GavinGee's Blog

Here is a link to Dan Holme's articles on his experiences with Microsoft Online Services.

The report card:
"Final Report: "A" for Effort & Service; "A-/B+" for Features – Absolutely Worth Exploring
What Microsoft has attained in this first release is an extraordinary, robust, enterprise-ready service. I don’t expect there to be many fundamental problems (security, reliability, availability, performance) based on my experience thus far. ":
http://www.officesharepointpro.com/TabId/149/NodeId/1950/a-microsoft-online-report-card.aspx 

His migration experiences: http://www.officesharepointpro.com/TabId/149/NodeId/1951/my-migration-to-microsoft-online.aspx

The Beta 2 release of Internet Explorer has been let out of the door here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx

Worth checking out from both an end user experience perspective but also to check that if you own a website it will still look right with the new version of IE.

An updated implementation of hosted CRM 4.0 has been released to demo and allow trial of a hosted CRM 4.0 platform.

The new site can be found here:

http://www.hostedmicrosoftcrmtrial.com/

Note. This is not a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online platform but one specifically built for our hosting partners and their potential customers.

• The updated trial site leverages the multi-tenancy capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.
• New features to experience:
• The trial instance is an organizational level deployment with administrative permissions. This means that each trial user has full access and control over their trial organization to add users and share the CRM product with others. In the previous version, the trial instance was provisioned as a business unit thus permissions were limited.
• A trial instance can be localized in the user's language of choice – the product is available in 25 languages (including English). Users worldwide can now experience their CRM trial the same way they'll consume it.
• Trial users can now change and reset their passwords without the involvement of Trial Support.
• Enhanced reporting for regional Microsoft trial site administrators enables them to analyze trial subscriptions by country and region.

One capability that is not supported is Outlook integration into the trial environment. Although Outlook integration is a very compelling feature of CRM, the effort to support such an experience in a trial deployment would have presented significant support challenges given the unknown state of each user's PC/laptop configuration, OS, software, settings, etc.

So we all know in the hosting field that power is a huge factor.

In 2006 according to the EPA in the US, datacentres used 61 billion Kilowatt hours (KWH) which is the equivalent to 5.8 million households!

Growing to 100Bilion KWH by 2011. This is 10 new power stations!

I thought I would share some resources on energy efficiency best practices from Microsoft Data Centres as simply cannot continue to just use more power but be more efficient with the power we have:

http://www.microsoft.com/environment/our_commitment/articles/datacenter_bp.aspx

5 quick steps to improving your power usage.

• Find servers doing REALLY nothing
• Right size your (new) hardware
• Consolidate underutilized servers
• Use free server virtualization
• Optimize & fine-tune your server OS

How?

• Check out System Operations Manager 2007 for benchmarking server utilisation.
• Right hardware – overspec'd power supplies waste at least 10% energy (www.apc.com/wp/?wp=127)
• Capacity planning with System Centre Capacity Planning tool.
• Consolidate through scalability improvements – Windows server 2008 and 64 bit hardware.
• Consolidate through Virtualisation - Hyper-V and Planning and Assessment toolkit http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977556.aspx
  • Leverage System Centre Virtual Machine Manager to manage your virtualisation platform.
• Leverage the OS energy features
  • Processor power management represents is an awesome tool available today for managing power usage. Lots of granularity built into Windows Server 2008.

Yesterday Tuesday 19^th of August we made some announcements around the change to support running on Virtualisation for our server applications.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615

http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp/

As far as I can see this is another reason for hoster's to adopt a Premier support agreement to mitigate any risk of running on 3^rd party virtualisation platforms.

A 48 hr conversation all about the 'Next Web', what it means today and the potential impact of technologies, tools and techniques for the future. Inspiring designers and developers to take the media they love to new levels of user experience.

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/remix08/

So who's going to speaking?

• How about the person who invented ASP.NET and who runs the team that writes Silverlight and makes Visual Studio and .NET a reality?
• How about one of the world's leading user interaction researchers and authors – someone that has been awarded for Lifetime Achievement by ACM SIGCHI for fundamental contributions to the field of Computer Human Interaction and many other amazing accolades.
• What about a designer who has helped forge the way we look at brands like Diesel, BBC, Channel 4, Disney, Benetton, Kellogg's and Coca-Cola?
• How about the person who had the number one requested session at Tech.Ed developer US or one of the highest rated speakers at Tech.Ed developer in Barcelona?
• Shall I go on - how about the creative director at moo.com, or the program manager for IE8, ...

How about ALL OF THEM? That's the profile of just some of the speakers at our very own ReMix UK 08 event taking place on 18/19^th September in Brighton.  You can read about the speakers on the event website.

MSDN downloads are available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx

More details here:

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/default.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/aug08/08-06SQLServer2008PR.mspx

Mike has written an article that's been posted on Technet on the above topic found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc745952.aspx

Missed this a few weeks ago, but the Microsoft.com team have published performance data on their experiences with IIS 7.

All found here: http://blogs.technet.com/mscom/archive/2008/06/09/microsoft-com-operations-performance-analysis-of-iis-7-0-windows-server-2008.aspx

Bottom line... 31% more requests per second than IIS 6 with a slight CPU increase.

http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

What is your perception?

Found this posted on the MS Exchange team blog:

• White Paper: Continuous Replication Deep Dive: Continuous replication is a key feature of Exchange Server 2007. Read about the technical details and inner workings of continuous replication technology in this white paper.
• White Paper: Planning for Large Mailboxes with Exchange 2007: Learn how to deploy large mailboxes in your environment while also achieving high performance, high availability, and rapid recovery-all at a lower cost than with Exchange 2003.

I was having a chat with the guys over at Mural Consulting about some activities they have been doing with Microsoft in enabling ISV's for CRM in the S+S world.

Check out the landing page here: http://crm.dynamics.com/microsoft_ISV_readiness/index.html

You can follow the links through and perform a self assessment as an ISV on your readiness for CRM and S+S http://www.saasreadiness.com/wpc08/

Top line blurb from the site:

The ISV SaaS Readiness Self Assessment tool is designed exclusively for ISVs who are planning, building, testing and/or launching a software + services solution on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. It will help you to continuously measure your SaaS business, technical, hosting, and operational readiness.

All details relocated from the IIS.NET website:

• IIS7 is faster and more efficient than any other version of IIS.
• With IIS7 you can manage whole Web farms from one place.
• IIS7 allows you to delegate management workload with site owners. Site owners can also remotely manage their sites and applications over HTTPS from Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008.  IIS7's XCopy deployment model even allows you to deploy applications preconfigured!
• IIS7 is much more flexible and customizable than before, allowing you to fine tune the server (including server core!) to minimize security footprint and downtime due to patching. 
• You can save loads of time by automating more tasks with the interface that is right for you.  
• If you do run into issues, IIS7 makes it easy to resolve site issues faster, minimizing down time due to that bone headed developer on your staff. 
• IIS7 includes built-in support for PHP, making it the best Web server for both Open Source languages and .NET.  You can now have a single Windows platform to host all your web workloads!
• IIS7 makes it easy to publish content securely over FTP/SSL or WebDAV!
• Windows and IIS7 are cheaper than ever with the new Windows Web 2008 product.  This version of Windows is super inexpensive and supports all the great features of IIS, Sharepoint, SQL, Windows Media server and more for Internet facing sites!
• And as if that isn't enough, IIS7 is getting better every day with new IIS7 Extensions like built-in progressive streaming and playlist support for media content, URL Rewrite capabilities, integrated database management, powershell support, and much more. 

So I was fortunate to attend this year's worldwide partner conference over in Houston, Texas

For those of you who don't know what this event is all about it's basically the big show of the year for Microsoft partners, 12000 of them in fact I believe, that are brought together for a few days of keynotes, specific breakout tracks, training and hands on labs not forgetting the most important aspect – networking and a bit of fun thrown in for good measure.

This year we all descended into Houston Texas, into a typical southern US summer... hmm anybody like rain in 35 deg C?

Anyway apart from the usual topics such as Vista, Windows Mobile and CRM the big message was on Microsoft's Online services and its strategy for the new world of Software as a Service – Software plus Services if you take the Microsoft view.

Lots of articles have been written on this topic to name but a few...

http://www.computerworlduk.com/technology/applications/software-service/news/index.cfm?newsid=9955
http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn/news/2221498/microsoft-woos-vars-saas-4121114
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/07/10/ballmer_partners_services/
http://channel.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=14319&page=1&search=microsoft%20partner%20conference

Microsoft Online represents a great opportunity for the whole of the Microsoft ecosystem and channel partners, including our hosting partners: bringing awareness to the world on hosted solutions and software services, enabling new scenarios and revenue opportunities for different partner bases and enabling the channel to provide solutions that customers have been asking for, plus enabling some great new opportunities for our hosting partners in differentiating their offerings and targeting more specific offerings to the market.

There is a picture I used to help me articulate at our hosting event in London a few months ago that really talks to this:

It was great to see some of the UK hosting partners in attendance this year at WPC including, Cobweb, Genesis, IncreaseCRM, Endeavours, MasterNaut, Trident Group, NetworkSI and although they couldn't attend, 7Global were a finalist in the partner of the year award for Advanced Infrastructure Solutions – Hosting solutions.

I caught this post up on my colleague's blog on Hyper-V and support for Exchange. http://blogs.technet.com/jkruse/archive/2008/06/27/hyper-v-is-here-what-about-exchange.aspx

For those hosters who are considering delivering a Hyper-V based solution for virtualised Exchange solutions please see the following detail:

In case you haven't heard the news, we have released Hyper-V into the wild.  In fact did you know that 25% of microsoft.com is already running on Hyper-V VMs?

So what about Exchange Server?

As we recently announced at Tech.Ed USA, Microsoft will be publishing a support statement with respect to Exchange Server on Hyper-V within 60 days of today.

Some of the more noteworthy bits of info from the session are:

• Within 60 days of Hyper-V's RTM, the Exchange team will publish a detailed support statement for Hyper-V, and a TechNet article with best practices.
• Customers should not deploy Exchange on Hyper-V until our support guidance is available.
• Early results show that performance of Exchange 2007 on Hyper-V is quite good, and that it scales very well from 1-4 processors per VM.

In terms of best practices and requirements, the following guidance was released:

• We're only supporting guests running Exchange Server 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008.
• We're only supporting fixed disks, and not dynamic disks.
• Storage should be on spindles that are separate from the Guest operating system VHD physical storage.
• Storage must be SCSI passthrough or iSCSI (with a preference of SCSI passthrough for queues, databases and log files).
• All Exchange server roles, except for the Unified Messaging server role, will be supported.
• There's a limit on VHD size of 2040 GB.

Let's not forget however that the recommended method to build a hosted Exchange platform is to use the HMC 4.5 guidance found here: www.microsoft.com/hosting