Tangential Thinking

One of the currently lesser-discussed Windows 7 features is Federated Search (also known as Opensearch). Extending Windows Search this feature allows Explorer searches to query online resources, anything from TechNet/MSDN to the likes of YouTube and Apple.

Much in the same way IE7 search providers are configured, Windows 7 Federated Search providers can be added via several sources.

The first and most common will be search sites themselves offering their providers for download. Simply execute the provided osdx file and the site will be accessible from within Windows Search.

It’s also possible to create your own search providers using either of two methods, the first for sites which support OpenSearch and are able to return results as RSS is to create an appropriate osdx as shown below. In this case I’ve created an OpenSearch provider for TechNet:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?><OpenSearchDescription xmlns=”http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/” xmlns:ms- ose=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/”>
<ShortName>TechNet</ShortName>
<Description>OpenSearch TechNet using Windows 7 Search.</Description>
<Url type=”application/rss+xml” template=”http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Search/Feed.aspx?locale=en-GB&amp;format=RSS&amp;Query={searchTerms}“/>
<Url type=”text/html” template=”http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Search/Feed.aspx?locale=en-GB&amp;format=RSS&amp;Query={searchTerms}“/>
</OpenSearchDescription>

The areas highlighted require modification for each new provider.

Ampersands present in the real URL have to be switched to &amp; in line 4 and 5 as above otherwise the provider will fail to import.

Saving the file with the osdx extension will associate it with Windows Search and opening it will add the search provider as above.

The second method and suited to many sites which don’t support OpenSearch as yet  is to use MSN search to search the sites and return the results as RSS as in the example below:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?><OpenSearchDescription xmlns=”http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/” xmlns:ms- ose=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/”>
<ShortName>Apple</ShortName>
<Description>OpenSearch Apple using MSN Search.</Description>
<Url type=”application/rss+xml” template=”http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}+site%3aapple.com&amp;num=10&amp;format=rss“/>
<Url type=”text/html” template=”http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}+site%3aapple.com&format=rss“/>
</OpenSearchDescription>

Obviously this method is more limited in terms of the format of the returned results but for anyone who frequenty searches online resources Federated Search in Windows 7 is already shaping up into a potentially very powerful tool.

windows 7

Dedicated Fax Numbers

Providing the connected PBX supports it, users can have more than one UM number, the first attached to their DDI and another for dedicated direct-fax. This may be necessary when migrating from a fax platform such as RightFax or may just be desirable when introducing UM.

On the Mitel environments our means of implementing this proved to be slightly hacktastic,using hunt groups with permanent forwards set as UM requires calls to arrive at the UM number via a forward. The Exchange 2007 GUI didn’t support adding additional extensions, instead we achieved this via powershell using the enable-ummailbox cmdlet, making this something which is preferrably done at initial provisioning. Additional numbers are provided after the first, separated by commas.

Adding a dedicated UM number which doesn’t first ring an extension has an added benefit to your organisation – corporate mobiles can be diverted to these numbers instead of the normal operator voicemail, further unifying lines of communication and helping your staff remain available to customers.

Having deployed one of the first Unified Messaging enabled sites in the UK I’ve had plenty of time to tinker with UM and discover some undocumented ‘features’ and workarounds to common requests.

Out of Office Autoresponses and UM

This one is mostly a matter of user education. Simply put whatever your users call their contacts is presented back to their contacts in situations where a UM enabled user defines both telephony and email contact details and an OOF event occurs with UM.

For example, Bob Davis a hypothetical user has Clive Green defined in his exchange contacts as: “Green, Clive (pest)” .

While OOF (with autoresponse enabled) Clive calls Bob and leaves him voicemail. Exchange upon delivery of Clives voicemail to Bob will email Clive Bobs autoresponse and in doing so expose the name Bob has given Clive. Bad juju.

One of my recent projects has been a UC PoC built around Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2010, SharePoint and Office Communications Server 2007 R2. Trying to be as green as possible all but the first DC in these environments has been virtualised using Hyper-V Server R2 on HP Proliant ML110 G5’s.

Due to a little bit of a delay with some of the servers I initially built the lions share of VMs on a single box and have subsequently transported the VHDs to the additional hardware as it arrived. Most of the guests were Server 2008 R2 servers and overall the experience has proven fairly painless, with one exception.

Moving VHD’s between machines running the same virtualisation technology is very straightforward, all of the virtual hardware the OS sees is the same, the one gotcha relates to the network cards, with the NIC on the new machine installing afresh - goodbye ‘Local Area Connection’, hello ‘Local Area Connection 2′. Even then, this isn’t the end of the world as IP addresses can easily be reassigned (and Server 2008 R2 will offer to remove conflicting IPs from the old ‘ghost’ NIC). The one cause for difficulty becomes any configuration where the name of said NIC is important as even when not connected the name is reserved and finding the offending adapter can be a bit of a pain.

The MMC as default doesn’t show old devices, after a bit of trial and error and a lot of hunting around I’ve found that the following from an elevated command prompt will do the trick:

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

start devmgmt.msc

Et voila, device manager loads showing the old offending NIC which can then be deleted, freeing up the previously reserved name

Screenshots – before and after with ’show hidden devices’ enabled:

One of the nicest features of my iPhone remains the mail sync capabilities. I’m a heavy email user and sync several accounts which include MobileMe and Exchange. This unfortunately means I also have first-hand experience of just how hard that hits the puny 3G battery roll on the iPhone released next summer!

Anyhow, Apple aren’t known for their openness when it comes to disclosing the finer points of their updates, so it’s no suprise there are some undocumented changes in iPhone 3.1 which are causing a range of pains for iPhone/3G/3GS users.

It turns out that until 3.1, the implementation of Exchange ActiveSync in 3.1 was fairly weak from a security perspective. Organisations which are using Exchange 2007 and have device policies set couldn’t properly block handsets which didn’t have a pin code set or encryption enabled.

So for users of the original iPhone and 3G as of 3.1 if your firm uses such policies you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place – unless they relax the Exchange ActiveSync policy associated with your exchange account (preferrably creating a new policy which is applied specifically to those with affected devices) your syncing days are over.

Users with the 3GS will either be prompted to use a PIN (or error out if one isn’t used, I don’t recall which) and find that encryption is enforced (if policy dictates).

Of course this is really an internal IS problem, after all nobody would connect their personal telephone to the corporate messaging infrastructure, right?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was recently caught out deploying a new organisation running Server 2008 R2. As our only DCs were R2 boxes we opted to run our AD at that functional level only to find that the latest Exchange 2007 packages (SP2) were incompatible.

Microsoft have now posted updates to the BPA files which will allow installation with this configuration, the english versions to which are linked below:

ExBPA.Prereqs.XML
ExBPA.Readiness.XML

To use the above just right click and ’save target as’ as the links are to the xml files themselves unpackaged which will otherwise be rendered by your browser. Then all you need to do is drop them in to the Setup\ServerRoles\Common\<language> of your installation directory – those installing from the DVD media will need to copy the DVD to local storage on the machine so they can drop the files in and make use of the fix.

Other language versions and more information is available here.

I tweeted about this earlier and thought it would be postworthy, albeit filed under trivia.

IPv6 is something we’re hearing a lot about at present, most of the latest Microsoft products are v6-ready (Windows itself has been via a downloadable pack for several years pre-dating Vista in fact) but very few organisations if any are doing anything with it.

I’ll post a little on the basics of v6 and my implementations fairly soon but the subject of the tweet which made me think about this was someone commenting about IPv5, or the lack thereof. Having a read around the web there’s clearly a mixture of opinion ranging from those who believe the version incremented by two to others who heard of a v5 but that it was only ever experimental.

It will come as a suprise to some that there was indeed an IPv5 and more importantly that it saw real-world implementation. Starting out as ‘ST’ a stream protocol for the transmission of “multidestination simplex data streams with QoS” (quality of service) and although the rfc 1819 here shows it as experimental and not a recognised standard several companies including Sun, NeXT and IBM implemented for real in the form of ST2, a refined version of the original.

… a word of warning. Well several in fact.

Historically the release process for Service Packs from Microsoft has a pretty good track record. Occasionally one small irritating bug might make it out (Server 2000 SP6 anyone?) but for the most part the quality is high, any major issues which are uncovered prior to RTW will trigger a delay for a fix, (as occured with SP1 with E2007 when issues were found in particularly large trial environments).

Unfortunately today I’ve come across a blocking issue in deploying Exchange 2007 with SP2.

In short:

Exchange 2007 SP2 is currently incompatible with Active Directory  running at 2008 R2 functional mode

Or, to be more specific, if you only DCs are 2008 R2 and 2003 pre-SP1, or 2008 R2 only at its highest mode you’re currently unable to install the latest release of exchange.

The response from Microsoft thus far is quite weak, I’ve chatted with several people who have responded to say that a fix will follow when R2 is “widely available” which to say the least is is nice and vague.

Which leaves two options, fix the prereq xml that BPA queries by hand, or go 2010 RC. Neither of which are exactly supportable. Sigh.

Let me start of by saying that I’m a huge fan of Quicksilver. It’s one of those apps which keeps me using a mac as my primary machine and the first thing I install whenever I rebuild or get a new one.

But since Alcor abandoned the project and released the source the shine has begun to fade in places. On my macbook pro the main window occasionally freezes and requires the app to be forcibly quit while on my nc10 hackintosh the icon insists in remaining in the dock.

Sure there’s several efforts ongoing to tidy up the code, Ankur for one was working on it which spawned a google code project, but it’s just not the same.

Anyhow, while listening to MacBreak Weekly recently Leo mentioned that Alcor, now at google had released a new project – the Google Quick Search Box.

Being a Google ‘thing’ there’s much more emphasis on online searching but most of the core functionality that the majority of QuickSilver users want is in there including interacting with apps such as your contacts and iTunes library.

You can invoke the app with the usual keypresses, it also offeres a standard + (double tap apple) which I’ve begun to favor. Suffice to say I’m going to follow the project with great interest!

(I’m probably way off base with this, but the thought keeps going through my mind so what the heck, flame at will)

I think Surface first saw the light of day at CES several years ago, the demo was heavily canned but it was a neat concept that we all knew would come one day… Multi-touch display surfaces which would enable a broad range of interaction and UX that previously wasn’t possible.

Today Surface is finding its way into the real world, however the cost of devices is still quite high when you consider some of the target markets (education being my most recent experience).

Which leaves me wondering… After the E3 keynote this year and the rather excellent Project Natal demos, will the penny drop with customers and this potentially $200 xbox peripheral squash a product which costs 50+ times more?