February, 2007

Respect to John Dowdell at Adobe who posted a link to a PDF (of course!) regarding Adobe product support on Vista. Whilst most products are listed as "does not support" or "not officially, at least it's definitive.

Download the video for local playback (right click and Save As) 121mb

I found this great new Vista Ultimate video last night that I wish we'd had for our EVO roadshow. If you need a good "bum warmer" movie when you're doing an event with people walking in settling them in to the mood of a Vista love-in :) Alternatively if you want a great looping promo video this would do the trick. Hopefully a higher res version (HD anyone) will show up!

I was just about to tip off my buddy Long but he already spotted it :)

Check out these two cool videos by the Canadian Live team on how you can get more out of Live Search and Live maps.

Windows Live Series - Live Search
Windows Live Series - Live Maps

Taught me a few things but hey, that's not hard :)

I've spoken with a number of partners I know in the UK this week about Vista deployments within their own organization and with customers. A few months back the barrier for Vista was drivers for hardware and whilst that hasn't totally disappeared, the situation is way way better than I expected. Sony who are sometimes a little tardy shall we say in putting drivers out has a full set for my Vaio SZ3 and I see Toshiba has a similar listing on their site.

The conversation seems to have shifted to application compatibility hence the release recently of a truck load of deployment tools is timely so I've listed them below. Equally timely (perhaps more so) is the list of 800 compatible apps. There are some big boys like Cisco, IBM and Adobe missing from here though David Boschman covered this nicely in a post last week.

[update from JD at Adobe - thanks!]

• Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment 2007:  BDD 2007 is a set of comprehensive guidelines and tools that organizations can use to help deploy Windows Vista and the 2007 Office system to desktops. 

• Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0: ACT 5.0 is a tool that helps businesses reduce the cost and time needed to resolve potential application compatibility issues encountered when moving to Windows Vista. Through a series of compatibility evaluators and tools, ACT 5.0 enables software developers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and IT professionals to determine whether their applications are compatible with Windows Vista.

• Windows Vista Hardware Assessment 1.0
  Does what it says on the tin.

• Microsoft Volume Activation 2.0 tools. Microsoft has added several options to the ways in which business customers can use volume activation technologies to activate multiple Windows Vista-based PCs in their desktop environments.
  • The Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) enables IT professionals to automate and centrally manage the volume activation process using a Multiple Activation Key (MAK).
  • Key Management Service (KMS) for Windows Server 2003 provides customers with the functionality of running KMS on Windows Server 2003.

• Virtual PC 2007. Virtual PC 2007 is optimized for Windows Vista and makes it possible to simultaneously run multiple operating systems on a single PC. but perhaps even more useful is the 800 strong application compatibility list. It's actually disappointing to see some of the big vendors like Cisco and Adobe missing off this which David Boschman discussed last week. Let's hope they join the party soon!

Microsoft Ships Vista Deployment Tools
Microsoft's List Of 800 Windows Vista-Compatible Apps Excludes IBM, Adobe

More PFTF coverage - this time from CRN - who I think captured the essence of this project very well. Hats off to Mr Flinders I presume. Backed up by Karl's quote:

Karl Noakes, director of channel development at Microsoft, told CRN: “We’ve realised that over the next three years developments in the Internet will change the way we do business. We therefore need to evolve our approach to partnering.”

Yep, that pretty much captures it. The landscape of partners is changing in lots of ways. I met up with Geek Squad UK today and I think these guys could take the market for consumers by storm. They'll certainly provide some strong competition for PC World and Dixons. More GeekSquad soon but if you live in London and drive out on the A40, check our their new office next to the Carphone Warehouse HQ.