Business communications are becoming increasingly complex and require workers to manage multiple devices, applications  and face-to-face interactions in an attempt to stay productively connected with one another… (more)

Have you implemented Microsoft BPOS or are you considering implementing it?

I am carrying out an assessment of Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) and its suitability for use in large organisations.  If you have implemented BPOS or if you are a user of BPOS, I would really like to hear about your experiences of implementing and using it.

What problems did you encounter, from a technical perspective? How did you migrate from previous platforms, e.g. Webmail, Outlook 2003, SharePoint 2003, etc. What use have you made of OCS and Live Meeting? What about non-Microsoft browsers, such as Firefox, Safari, etc. Do you use other platforms, such as Apple and mobile devices? What approach did you take to roll-out, particularly in larger organisations? How many users did you have to cater for? How have you found the service  from the perspectives of security, availability, reliability, resilience, etc? And how have you found it from the perspectives of usability and accessibility?

What went well in your project? What benefits did your organisation gain from the implementation? What was the user and techcial training requirement? How have users adapted to the service and what has their experience been?

I’d really appreciate if readers would share their experiences with me and leave a comment here. I will collate all comments for a later blog post.

Se que muchos ya lo saben, pero durante estos días me gustaría reforzar el mensaje que existen herramientas de colaboración que son gratuitas y accesibles a todos, además de que son perfectas para colaborar virtualmente ya sea para el trabajo, la escuela, o cualquier otro propósito.

Windows Live SkyDrive. Store, access, and share your files with friends or co-workers, from anywhere online. Free 25 GB online storage means you can easily get to your stuff with just a few quick clicks. Top features

• Hefty storage With 25 GB of free, password-protected online storage, you’ve got the freedom to share large photos, files, and documents.
• Photos SkyDrive now does a great job with your photos, including large previews, thumbnail views of your photos, captions, and comments.
• Personal folders With personal folders, you can keep your files online and access them with virtually any Web-enabled computer or mobile device — whether it’s yours, a friend’s, or a public computer

Live Mesh: With Live Mesh, you can synchronize files with all of your devices, so you always have the latest versions handy. Access your files from any device or from the web, easily share them with others, and get notified whenever someone changes a file. Working on one computer, but need a program from another? No problem. Use Live Mesh to connect to your other computer and access its desktop as if you were sitting right in front of it.

Office Live Workspaces: Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta is your online place to save, access, and share documents and files. Use it to group related information for work, school, or personal projects. No downloads are required—just sign up and go. Access Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files from anywhere Save up to 5 gigabytes (GB) of documents and files in one place. Access and preview them from almost any computer, whether or not it has Office installed. All you need is Web access and a compatible browser. Open files from your poolside laptop or your home office.

Live Sync: Windows Live Sync is a free service designed to help you synchronize (The process of uploading and downloading information between two or more computers so that the information on each computer is identical.) files across all the computers you use, share files and photos with friends and colleagues, and remotely access your files from any other computer connected to the Internet. If you have more than one computer, you can create personal folders (A synchronized folder that you create for yourself. Files in a personal synchronized folder are not shared with other people and only the owner of the folder can access them. If you have more than one computer, you might create a personal synchronized folder to share files between them.) to synchronize files between them. You can also share files with friends or colleagues when you create or connect your computer to a shared folder (A synchronized folder that you have been invited to share, or a folder that you have invited others to share. Files in a shared synchronized folder are accessed and can be changed by more than one person. The owner must invite other people to use the folder in order for them to have permission to access it.) .

Microsoft Live Meeting (Servicio de Prueba por 30 días de Microsoft Office Live Meeting)

• Si crees que debería estar alguna más en la lista avísame y la agrego.
• Por favor comparte esta información recuerda que la idea es ayudar.

Saludos

Ferglo

This week I gave a presentation at Winvision and recorded it in Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007. The resulting recording is a webpage with multiple streams: desktop video, presenter video and audio. The problem is that the codec used doesn’t work on x64 systems or Windows 7 (Server). Watching the separate streams isn’t really an option because there is no audio included in the video streams.

But I got lucky as it seems Microsoft has released a new tool called “Recording Converter for Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007” only last month.

This tool allows you to convert a Live Meeting recording into a WMV file. You can choose the output resolution and, optionally, you can include the presenter and/or panoramic video streams. Takes an hour to process (my presentation was nearly 2 hours) and now I have a file most video players can render.

I’ve blogged about my eating plan before, but I still get asked several times a week to walk through exactly what I’m doing. (Probably because I’ve gone from 276.8lbs to under 250 in about 6 weeks!) So I’m going to try out Live Meeting tomorrow at Lunch. I’m going to walk through exactly how the meal plan that I’m doing works, how I implement it and the areas that I’m still working on. Note: I am going to show you the specific products I’ve been taking and show you have you can buy them directly from the manufacturer.

P.S. – sorry for the late notice on this. I kept meaning to schedule this, but then had a crazy weekend. If you can’t make this, but wanted to attend, leave a comment and I’ll see about scheduling another lunch later in the week.

Click here to Join the meeting, Monday Feb 2, 2009 12pm to 1pm CST.

See you then!

Audio Information
Computer Audio
To use computer audio, you need speakers and microphone, or a headset.

First Time Users:
To save time before the meeting, check your system to make sure it is ready to use Microsoft Office Live Meeting.

Troubleshooting
Unable to join the meeting? Follow these steps:

1. Copy this address and paste it into your web browser:
https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/join

2. Copy and paste the required information:
Meeting ID: S843FM
Location: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp

If you still cannot enter the meeting, contact support

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In an email from Microsoft the other day, I saw an offer for Microsoft Online Services and was curious about what’s available and what the pricing might be.  After navigating through the too byzantine process to get to it, I was able to see the pricing below.

Microsoft Online Services Pricing (as of 2009-01-17)

Here’s the blurb on the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite:

Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite is a set of messaging and collaboration solutions hosted by Microsoft, and consists of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online (coming soon). These online services are designed to give your business streamlined communication with high availability, comprehensive security, and simplified IT management. Your business benefits from always up-to-date technologies that are deployed rapidly, maximizing your valuable IT resources and reducing your need for infrastructure investments.

It’s a growing trend.  In 2009, you’ll be attending more and more meetings.  From your desk and desktop, that is.  In a Travel Procurement article titled “The Next Best Thing To Being There: Virtual Meetings Earn Their Rightful Place In Strategic Meetings Management”, surveyed travel buyers confirm that the trend is real:

Faced with an economic downturn and increased airfares, three-quarters of 230 U.S. travel buyers responding to a recent National Business Travel Association poll reported increased use of teleconferencing and Web-based meetings. Nearly 57 percent cited increased use of videoconferencing. More than 80 percent said the technology replaced actual trips.

Consider the travel policy at P&G:

“Our policy is set up so that virtual media must be considered if business objectives can be achieved,” said Diana Johantgen, service manager for Procter & Gamble’s new meeting, event and convention management team, who helped incorporate a virtual meetings program into that company’s strategic meetings management program.

This shift towards virtual meetings means good things for Cisco (Telepresence and WebEx), Nortel and HP (Telepresence), Citrix (GoToMeeting), Microsoft (Live Meeting) and many others.  While virtual meetings and telepresence may never reproduce 100% of in-person meetings, you can’t beat the cost efficiency and convenience.

Additionally, online meetings provide unique benefits, such as the meeting archive.   Ever need to schedule a series of information sessions or training presentations?  Why not do a virtual meeting (live) and record it – take the archive, edit it down (if needed) and then allow all reamining groups to view the session on-demand, on their schedule.  If the presentation is mandatory, the online meeting can be tracked to ensure that all required users end up viewing it.

OK, gotta go now.  A virtual meeting awaits!

If you are deploying the Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007 Client, here are some quick facts that will help answer some basic questions:

1.       The Live Meeting 2007 client shares several settings with Microsoft Office Communicator. The specific registry key settings the two clients share is documented here. There are four settings which determine how the client connects to the OCS server:

a.       ServerAddressExternal:  server name for external meeting participants to connect to.

b.      ServerAddressInternal:  server name for internal meeting participants to connect to.

c.       ServerSipUri:  the SIP address used when connecting via Communicator, Live Meeting, or the Outlook Conferencing Add-in clients.

d.      Transport:  the network protocol (TCP or TLS) used to connect.

2.       The Live Meeting 2007 client settings are shared with the Microsoft Outlook Conferencing Add-In.

3.       There is a Microsoft KB article describing an administrative template for the Live Meeting 2007 client (but I cannot find where to download it):  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948741/.  One useful setting here is the ability to suppress the User Accounts dialog box that appears when a user starts the Live Meeting 2007 or the Conferencing Add-in for Outlook for the first time.

En el dia de hoy Microsoft ha anunciado que los servicios online Exchange Online y Sharepoint Online han salido de la Beta y ya es posible disfrutar de estos dos productos, junto con Live meeting y Comunication Online, por un precio de 15$ al mes por usuario. Además es posible probar sus servicios durante un mes sin coste alguno.

La verdad es que no han tardado mucho en liberar el producto porque fué en Julio de este año cuando anunciaban la apertura de la beta y adelantaban los precios de los online services que como podemos ver sus precios no han variado desde aquel anuncio.

El acuerdo del nivel de servicio para las suit de productos online en lo que se refiere al pago por incumplimiento del acuerdo se puede ver en la tabla de abajo y al menos es capaz de devolver el 100% en créditos (=esto es lo mismo que cuando te dan un vale en un tienda y solo lo puedes canjear en la misma tienda), cosa que Amazon ni siquiera se plantea.

    i.     Uptime Service Levels

Monthly Uptime Percentage	Service Credit
< 99.9%	25%
< 99%	50%
< 95%	100%

El posicionamiento que quieren hacer del conjunto de productos es tan ambicioso como en muchos de sus productos: apuntar  a cualquier tamaño de empresa aunque bajo mi punto de vista productos como comunication online y Sharepoint solo los veo para empresas de al menos tamaño medio.

Esta claro que Microsoft ve en la nube una nueva fuente de ingresos y no quiere dejar escapar esta nueva tendencia del cloud computing.  La prueba está en que en un breve espacio de tiempo han anunciado SQL Data Service,  la plataforma como servicio Windows Azure, el nuevo Office que estará en la nube y estos servicios. Atrás quedan los días donde en Microsoft defendían el software + servicios en una estrategía más de comunicación y reorientación de sus mismos productos que de seguir la arquitectura de desarrollo (multitenancy) y modelo de negocio del software as a service. Veremos cual es el siguiente paso de este gigante.

Microsoft Online Services are getting ever closer to being a reality in the corporate world, with the official US launch on Monday (17-11-08). The UK launch will follow in the Spring so around March/April 2009.

The first acronym was SAAS or “Software-As-A-Service” with perhaps the biggest example being Salesforce.com, the CRM system. This is an online only model where the customer doesn’t have anything “on-premise” (installed at the customer site) and instead it is all in the “Cloud” (the internet). Microsoft realised that that doesn’t always suit all customers..they often like to have at least some portion of the software installed on-premise too, be it for Disaster Recovery, integration with other existing systems, high levels of customization and many other reasons so they invented Software+Services. The “Plus” is the key..customers can have the software on premise, in the cloud or a mix of both giving them a greater level of flexibility.

Microsoft Online Services AKA BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) provides corporate users with Microsoft hosted versions of the software, accessed via the internet. The products included in the BPOS Suite are:

• Exchange Online
• Sharepoint Online
• Office Communications Server (OCS)*
• Live Meeting

*It’s to be noted that OCS isn’t available as yet and will be making an appearance a little while into 2009.

Mary Jo Foley has a new post with info on future S+S offerings from Microsoft. Their stated aim is to have a web-based service to match all their exisitng on-premise offerings and it looks like ForeFront Security and System Center Management tools are the next in the line up. This would likely encompass anti-virus, web/content filtering, firewalls, online backup, disaster recovery and more-quite a good string to their bow.

Some people might wonder what the point of this is and while there are many reasons that customers will looks at BPOS, here are what I see as the 2 key drivers.

The Small to Medium Business (SMB’s)

I first took a real look at BPOS over at the WPC in Houston and right away I could see the potential for SMB’s. These are customers typically around the 50-100 user mark (although they could be smaller/bigger) who love the features of (usually) Sharepoint server and can see that collaboration, enhanced search, wiki’s, portals and more would benefit their business by increasing efficiency. However, they often can’t afford the initial monetary outlay for Sharepoint and/or don’t have the people to deploy, configure and maintain a Sharepoint installation.

Typically this brings an end to the matter until the customer increases in size to make the internal administration do-able or they find a chunk of cash down the back of the sofa BPOS however, will be a perfect solution as it can resolve both the afore mentioned issues.

Because BPOS is hosted at Microsoft’s DataCenters in The Cloud, the customer doesn’t need to worry about learning the skills to deploy and configure the software at installation, ensuring they have the people and time to perform ongoing maintenance, deploying updates & patches-Microsoft will take care of all that.

Because BPOS is charged on a monthly basis, this allows customers to spread the costs over the course of the 12 months, rather than paying it all in one hit up-front.

The Busy Corporate

In some ways this is similar to the first example but it applies to bigger companies. Most corporates around the 300+ user mark have a very long to-do list..upgrade network switching, implement SAN (Storage Area Network), desktop refresh, move to a virtual infrastructure and so on. Added into/onto a list like this, deploying something such as Sharepoint or Office Communications Server can seem a daunting, perhaps impossible task to system admins. They’ll need to purchase and deploy new servers, perhaps upgrade parts of the network to cope with the increased demand, add extra security and plenty more which can mean that the timescales for deployments such as this are quite lengthy and keep growing.

BPOS can cut through all that. The busy admins don’t need to do anything other than grant users access to the services. As they don’t need to deploy, upgrade or install anything-the implementation timescales can be drastically reduced, which is good for all involved.

BPOS will allow companies to realise the many benefits that these Microsoft products can offer them much quicker than is currently possible.

Although the BPOS suite includes all the mentioned products, they are also available individually which gives customers the flexibility to have, for example, an on-premise Exchange server with a Cloud based Sharepoint server. Alternatively you can have the same product both on-premise and online so a big corporate HQ could have Exchange onsite, while their satellite offices could use the MS hosted version.

As for the licensing side of things, I do have some info. Customers that have current Software Assurance (SA) will be able to purchase the services at a reduced cost to reflect their already increased investment in MS technology, and they will need to keep their SA current alongside their BPOS licensing. This means should they choose to move away from BPOS at a later date, they will still be fully licensed for the most current perpetual versions of the software too. Customers that don’t have SA will have to purchase a User Subscription Licence (USL) to gain access to the BPOS suite. Should they choose to revert back to soley on-premise software, they won’t retain any entitlement to the software (as it is a non-perpetual subscription).

Many people view S+S as a bit of a black art or perhaps a fad but I really think this is a watershed moment for anyone that uses software. The companies that embrace Software+Services from the start, be they MS partners or end users, will really have an advantage over their competitors in the long run. As a Microsoft Gold Partner I’m very excited about the new things that BPOS will bring along

*Update* I heard today direct from Microsoft that Dynamics CRM will be available as an online version in July 2010, so a little while yet.

If you have any questions or comments about moving to a Microsoft hosted solution, please feel free to leave a comment and I’ll help you out as best I can!

Cheers

Rich

NotAtPDC Logo

The effort to organize NotAtPDC all started from several people on Twitter having a few laughs because “everyone” is not at Microsoft PDC (going on 26 Oct 2008 – 30 Oct 2008).  As such, a few people got together and thought it would be a great opportunity to organize a completely virtual conference with information being distributed via mediums such as Twitter, Microsoft SharedView and Microsoft Live Meeting.

Check it out here: http://notatpdc.com/

Hi there! If you’re wondering how you can download gotomeeting for free, the answer is Citrix provide a 30 day free trial. You can get it by following this link.

If you’ve got any questions about the download, for gotomeeting in general leave them as a comment and I’ll tell you what I can

When you are invited to a Live Meting you will receive and email that looks similar to:

Once you perform any calendar options the invitation will only be available from within the Outlook calendar. Go to your calendar and double click to open the meeting detail to connect to the meeting.

*** If you have not used Live Meeting before, click on “check your system.”

***Using this link will save time when it comes time for your meeting by installing the necessary software prior to the meeting. Clicking on the check your system link will open you up to a test live meeting.

Join the Meeting

To join the meeting click on “Join the meeting.”

Clicking on the meeting will open the Live Meeting software. Depending on the options and type of meeting you will need audio equipment. To be able to hear the meeting you will need speaker or headphones.

To be able to speak and be heard you will need a microphone. The McKim & Creed laptops have built in microphones that can be used. The desktops do not have microphones. If you are using Live Meeting often you may want to get a headset with headphone and a microphone. There are plenty of options available.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010290707+4093&name=%2410+-+%2425

*** Once the Live Meeting software opens up you will have to un-mute the microphone by clicking on the Microphone in the upper right corner.

The Tools

Right Side Toolbar

There are 2 toolbars at the top of the interface.

Speaker – turns the speaker that allows you to hear on and off
Microphone – when there is a red circle with the line through it the microphone is muted. To allow others to hear you, click on the microphone.
Webcam – if there is a webcam attached you can turn it on and off by clicking the webcam icon.
Handouts – If the presenter has files available for download they will be in the handouts section.
Notepad – This is a notepad. If the presenter allows you to take notes this is where you will do so. These notes are available and accessible by everyone.
Feedback – Allows you to provide feedback:

Left Side Toolbar

Attendees – Allows you to see who is in the meeting, what there feedback is, who the presenter(s) is, and who is muted.

Voice and Video – Allows you to set audio and video settings. Also allows you to bring up another person’s video is they are using a webcam.

Q&A – The question and answer manager is used to ask questions. This is useful to ask questions during a meeting without interrupting the presenter. It is also used when the attendee is unable to use the microphone.

Meeting – allows you to view meeting info and exit the meeting.

There are multiple ways to share the desktop in Live Meeting. You can share just a program, your whole desktop, part of your desktop, or you can share an attendee’s desktop. Sharing just one program is good for when you are demonstrating how to do something in just one program where as sharing your whole desktop is good for demonstrating how to do multiple things including windows based actions like clicking on the start menu.

Share a Program

To share just a program click on Content è Share è Share a Program è The program you wish to share.

Once you have shared a program it available for others to see. You will have a menu at the top with some options available to you.

The arrow stops the sharing and returns you back to the Live Meeting program.

The Pause button pauses the sharing of your desktop.

This button allows others to control your desktop.

Share the Entire Desktop

To Share the entire desktop click on Content è Share è Share your Desktop è All

This will share your entire desktop. You will get the menu at the top of the screen as you get when sharing just a program.

Share Part of Your Desktop

To share just a part of your desktop click on Content è Share è Share your Desktop è Selected Area

This will bring up the Sharing Frame. Whatever is in that frame will be viewable by the attendees. To resize the frame place the mouse over a corner until it turns into a 2 sided arrow. Click and hold the left mouse button and drag the window to the desired size. Let go of the mouse button.

Note:
If you are using multiple monitors only the Primary monitor will be shared. This goes for all sharing, so if you share just a program and move it to the extended desktop the attendees will not be able to see the program.