Just Another Blog

If you have some Windows Media Center WTV files you need editing then Expression Encoder 3 (EE3) appears to be the most robust way to achieve this task. I have a backlog of files waiting to be edited but all the available software for WTV editing up to this point was lame. EE3 which has only just recently launched is the first video editing software from Microsoft that natively supports WTV. EE3 also batches jobs and can convert files for all popular streaming formats even MP4 and H.264. Check it out. Nice.

Johnh

Note to self: One of the main reasons I bought the Belkin Storage Router was to take advantage of the NAS like features.

Seemed like a really nice solution without a bigger investment.

As a wireless and wired router it works a treat.

However as an attached storage device (via the StorageManager application) the slow transfer speeds to the connected drive (~2mb/s) make it unusable as a NAS alternative. What a shame...

John Hodgson

The new beta version of Windows Virtual PC feels kinda nice but is a little unpredictable.

A few key points I have come to learn:

1. Server 2008 does not appear to be a supported guest OS. But it does seem to work ok for me thus far.
2. There is sparse documentation it appears (as in none at this stage).
3. Virtual PC 2007 and the new beta version cannot co-exist on Windows7.
4. Integration features are flakey at best with server 2008, mapping to a share from the host to the guest is slloooooowwww as a work around.
   • I found upon startup that the enabling integration features screen would drag out for a few minutes and sometimes show an error dialog but the VPC would still open and be functional, but no VPC integration of course even though the VPC itself thinks integration features are active, the Tools menu shows the option to enable integration features greyed out indicating the features are active.
   • I was able to get integration features working once the guest has started by opening the services applet and restarting the “Virtual PC Integration Components” service. This step reactivates the Enable PC Integration features in the tool menu which subsequently allows drives to be used from the host in My Computer.

The new version seems nicely integrated with Windows7 and seems to be less aggressive with system resources; possibly quicker to start up and suspend and I like the full screen mode which is more like RDP, however you can no longer drag files between the host and guest desktops like you can with VPC2007, hence PC integration features are pretty important. Anyway its looking good but there seems to be room for improvement at this early stage; otherwise this is a useable beta.

John Hodgson

I had the Q1U only a few hours before replacing XP with Windows7. But touch and pointer accuracy was low. The Q1 needed to be calibrated.

However it took a lot longer stuffing around with the Q1U to get the display recognized as a real Touch Screen so that calibration is possible.

It would be nice if Samsung released some native HID device drivers for the Touch Screen. Anyway it's nice to be able to calibrate the Screen and finally be able to touch the screen with some accuracy using Windows7. The UMPC Portal has a thread discussing the issues.

I followed these hints and tips but I couldn't get touch working properly until I did the following.

1. Open device manager
2. Expand the Human Interface Devices Section
3. There should only be one device in there
4. The advice in the thread suggests to uninstall and delete the existing driver; this didn't work for me 50 try the following
5. Update the device driver manually with one of the inbuilt drivers as shown, Finepoint seemed to work for me
6. 
7. Once the update completes, reboot the Q1
8. The device will now work like before but you can now do the update again to the indicated driver
9. Update the device driver with this as provided by the UMPC thread
10. Reboot again, I then found I had pen and touch settings in control panel, then you can calibrate

Anyway this was one major step toward getting the most of the Q1.

Without much effort. other features work well and mostly out of the box including the Fingerprint reader, Webcam, wireless and Bluetooth.

However the Samsung application Menu UI doesn't appear to work although it installs and displays.

Other than that this is a pretty cool UMPC and at 800 MHz Windows 7 runs well and it to is looking good even at RC1.

John Hodgson

If you are trying to index Vignette with MOSS make sure don’t attempt it without the Infrastructure Update and registry changes to the index server to accommodate case sensitive URL’s where relevant. Then try different start URL’s for the content source and of course create crawl rules for the complex URL’s again if this is relevant to the Vignette specific implementation. And client cookie requirements on the start page can also impact SharePoint’s ability to begin crawling the Vignette start address.

JohnH

I had annoying issues when streaming live TV or Recorded TV on Vista Media Centre but only with HD content. I just upgraded to Windows 7 beta and the problem didn’t improve. I must admit I always just blamed the xbox360; its an easy target. The bandwidth tuning tool in the 360 extender always indicated full bandwidth and suitability to HD content so it does have some issues there.  It maybe more relevant for wireless networks I’m guessing.

I have a thoroughbred GB network and felt this problem shouldn’t exist so I decided to invest some time fixing the issue.

I eventually resolved the problem by updating the drivers and forcing the speed of the network device. Nothing too scientific thankfully. My faith is restore in the 360.

Not sure if the drivers, the config or both changes actually resolved the problem but my 360 now boots and reacts much faster; unfortunately its no quieter.

JohnH

I have installed the TVPack on a fresh Vista Ultimate install and I am getting Guide information even without IceTV or EPGStream installed.

This is confusing me a little.

The TV Setup process clearly stated Guide information is "not" available for Australia, could it be Over The Air guide data getting picked up by Media Centre much the same as TV's take advantage of?

John Hodgson

With all the whining and moaning about the new TV Pack for Windows Media Centre, I'm just enjoying more than 2 tuners which was previously a restriction.

I have now tried up to 4 but have settled for 3, consisting of 1 x Hauppauge HVR-2200 PCI-e (dual tuner) and 1 x Hauppauge NovaT PCI.

Amongst all the other features of the TV Pack that have been well covered, there are a few other small differences that I am starting to notice too, this is what I have picked up so far:

1. The fast forward indicator on the timeline has changed and the functionality appears slower at full speed.
2. Subtitles option on live TV (seems new to me anyway)
3. Guide presentation is an obvious difference and some guide functionality has changed, custom channel lineups etc...
4. New file format (WTV extension)

The changes to the Guide and related underlying format will impact us here in Australia no doubt considering Microsoft don't provide a supported guide. IceTV and other guide providers will not be motivated to fix this for a while because the TVPack is not readily available.

John Hodgson

This is a great free tool for keeping 2 locations in sync.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c26efa36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52&DisplayLang=en

I almost wish Microsoft would remove the word "Toy" from the products name because it really is quite a robust tool. Calling it a toy devalues the product in my opinion.

John Hodgson

Heard the phrase "if it isn't broken don't fix it"?

I heard these words from my family quite a lot over the weekend. :-)

After acquiring new hardware for my main Media Center and hence rebuilding the system from scratch I found I could not share videos with the XBOX360 dashboard. As an extender it works great for WMV and DVR-MS files but I need the dashboard access to videos for DIVX files that I also host on the main Media Center. But this failed to work this time around.

Haven't experienced any problems like this previously with the XBOX and prior builds of VMC. But this time was painful. Many hours lost.

Having rebuilt the system and everything working well with Media Center itself I then had the kids asking for access to the video library through the XBXO360. However my video shares would not show even though I had shared them the same way previously.

The XBOX360 is able to share music, videos and pictures from a PC using Windows Media Player 11 (WMP11) with Media Sharing enabled. Plenty of information on the XBOX site to set this up. My new Media Center with WMP11 looked liked the videos were showing up fine and I could play the videos I wanted to share from Media Player itself. The main symptom for me was during the addition of files. WMP11 enables this through "Add to Library" and the selected folders show up in "Monitored Folders". 

Whenever I added more folders it seemed to scan but not find any files even though the same files that were not found would actually be visible in the library...but not visible from a trusted sharing partner like the XBOX or another PC...go figure. This symptom led me to the Microsoft KB 925718.

Once I completed the simple process outlined in this KB scanning new folders with the Add to Library functionality and access from the XBOX worked as expected; I hope this saves someone else time in the event you run into this same problem.

Let's hope the kids and wife will leave me alone now media is moving smoothly around the house once again...

John Hodgson

This "problem" really started to annoy me recently; whenever I connected my laptop to a base station at home which is connected to a larger external monitor Vista would always assume that my laptop screen was the best primary display, go figure. The primary display  is the display where you access the Start menu in Windows.

Often the Mobility Center pops up and you know the drill; Vista asks if you want to see the same information on each screen or show a separate desktop on the external display etc...

However if you want to ensure that the larger external display is considered the primary for the desktop and the laptop LCD or alternate display  is the secondary follow these steps:

1. Wait for the prompt to configure the external display
2. This can be forced to open through Mobility Center (Windows key + X or accessible through Control Panel). Select the "Connect Display" button.
3. Choose to display desktop on External monitor only, this is the one you want to make the primary display.
4. Now right click on the desktop and select "Personalize", then select Display Properties. This option can also be accessed through Control Panel.

a. When display properties dialogue is displayed you need to select the second screen that you wish to extend onto, in my case its the generic LCD panel of the laptop.

b. Once selected you can then check the box labelled "Extend the desktop onto this monitor"

In this dialogue also remember to drag the second monitor to the left or right of the primary so that your mouse has a natural method of entering the desktop field of vision of the second screen i.e. to the left or the right. Then your mouse can predictably enter the desktop of the second display. You can also position this field of vision entry point to be corner to corner of each display. Therefore your mouse will not accidentally leave the primary desktop unless you move your mouse to the second display through this specific entry point.

HTH

John Hodgson
HP Australia

Wow I never heard this was coming? Works with MOSS and Search Server. 

This could be a real game changer.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/results.aspx?pocId=&freetext=indexing%20connector&DisplayLang=en

John Hodgson
HP Australia

This surprised me a little...

Whilst fault finding issues with different browsers and OS's accessing SharePoint I discovered there is growing support for NTLM (Windows Authentication) in all the most popular browsers. This is somewhat of a relief because without this support I was looking at Basic over SSL to deliver the required security for a customers internal facing deployment. If we enable Basic and NTLM by default it means some browsers will send user passwords in clear text. Not the best outcome.

However if I can define supported browsers that all allow NTLM we are good to go...

Of course there are issues as outlined in this post that started in 2005, specifically with Safari on a Mac:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6102379

Windows version of Safari appears to provide support, currently in Beta:

http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

Firefox looks like it can do NTLM tricks, we'll see:

http://codebetter.com/blogs/eric.wise/archive/2006/11/16/Note-to-self_3A00_-Firefox-Windows-Authentication.aspx

I won't hold my breath but it looks promising.

John Hodgson (HP Australia)

In the past this question has come up a lot; customers want to store video in SharePoint document libraries and have them streamed from the libraries much the same as an efficient streaming server. As cool as this would be in my experience its not really possible.

The standard libraries in MOSS do not support streaming per se but you can host WMV’s in the library just like any other file assuming the file type has been enabled.

The problem with most WMV’s and any video format is file size and hence they usually get stored on the file system. By default SharePoint sets the max upload file size at 50MB; this can be as large as 2GB (good luck). The best approach is to setup Windows Media Services which is part of Windows Server 2003/2008 and link to the stream from SharePoint as an ASX file. It is also possible to host Media Player as a webpart that points to the stream (or a standard WMV in a library) and renders the video inside the web page where Windows Media player is available on the local machine.

One technology I am pretty excited about is the FileStream object in SQL Server 2008; I think this could be a very interesting way for MOSS to manage large files like videos, ISO, VHD’s etc... However we may not see anything like this until 2009 with Office 14. Who knows. It would also be nice to see improved document streaming so for large documents I could start to see pages and could interact with a document without the whole document having to be fully downloaded.

BTW there are some niche solutions like Telestream that do work with SharePoint.

John Hodgson
HP

We use Groove a lot within our group at HP and we collaborate with Microsoft and some of our customers on Groove...nice to see some activity in the Groove space.

Proposal Tracker
Groove 2007 Tool Template- Proposal Tracker

Issues and Tasks Tracker
Groove 2007 Tool Template- Issues & Tasks Tracker 

Contact Tracker - released in 2007
Groove 2007 Tool Template- Contacts Tracker

Check out the new Microsoft Home Server promotional site that highlights HP's Home Server. Some entertaining videos of why a the average home needs a server; I guess this will be the hurdle for some families, not mine.

http://www.stayathomeserver.com

The most the surprising thing about HP's Home Server is the size. All the photos of the HP device don't do it justice. Although Amazon's product shots help put it in perspective.

Looking forward to seeing these in OZ.

John Hodgson

When testing Office 2007 Information Rights Management against an Rights Management Server deployment you may notice that you get a very vague error message that simply states "Unspecified Error ....". Very helpful message right?

It would appear this is caused by using a Windows account that is not yet associated with an email account. Yep that's it; do you reckon Microsoft could of made the error message more descriptive?

John Hodgson (HP Australia)

Working with SharePoint Server means I am often promoting and demonstrating Office 2007; however this demonstration generally follows with questions and raised eye brows over the dramatic changes to Office. Some of our customers are still concerned about deploying Office 2007 because of the inherent changes in Office 2007 and especially the ribbon. The main concern appears to be a disruption in productivity.

Of course those that are using Office 2007 would never go back but there is a definite learning curve irrespective of the technical competency of the user.

In regards to Office 2007 deployment there is a need to consider a number of areas:

• The deployment itself (language packs, updates, configurations etc..)
• User training (The client tools themselves and integration points with SharePoint and other services)
• New Office OpenXML File Format Adoption and content migration (if applicable, you can continue to make 2003 the default format, but there are tools to help)
• Application compatibility (Office addins/custom office solutions)
• Ongoing Support

I find custom applications  like addon's and macros are a primary concern but this is closely followed by user training considerations. Here is a list of resources and tools I provide to customers to assist in planning for user acceptance/training, make sure the user base has easy access to these resources as part of a roll out:

INTERACTIVE GUIDE: Office 2007 Command Reference Guide for Word (Interactive guides also available for Excel and Powerpoint; other tools covered by Whitepapers) http://officebeta.iponet.net/en-us/word/HA100744321033.aspx

VIDEO: Great User Introductions to the Office 2007 clients
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101679481033.aspx?pid=CL100796341033
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101679471033.aspx?pid=CL100796341033

STUDY: Real People Doing Real Work with Office 2007 (Part 1) http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/05/655119.aspx

STUDY: You Mean I Don't Need To Retrain Everybody? (Real People Study, Part 2) http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/06/658077.aspx

TOOLS: 2007 Microsoft Office System Migration Guidance: Microsoft Office Migration Planning Manager (Preview) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=13580cd7-a8bc-40ef-8281-dd2c325a5a81&DisplayLang=en

Another stealthy technique for organisations with the appropriate Microsoft software licensing agreements in place is to take advantage of the Office Home Use program; this is a way to give your employees the latest version of Office for use at home. By using it at home they get more familiar with the product and less likely to have issues at work.  Simple.

The investment users make in understanding and appreciating the ribbon will pay off as more and more applications adopt this new powerful way of navigating our day to day tools.

John Hodgson (HP Australia)

Collaborating with customers recently has been incredibly seamless thanks to Groove; in fact our team has also been sharing documents and discussion forums with Microsoft on a recent project. I found myself thinking quite often "how cool is Groove, it just works!"

One customer in particular asked me to look at Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional; I had never heard of it before; originally called Breeze. It was interesting but was browser based and not as stable or as polished as Groove.  The Adobe product did perform a range of tasks that Groove was not designed to provide so I wanted to give the customer a quick overview of what I think Grooves strengths in particular were; here is a quick run down of what I said for those that are not that familiar with what Groove is.

Groove is:

• A locally installed client like Word or Excel
• Designed for short term adhoc workspaces
• Offline cache of the Workspace (every member of a particular workspace has the same content)
• Deals with connected and disconnected scenarios or poor networking conditions
• Secure 192AES lockbox and communications
• Smart and efficient in the transmission of content between users (Bit level differencing)
• Extensible, you can build custom tools  i.e. applications that take advantage of Groove replication
• Part of Office Enterprise
• Can be managed and controlled through policy, just like Exchange and Outlook
• Not just for enterprise customers
• A tool that just works reliably, set and forget

I can invite anyone with an email address to a Groove workspace and they can try Groove for free; its a great way to try this very useful tool.

Free trial: http://us7.trymicrosoftoffice.com/product.aspx?re_ms=oo&family=officelivegroove&culture=en-US

When you have it installed it here are some of my favorite features to try:

• Right click on any Windows folder and Share as a Groove Sync folder then invite people.
• Drag emails from Outlook into a Groove file library; great way to share emails.

These are the tools that are available out of the box in a Groove workspace.

Make sure you try it out.

JohnH

I was recently demonstrating MOSS (level 200) to a customer and there was a lot of interest in the Business Data Catalogue (BDC). Without previously preparing a detailed demonstration I was asked to explain and walk them through how they could create a Search Scope against the data being indexed in the BDC.

Fortunately I had a sample BDC installed and functional and continued the now increasingly high risk demo. I stumbled around in the Search Scope settings of the Site Collection trying to create a scope with a rule that only included BDC data; however it is not possible to create a new rule from within the Site Collection scopes that use the BDC, where a Shared Scope has not been previously configured.

To create a rule that includes the BDC you must first create a Shared Scope from the Shared Service Provider search settings; depicted below. This Shared Scope can then be leveraged by rules associated to scopes created in the Site Collection Search Scopes and can also be associated to a custom tab.

jh

“Anyway, we got a lot of feedback in Beta 2 that the collapsed Ribbon was a great idea in principle, but that it didn't work very well in the real world. “