Tech for Lunch!

Pinnacle, a division of Avid (editing software used in television) offers a beautiful product to the general public, the Dazzle Video Creator Platinum. It allows you to simply capture images of your VHS and video cameras in your computer and then make montages to be transferred to DVD or video to the Internet.

The software comes with a capture card. An external module that you plug into a USB port on your computer. In this unit, you plug your VHS player, your video camera or any other video player connecting with RCA cables or S-Video.

You capture, edit and you create. During the capture, the software scans the video images on your computer. Once this stage is completed, it analyzes the images and divides them into chapters (like a DVD). This will help you when the time comes to create the menus. If you want to keep the images as they are (e.g. a TV show in full or video of your marriage) simply choose the beginning and end and voila!

If you wish to make a montage (best time, remove the ads, etc..), You can choose the samples to keep and paste, reverse them and choose transitions. The editing software allows you to simply create your montage and is suitable for most people. You choose the look of thee DVD menu, it gives a name to each clip and is almost finished.

Finally, you select the type of video you want. A DVD? A Web clip(Real Player, Windows Media)? A digital file in MPEG format?

If you have added several effects, transitions and added several titles, the computer will take some time to compile the video. Burn the result to the DVD itself and you have a true DVD as the ones you rent in video stores.

The software comes with Pinnacle Studio QuickStart, which offers a capture module only. This means that you cannot do anything other than DVDs or videos to computer.

The Dazzle Video Creator Platinum is a module which does not require installation. Just connect it to the USB port of a computer and you’re ready to go.

Be aware that any kind of video editing requires quite a bit of memory and processing power so make sure you have a good enough machine to do it. This will work on older machines but it just takes longer during editing and compilation.

I’m sure a lot of you have other suggestions for video editing software, but this is an easy to use solution for those who are looking for a quick and easy way to convert video to a digital media.

Well, I discussed Windows Vista SP1 previously, and now Microsoft has turned on the deployment through automatic updates. This means that if you have automatic updates turned on to download and install automatically, you should be getting SP1 installed pretty soon.

Naturally, the process will be progressive because of the many bugs that were found during the first phases. The most annoying bug is the endless booting loop where your computer simply reboots constantly after SP1 is applied. It’s a bit difficult to get any work done when that happens. Other problems are mostly with security programs which end up broken after the patch is installed.

You can still just go ahead and download the full installation file directly from Microsoft (mostly for administrators) to get SP1 right away if you don’t trust the automatic updates.

Earlier this month, Yahoo! announced “ Onesearch 2.0“. Onesearch is Yahoo’s search software for Internet connected mobile devices. The newly released version allows users to use voice commands to search the web.

Now you can use your voice to get answers on your phone. With Yahoo! oneSearch™ with voice, it’s fast and easy to search for anything you need when you’re mobile. Just speak into your phone and get relevant and accurate results from Yahoo! oneSearch, an industry leading mobile search product.

Onesearch is a pretty cool product because it allows you to find things faster than you normally would on your mobile phone. No need to browse to yahoo, search and then hope the results are relevant and well formatted for your phone. OneSearch runs directly on your mobile phone and lets you launch a search faster and returns relevant results that you can actually use.

Yahoo has partnered with 29 mobile telephone service carriers, representing 600 million customers, since the first version of oneSearch launched in early 2007. The second-generation oneSearch software is free for download and installation to mobile telephones linked to the Internet.

Not too long ago, I covered the Microsoft Online Portal Solutions offering Exchange and Sharepoint capabilities as web services. Microsoft just announced that the Office suite will now also be a part of this approach. This is no surprise since Bill Gates mentioned that we would be seeing more and more of this from Microsoft to keep up with the competition, but also to offer more choices to the customers. The yet-to-be-released product, code named “Albany” will be a bundled installation available on a subscription basis.

With just a few clicks, “Albany” subscribers will be able install the whole package, which includes Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, giving them the latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for their personal and school projects; Windows Live OneCare to help keep viruses at bay and their computer fast and healthy; and Windows Live Mail, Messenger and Photo Gallery so they can connect and share with others. Albany also installs the Microsoft Office Live Workspace connector on the Microsoft Office toolbar, so users can save documents to their own dedicated online workspace and invite friends and classmates to collaborate and share.

Right from the start, we can see that the main difference here is that the product does not run directly in a browser like Microsoft Online, but is offered as a subscription-based download with updates for as long a you are a member. This is certainly a brand new approach for Microsoft who have always offered software on a license based model either per seat or per user.

The target audience for a product like this is limited because it is not for businesses and not everyone is inclined to having a bunch of Microsoft products pushed onto their machine. Microsoft’s point of view is that they are bundling the office software with a software segment that most users are willing to pay to get as a subscription: Security - They also aim for people who like to always have the latest version of everything installed on their machines.

Microsoft will be adding products to this new model to broaden the target audience and to better compete with their closest competitors for the online suites: Google and Zoho. A business version should also become available.

The beta version of Albany will become commercially available later this year and and pricing has yet to be established.

While we are in this line of thought, might as well cover another application that uses the Adobe Flex framework and that deals with financial data. I spoke about Spiceworks.com and iexpenseonline.com in my last two posts, so this application is a bit more for developers, but could have some very interesting results for the end-users.

Intuit has just announced that they are joining the “Platform-as-a-service” band wagon with Amazon, Google and their closest competitor, Salesforce.com. The Quickbase development environment offers developers the opportunity to use intuit’s Quickbase as a platform combined with the Adobe Flex Framework to build applications for end-users.

Quickbase is not the new product, but the fact that it is going to be available for developers to use openly and to publish their own applications directly for all quickbase users to see, is new. One great advantage that Intuit has is that large user base for Quickbooks. The apps developed will be web add-ons for Quickbooks users sold on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Developers not only get the power and reliability of the Quickbase platform, but the visibility to Quickbooks users. Users are already familiar with quickbooks so a minimized learning curve is also important.

Take a look at the quickbase website; there are videos and some demos of applications that can be built using the Quickbase Development Environment.

I was very surprised when I came across this application about a week ago, that I had not heard about it earlier. I have seen and implemented a pretty good number of commercial “suites” that are supposed to be flawlessly integrated and offer everything you need out of the box. Truth be told, most of the time, you need some heavy customization to get the results you are looking for and you usually need to change your business process to fit the “mold” of the application. This is true for most suites that try to take over your entire IT Management activities.

Spiceworks may not offer the entire spectrum of IT Management tasks, but it does what it does very well and offers the most important applications that any IT manager needs in one simple and free package.

Essentially, Spiceworks is setup locally on a machine inside your network and installs its own web server on a port of your choosing. The entire interface is web-based and allows you to do a multitude of things such as:

• Automatic computer and software inventory
• IT asset reporting
• Network Monitoring and troubleshooting
• IT Helpdesk
• Connect to the spiceworks community for IT answers, product reviews and advice from other IT pros

I absolutely love the integration that they have done with this product and the way the interface is designed. It’s simple and intuitive and lets you get things done quickly. I especially like the portal section of the website which allows your clients to log on to open helpdesk tickets directly and gives them a source of information specific to your environment. You can place a message at the top of the page to let your customers know if there are problems on the system and give them a list of places to look for information to fix their own problems.

The software inventory portion is very well done and the best part is that it will run an inventory on your entire network without having to install anything on client machines. You simply supply an administrator username/password to access all the machines on the network and away it goes, capable of detecting Windows, OS X and Linux boxes. Spiceworks lets you complete the information manually to specify, for example, how many licenses of each software you have bought to make sure you are legit and up to date. You can pull out many standard reports so that you are always on top of what’s going on in your environment.

Network Monitoring will let you see all the recent activity on your network and one of my favorites is the “Recent software” section. This one lets you see what recent software was installed by your end-users so you can enforce company policies if needed. There are many indicators that you can use and another very useful one is hard disk capacity which lets you know whenever a machine is running low on disk space. Spiceworks will let you connect directly to a machine (Using RDP) for troubleshooting and has a few other helpful tools to diagnose network problems.

The community section connects back to the spiceworks site and lets you interact with other IT pros to get answers and advice for some problems you may be having and acts just like a portal with a forum, news, reviews, and even a store. I see it as a portal for IT Pros.

So how does spiceworks offer such a complete and well done package for free? There are a few very non-obstrusive ads in the application by IT partners such as HP, Rackspace and Logmein. Quite honestly, this is the kind of package that I wouldn’t mind paying for to use it in a company, but free is always good :-)

Overall, Spiceworks offers a well rounded solution for IT managers with an environment of less than 250 devices and admin rights on all of them. As mentioned on their site, it will work with larger networks, but it might be slower. If you need to implement a quick ticketing solution and/or a network inventory solution, Spiceworks may be just the thing you are looking for.

It’s no secret that I am a fan of Google’s impressive array of online applications and, when it comes to desktop applications, they do an excellent job as well. Google Earth is one of those applications and an even more impressive one if you stop and think about the massive amounts of information that are required to make it possible.

Google Earth 4.3 was released this week and there are number of new features to make this a worthwhile upgrade if you like the application. Google Earth Blog has a great review with screenshots of this version. The best way to get a good look at the features without doing all the work yourself, is probably the videos on Youtube: This one by Google, and this one by Frank Taylor which is embedded below.

The most important new features are:

• Photo-realistic buildings from cities around the world
• Dawn to dusk views with the Sunlight feature
• Swoop navigation from outer space to street-level
• Improved Streetview
• Imagery dates

All of these features a pretty clear in terms of what they offer, but the Streetview feature is probably one of the coolest in its presentation. When you get to the street level of a city(a city which has streetview and pictures to go along) you can see “spheres” representing the images that you can walk into at that specific spot. Once inside the image, you have a picture-quality view as if you were standing there.

One thing I was waiting for and that is now available though, is the imagery dating which allows you to know when the images you are looking at were taken. This way, you’ll know if that’s really your car your seeing!

According to Neowin, the long awaited Service Pack 3 for Windows XP is almost here. Although unconfirmed by Microsoft just yet, the dates would be the following:

• April 14, 2008: Support becomes available for the release version of SP3
• April 21, 2008: OEMs, Volume License, Connect, MSDN and TechNet
• April 29, 2008: Microsoft Update, Windows Update, Download Center
• June 10, 2008: Automatic Updates

For most of us, this would mean we could get an official release of SP3 on April 29th and for those of us who need to test SP3 for larger environments, we should have until June 10th before it gets automatically pushed out to customers.

This is the fourth part of my review of the new features in Windows Server 2008.

Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7)

IIS has been pretty much the same old service for quite some time and now comes a much needed update with Server 2008. IIS7 is a robust solution for web hosting and application development using Microsoft’s technologies. Just like all other services of the same nature, Internet Information Service 7.0 becomes fully componentized so, should you decide to install this as a role on your server, you only get the required pieces to run it properly and nothing more, reducing the need for updates and the available attack surface.

The administration console, which is part of Server Manager, has been much improved as well and gives a more flexible management experience to the administrators. IIS7 can be installed as a ServerCore role as well as Windows Media Services 2008 and now supports direct xcopy-installations of your websites.

Terminal Services (TS)

Terminal Services is probably one of the features with the most noticeable additions, if your organization uses these services already. My favorite one is most definitely the RemoteApp capability. When your users access an application that is published through RemoteApp, they are actually logged in with TS, but the application looks and feels exactly as if it was running from the local machine. The great advantage of this possibility for administrators(and ease of use for end-users) is that the users no longer have to see the full desktop along with their application. Terminal Services Web Access allows you to deploy RemoteApp applications through

Terminal Services Gateway allows users to connect to their apps and desktops using a regular browser connected to the internet. This would also work from mobile devices with the right software. The Gateway Services run on the RDP protocol tunneled over HTTPS to make a very secure connection. This option is a great alternative when VPN connections are blocked in hotels or wireless access locations.

Regular Terminal Services also get some changes, although not as big as the previous ones. The new Easy Print feature lets users print to local printers when they are using RemoteApps or desktop sessions more easily and reliably. It also supports 32-bit colors and copy/paste operations between the client and the host.

Hyper-V

Hyper-V is a next-generation Hypervisor-based server virtualization technology that allows you to consolidate multiple machines on a single server or run a virtual test environment, for example. Hyper-V is implemented as simply as all other roles on Server 2008 which makes it very easy to configure and manage.

Hyper-V is not quite completed yet and, as such, only a beta version will be included in the first release of Windows Server 2008. When the product becomes available later this year, it will be updated through an automatic Update. The Release Candidate that is currently available for download is feature complete but the product will have to prove itself since there are some heavy contenders in this market slice such as VMware.

Versions

As usual, there will be several versions of Windows Server 2008 available which you can see in details here. Be sure to look around on that page to find all the comparisons that are available. I personally can’t wait for the Small Business Server 2008 edition to become available.

This is the third part of my review of the new features in Windows Server 2008.

Network Access Protection (NAP)

Network Access Protection is one of my favorite new features of Server 2008 because I’ve been in a few companies which asked specifically for such a functionality. There are third-party applications that allow this and some cisco gear also permits this but the management is sometimes problematic and decentralized. Windows Server 2008 allows you to implement NAP very easily and uses Server Manager for management and monitoring.

The purpose of Network Access Protection is to prevent unauthorized machines from getting onto your network. Using a Security Policy(or many policies…), Windows Server will verify the health of client computers (Vista and XP SP3 are supported) that connect to the network. Once their compliance is established, an action is taken depending on the settings you chose in the policy. Non-compliant machines are either denied network access completely or redirected to a secured subnet where they might only have access to the internet(for consultants, perhaps) or have access to the necessary resources to correct the problems that were found.

The requirements you choose to determine your system health can include certain software installations (anti virus, or a specific corporate software), patch level and even some computer settings such as having a firewall enabled. Once computer health is determined to be under par, you could set an auto-remediation policy which can automatically correct the problems found on client machines to allow them to connect more quickly.

Windows Firewall with Advanced Security

Previous versions of Windows Server had the firewall included in the bundle but it was not enabled by default. Windows Server 2008 ships with the firewall enabled. Most administrators tend to simply disable (or just not turn it on) the firewall in windows because it is fairly useless in the sense that it blocks only incoming traffic. So if your machine is being used as a launch pad for a virus, you might never know about it until it’s too late. The firewall in Server 2008 however, is much better because it monitors incoming AND outgoing traffic as well as offer the possibility to encrypt your traffic for increased security.

When administrators actually ended up using the old firewall, it was usually like swiss cheese because there were way too many ports opened. Everyone has probably done this: you need to figure out how to make a certain software go through your firewall, so you poke holes into it by opening a bunch of ports and when you finally get everything running, you don’t always go back to remove the unnecessary ports since you don’t really know which ones they are. Server 2008 offers a bit more flexibility on this perspective. Because the new firewall is integrated with roles-based installs and IPSec, whenever you add or remove a role on the server, the firewall gets configured automatically in the background, leaving nothing to chance(or your admin’s knowledge)

Windows PowerShell

The Windows PowerShell is a new command-line shell, based on the .NET Framework. Those who like managing servers through the use of text commands will certainly enjoy this new addition. Powershell was available as a download previously but is now built-in to Windows Server and adds many new possibilities to the “command-line enabled” administrators.

Because the PowerShell is based on .NET, it allows you to enter and return .NET objects. This has power written all over it. Windows PowerShell introduces the concept of a cmdlet, a simple, single-function command-line tool built into the shell. Windows PowerShell includes more than 130 standard cmdlets, and you can write your own cmdlets. Each cmdlet can be used separately, but their power is realized when you combine these simple tools to perform complex tasks.

You can use the PowerShell for pretty much anything including adding/removing/configuring server roles like IIS 7 and Terminal Server, or managing Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 or Operations Manager 2007.