Hazy, Hot and Houston

Well, Microsoft did, and the thousands of partners who are descending upon the city this week will likely be met with a Texas-style welcome: temperatures in the 90s (today's high topped out at a relatively cool 92) and high humidity. Great.

Maybe it's your editor's bias toward Dallas-Fort Worth (mainly Fort Worth), but RCPU has never been a huge fan of Houston. As a native Texan, your editor knows and loves huge swaths of his home state -- Austin, San Antonio, the Hill Country, parts of the Gulf Coast, the desert mountains of West Texas and, of course, Cowtown (or Funkytown, or whatever you want to call Fort Worth). Texas can be beautiful.

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But RCPU came to Houston expecting to spend a lot of time in the hotel, and, well...we've been pleasantly surprised. The RCPU team -- four strong for this event -- strolled over to a downtown steakhouse Monday evening for dinner after the show and had a great time and a spectacular meal. Then, we strolled back by Minute Maid Park -- the Astros' stadium, which, we have to say, looks kind of funny from the outside -- and over to a place called Discovery Green.

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Discovery Green, officially dedicated in April, is a lovely little park with a small pond and a fairly swanky restaurant (from what we hear; we haven't eaten there) plopped in the middle of it. It's breezy and pleasant -- pretty, really -- and it's right in the middle of downtown, directly across from the convention center. Color us impressed. We had a lot of fun downtown.

Houston's still a bit sprawly for our taste -- our team's two hotels are about 15 miles apart -- but it's nothing a good GPS and a city-wise driver can't handle. It's also a bit warm, but good food and Texas friendliness -- along with ice-cold central air conditioning in every building -- go a long way toward making us feel comfortable even when the thermometer climbs toward triple digits.

Let's put it this way: RCPU firmly believes that all conferences from now on should be held in San Diego, America's most beautiful city...preferably in March, when it's 33 and sleeting in Boston. But we'll take Houston any time of year over the schmaltz of Orlando or the sensory overload of Vegas. (Most people would probably prefer Vegas, though -- your editor acknowledges being an exception in that regard.)

So, maybe it's the melted-in-our-mouths filet mignon talking, but we'll give Houston an unexpected thumbs up...for now. There's still a lot of conference to go, but as long as the AC works in the convention center, we should be just fine.

Posted by Lee Pender on July 08, 20080 comments

Hyper-V: Time To Curb the Enthusiasm?

However, as we expected, not everybody is all that thrilled so far. We've been hearing little tidbits here and there about how VMware and its ESX competitor don't need to lose any virtual sleep over Hyper-V, but Angelo sent us the most detailed user review of Microsoft's newest creation that we've seen yet:

"I have been experimenting with this 'new' product that is supposed to compete with VMware ESX. And I have several notes that you and others should be aware of.

1. Every time any Microsoft OS patches are deployed, you begin having issues with the guest OSes. I have tried different update orders: host first, then Guest (ugly); guests first.


2. There is no easy way to set up isolation networks and determine which guests are attached to each virtual network.


3. There is no reporting on the VM utilization of CPU, memory, drive or network.


4. There is no native support for cluster in a box (CIAB), without purchasing expensive SANs.


5. Provisioning new workstations is still a massive undertaking, and keeping that image patched or up to date poses a real challenge.

As far as I am concerned, it is a nice toy to play with, but if you want to get work done, stick with what works. The strength and power that VMware has are well worth the money."

Thanks, Angelo. So, there you go -- not everybody's in line with the claim that users won't give anything up when switching from ESX to Hyper-V. We expect more of these e-mails in the days and weeks to come, both in support of ESX and in defense of Hyper-V. Help us fill out or collection by contributing at [email protected].

Posted by Lee Pender on July 02, 20080 comments

Intel Also Rejects Vista

There's really nothing left to say here, but we're sort of enjoying looking at the Vista car wreck from the traffic jam on the (hello, early '90s phrase) information superhighway.

Suggestions to Microsoft, which finally (mostly) killed XP yesterday: Bring back XP, get Windows 7 down to being manageable, and let us all forget about Vista. In other words, listen to most of your customers and partners. Please.

Posted by Lee Pender on July 02, 20080 comments

Microsoft Buys Powerset

Posted by Lee Pender on July 02, 20080 comments

RCP at the WPC

Before you go, you simply must check out RCP's preview video, starring your editor and RCP Editor in Chief Scott Bekker (although not necessarily in that order -- you might say that this video has no lone star).

We'll be at the WPC in a big way; you might even say that we're going to cover this event Texas-style, pardners. Yee-haw! (OK, we promise not to bombard you with too much Texas shtick over the next two weeks. Then again, just how much Texas shtick is too much? Remember, your editor is a native.)

Anyway, we'll have a special portal just gushing information (like Spindletop) at RCPmag.com/wpc, and we'll be blogging our fingers to the bone, so check in frequently for updates. (You can even get a headstart right now by checking out Scott's entries on the speaker lineup and attendance numbers. In fact, you might just want to sit at your laptop and reload the portal all day.) Also, check your inbox for show-themed issues of RCPU written by your editor and by Mr. Bekker -- starting with a special edition this Sunday penned by the EIC his own self.

We're also going to have a wrap-up video online at some point during the week of the show, which you won't want to miss, especially if you saw the preview video (which, if you haven't, you should now).

So, we'll see you in Houston -- or online -- next week. Oh, and by the way, there won't be an RCPU on Thursday. Happy July 4, everybody! (And, for our fellow Americans specifically, happy Independence Day!)

Posted by Lee Pender on July 02, 20081 comments

Microsoft Tries To Simplify Licensing for Larger Customers

Anyway, there's a pretty good synopsis of Select Plus here, and, of course, there's Microsoft's press release on the plan. Now, maybe we're just obtuse, but none of this actually seems very simple. In fact, it seems pretty darn complicated and dense.

Regardless, Wall Street-types are concerned that the discounts in the plan will hurt Redmond's profit margins, while somebody at Forrester, at least, thinks that the plan will be mostly good for bigger companies.

Here at RCPU, we're...well, we're not really sure yet what this means for partners, but we'd love for you to clue us in at [email protected]. So, uh, go ahead and do that. Thanks.

Posted by Lee Pender on July 02, 20080 comments

Microsoft's 50,000-Page Summer Thriller

At the end of every school year, some well-intentioned teacher would give her students a list of books to read over the summer -- without the power of actually being able to "assign" them. The more intellectual kids probably read them, but your editor never did, preferring instead to devour Sports Illustrated and the Dallas Morning News (yes, even as a kid) and then participate in the aforementioned outdoor sporting activities.

Well, this summer, Microsoft has its own suggested reading, which should prove more popular among certain audiences than the old summer reading list did in this house: Redmond has released "Version 1.0" of documentation on some of the protocols in its most important products.

This is the stuff that Bill Gates -- you might remember him as Microsoft's former CEO -- never wanted to publish. But antitrust suits forced Microsoft's hand, and now the company's all about interoperability and openness. This week's dump includes information on protocols used in Exchange Server 2007, SharePoint Server 2007 and Office 2007, among other big-name Microsoft offerings.

So, who's hauling this tome to the beach or skipping a pick-up soccer game to stay inside and read? Well, the European Union's competition cranks, for sure, given that the existence of this documentation is as much their doing as anybody else's, and given that they're still not convinced that Microsoft is interested in interoperability. (Ha! Just try to take the whole month of August off and still finish reading this stuff by fall, Eurocrats.) But other audiences of immediate interest to Microsoft will be turning pages, as well.

Specifically, the Office stuff will appeal to the nations and organizations that contend that Office Open XML, currently an industry standard with a big asterisk on it (as in *pending appeal), shouldn't be a standard at all. Plus, we imagine that some Microsoft competitors might be a little bit curious about the new documentation.

Will Microsoft's summer reader be enough to assuage those hostile audiences? We doubt it -- after all, this is really just an update of documentation released in April -- but for Redmond, it's another step on the path to working more readily with other vendors and with the industry as a whole.

And while we've defended here Microsoft's right to keep proprietary things private, we also can't see all that much of a downside in Microsoft explaining how its stuff works and making it easier for other vendors to work with it. In other words, we have a feeling that divulging these precious trade secrets won't put Microsoft out of business.

As for us, though, we'll be skipping Microsoft's summer page-turner. Next week's Worldwide Partner Conference and other events (along with a complete lack of skill in both sports) will probably cut down severely on the baseball- and soccer-playing, but we're pretty confident that we can still find better things to do this summer than read 50,000 pages of protocol documentation -- like, for instance, anything.

What's your take on Microsoft's new "openness"? Will you be reading all 50,000 pages this summer? Sound off at [email protected].

Posted by Lee Pender on July 01, 20081 comments

Microsoft Finally Fixes Anti-Virus Bug

By the way, should we read anything at all into the fact that Microsoft, which is now more than a year into its effort to be a security vendor, had a "bug" that messed up certain Symantec applications? Hmm, should we? Probably not, but we do like to cause trouble when we can.

Posted by Lee Pender on July 01, 20080 comments

Redmond Beset by Patch-Blocking Problem Again

Posted by Lee Pender on July 01, 20080 comments

Redmond and the Four-Letter F-Word

Posted by Lee Pender on July 01, 20080 comments

MSPs Turning Out To Be Right About UC

Posted by Lee Pender on June 30, 20080 comments

The Search for a Service Provider

Posted by Lee Pender on June 30, 20080 comments