The Sikh Geek

As Vista nears the business launch date of November 2006 the articles doing a comparison are appearing thick and fast. Firstly, let me say I’m an advocate of Open Source and what it has brought to the world. It’s given us some great solutions and powers the heart of the internet as we know it and companies like Google have built their business on it. That’s not a bad achievement!

However, Microsoft has a formidable offering to both consumers and businesses alike. This offering is only getting stronger through EVO (Exchange Server 2007, Vista and Office 2007) and issues such as the WGA debacle and delays in Vista aren’t going to make the impact of these new technologies any less dramatic. For sure, there are are a vocal group who will cry foul and that anything Microsoft produces is inferior and the spawn of the devil. Whilst doing this and focusing on specific issues, they are taking their eye off the big picture. Microsoft is focused on addressing business issues! Whilst OpenOffice.org is a tremendous productivity suite and uses the Open Document Format (which I think Microsoft should adopt unreservedly and stop trying to fool us into thinking the ODF standard is somehow inferior), Microsoft is ploughing ahead with Office 2007 and enhancing collaboration through Sharepoint and other tools. I don’t see this happening in the Open Source world. I see many articles trying to compare Open-XChange Server to Microsoft Exchange Server and really there is no comparison. Any one who has tried to set up Open-XChange Server will know the nightmare task this is (okay you can buy the commercial version for the simple installer) and that the quality of the Outlook connector is poor and does not working with things like roaming profiles. The list goes on in terms of the ability to manage your IT environment with things like Group Policy, WSUS (for updates, security fixes), remote access using Remote Web Workplace, Activesync for mobile devices, etc, etc…

For sure you can cobble many of these things together for Linux and some work quite well but they always leave you with that not quite integrated together feeling. It’s no good for users and no good for providers. Yes, Linux has a place and it’s established a strong foothold in the Enterprise but doing things like Application Servers, Database Servers, Network Services, Webservers, etc. Novell has been the only vendor to try and push it beyond the Enterprise confines and they are finding it tough, very tough to do!

One last point, if Microsoft Technology is so bad then why are prople like Miguel de Icaza (founder of Gnome) and Nat Friedman busy developing .NET technology for Linux!! It’s because they understand the power of this underlying technology to application development. This is the key and not these insignificant arguments that keep cropping up about Vista!!

I visited the B2B Midlands Business Expo in Coventry yesterday and was interested to see Blackberry was being pushed quite heavily with presentations from O2 (which were very poorly attended). However, I got talking to a distributor of Blackberry based in Leicester (which is handy) and the new Blackberry Pearl device looks quite good! Also, by signing up as a reseller I could get the Blackberry Enterprise Server software (normally costing £999) for free and integrate that with my SBS Exchange Server. I have to say that my Dell Axim x50v PDA, which I upgraded to Windows Mobile 5.0 has to be soft and hard reset quite often!!

Just as I’ve got Vista RC1 set up and installed, Microsoft sneak out RC2. I’m going to have to get a copy of this and install it as it would be good to test the latest release. Vista is now my default desktop and we’ll see how far I get. Application compatibility is going to be interesting, but I’m hoping that I can just install VMWare Server to run Windows XP Pro and other applications such as Quickbooks. I don’t believe Virtual PC 2005 is out yet, which is supposed to run on Vista. I don’t know if VMWare Server runs properly on Vista but I’ll have to try it.

Yes, this is very ironic but also worrying and perplexing. Having just installed Vista RC1 and then attempted to take some online training (as a dutiful partner) on one of the greatest accomplishments by Microsoft in the past decade, I find that the training portal says that my IE 7 (which is being run from Vista) is not supported!! See the screenshot below

So, we’re supposed to go out to customers and say how they should be early adopters of this wonderful new technology, but Microsoft hasn’t got some of their own websites to work with IE 7!!

UPDATE

Someone just pointed out that it is possible to still take the training and it works fine, you just have to ignore the IE 7 warning. It’s still ironic though!

I discovered a problem when trying to connect to my Samsung SCX 4100 printer, which is a USB attched printer to the SBS server and accessible via SMB sharing. When I browsed through to the SBS server (using network browsing) and try to connect to the printer, I got an error saying “Not enough memory to complete this operation”. I submitted the feedback on this via the Vista Beta Client and Forum pages. After a bit more playing around, I browsed through the “Printers” share (see screen capture) and then double clicked on the Samsung Printer and printer queue came up. I then went to the “Printer” menu option and selected “Connect” and it worked! Obviously, this is still an issue as it should have worked through the “SamungS” share that was available.

So, I’ve managed to join my Vista RC1 laptop to my SBS 2003 server without too much trouble, hooray! The only thing which I had to do was to disable UAC before running through the Network Connection Wizard, otherwise it kept complaining that the account wasn’t a member of the local administrator’s group when it certainly was. This was the only difference to Sean Daniel’s procedure outlined in his blog entry that I encountered. I’ve also got Office 2007 Beta running on it as well. I’ll be seeing what applications will run on it like Quickbooks, etc.

Vista RC1 is certainly snappier than the Beta release, so some good work has gone on around performance. I’ve given up on the whizzy new graphics stuff as my integrated ATI 9000 IGP graphics isn’t supported. Time for a new laptop!

I have my copy of Vista RC1 now, as I had to wait for my DVD copy. Unfortunately one of my laptop’s hard disks gave up the ghost, so I’m waiting for a replacement. I believe that Vista RC1 has wider support for graphics cards as my ATI integrated graphics wasn’t suported in the Beta version. Also, performance is meant to be much improved as well. I’ll also be connecting it up to my SBS 2003 server as well and see how well that goes? I wanna play with those 3D graphics effects!

I’m on a bit of a mobility role at the moment. Now that I’ve got my Dell PDA to synchronise with SBS 2003, this is no longer good enough and I need the phone capability as well. I started looking at the Orange SPV 3100 Smartphone, which looks good and has a slide out keyboard which I like.

You can get it for £42.54 if you sign up for a 12 month £22 per month contract (inclusive of 120 minutes)! Not bad really! The reviews of it seem quite positive and access to things like email when out of the office are essential now. Also, it’ll be a great demo of mobility with SBS 2003 to potential customers.