Yesterday I had a visit by one of our customers with whom we are working on a POC for migrating their legacy Lotus Notes forms to Microsoft Platform. From Vishwak, we had suggested they move to the Microsoft Office and Sharepoint technologies, especially the new Forms Server 2007 and Windows Workflow foundation. Having said this, we had to justify our recommondation as both Forms Server and WWF are in Beta 2 stage.

Why should a customer look at Beta Products, that too a Microsoft Beta Product and in what way it favours the risk associated?. What we said to him was worthwhile of repeating here :

1. Customer was looking at a go production time frame of October/November 2006 or later. Because of their business criticality there were several internal trial runs that have to be completed before going live. By that time frame, both Microsoft Forms Server 2007 and Windows Workflow Foundation will be released.
2. As an outsider to Microsoft, reasons for us to be believe that this releases will happen by the time frame - is because Forms Server is part of Vista/Office 2007 wave and WWF is going to be part of every copy of Windows Vista. For both these Vista and Office 2007, Microsoft have assured release will be in October/November 2006 time frame. Going by the stability of the products we are playing around we see no reasons to doubt the above time frame. Also Forms Server is based on WSS (SharePoint Technology) and WinFX both of which are core platform products. MS cannot afford to delay on these building blocks, as any delays will not only affect MS, but the whole ISV and SI eco-system that is using them.
3. Windows WorkFlow Foundation, though in Beta 2 has a "Go-Live" license for it. This shows Microsoft's confidence on the technology.
4. Stability and Road-map on technologies (in other words - Microsoft is known to change their product stratergy very quickly):
   1. There can be no doubt on the strategic important of Sharepoint technology. WSS (SharePoint) on which Forms Server 2007 is built is very key to Microsoft. MS sees the next growth oppurtunity in terms of sales to be on SharePoint (I always like to think of it as MS Office Server), after Windows and MS Office Suite. I read in many Media coverages and recent BillG speech in Office conference that MS is investing huge amount on SharePoint and Office System, so there will be regular updates to the technology.
   2. WWF (Workflow) is part of .NET Framework 3.0. This shows it is extremely important for Microsoft and they cannot remove anything that easily or decide not to support anything that is in the core of their platform.
   3. WWF is a base framework and not sold as a product. So if Microsoft's base offering doesn't give enough features, I am sure there will be hundreds of third-party Workflow ISV's who will come up solutions that extend WWF in many ways.
   4. WWF is the workflow backend for all the upcoming MS Products - Microsoft BizTalk Server 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Office 2007, etc. So they cannot afford to goof-up on WWF.
5. SharePoint and InfoPath (on which Forms Server 2007 is based) is mature technologies. This is not the first version for either of them. In fact, Forms Server 2007 is not the first product to render InfoPath forms in a browser - even now there are third-party products that do this. So the technology is proven.
6. Forms Server / InfoPath allows them to not only persist data in its own back-end like Notes, in this case in SharePoint Forms Library, but gives you the choice of any backend storage like SQL Server, Oracle, etc. The only requirement being Web Service interfaces. This gives the confidence and the choice of any back-end that suits various individual needs of the customer organization.
7. The ease of availability of trained manpower in these technologies. It is much easier to get an .NET Developer than Lotus Notes in Indian Market due to the sheer volume of them. Now with SharePoint 2007 based on ASP.NET v2.0 architecture and WWF being part of .NET Framework 3.0, getting .NET developers of earlier version to this new version will not be that difficult as well.
8. Finally they having decided to move to MS Technologies, they should go with the new one's because of the huge advantage they will bring in.

For those of you who are new to Forms Server 2007 - read this MS FAQ.

One of the leaders in IT I enjoy listening to is Mr.Lakshmi Narayan (President & CEO of Cognizant). It was probably 3 years back that I got a chance first to listen to one and since then I won't miss a chance to attend any time I get one. Today just now I returned from one of his speeches as part of TiE Chennai Forum, and as usual he was brilliant. What I like about this man, is his down to earth style in all aspects - in his speech, vocabulary, thoughts, dress; everything is simple, dignified and no bit of artificialness that a CEO of a US$1Billion company will aquire without his own knowledge. And when he answered questions he doesn't pretend to be "the choosen one" to succeed in the business; nor he tried to portray that right from the start he and other founders with him knew what they want, how to go, a clear road-map or stratergy.

In my opinion, in real life you can only go with the flow of things, and when oppurtunities come you pick them up, make right and wrong choices decisions, keep going. What matters is to continue going and not stand still - because life is all about good and bad; planned and unplanned. Because of the stereotype image that Media and Management Books portray, we thing that successful people and hugely successful companies like Google, Microsoft knew it all when they started and they are exceptions. In reality, it is not so. It is just that successful companies, keep themself agile, keep working hard, continue doing things, learn from right and wrong things they do and always try to improve things, be paranoid all the time and finally put the "Organization" in front of any single individual. Because one thing that can kill any company is "Complacency" or "Idol" worship.

Today is the last day of the final city in the India Tech Ed 2006 tour. Tech Ed traveled to Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore this year. I didn’t do Delhi – I went to all other Cities and except in Pune, Hyderabad – I did two presentations in each city. One on “SharePoint 2007 for Developers” and one on “SharePoint 2007 for IT Pros”. It was an interesting experience doing for two different audience profiles.

Installing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) was an ordeal by itself. I setup a Virtual PC Image with Windows Server 2003 R2, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2005 SP1, Visual Studio 2005, WWF (Workflow) Beta 2 RunTime, Windows SDK with WinFX, WorkFlow Integration with Visual Studio (Orcas), Office 2007 Professional then finally MOSS 2007. After configuring the product I realized on a Virtual PC in my laptop this was slow even after giving 1GB RAM to the VPC. So from the second city, I moved to Virtual Server 2005 R2 and the Virtual Server Add-Ons that it provided. Performance is much better – only downside is that I have to go a WebBrowser to start and stop the VPC; then connect using the Virtual Server Remote Client to connect to the VPC. With Virtual PC it was lot easier. So far I am unable to find the Shared Folder options in Virtual Server – searching for it!

Virtual Server 2005 R2 (VSR) works well on Windows XP & Windows Server 2003; it doesn't get installed correctly in Windows Vista. So you are stuck with Virtual PC if you are using Vista.

I live in West Mambalam (Chennai) and everyday to come to work in Habibullah Road T.Nagar, I have to drive through the T.Nagar Panagal Park Shopping crowd and traffic. The distance of less than 3 Kms can take on peak hours more than 30 minutes. The main reason is the pedestrian crossing (can you believe it they don't have a overbridge here) near Nalli/Pothy's textile stores and the traffic jam in front of New Saravana Stores. Anyways, today I made the journey in about 10 minutes - thanks to it being a "Tuesday". In Tamilnadu Tuesdays are considered inauspicious and people don't buy new items or start new work on Tuesday. Because of this, the shopping districts in Chennai are not crowded on Tuesdays - if you want to do relaxed shopping then you should avoid the other 6 days in the week.

Anyways I like Tuesday's a lot - One because of less traffic while coming to work and second I was born on a Tuesday 31 years back. So do you agree with me that Tuesdays are lucky

About a year back I wrote about my first love with Windows XP 64. In the last 12 months, all major server softwares from Microsoft has had a 64 bit release including Windows Server 2003 R2, SQL Server 2005, upcoming MOSS (Sharepoint) 2007, MOFS (Infopath Server) 2007 and more. Betas of both Windows Vista and Windows Longhorn servers are now available in 64-bit edition. In fact, the upcoming release of Exchange Server (Exchange "12") is available only as a 64-bit edition. With the prices of memory coming down and RAM of 4GB+ is becoming affordable, 64-bit offers tremendous advantage especially coupled with Dual Core Chips.

Recently I came across this site Extended64.com that seems to have good information, drivers for using Windows 64. 

For me, I am waiting for Vista to get launched - after which I am shopping for a new laptop which is small and light-weight but Dual Core and 64-bit

Today I installed in my Desktop Windows Server 2003 R2 (WS2003) in D:\; The machine has in C:\ Windows Vista Beta 2 working. After the base installation of WS2003, machine restarted and that's it. It complained about a bad boot partition and refused to proceed further. There was no way to continue WS2003 installation (or) get back to Windows Vista. Then I resorted to booting the machine with Windows Vista CD, went into recovery mode. In recovery mode after trying auto-fix options I went to command-prompt. Windows Vista Recovery mode command prompt, shows up as X:\ and has the default recovery utilities loaded there. One of the utilities I found was BootRec.Exe in X:\Windows\System32. Used the tool to rewrite the partition boot record and the MBR (Master Boot Record) by following commands:

 X:\Windows\System32\BootRec.Exe /fixboot
 X:\Windows\System32\BootRec.Exe /fixmbr

After this I restarted the machine. Everything worked well I got Windows Vista booting, but no way to reach WS2003. I tried editing c:\boot.ini, no effect. Doing some research I realized Windows Vista has a new Boot Configuration Manager, Boot Loader - Boot.ini has no effect in Vista. BCD (Boot Configuration Data) Store in Windows Vista has replaced Boot.ini and there is no GUI to do changes to it. There is a command-line utility "BCDEDIT.EXE" that can be used to view, modify boot options. After reading about BCDEdit, I realized it was not that easy to understand at first try and I need to do serious reading before I can use it. So I searched for more information on BCD and then came across VistaBootPro. VistaBootPro is a 3rd Party utility that gives a easy GUI to add boot partitions and do pretty much everything that BCDEdit.Exe can do. After installing the tool, it took me few seconds to add my D:\ (Windows Server 2003 Partition) into boot sequence. After restart got the Vista Boot Menu showing both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 boot options.

(Copyright 2006, PROnetworks)

If you want to avoid all this, first install the old version of Windows (Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, etc.) then install Windows Vista.

Update Nov 2007: I found this Technet article detailing on how to do common tasks in BCD.

For me who has admired Bill Gates for his lifes work with Microsoft; yesterday was a big day. Bill Gates announced yesterday that from July 2008 he will primarily work in Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He has announced a transition team that will take over from him the job in Microsoft. I guess it is a good coincidence that from next month Narayana Murthy will relinquish his job in Infosys. Two great achievers in IT field have decided to move on...

I always wondered what makes someone like Bill Gates even after making billions motivated to come to work every-day. Though I don't have the answer for it; I remember a quote by Narayana Murthy once in a Interview saying that biggest thing for him about making wealth "Is creating a positive impact on other's lifes". A very profound thought indeed.

Webcast of Bill Gates' announcement 

What will her voice sound like - it was everyone's imagination when they see Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa Portrait. Now that puzzle has been solved by a Japanese Scientist "Dr.Matsumi Suzuki". Based on her perceived Height, Facial Dimensions, he claims to have produced to 90% accuracy of how Mona Lisa's voice would have sounded. If you want to hear it, go to Mona Lisa Speaks site. Dr.Suzuki also explains his method in the video. Only downside all of this is in Japanese  

Late last friday Microsoft announced through SomaSegar's (Vice-President) Blog that WinFX will now be called .NET Framework 3.0. The underlying CLR, C#, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, VB.NET and everything else will continue to be 2.0, but .NET 3.0 will include WCF (a.k.a Indigo), WPF (a.k.a Avalon) & WWF (Workflow). It seems to be a good marketing idea, I just hope they bundle the core framework (2.0) files into one single redistributable.

Enterprise Customers tend to believe on third version of Microsoft products - so I suppose those will get excited about this.

Last one week or so, I am using Vista Beta 2 in my Desktop (AMD 64, 2GB RAM, 160GB SATA, RADEON 9550). I found it to be stable and very usable. So far I didn't come acrosss any show-stoppers in using it as my primary OS. One tough thing was getting used to the new UI and changes in the way to do many of the common admin tasks. For example Add/Remove Programs in the way we know it is gone. The integrated search is also cool.

One of the features I liked was the new XPS Printer installed by default. XPS (XML Paper Specification) is like Adobe's PDF format for storing, viewing & printing documents. Using this, you can print from any Windows Application and save the screen as a XPS file. The saved XPS file can be viewed very easily using the built-in XPS viewer.

What about people who don't have Vista?. The good news is that you can download a free XPS Viewer that is about 1.4MB and it doesn't even need WinFX to work. It works on any Windows 2000SP4, Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 machines.

Now all this, might change because of a move by Adobe to sue Microsoft in Europe. As of now the news is that Microsoft is pulling out both Save as PDF and Save as XPS feature in Office System 2007. I am not sure whether this impacts Vista as well.