That's a big philosophical question, but sometimes it's a practical one, as well. Getting around town is getting more and more difficult, as familiar landmarks disappear, road construction interferes with known routes and new streets and highways change the way we get from one place to another.

Driving in the Dallas metro area has changed a lot - and not for the better - over the last decade or two. Luckily I work at home and so don't have to hassle with a daily commute, but I still need to venture out now and then. Yesterday Tom brought me a new toy that I'm hoping will make things easier.

I've used GPS before, specifically a GPS transceiver and software for my old iPaq Pocket PC. It was cool to play with, but there were a number of drawbacks. First, you had to either get a GPS that connects via SDIO (and thus give up your slot for extra memory) or one that connects via Bluetooth (which costs more). I opted for the latter, but found it to be less reliable; the connection would often get lost and keeping up with all that equipment was a pain. And the PPC and GPS transceiver were two separate devices; carrying them both on your person is awkward; they don't both fit well into a pocket.

The functionality of the software also left something to be desired. It would get confused easily by close parallel streets, such as a service road running alongside a freeway, and keep telling me to enter the freeway when I was already on it. The built in speaker wasn't loud enough for the voice to be heard well in traffic, even with the car windows up. And it sometimes took some very roundabout routes to get to the destination. Plus, I didn't have a mounting bracket for it so I had to balance it in the cupholder, making it hard to see properly. I used it for a while but soon stopped once the novelty wore off. The trouble of taking it in and out of the car just wasn't worth it.

I suspected a dedicated GPS navigation device would work better, but the in-car devices were expensive - most were over $500, many of them way over. I just didn't care that much. Then yesterday, Tom came home with a "birthday present" for me (on his birthday - yes, I know I've got quite a guy there ... but he did get a pretty nice gift himself): a MioMap GPS that cost only $199.

Here's a picture:

I was a little skeptical when I saw the price. Could it really work? But today I set it up and found that it has far more features than the GPS software for the PPC did. This little thing does everything. You can even add red light cameras to its database. The map displays in 2D or 3D, the voice is loud and clear, and it also plays MP3s with amazingly good quality for little speakers like that. It has a USB port and an SD card slot and comes with U.S. maps preloaded so you don't have to bother with downloading new maps whenever you go to a new city.

It quickly found our location in the house and I walked down the street with it and watched it follow me. I haven't taken it out for a test drive yet - I'm planning to do that tomorrow. But it came with a mounting bracket so I'll be able to just leave it in the car, or it's easy to pop the device out and put it in a pocket or briefcase (no more trying to juggle both the device and an egg sized transceiver in a small pocket).

I'll be reporting on this further after I put it through its paces on the road, but so far, I have high hopes.

deb@shinder.net     www.debshinder.com
"Never enter a battle of wits unarmed."

Link to » Microsoft’s ignorant PR | Open Source Report | TechRepublic.com

Just about the only thing in this article with which I'd agree is that Microsoft's PR department leaves something to be desired. But that's because they so often pass up the opportunity to make the public aware of the good things that the company does and to counter the FUD spread by the ABM crowd.

What I take issue with here is an article that names the names of those it criticizes, making disparaging remarks about Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, while attributing them only to some mysterious "lady" who once upon a time worked on the Microsoft campus.

"So someone from MS PR is willingly, openly admitting that the company lied to the courts." Huh? Companies don't testify in court; individuals do. Companies don't get charged with perjury; individuals do.

And when accusations of criminal conduct are made, those individuals have the right to confront their accusers. Unfortunately, in a blog post it seems to be considered okay to accuse an entire company of criminal conduct based on an anonymous source, who no longer works there (disgruntled ex-employee? Who knows, since we don't know who she is).

"She said that on the MS campus the OSs were changed about every two weeks. She said it was impossible to get anything done." That's interesting, because I know a lot of people who work at the Redmond campus and they don't find it impossible to get anything done. In fact, they get a lot done. So now we're supposed to not only take the word of a former employee whose name we don't know, but also one who by her own words never got anything done when she was working there?

And then we read further and find out that after ten years of working for Microsoft, this lady knows "nothing" about Linux and open source. Can she read? This person is coming across as less and less intelligent and credible the more you read about her.  On the other hand, it's hardly the job of the PR department to promote the competitors' products.

The Microsoft employees I know (who don't work in the PR department) know about Linux. They know about OS X. And they're dedicated to making their operating systems better than those competitors. And must be doing a pretty good job of it, still, since Windows still holds the top market share even when one of its two major competitors gives its product away for free.

deb@shinder.net     www.debshinder.com
"Never enter a battle of wits unarmed."

As has been widely discussed, the "save as PDF" functionality that was built into beta versions of Office 2007 had to be removed due to Adobe's complaints. However, Microsoft provides a free add-on that gives you back this very useful feature. You can download it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en

Beware the Genuine Advantage validation process, though. When I recently went to download the add-on for one of my installations of Office 2007, I found myself looking at the dreaded "Failed validation" page. What's up with that?

Well, it turns out that I had installed Visio 2007 but since I hadn't yet had occasion to use it, I'd never activated it. That caused the validation to fail even though my copy of Visio was completely legal. I went through the activation process and then clicked the "run the validation tool again" button. Lo, this time it passed with flying colors and I was taken to a web page that offered its congratulations - but did not offer any way back to the add-on I was trying to download.

Instead, I had to start that process all over again and go through validation one more time before I was finally allowed to download the add-on. Not a big deal, but annoying. The validation process could be a little more friendly, and it would be nice if, once validation was successful, you didn't have to start all over again with the download.

In the end, though, it's well worth the trouble to be able to select PDF or XPS in the Save As menu.

deb@shinder.net     www.debshinder.com
"Never enter a battle of wits unarmed."

You may think "Microsoft Office Security" is an oxymoron - a lot of folks do. And no wonder, with the well-advertised weaknesses in previous Office security mechanisms, such as its password protection that could be easily broken by any Tom, Dick or Harry.

Of course, you can use OS-wide or network-wide security technologies to protect Office documents (EFS encryption to protect documents stored on the disk, IPsec to protect the data as it's sent over the network, etc.), but Office 2007 also has a number of security-related improvements that will help you to keep Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and Outlook email messages safe from prying eyes.

These include a much improved password protection scheme that uses AES, built in support for Windows Rights Management Services (RMS), more user friendly digital signature support, the ability to force users to use the new, more secure XML-based file formats, cryptographic options for Outlook and more.

I'm so excited about all these security enhancements that I'll be doing an article about them for TechRepublic in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, if you want to really dig into the security features of Outlook 2007, there is a downloadable 155 page document on the subject that you can find on the Microsoft TechNet site at http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/863f35d0-21ca-4281-a568-8992f6e830051033.mspx?mfr=true

Deb Shinder
deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com 

I've had some people ask how I manage to be so prolific. I wouldn't be able to get nearly so much work done without my "helpers" who provide encouragement and companionship throughout the work day:

Unlike human co-workers, they never argue with me or try to take credit for my work, and they remind me when it's time to take a coffee (and cat treat) break.

Of course, it also helps that the view through those two little windows are this calming and inspiring lake view:

Deb Shinder
deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

Well, okay; maybe that's not the best analogy since I like the kind of just-baked, piping hot bread that you break off in big chunks. But Sprite is definitely one of the best things that ever happened to the Pocket PC.

The Sprite Backup application is a Pocket PC lifesaver

Our Samsung i730 PPC phones came with it installed, and it's been a lifesaver more than once. Most recently, on the plane coming back from Seattle, my phone's battery ran all the way down and all of my user data was lost. Ouch. But I had several backups stored on my SD card. All I had to do was pick one to restore, and five minutes later everything was back in place, all my applications, my wallpaper, my custom ring tone, etc.

About a month ago, something corrupted the phone's system and Sprite stopped working. I could no longer make backups. Not a good thing. But when the battery died and the OS went back to its defaults, Sprite was back to normal too, so I had no problem restoring the previous backup. Very handy.

 
Sprite gives you lots of options for backing up your PPC

Now I know that if I switched from Windows Mobile 2003 to WM 5, I wouldn't have to worry about this problem (at least in theory), because everything goes in ROM and you don't lose it if the battery dies completely. But I've seen the performance trade-off that comes with that, and I'm not willing to take the hit. Especially not when Sprite makes it so easy to restore. And one cool feature is that you can set it to make a backup automatically if your battery capacity goes below a specified percentage (30% is the default), so you'll be sure to have the latest configuration backed up.

You can set Sprite to backup automatically when your battery gets low.

I'll wait for WM 6 instead. It's supposed to have fixed some of the performance problems, and it has new features that I just may not be able to live without. Meanwhile, I'll rely on Sprite. It's available for WM 2003 and WM 5, both PPC and SmartPhone editions, as well as Symbian Series 60. If you want a great backup program for your mobile device, check it out at http://www.spritesoftware.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=184

Oh, and if you're wondering how I got those screenshots of the Pocket PC: I used a little Microsoft PPC PowerToy called Remote Display Control. You can download it from the PPC PowerToys web site at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/wce/downloads/ppctoys.mspx

To install it, connect your PPC to your PC through ActiveSync or the Vista Mobile Device Center, then run the remotedsp.exe program on your PC. This will install it to both the PC and the PPC. It was written for PPC 2002, so if you're installing it on PPC 2003, you may get a message saying this program might not display correctly because it was written for a previous version of the operating system. Don't let that scare you - it works great on PPC 2003. I haven't tried it on WM 5, though. I did install it on a PC running Vista, with no problems.

This is a very cool program because it displays your PPC's screen in real time on your PC's monitor. That means not only can you use it to capture screen shots, you can also project it to demo PPC features and applications to an audience. Here's what the application looks like on my Vista desktop:

 
PPC screen displayed on Vista desktop

Last week wasn't all work and no play. There were dinners and parties every night. We made it in rather late and didn't attend the regional dinner on the first night, but we made it to all the rest.

The big party for all MVP attendees was Tuesday night at the Museum of Flight. There were too many people and there was too much loud music to really get to "network" much, but the museum itself was fascinating. I loved all the old planes and aviation related "stuff" there, and would love to go back sometime during their regular business hours when you can tour the old Air Force One. If you're ever in Seattle and looking for something to do, check it out: http://www.museumofflight.org/Portal.asp?Flash=True 

Wednesday night we had dinners for our specific product groups. Since the Security MVPs don't really have a product group, they put us in with the Networking and Client OS folks. It was a nice little gathering and almost everyone at my table won something in the lottery drawing. I won a goodie bag full of cool stuff: Microsoft headphones, a Forefront tee shirt, a universal power adapter, a mug with the Office logo and that sort of thing. Unfortunately, I didn't win the grand prize - an Xbox 360 - but then I'm not sure how I'd have gotten it back home anyway. Met some interesting people and had some good food and wine and a good time.

The best party, though, was definitely Thursday night's bash for the Security and ISA Server MVPs at the Parlor Billards in Bellevue. The back area of the club was reserved for us and we had some very good food, including crab legs, oysters, shrimp, a savory chicken dish, asparagus, potatoes etc. etc. There was also a full open bar - of which a number of people were taking advantage. We even had live entertainment: a demo by a trick billiards artist of some amazing shots. And we got a chance to network more with the people within our group.

Oh, and they gave away more prizes: five Zune players (I didn't get one) and 4 GB USB drives to use for ReadyBoost with our Vista laptops that everyone got. All the Security MVPs also got $75 gift certificates to the Microsoft company store. The folks who were running things for the Security group really outdid themselves this year.

Here are some photos from the Security/ISA party:

Setting up for a trick shot

 
Balancing act

How does he do that?

The group watches, enthralled

Tom and Jim, being Tom and Jim

Mark R. picks the winning ticket

 
Camie presents the big prize

I want to say a big public "thank you" to the folks at Microsoft who were in charge of organizing and managing this year's MVP Summit, especially those involved with the Security group. They did an extraordinary job and I am already looking forward to next year.

Some of the highlights of the summit included:

- BitLocker presentation by Russ Humphries: I learned a lot about this technology that I didn't know, information that I'll be using in future articles. It was especially interesting to learn that you can encrypt two separate OS volumes on a computer, so that in a dual boot configuration, if you're booted into one instance of Vista, you won't be able to see any of the information on the other OS volume. Also brought up were the new challenges that BitLocker will pose to law enforcement forensics experts. This will make a good topic for some of my LE lists and magazines.

- NAP presentation by Amith Krishnan: this was a very comprehensive coverage of NAP in Longhorn Server and Vista (given the time constraints) that discussed various NAP scenarios, as well as NAP/NAC interoperability. Particularly interesting was the information about the real-world deployment of NAP across the Redmond campus.

- Security Compete by Jeff Jones: I was especially glad to get a slew of statistical information comparing vulnerability reports on Vista's first 90 days after release in comparison with the same time frame for OS X, Novell SLE010, Ubuntu, Sun Solaris and Red Hat Linux Enterprise Edition, as well as comparisons with XP and Server 2003. This information will be published in Jeff's TechNet blog sometime in the next two weeks.

- Windows CardSpace presentation by Nigel Waltling: I admit it; I didn't even know what CardSpace was prior to this presentation. Now I'm intrigued by it. It appears to be one of the most user-friendly identity management/selection solutions I've seen, and I like that the client is built right into Vista and that it's not proprietary (i.e., it works with Firefox and other browsers, not just IE). I'll be looking into this one more. Nigel did a great job of presenting the information.

- Vista Security/UAC presentation by Mark Russinovich: Of course, I was looking forward to this "big name" speaker and he didn't disappoint me. Mark somehow managed to compress a huge amount of information into a much too short timeframe - we could have listened to him all day. This was not the standard spiel on User Account Control; we got new "under the hood" information that I haven't seen anywhere else. And it was a sobering reminder that no security technology will ever make you 100% safe; as UAC creates an environment where most code runs under a standard user account, malware developers will focus on building code for the standard user environment.

Mark Russinovich speaks to the Security MVPs

- Forefront Server and Client presentation by Peter Eicher and Saveen Reddy: A good, solid overview of Forefront featuring the famous "football field" slide that provides one of the best visual representations ever of Microsoft's security technologies.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

I wasn't sure whether the contents of Bill's speech fell under the NDA so I didn't blog about it - but it turns out Microsoft released the transcript on their web site. So if you're interested, you can read the whole thing at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/billg/speeches/2007/03-13MVPSummit.mspx

And if you do a search for "MVP Summit 2007 Bill Gates," you'll find about a hundred people who did blog about it, so I won't take up more bandwidth repeating what they all said. 

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

I'm back home from the MVP Summit and have lots to write about in that regard in the upcoming week. This was my first major business trip with the new Sony TXN laptop with Vista and thus my first opportunity to evaluate its real-world performance in the field, so I have some comments on that.

As with my older Sony TX with XP, the light weight and small size made it a delight to carry around all day. The setup we had at the conference was perfect for laptop notetaking; we Security folks were assigned to the Cascade room in the Microsoft Conference Center. This was a large auditorium type room that had desks with individual power and data ports at each seat so there was no worry about running down the battery.

I used OneNote to take notes and have grown quite fond of it. I'm an obsessive compulsive type, and the ability to organize my notes into sectioned electronic notebooks is a wonderful benefit. I have a notebook called Conference Notes and created a new section (tabs across the top) for the MVP Summit 2007, then pages (tabs down the side) for each session. But it was easy to save the whole thing as a Word doc for Tom, who doesn't have OneNote installed.

 
OneNote makes it much easier to organize conference notes

I recently received a question from a reader concerning other folks' reports that the TX is slow with Vista. After a full week of using it as my only computer, I have a better handle on the performance issue. It's definitely slower than my Dell XPS desktop (which of course has a faster processor and much more RAM) but I'd say performance is about the same as the old TX with XP. Now the old TX had only 512MB of RAM and this one has 1 GB, so that's a testament to Vista's greater RAM requirements. I am, in fact, planning to add more RAM to this machine, as 1 GB is actually a bit skimpy for Vista.

I have to admit that I don't expect as much performance from an ultra portable. The TX machines are fine for the normal tasks I perform when on the road: web surfing, getting my email and working on a single word processing document. If you run more than three or four apps, or you add a lot of multimedia to the mix, performance does degrade. That wouldn't be acceptable for a desktop system, but I can live with it in a laptop in order to get the extreme portability.

Life is always a trade-off (and so is picking a portable computer). My priorities were portability and features/functionality. I got what I needed with the Sony: extreme light weight/small size coupled with a keyboard that I can still touch type on. The keyboard was the reason I picked it over some other, less expensive under-3 lb. machines from other vendors. Of course, keyboards are a very personal thing, and if you expect to do a lot of fast typing on a laptop, you should always try out the keyboard in person (this is the reason I'd never buy a laptop online unless I was able to find the same model in a retail store or a friend had one I could try).

So I'd have to rate the Sony just so-so when it comes to performance. But what does that mean? Well, Vista doesn't boot up nearly as quickly as it does on the desktop (which is very fast - and has gotten me spoiled). Apps don't open instantly if other apps are running; it takes a couple of seconds. However, I don't get any latency in typing (that would drive me nuts) and music plays fine. If I'm running several apps and playing a movie at the same time, there is a bit of jerkiness at times. However, I don't really do that on the small screen machine anyway (except to test it). In fact, if I want to watch a DVD movie I don't even boot into the OS; Sony has the cool AV mode that lets you play DVDs and CDs outside the OS and it works great.

I did try out Vista's ReadyBoot feature and that improved the performance a bit. This is the feature that lets you use a flash drive for virtual memory. Since flash is a lot faster than a laptop hard disk, it does speed up the system. I had been using 512 MB of a 1 GB SD card for ReadyBoost and noticed slight performance improvement. But the last day of the MVP Summit, our MVP leads held a party for the Security MVPs and gave each of us a 4 GB USB flash drive optimized specifically for ReadyBoost use. When I plugged it in, there was much more noticeable improvement.

Back to the Sony itself: I really like the high quality of the display, and I like the indicator lights that make it easy to know when wireless is on or off (Bluetooth, WLAN or WWAN). I also like having the headphone and microphone jacks in front, but I do wonder why they didn't include a built in mic). The built in speakers are not that great, but I rarely use them on a laptop for sound that needs high fidelity anyway. If I'm listening to music or a movie, I'm going to be using a headset, and if I'm sharing an audio presentation with someone, I'll be plugging in external speakers (as well as plugging the video into an external monitor).

The built in wireless adapter works great (something that can't be said of every notebook computer I've tried) and that's another high priority item for me. Another very high priority (although not an issue at this conference) is battery life - and the little Sony gives me 7 hours, enough for most working days and most airplane trips that I take.

So all in all, the Sony meets my needs extremely well. Your priorities may differ. If it's a multimedia powerhouse you want, or you need to do a lot of multitasking and run VMs and such, I'd recommend a "tank" like our HP DV9000 series laptop with the 17 inch screen and excellent built in speakers, 2 GB of RAM and a 100 GB hard disk. Of course, it weighs a ton (well, okay, 8 and a half pounds, but it feels like a ton), and the battery lasts about half as long as the Sony's. Different machines for different purposes.

Despite some drawbacks, I'm happy with my choice.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

You might have thought that, after two nights in a row of almost no sleep, I'd have gone to bed early last night - but you'd have been wrong. First we had the MVP party at the Seattle Flight Museum - a great location, at least for an aviation fan like me. I love looking at all those old planes and could wander around that place for hours. The food wasn't bad; I kept it light -- lots of vegetables, a rice dish, a little cheese.

We actually left fairly early, and got back to the hotel by 23:00. That's when the real "fun" began. The hotel Internet connection was still working fine, but we were unable to access our email. We already knew that some big storms had blown through Dallas in the late afternoon and early evening, and it was obvious they had taken their toll. We figured it was another blown UPS.

Luckily, we were able to get in touch with Kris and he trekked over to the house at 02:30 (his time) to fix the problem. The UPS into which the switch with all the external connections (T-1 router, FiOS line) are plugged was indeed whacked. He reset it and restarted the servers that were plugged into it, and we were able to VPN into the LAN via the FiOS connection - but the T-1 was still down.

Tom spent an hour on hold with tech support for our T-1 provider (Speakeasy) and then another hour or so going 'round and 'round with them. Our router was up and the internal interface was pingable, so it seemed obvious the problem was on their end (and they did confirm that) but never managed to get it fixed.

So for now, our Exchange server is cut off from the Internet and I'm stuck with my Gmail account. Not a huge big deal, but annoying.

Meanwhile, I'm now in the MIcrosoft Conference Center on the Redmond campus, waiting for our first session (Executive Security Briefing) to start. The day is overcast and drizzly - as usual for the Seattle area. Today's agenda includes sessions on BitLocker, Wireless Security, NAP, Card Spaces and Vista Security. I don't expect to learn a lot of new stuff in the last one but am looking forward to the first three and curious about Card Spaces since I've seen very little on it so far.

Early Monday morning, after about four hours of sleep, we were off to Seattle for the MVP Summit. Had a surprisingly smooth flight here, considering that we flew on American. Used to love AA, but they had deteriorated badly over the last few years and I haven't used them in about a year. We hit a little turbulence about an hour into the flight but nothing like that last trip to Las Vegas. Otherwise it was an excellent flight. 

Got to the hotel around noon; unfortunately check in wasn't 'til 15:00. So we had to stow our bags with the concierge and trek over to the convention center where the first two days of the MVP Summit are being held, to register and get some free food. We were surprised and pleased to find that this hotel is right across the street from the convention center (last year, they put us in hotels in Bellevue and Redmond, close to the Microsoft campus but a long way from everything else (i.e. restaurants, entertainment). There's a bookstore on the other corner across from this one. What more could I ask?

Registration was a bit crowded. The "S" line was the longest, of course (and it was also the only letter of the alphabet that had a line all to itself; all the other lines encompassed two or more letters). Met up with a few of Tom's fellow ISA Server MVPs, including guys from Germany, Denmark and Australia. One of the fun things about this conference is being able to see so many people from other countries.

Got back to the hotel to check in and to our surprise they were very apologetic for the wait and they upgraded our room to a suite without us even asking/complaining. The accomodations are very nice; we're on the 21st floor with great views of the bay and the space needle.

Here are a couple of pictures:

Space needle (from Grand Hyatt hotel room)

 
Bay (from Grand Hyatt hotel room)

The rooms are very upscale with marble bathroom, electronic blackout shades, nice desk with both wired and wireless Internet connections. Microsoft is paying for the rooms and the Internet connections. :)

We skipped out on the MSFT regional dinner Monday night because we were both too tired and too hungry to wait 'til it started, so we had dinner at Ruth's Chris Steak House here in the hotel. They're pricey but the food was good. Maybe not THAT good (to justify the prices). But the atmosphere was very nice and steaks are their specialty, after all. I don't do steak - I had a Caesar salad and creamed spinach dish. Tom had ribeye and said it was quite good. It certainly sizzled when it came out. My only real complaint: the bread was cold. I don't mean it wasn't hot; I mean it was cold, as if it had just come out of the refrigerator. Cold bread is not something I can get excited about, but the waitress said that's the way they serve it because they don't have a bread warmer. You'd think that, for $24 for a chicken breast (side dishes cost extra), they could at least buy a cheap microwave at WalMart to heat the bread with. Ah, well. The Pacific Northwest is, in many ways, a foreign country to me.

Up early this morning to get over to the convention center in time for Bill Gates' keynote speech. Here's a picture of him during the Q&A:

Bill Gates: Q&A session after the keynote

It's fun to see Bill, but I missed Steve Balmer. Too bad we couldn't have them both; Steve's high energy level makes him really better at the speech part, but in my opinion Bill is better at the Q&A. He's more patient than Steve, I think, with stupid and/or hostile questions.

Speaking of which, I was really surprised at the hostility of some of the questioners. You'd think that a group of MVPs, whom Microsoft has invited here to share insider info with (not to mention providing lodging and three meals a day) would be a friendly crowd. Instead, both in Bill's session and in the Q&A with one of the senior vice presidents we attended later, several of the people asking questions were very aggressive and insulting. Hard questions are one thing; attacks on the speakers and/or products are another. Because the sessions are under NDA, I can't mention the actual questions/accusations, but I can say that some people really have a lot of nerve.

Tonight we have the MVP party at the Museum of Flight. I've never been there and am looking forward to it, as I love aviation stuff. Meanwhile, lunch time is over and it's time to get back to the sessions. I have one coming up at 3:00 on Windows Mobile 6 that should be fun.

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

It's been a long week; I've been buried up to my ears in a project on Microsoft Rights Management Services (RMS) that involved doing a 15 page white paper and revising a 30 page Web document (which turned out to be a little over 50 pages when I got finished with it). Lots of work, but lots of fun digging into all the little technical details of RMS and its counterpart, Information Rights Management (IRM). The latter is the "application piece" that enables Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint Server etc. to work with RMS.

There have been some subtle improvements to RMS/IRM. For example, now you can't use the Print Screen or ALT + PRTSC to take a screenshot of a rights-protected document or email message. In fact, I discovered that if you try to do so, it kills the Print Screen functionality not just for the protected file but for all other applications, too - until you close the application in which you opened the rights-protected doc. Closing the app fixes your Print Screen function, though.

RMS is a bit more complex than it appears at first glance, insofar as setting up the server(s) and getting everything configured. On the client side, though, it's pretty transparent for the users. I like it because it lets you control (to a point) what people do with the documents or email messages you send them. Who hasn't had the experience of having something they intended for one recipient forwarded to someone else? Not that RMS makes it impossible - a determined recipient could still take a digital photo of the screen and send it to somebody, or use a third party screen capture utility such as Snag-it to take a screenshot, but it does make it a lot less convenient.

If you want all the gory details, you can find almost everything you want to know about RMS here in the Windows Rights Management Services Technical Library: http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/14002ade-53b2-4315-90f1-c0b96e5f20611033.mspx?mfr=true

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

In an article in today's Dallas Morning News at http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/ptech/stories/030207dnbustechreview.37a31a5.html, the author presents online services such as Google Apps as alternatives to buying Word. Although these free online services will work for some people whose word processing needs are limited, I have to take issue with a few of the statements:

“The question, of course, is whether you use such tools enough to justify the $150 expense and the inability to share documents beyond a single company's servers.”

This implies that you can’t share Word documents outside the local network. That is, of course, completely inaccurate. SharePoint services can be used to collaborate on documents via the Web. Some editions of Office come with Groove, a Microsoft collaboration tool that can be used over the Internet as well as within the LAN. Or Word’s “track changes” features can be used to collaborate on document authoring and editing via email.

“Cons: It lacks many features. It's more vulnerable to hackers. Compatibility issues can garble a document transferred between traditional and Internet programs, particularly documents with pictures or graphs.”

The author omitted perhaps one of the biggest disadvantages of the services: you can use these online applications only when connected to the Internet. That means you can’t work on your documents on the plane or in other circumstances where you’re without an Internet connection.

In addition, the services have only a limited “suite” of applications. Google Apps, for instance, offers email, Docs & Spreadsheets (word processing and spreadsheet application) and calendaring. It doesn’t include a database application like Microsoft Access, a presentation application like PowerPoint, or other applications that are counterparts to the programs in various editions of Office (Publisher, OneNote, InfoPath, etc.). Although the article is focused on Word, most users buy the Office suite rather than a single application.

The article also gives the impression that online application services are the only free alternative to Microsoft Office. OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) is an open source (free) application suite that has much of the same functionality as Office – although not all of the sophisticated features in Office 2007 – and creates documents that are compatible with the Office applications. And as with Microsoft Office, you can use it whether you're connected to the Internet or not.

Finally, the article gives the price of upgrading to Word 2007 as $150. Actually, the upgrade software can be found for well under $100 from numerous vendors. Amazon.com shows it at $89.99 (with free shipping) at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000HCVR5S/ref=nosim/?tag=pricegrabbercpc7-20&creative=380333&creativeASIN=B000HCVR5S&linkCode=asn. And in fact, you can get the Office 2007 Home and Student edition, which includes not just Word but also Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, for only $128 at http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Office-Home-Student-2007/dp/B000HCZ8EO/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-1230405-6399066?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1172855017&sr=1-1

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com