Sean McBreen's WebLog

I'm Moving to Redmond

Well it's probably old news for many people...

http://www.microsoft.com/nz/presscentre/articles/2007/newleadership.mspx

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/CCD674FACCC2FD78CC25738B007910B2

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=7483

http://m-net.net.nz/2038/latest-news/latest-news/microsoft-nz-announces-top-management-reshuffle.php

My family and I are making the move to Redmond at the start of next year.  in fact as I write this blog post I'm sitting in a hotel room in Redmond town centre (Marriott Residence Inn) after being over here for a week 'house hunting'.

It was not really my plan to head off to Redmond after returning to NZ only three and a half years ago.  But I've been given a great opportunity to work for the corporate version of the team that I run in New Zealand, which is the Developer & Platform Evangelism (D&PE) team.  It's a great opportunity to understand how Microsoft works in it's corporate headquarters and also develop some additional perspective as I get to look at every market across the globe (all scales and all stages of development) in this role.

The official title for my new role is 'Director of Business Management' for the world-wide D&PE field, what exactly does that mean?  Well I guess I'll only now for sure in a few months time ;)  What I do know is that I'll be running the team that is responsible for running the following key processes for the world-wide D&PE field: target setting, resource allocation, communication, strategy and core review process.  It should be a lot of fun and I know I'm joining a great team of people in Seattle.

One of the people who will just be down the corridor from me is Frank , Frank works in the same team as I do so the ANZ team are slowly taking over Microsoft corporate (actually there are heaps of us up there but at least two more in this team now).

It's the right time for me to change roles at Microsoft - I've been there for a while and grown the team I look after significantly.  We had a great year last year where we were recognised as the best team of our size world-wide.  The individuals I'm leaving behind are just awesome, so it's time for me to move on and give someone else a shot at D&PE in NZ.

I'll miss the customers and partners I've worked with in NZ and I'll especially miss my direct team (the list is missing Tarryn, we must update that) and my peers in the leadership team - we have had a great time over the last 3 years! 

Disaster - Major data loss

Well it's clear I celebrated too soon - I've lost at least 3 months of data, the entire (digital) life record of my daughter - gutted...

While my HDD does appear to working as described in the last post, however, the data on the drive is old at least three months old.

How did that happen?

Clearly the Raid driver was not working at all for the last three months and the second drive has not been getting mirrored the updates...

I just don't get it and I'm just gutted.  We had so many great photos from that period that we will never get back..

So the question now is how do you get data off a SATA drive that has given up the ghost...

Moments of terror - loosing a HDD and the key data... Well almost!

Wow - I've just had a few hours of terror as I cam home to hear my Maxtor Onetouch III 1TB external HDD clicking away and no longer in explorer... SCARY!

A few quick searches on the web and looks like I'm toast - so ironic as we have had a few HDD failures in our team over the last month.  I just knew I should have backed up all those new baby photos we had been taking (I'm a dad now for 3 months).

After looking on-line and deciding that a fee of up to $2,000 and a distinct lack or warranty cover from the vendor I decided that I should take my chances and pop off the lid...

It's was a luckily escape - I had the 2x500Gb drives configures in a Raid 0 set-up so when I disconnected the faulty unit and booted up the drive the the other one is working fine - so I'm mid back-up now.

I've only ever had two HDD issues and both have been external HDD units (actually both Maxtor units as well) I'm losing confidence and my wife is losing confidence in my ability to protect our key data.  All I can say is thank goodness I had it in Raid 0!

It does pose an issue what do I do now so a few questions I'd love input on:

• Can I put an off the shelf SATA drive back in the enclosure to replace the toasted one?
• If so can it be any SATA drive - I guess it must be the same size i.e. 500Gb

This is also the CHKDSK from my other external HDD - I use this as an offline back-up but as you can see it returns some data errors - should I throw it out?

Bottom line is how should I protect my home data what's a good solution that's not to crazy, caters for not too much intervention and will let me know an issue exists in advance?

I'm Number 10 in the 'Geekfest' top 10

A good laugh from Louis:

http://blogs.reseller.co.nz/reseller/channelling/2007/08/you_may_very_well_be_at_a_geek.html

Can't remember having my name badge on but it's very possible ;)

It was a great event and we have updated TechEd Live (www.techedlive.co.nz) with even more stuff now.

Final US OOXML Voting Result - Yes with Comments

This is already everywhere, but I thought worth repeating for readers of my blog.

On the 24th the results of the United States vote for Open XML were made public. The INCITS Executive Board approved a “Yes with comments”  position in a 12-3-1 (yes, no, abstain) outcome.  

Here is a screen shot of the vote outcomes - the positions of each company are really not surprising. 

It's good to see a number of key customers and vendors in support of the standard.  

This note from Forester is worth reviewing if you have not seen it before as it's pretty clear on why a few key vendors choices (specifically Sun, IBM & Microsoft) are prretty predictable.

I also scanned the comments, nothing new in anything I saw - they were what I would expect to see.

Who Made the Ecma Office Open XML Standard

Another common question...

Ecma Office Open XML was developed over the course of a year at Ecma International with input via Ecma’s Technical Committee 45 (TC45), which included information technology companies (Apple, Intel, Novell, Microsoft, NextPage, Toshiba), reputable government institutions that archive documents (The British Library, the U.S. Library of Congress) and power users of information technology (BP, Statoil, Barclays Capital,  Essilor). 

While Microsoft made a significant contribution to the development of ECMA 376, the initial draft received considerable development and enhancement through the work of Ecma TC45, resulting in the specification growing from 2,000 to 6,000 pages, which constitutes the current Ecma standard.

People Implementing Ecma Office Open XML

Over on Rod's blog the comments wage on and there is another common question popping up - 'no one can implement this standard other than Microsoft'.

Luckily this is not true - we even have people in NZ who have used it to render documents and build solutions. 

Implementing the entire standard is not easy - you need to build a fully featured productivity suite however - and that's why the standard is quite detailed.  however many, many other vendors have already implemented Open XML. 

If you want to get started and se how easy it can be just pop over to this page for a great guide with (very) short example of how to do it.

http://openxmldeveloper.org/articles/1970.aspx

Here is a short subset:

IPR on Ecma Office Open XML

One of the first comments on Rod's blog related to IPR on Ecma Office Open XML.  Here is a quick explanation of how we handle this..

There is a great deal of confusion on the IPR points in relation to the Ecma Office Open XML standard. 

We [Microsoft] have provided assurances for full or partial implementations under three different approaches (from which an implementer can select). These options include:

1. Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (the OSP),
2. Microsoft’s Covenant (the Covenant) and a
3. Royalty-free Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (RAND) license.

Here is a little external commentary in support of each model and the applicability of it to Ecma Office Open XML...

1. The OSP: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx

Red Hat believes that the text of the OSP gives sufficient flexibility to implement the listed specifications in software licensed under free and open source licenses. We commend Microsoft’s efforts to reach out to representatives from the open source community and solicit their feedback on this text, and Microsoft's willingness to make modifications in response to our comments.
Mark Webbink, Deputy General Counsel of Red Hat Inc

 

2. The Covenant:

This covenant goes beyond anything Microsoft has ever done before. It means that both open source and proprietary software can compete in implementations of these important XML schemas without the threat of patent litigation from Microsoft.... We can participate in crafting the standard in ECMA, we can read and write Office 2003 files in open source applications, and we don’t have to pay royalties to Microsoft to do so.
Larry Rosen - former General Counsel of the Open Source Initiative and author of "Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law"

A full 3rd party view: http://www.bakernet.com/NR/rdonlyres/CC54A6B6-79E8-4E0D-B290-C836D5F70867/0/OpenXML.pdf  

3. RAND Licensing:

Reasonable and Non Discriminatory Licensing (RAND) is a term for a type of licensing typically used during standardization processes. The normal case is that when joining the standardization body, companies agree that if they receive any patents on technologies which become essential to the standard then they agree to allow other groups attempting to implement the standard to use those patents and they agree that the charges for those patents shall be reasonable. RAND licenses allow a competitive market to develop between multiple companies making products which implement a standard.

From – Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_Non_Discriminatory_Licensing

I hope that helps to clear up some of the concerns here.

My top 4 questions on Ecma Office Open XML and simple answers

There are a number of common questions in relation to this standardisation effort that I've heard many times - these are my short answers to each:

1. Do other standardised document formats not exist today?
   Yes, in fact there are actually many different and at times overlapping formats that exist today, for instance PDF/A, ODF and HTML are all ISO/IEC standard document types today. 
   
2. Why do we need multiple standardised formats?
   Multiple formats are required as requirements change and to cater for differing scenarios for instance PNG and JPEG are two ISO/IEC image standards in heavy use today.  Individuals and organisations will also continue to innovate and standards must evolve to keep pace with this, for instance MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG -4 are all ISO/IEC standards for video encoding.
   
3. What is the impact to the industry if Open XML is not accepted as an ISO/IEC standard?
   Literally billions of documents today are stored and saved using Microsoft Office file formats, an important aspect of Open XML is backwards compatibility for these documents.  Not standardising Open XML will have an impact on the longevity of these documents and force government departments, individual organisations and consumers to migrate all of their documents over time.  It will also significantly reduce the choice available to our customers in relation to document formats.
   
4. What is the impact to Microsoft if Open XML is not accepted as a standard?
   While standards themselves don’t dictate customer and partner behaviour or purchasing patterns they do have a strong influence on this over time.  As a result there is likely to be a direct impact on the adoption of Microsoft products if Open XML is not accepted as a standard that will reduce our ability to compete in the marketplace.
   

Why have another document standard?

There are a number of great reasons for this - but the first and most important point to make is that Ecma Office Open XML is already a standard today ratified by Ecma.  The current discussion is whether it should be ratified as an international (ISO/IEC) standard.  Not to mention there are many ISO approved document standard out there today but more on that in a later post.

The top four reasons from our point of view to have this as an international standard are:

1. PROTECTING OUR HERITAGE - enabling and guaranteeing ongoing access to valuable legacy documents. It provides freedom from dependence on specific applications, vendors or platforms in order to exchange documents.
2. SECURING OUR FUTURE - providing choice and encouraging competition in the marketplace – facilitating interoperability and platform independence.
3. FOSTERING INNOVATION - enabling the New Zealand IT industry to provide new and innovative solutions for sale locally and worldwide.
4. CREATING A PUBLIC GOOD - stewardship and ownership of the standard has been moved from the vendor (Microsoft) to a neutral, internationally-recognised standards organisation (Ecma).

Open XML can and will co-exist with existing and future open document standards.

Ecma also supports this point of view and a summary of their document (with link to original) is here: http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/summary.aspx

It's really interesting to look at the Ecma members here are a couple of screens grabs from their site - not the typical Microsoft fraternity but a good industry cross section.

http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/members.htm

Just looking at the Ordinary members alone...

http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/ordinary.htm

Microsoft has passed this document format onto Ecma for it's stewardship - we have also done this in the past and it's been a positive thing for the industry.

OpenXML Debate – the heat is on...

Standards New Zealand hosted the first day of feedback on Ecma Office Open XML in Wellington yesterday.  Many of our customers and partners have not been able to attend this meeting which is a great shame as it’s important for the whole industry but time was short.

Over the last few weeks I’ve spoken to many (hundreds) of people in the communities I look after for Microsoft – the Developers and IT Professionals across New Zealand.  The universal feedback has been that this is a good thing – I work for Microsoft so I of course also consider it a very good thing.

One person I took the time to chat with was Rod Drury – Rod’s a great guy who cares about the industry and posted in relation to this on his blog – thank you Rod!  This has resulted in a lot of comments many great ones from both sides. 

So I wanted to use my blog to put up some the common answers to these questions – I’ll do this in some follow-on posts.  Our NZ ISV Blog also has some comments on it about OpenXML up on it. 

Two good resource URL’s for OpenXML are:

1. www.openxmldeveloper.org
2. www.openxmlcommunity.org

If you are a developer and want to start working with the standard then this is a great short and visuals resource to get you started: http://openxmldeveloper.org/articles/1970.aspx

p.s. I'm actually on holiday today post an awesome TechEd - thank you to everyone who was there.  For those of you who missed it pop over to www.techedlive.co.nz and see what it was all about (videos, photos, blogs, slides, ...).  I'll also [as a result of the holiday] not be lightening fast on reply's today ;)

TechEd NZ is in full swing

The event is going well and we are into day 2.  TechEd Live (www.techedlive.co.nz) is the place to go to see what's happening...

Blogs, photos and videos...

TechEd It's Happening

Well we are in full flow for TechEd - I spent the entire day on the event and visited the venue it's looking great.

I also visited the .NET User Group AGM (www.dot.net.nz) and they had a great meeting but I should let them break any news from that.

There is a good interview of Darryl on GeekZone that gives a behind the scene look at the event - worth a scan if you want to know what makes it tick... http://www.geekzone.co.nz/teched/3509

Anyhow, there is a lot to do and I'll be popping into code camp tomorrow to visit the 280+ attendees and ask a little favor - more about that later.

Nigel has also been working hard on a cool Silverlight viewer for a few daily videos from TechEd these will be posted on the www.microsoft.co.nz/teched site each day with photos from the event as well.

Go TechEd Go!

More Intro Videos - Data Access

I know I talk about these all the time but there really is (my point of view) no better way then to quickly digest some of the great new features there are 75 of these in total now and we just added a few more. 

The team review these regularly, we learn new stuff from them all the time - arguably we need the help :)

http://www.asp.net/learn/data-access/

Blatantly stolen from ScottGu's blog...

Catching BillG

 I recently went up to the US and was lucky enough to get an award.  As a result at the awards dinner one person I got to catch for the first time this close was BillG:

Cool...