Moving to Posterous…

My Getting Things Done system for Microsoft Outlook 2010

Recently I started to use Getting Things Done for my Microsoft Outlook 2010 inbox. Due to the many emails I get, I had to do something.

In Microsoft Outlook 2010 I created several categories that I use as tags for email messages.

Based on these categories I have created Search Folder the are filtered on these categories. I added these Search Folder to my favorites for quick access.

I have created one folder under my Inbox named File. This folder is used to place all processed email. By automatically tagging email messages, I can always find them inside this single folder.

For email processing I have created several Quick Steps. This is a great feature by the way of Microsoft Outlook 2010.

The Quick Steps allow me to:

• Convert an email message into an action item with a flag and due date
• Forward the question to someone else (Delegate)
• Schedule an appointment to take care of a request (Defer)
• Store the email message for later (Someday)
• File without any action

The Quick Steps are configured with native Microsoft Outlook 2010 actions.

The last Quick step asks me for a category that can be a Project or just Reference.

I have already processed 554 emails with this setup and it feels nice. Give it a try and let me know if you have found any improvements.

Other source(s): 4 ways to take control of your email inbox

First steps: Windows Phone 7

Last night I played around with a Windows Phone 7. The Windows Phone 7 devices are quite big, but the graphics that you will get are really beautiful.

Microsoft did a really nice job in interaction design. I was not able to find any Windows Mobile traces. Finally the new mobile OS is made for big fingers.

The home screen with tiles is innovative. Microsoft did not copy competitors, but picked their own intuitive way of user interaction.

Installation and configuration

After unboxing the phone started with a getting started screen. Following the steps allowed me to add my Windows Live account and other settings. Setting up the WiFi cause some Bing activity. I needed to find the MAC address for wireless security, but is was not exposed in the About.

There is a ‘maintenance mode’ that can be activated by dialing ##634# followed by *#1234# for diagnostics.  There are other inconveniences like this, that indicate a 1.0 version of the OS. I am sure that these inconveniences will be solved in the next release.

Marketplace

I linked to the Belgium Marketplace, because there was no Dutch Marketplace available. Changing the Marketplace is only possible through Zune software, just as software updates. I never had to install any software on my PC for my Android phone.

I installed Facebook, Twitter and a Impossible Shoota without any problems. Impossible Shoota is a addictive game though. Facebook and Twitter work as expected,

Windows Live

The integration with my Windows Live account is nice. Not all services are available by default. I cannot find my Windows Live Photo Album in Photo Sharing, while a lot of other photo services are. I guess that Microsoft will add these Windows Live services in the near future. That would really do the trick.

Verdict

Microsoft did a great job with this redesigned mobile OS. Windows Phone 7 GUI is beautiful, easy to operate and fast. I am sure that the ease of use will increase over time.

I am looking forward to v2 .

Review: ScriptLogic Privilege Authority

Today I have received an email from ScriptLogic with the announcement of Privilege Authority 2.0 that includes a free community edition. There are many solutions that support the principle of least privilege. Some solutions are only dealing with this challenge and others offer this feature as part of a broader solution.

The idea is that administrators can manage processes to launch with elevated privileges, without elevating the user account.

Installation

The installation of Privilege Authority is pretty easy. A simple server setup on the server side installs the management console.

Once the console is installed, you can install an client on the console machine from the menu. Remote clients can be installed with a Windows Installer package that can be found under ‘ Client\Open file location’.

I have installed the server component on Windows Server 2003 R2 and the client component on Windows 7. Both installations did not require a reboot.

Configuration

Once the clients are installed, configuration is done through Group Policy Objects (GPO). The Community section provides many pre-defined rules created by the community.

Let’s create a rule on a newly created GPO to elevate the Command Prompt process with the BUILTIN\Administrators group and an additional DEMO\Cheese group. The DEMO\Cheese group has no members.

Additionally you can add other groups to the security token of the process. Advanced options allow you to manage the actual privileges.

A test button allows you to test the rule from within the console.

Now, simply link the newly created GPO to the appropriate Organizational Units (OU) where the end points reside and off you go.

To validate the actual elevation of the process, you can use Process Explorer to check the security of the process.

As you can see, the security group DEMO\Cheese has been added to the cmd.exe process.

Conclusion

ScriptLogic Privilege Authority is a nice point solution for process elevation. If you want to design your environment with the principle of least privilege in mind, process elevation is essential. But, process elevation is just a little piece of the puzzle.

Besides providing the appropriate privileges for those processes that do not run without, you also need to take care of providing the appropriate applications, data and personalization to your end users. Taking control over these pieces of the puzzle as well, will really support the principle of least privilege.

Review: Evalaze Application Virtualization

Finally I have some time to look at the Evalaze application virtualization technology. I discovered this product when evaluating Cameyo (see previous post).

Installation

There is no installation required. Simply download a archive containing a few files. In combination with the Microsoft .NET Framework 2 the GUI runs without additional actions.

Capture

The capture process is just as simple. A wizard in the Evalazer application will guide you through the following steps:

1. Name the application
2. Pre-scan the environment
3. The usual installation of the application to be captured
4. Post-scan the environment
5. Choose the application executable
6. Splash screen settings such as “This application was virtualized by me.”
7. Build

That’s all. Customizing splash screen is different from other packaging products. The splash result though is not art, but in your face red. The resulting .exe does work fine. Even on Windows 7 x64 the .exe runs without any problems.

Samples

The website itself provides a lot of pre-packaged open source/ free applications for download. These samples consist of the resulting .exe and project file, in case you want to modify the package. If you are curious about the splash, just download and start one of the samples.

Conclusion

Evalaze Application Virtualization is young application virtualization technology that has room for improvement. The capture process is straight forward and the end result of standard Windows applications is fine. More complex applications demand tweaking to get them to work, but that is what application packagers live for . Personally I like Cameyo more.

Try it yourself and download the Evalazer.

Review: Cameyo Application Virtualization

I have just discovered, and played with Cameyo. Cameyo is a free application virtualization product that works a little like VMware ThinApp.

Installation

The download is less than 2MB and the installation is next, next, finish. After installation, Cameyo offers two programs. One program to capture and build packages. The other application can be used to modify packages.

Capture & build

Upon first launch of the capture program, an Internet activation is performed in the background, so you need Internet connection. After activation a pre-capture snapshot of the reference machine is taken. A next dialog tells you to start the installation process.

During the installation process, you can add any component and configure the application to your needs. When the application is installed and configured, simply click [Install done] to take a post-capture snapshot.

Once the post-capture is performed, the only thing left to do, is select the .exe that represents the actual application and a build is performed. The build results in a directory with some shortcuts and an <appname><version>.<appname>.virtual.exe. The last is the isolated application that can run on any Windows system.

Opinion

Looks simple? It is that simple. I have packaged Team Viewer and Opera without any problems. The packages ran fine on my Windows 7 x64 system.

Cameyo is not as enhanced as VMware ThinApp, but for simple application virtualization it is great. I would place it in the same category as Symantec Workspace Virtualization Personal Edition (download under Trialware) that is good code to simple isolate individual applications.

Try it yourself and download Cameyo.

My next stop will be Evalaze Application Virtualization (free for personal use), which looks a lot like Spoon (formerly know as Xenocode).

Review: Ubuntu Netbook 10.04

Hello everybody. It is been a long time. Sorry for that.

Yesterday I made a big switch from Microsoft Windows 7 Home to Ubuntu Netbook 10.04 LTS. With the Long Term Support (LTS) version you get 3 years support on Ubuntu Desktop, and 5 years on Ubuntu Server.

In this post I want to share my experiences with Ubuntu Netbook.

I replaced Windows with Ubuntu on my Netbook. I use my netbook mainly for surfing and multi media purposes.

Due to the lack of CD-ROM, I first had to make an USB drive installation. Just download the .iso from the Ubuntu website and follow the instructions for Windows, Mac or Ubuntu how to create a USB drive. In my case, I had to download a simple Windows application that simple needed to know the distribution and location of the .iso.

The installation also contains a Try it! mode, which allowed me to run Ubuntu without touching the system. This is ideal for finding out if all hardware is supported.

All hardware on my Samsung NC10 was detected and worked out of the box. Also most of the functionality I used on Windows appeared to be part of Ubuntu Netbook default software set. The only difference is that Ubuntu required 715MB for the operating system including applications, compared to Windows that requires 3GB excluding applications.

Some applications that are installed by default:

• Firefox Web Browser
• OpenOffice.org 3.2
• Evolution Mail and Calendar
• F-Spot Photo Manager
• Gwibber Social Client
• Empathy IM Client

The few applications that were not part of the default installation that I installed additionally from the Ubuntu Software Center or developer website are:

• Google Chrome
• Adobe Flash plugin
• Touchpad
• Dropbox
• FFmpeg plugin for GStreamer

I was really surprised that all these applications were available as .deb. In the earlier days, I always has to search for repositories that held experimental sources. But apparently Ubuntu became an important Linux distribution, that software developers want to support.

With the additional software installations I am now able to do the same as with Windows, but more free space and all for free.

My experiences with Ubuntu Netbook so far are great. Fast boot time (30 sec. until desktop), nice netbook aware interface and kind for the battery. I love the Gwibber Social Client, that links to almost all social networks, including Twitter, Facebook.

Evolution Mail Client works fine. I would like to have better Gmail integration though. Mail itself is fine, but Contacts and Calendat requires some tweaking.

Sound & Video applications Rythmbox Music Player and Movie Player play all the well knows formats. The Rythmbox Music Player is by default linked to two music stores (Jamendo, Magnatune and Ubuntu One Music Store).
Something nice I discovered is the automatic playback of .mp3 as soon as you hover above a file in the Ubuntu File Browser.

Ubuntu has also a cloud service called Ubuntu One. From the default installation you can easily create an account and add the computer to the Ubuntu One cloud. All computers in the cloud can synchronize Notes, Contact, Bookmarks and Files. Unfortunately you can not yet link your Windows machines to Ubuntu One.

So far, I can really recommend Ubuntu Netbook on netbooks.

I will continue my research to see if Ubuntu can be used as stable VDI client.

Microsoft Tag

Just created a Microsoft Tag for this weblog. Let’s hope there is a tag reader for Android .

Tag Cloud

Client hypervisor value add

Recently I have been thinking about the a new wave called client hypervisor. After all major vendors have server virtualization on stock, the client will get focus. Citrix are already talking about Citrix Client Hypervisor, VMware named their new kid Client Virtualization Platform and probably Microsoft has some stuff in their kitchen as well. A nice startup company called Neocleus already has some cool technology supporting the client hypervisor.

A client hypervisor is a type 1 hypervisor that runs on bare metal instead of a host operating system. It allows direct use of the hardware. Depending on the technology used, the hardware can be shared or partitioned.

I have seen several projects where a second PC on a desk with a different meaning would be useful. Think about a high performance PC for graphics, or a less restrictive PC for development. These requirements are often valid in remote computing environments, where the ‘task worker’ workspace does not provide enough power or flexibility. But besides remote computing environments, the same challenges exist in well controlled client-server environments.

A client hypervisor might solve the challenges described above by providing a second operating system running on the same machine simultaneously. In case interoperability is required between the two operating systems, the underlying client hypervisor technology should support this. Both operating systems still have to be managed though. This will probably result in a happier user and a very stressed IT administrator that has to manage an extra operating system and the additional client hypervisor technology.

The real-life examples that I have seen (Europe), were applicable to only a small group of users throughout the enterprise. Most users were just happy with their ‘task worker’ workspace. From a commercial point of view it is more interesting, when  the solution is applicable to all users instead of a small group.

When looking a little bit more out of the box, other possibilities arise. What if I can give all by users a private operating system with all the flexibility and software they use at home. Having a private operating system by hand, users can keep up their social life at work. If this is adopted in a disciplined way, users might spend more hours at the office with a smile on their face. From a technical point of view the IT administrator can isolate the private operating system from the corporate one. As discussed earlier, introducing client hypervisor in the enterprise will require more administrative attention, but in this case it might pay off by more productive users. The concept of Bring Your Own PC also offers two computing environments in a box, but not on a corporate PC, but on your own PC.

Another totally different way to use client hypervisors in the enterprise is to enable distributed computing. Not the seti@home kind of distributed computing, but distributed services. The desktop computer has a lot of power that is not always used. For example when typing a letter in a word processor, I have a lot of memory and CPU cycles doing nothing. If only I could run an application server in the background, the user is not even aware of. Of course I have to break the power button to prevent power off .
If using the client hypervisor for distributed computing, probably the current solutions have to be modified a bit, but cost wise I think it is interesting, because you might be able to empty out the datacenter.

The startup Neocleus has a great technology, that allows ISV to create software for the client virtualization framework. This allows ISV to perform out-of-band management with the use of Intel’s vPro technology. Out-of-band management might improve security and manageability of operating systems.

Roundup

The client hypervisor is cool technology, but personally I would first do the math (ROI) on the server virtualization hype to see if that innovation already paid off. A thorough business case has to be made to decide if this new wave is profitable.

Technical impact:

• More complexity by introducing an extra virtualization layer
• More operating systems to manage
• Exited IT administrators, because it is cool

Profitable use cases:

• Introduce private computing environments that might increase productivity
• Distributed computing
• Provide a second computing environment different from the corporate standard to those who have exceptional needs
• Improve security with out-of-band management

This article is just a personal opinion.