nancy Williams for dinner at Brennen's. Thank you David for picking up my tab!!! Afterwards we went up to the veranda (balcony) of the hotel to watch the crazys walking up and down Bourbon Street. Of course we were appropriately armed with tons of strings of beads to throw to the adoring crowd on the street.. But, what happens in NOLA, stays in NOLA. No, wait! That's the Vegas line :-)
Sunday's sessions were a bit different from those on Saturday. We started off with a presentation by the Microsoft SBS (Cougar) team. I blogged that right after so I'll let you go to my last post for those comments. The rest of the day was mainly technical in nature. I was impressed by the backup solutions that were presented, especially StorageCraft. I heard nothing but good things about this solution so I joined their partner program (FREE!) and am looking forward to trying out their product. Most folks favored the Sunday sessions. I preferred the Saturday sessions but thought they were all great. The presenters were mostly MVPs who donated their time to attend and present. One thing that Jeff decided early on was to have a single 'track' and not split the group up into separate sessions. I applaud him for that. That's one of the benefits of a relatively small conference. As they grow, they are forced into having tracks.
Sunday night the conference was capped by a Mississippi Riverboat dinner cruise. It was a very nice way to end up the conference. Most conferences tend to just kind of peter out at the end with nothing really capping it off. Of course a number of folks went on the real cruise starting Monday. I think Cozumel was the target destination. I'm sure there will be a lot of 'business' done on the waves this week.
See you at NOLA 08!
Cougar is the code name for the next version of SBS. The SBS team, lead by Group Product Manager Dean Paron, just gave a presentation here in NOLA. Here are some interesting, public, points:
1. Because Cougar includes Exchange 2007 which is 64 bit only, Cougar will be 64 bit ONLY.
2. Because it is 64 bit only, in place upgrades from earlier versions will not be supported. There was a discussion of how migration will likely take place by Product Manager Chirs Almida. You won't be able to do an in place upgrade EVEN FROM 64 bit hardware. There will be a migration too that will take you from your current SBS to Cougar on ANOTHER BOX. Surely there will be other third party solutions. Can you spell www.SBSMigration.com?
3. The backup will be very interesting and robust. However, it will NOT support tape. It will be fast and incremental backups can be scheduled as often as every 30 minute. There will be a read only version of NTBACKUP to allow for reading data from backups on your old system. Third party backup solutions may still support tape, but not the built in solution in SBS.
4. The current user cap of 75 users will likely remain.
5. Cougar will need to be installed behind some kind of firewall and the single NIC model will be the standard.
6. Cougar will be based on Longhorn server now officially called Windows Server 2008. I think we all figured that but now Longhorn has a real name.
I am currently attending the IT Pro Conference 2007 in New Orleans. This is a great event!
This is the first day of official events but yesterday was actually pretty much the kick off. I'll call yesterday Day 0. Day 0 was of course a travel day but I arrived in time for a private session by Microsoft for the MVPs. Can't tell you much about it except the food was GREAT! And I was hungry. Then last night Jeff Middleton, SBS MVP and conference host, put on a great 'Jazz Reception'. The food was wonderful as was the booze. Jeff went first class with Chivas Regal, Crown Royal, etc. Upper top shelf all! Most wandered off from there and hit Bourbon street. The hotel is located on the corner of Bourbon and Canal in the French Quarter. A few folks were a little draggy this morning.
It's been great chatting with my friends from all over the world. Wayne Small and Dean Calvert (and family) are here from Australia. Ian Watkins is here from London. And many more from around the world and the US.
This morning we started with a great breakfast and then on to the sessions. I came here expecting mainly some nice networking time with my peers. I was bowled over by the sessions this morning. They were right on and very valuable from my business stand point. Most of the presenters are SBS MVPs or user group leaders and have been talking about subjects of great interest to small IT Pro , firms, like ME, and how they do business, resolve issues with SBS, etc.
One nice tip I'm going to follow up on is www.smallbusinessserver.net manned (womaned) by Marian Roos, SBS MVP from the Netherlands. She will provide direct support and issue resolution for you, for a charge of course. I'm going to chat a bit with Marina and find out more.
Tonight we're on our own for dinner so we can choose one of the many, many great resturants that New Orleans is famous for!
Recently I posted how to run CRM in an IE 7 tab. It required editing the web.config file and setting AppMode 'Off'. Henrik Ditlevsen suggested a simpler way that doesn't require editing the web.config. Simply set the home page to http://crm/loader.aspx. Thanks for the feedback, Henrik.
The CRM dev team have created a forum for CRM discussion. Actually, it's been around for over a year but they are now in the process of trying to promote it. Give it a try at http://forums.microsoft.com/Dynamics/default.aspx?SiteId=27
Recently I set up a branch office for a company that has SBS 2003 R2 PE installed at their main office. The main office also has a member server that runs SQL for its line of business application. The branch office also has an SQL member server to run the LOB application there as well. The two servers need to be able to communicate. However when I first set it up, I was unable to see the main office member server. I head scratched and even got Microsoft support involved. Long story short, it turns out the Widows Firewall on the server at the main office was set with its defaults. These defaults pretty much shut out everything. I checked the File and Print Sharing and the Remote Desktop boxes to enable them and it worked. Sometimes the simplest things are what makes it all work.
One of the nice things about Internet Explorer 7 is Tabs. Tabs let you have several web sites open at once and makes it easy to switch between them. A resultant benefit is that you can also configure multiple home pages to open when you first start up IE. Being a true SBS believer, I have mine set for my Companyweb page. But often I open IE, and thus the Companyweb, just to get to the CRM web client. I do have a link for CRM on the Companyweb which makes it easy to get to CRM. But recently I started thinking that it would be nice to have CRM open as its own 'home page' in its own tab. So, I configured http://CRM as the second entry in the home page. Well, this became pretty awkward. CRM would open, but in its own browser. It wasn't pretty so I quit using it. Then, while conducting a Customization training session in Tennessee last week, it hit me, let's see what happens if we turn off App Mode.
Now, I don't normally like turning off App Mode. It makes CRM open in a regular web browser, complete with all the buttons and tool bars and address lines and menus and all. I kinda like the nice clean look of CRM without all that stuff. But! If you want to run CRM as a tabbed home page in IE7, it's a good thing.
To set this up is very easy. On the CRM server, find the CRM web files and look for the web.config file. Open it and towards the bottom, you will find <add key="AppMode" value="On"/> and change the On to Off. Save the file and you're done!
Now when I open IE, my Companyweb comes up and CRM comes up all nice and fine in it's own tab. Give it a try, both ways. You'll like AppMode Off with IE7.