Samim Erdogan

Another "Towels-and-Staples" in the Making? ;-)

2006-05-23T18:39:00Z

Slashdot is quoting from ZDNet Australia that MS IT has considered restricting employees from having admin rights on their work PCs. Thank God they decided against it.

I actually had a conversation about this with Tomas Vetrovsky last year while we were both at Mobile & Embedded DevCon 2005 (Checkout MEDC 2006 here). Tomas told me then that maybe 10K MS PCs are already running with low-rights to their users. He thought it was only a matter of time before MSIT expands the practice to engineering staff as well.

However, LUA (Limited User Access)—or what is now called User Access Control—is already taking us in this direction. 100% unfettered access was great in the early days of the PC because it gave any amateur programmer the tools to build the next cool app. In todays world of worms and spyware, it could be a nightmare. Most users don’t ever download anything to their PCs, at least not knowingly. If only we could get all the apps to play along.

Microsoft to Acquire Softricity

2006-05-23T09:39:00Z

Microsoft just announced intent to acquire Softricity. Bill Gates’ keynote tomorrow morning at WinHEC will probably mention the acquisition and perhaps even have a demo involving Softricity. This is quite interesting for Terminal Services, considering the overlap between the scenarios addressed by server and application virtualization and the use cases of Terminal Services. Softricity rounds up and completes MS’s virtualization story.

BillG’s keynote will also demonstrate a TS scenario that is our primary focus in Longhorn: Remote access to applications via TS WebAccess and Remote Programs. As the owner of our WebAccess and remote programs publishing story, I am quite excited. This will also be the fist time that TS itself is featured in one of Bill’s keynotes: Technologies and scenarios that we very heavily supported, such as MediaCenter, have been in keynotes in the recent past, but never TS on it s own. This is a first for us, and a very proud moment.

You can watch the keynote here: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winhec/default.mspx. Do watch, and let me know what you thought.

Cross-posted on the TS Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/ts/archive/2006/05/23/604498.aspx

Vista Search will improve your life and Beta2 is here to prove it...

2006-05-23T01:16:13Z

The web is a-buzz with expectation as we make our final march towards Vista Beta2. There are many rumours about the exact timing, the exact date. More important than “when?”, however, is “what?”. Quite apart from the ship date of Vista Beta2, and eventually of Vista & Longhorn Server, what is its contents? WinHec06 is beginning tomorrow, and its focus is Vista & Longhorn Server. What is the focus on?

Since Beta1 in December of 2005, more and more people in Microsoft have been self-hosting Vista as a daily work machine, as a laptop OS, as a home computer. The February CTP improved on Beta1, and increased the ranks of self-hosters. Since February, we also have many customers who are beta testing both Vista as a client and deploying Longhorn as a server.

Over this time period, I tried to self-host myself, but until last week, I failed. There were some mundane reasons for this failure: I did not have enough time to transfer all my apps and data to a new computer. The Windows Easy Transfer wizard was not working that well yet, and even if it worked perfectly, I felt uneasy letting it handle the weird partition structure I maintained on my XP desktop. For a while I was dogfooding Office 2007, and I felt one dogfood at a time was more than enough.

But the most important reason was Search.

I did not realize how much I came to depend on Windows Desktop Search. Since lookout I have stopped filing into folders—I flattened my filing folders to a single archive folder. Since Yahoo's X1 and Google’s desktop search, I stopped deleting my e-mails—I archive everything that may remotely be necessary one day. And since MSN’s desktop search, and later with Windows Desktop search, I nearly stopped using the Windows Explorer and Outlook’s folder views—I use the search view exclusively. At each step in that progression of search tools, I came to depend on another feature that became mission-critical for my day-to-day work. So much so that now, I have literally gigabytes of email, documents, cached files from our team spec library, documents I collected from the web, source code snippets, blogs, all sitting on my computer.

I jumped on the Vista self-host bandwagon soon after Beta1, but I jumped right off, because search did not work for me. In Beta1 Vista Search fell short:

Indexing email: Played reasonably well with Outlook 2003, but severely conflicted with Outlook 2007’s indexer. This was not a deal-breaker though—I could live with slow results, and did not expect to dogfood two Beta-1 products at once.
Reliability & uptime: As expected from a Beta 1 product, memory use, stability, and performance was dismal. But it was improving.
Scope & Comprehensiveness: I had no idea and no control over what was being indexed or searched. This was a deal breaker: While “finding” is important, not-finding is almost as important: If I search for a tag that I know should hit that market research I downloaded last year, and I don’t get a hit on my desktop, that is still a very valuable result: It tells me a clear “No”, and stops me from wasting my time. Assured that I really searched everything I had, I can now search for it somewhere else, e.g. by going to the Internet, or to the CorpNet library. But if my index is not comprehensive or if the search scope is not clear, then I do not get that clear “no”.
Tag search: “From:samim to:steve date:yesterday” simply did not work. This was a deal breaker, too. I had no way to find many things which I remember only by those tags.

Now, with Vista Beta2, I find that all of these are fixed:

The indexer in Outlook 2007 Beta 2 works perfectly with the one in Vista Beta 2. I have my 200K+ emails all indexed and can find an email I sent 4 years ago, using either the Outlook interface or the Vista interface. Wow!
Tag search is back: I can now enter the tags right into the search box. This is immensely useful and so intuitive. I personally have no use for the search builder UI, and I am glad it is tucked out of the way in the default view.
Reliability: I have been using a Beta-2 build on my work PC for a full week now, and I have never seen the search fail, or take more than 3 seconds to return results. That does not mean it does not crash: A couple times I saw a pop-up saying “SearchIndexer.exe stopped functioning…” But, it restarts even after a crash.
Scope: One gripe I had from Beta1 was that the default scope of the search was the current window. This made no sense to me: If what I was looking for was in the current folder, I would not be searching for it, right? Now with Beta 2, searching over everything is a lot easier. I think this still needs to improve, but now it works much better.
Comprehensiveness: The UI to control what is indexed, while still a bit cumbersome, makes better sense now. As a PM, I would agree that this UI is useful only for a very small minority of tech-savvy users. But I am one of them, and I am happy to have it.

At the end I can say this: Vista Search is going to improve your life and Beta2 is here to prove it. Even if you set your UI Theme to Windows Classic and never see a single shred of AeroGlass, you will get enough from search alone to make the wait worthwhile.

Here is to Thinking Fast On Your Feet

2006-05-16T08:22:00Z

A few tips for your next VP presentation:

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/video/cabbie.wmv

AT&T Cingular Merger Causing Overage on Wireless Minute Plans

2004-05-20T21:02:00Z

I was looking at our wireless account statement on the AT&T wireless account today, and I saw an anomaly: Shared Mobile-to-Mobile usage was zero on one of our two lines. Like most people with shared plans, we use our phones mostly to call each other, and most our friends are also on AT&T. So Mobile-to-Mobile minutes are the ones we typically use the most. Our usage pattern, our minute plan, our phones, our friends' providers, nothing changed since last month, so why are we not using our much cheaper Mobile-to-Mobile minutes as we should?

Here is the answer:

Q: How do I know whether a call will be counted as part of my unlimited Mobile-to-Mobile calls?
A: With GSM America National, your unlimited Mobile-to-Mobile minutes are available for calls placed to or received from the applicable Mobile-to-Mobile Service Area to or from another AT&T Wireless customer when both are on the portion of our domestic network that we own and operate and "AT&T" or "AT&T Wireless" is displayed on the phone.
Pasted from http://www.attwireless.com/gsmamerica/gsmamerica.jhtml

Our phones were displaying “Cingular” every now and then, and we thought the merger was coming through, we were getting better coverage, it was cool! But the whole time we were being overcharged.

In fairness to AT&T & Cingular, pulling off a a merger like the one they are going through is a tough engineering task. The customer support person indicated that they would go through our bill at the end of the month to see if any refund is appropriate. It would be a good idea to pay attention to this as you look at your next bill.

News of OneNote SP1 is out.

2004-04-21T23:33:00Z

Here it is in CNET:

Test Version of OneNote Update Released
Microsoft has released a trial version of the first major update to OneNote, the note-taking application it introduced last year. 4/21/2004 CNET

Microsoft Disclaimer

2004-04-21T08:12:00Z

I work for Microsoft, which means I need to caveat my public comments, especially when they are about Microsoft and Microsoft products. :-)

This blog reflects my opinions only. The posting is provided ”AS IS” with with no warranties, and confers no rights. Any code, demo, or sample on this blog is subject to the terms specified at >http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.mspx

OneNote SP1 preview is out.

2004-04-21T08:01:00Z

A fitting way to start this blog: A preview of OneNote SP1 is available. Mentioned here, and here, and available for download here.