You have a Twitter account. You Facebook. You post on forums. But you don't have a personal website or blog. Does this mean you don't exist on the social landscape?

It's a topic I have been pondering for a number of weeks now, but I've finally put it together, after applying for the Telstra Windows 7 Phone Social review process. Now this isn't a whinge about not getting it, nor is it a suggestion of their preference in allocating positions (congratulations to those who did get chosen, especially the AuTechHeads regulars!). Rather, the process made me think about the topic a great deal. Which is why I'm here.

Having your own blog is a pretty decent undertaking. For it to be good, you must generate fresh content on a pretty regular basis, be a good writer, without necessarily making anything back on your investment of time and thought. However, blogging about your personal areas of interest, passion and experience can be a rewarding experience, especially knowing that your readers share your ...

 I won't bore you with unboxing details or first impressions. Enough of the Social Review team have delivered that far more eloquently than I (damn there are some good writers in the group).

I've really been enjoying following the reviewers and hearing their successes and failures. Finding the common ground. Hearing their pain. A review like this takes balls on the part of Telstra (and Microsoft) and I applaud them for having a go and allowing 25 opinionated people loose with their gear to do with as they want and say what they want. Our opinions as reviewers are what they (and I'll assume you reading this) want to hear. So hang on...

I intentionally didn't read the manual as I figured most people won't. It bit me in the bum a little, as I had some questions that I'm sure people who'd read the manual wouldn't have asked. I'm a seasoned Windows Mobile user, having owned and used a number of devices for years. This couldn't be too much different. WRONG.

The Metro UI is ...

Yesterday, Telstra kicked off its social reviewer program for the HTC Mozart mobile phones. I'm not involved (although I recognise quite a few names as AuTechHeads members!) and have already given my thoughts on one that was purchased via work for the purpose of evaluation. I certainly wish the social reviewers all the best, and will read their own thoughts with considerable interest.

It did, however, get me thinking more on a train of thought that's already been at the back of my head, especially when seeing the first sets of comments and gripes about the phones flowing via Twitter. I'm talking about, for example, "I miss X app" or "I miss X feature". And here's where the fragmentation first becomes evident.

We used to have phones where the biggest concern, when switching, was making sure your contacts were copied to SIM or to your PC somehow. It was largely seamless to transition between Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, etc. Even with the advent of Pocket PC Phones and Smartphones fro ...

This video is with John Pritchard, Optimised Desktop Specialist with Microsoft Australia. John ran the Perth and Adelaide sessions of Microsoft latest round of free workshops for IT professionals. The first round occurred earlier this year and revolved around Microsoft's virtualisation technologies - specifically Hyper-V and SCVMM. The latest round is all about Application Compatibility.

Microsoft are seeing customers expressing plenty of reservations about their existing suite of applications which need to be supported on Windows 7, and are looking for as many resources and as much guidance as possible to overcome and lingering issues and migrate to Windows 7.

There are two sessions left - one in Melbourne and the other in Canberra. Jeff Alexander has blogged about the details, and you use the details on his site to register. For any IT professional involved in deploying Windows 7, these workshops are a great resource and well worth the time (especially as they don't cost anything!).

It’s just a Jump to the Left – and a step into the 1950’s OK I think I’m Hilarious anyway

Wondered if the owners of Yellow Cab Company are colour challenged of if the was a referendum to change Yellow to Orange (won’t be the first dumb poll result) more on that later.

Walked over to “The Hungry Heart” and had the big Breakfa ...

It has got to the stage where I can no longer test and learn current Microsoft software technologies on the hardware that I have on hand. The number of products demanding 64-bit only, >2Gb RAM, multi-core, etc mean that my ancient Xeon server, or my Mac mini running VMWare Fusion no longer does the job.

In this series of posts I will be ordering, unpacking, building, and installing a new server. This one is a little different as I wanted something really small and really quiet, but with still sufficient grunt to handle anything I throw at it. So while I can build a tiny Atom-based PC, it's hardly going to run anything useful.

My requirements were:

Yep. I applied here, and got selected! I'll be dropping my blog posts here at AuTechHeads and tweeting somewhat obsessively about the experience over at @themolk - and I'd love to know both what you think about the HTC Motzart running Windows Phone 7 (I willingly accept tips, hints & pointers) AND what you think about my experience using it...

It's not just me invovled, either. You can see the full list of people involved over here, and keep up with the goings-on from the social review and other Telstra Exchange blog happenings here. This is gonna be a lot of fun.

Why is this iteration of Microsoft's (Forefront) Identity Management suite of products exciting the Sys Admin community? Put simply: It works, and its easy to implement!

OK! When I say "easy", I should say it is "easy. Once you get your head around a few key concepts and terms". Here go's!

Synchronization Service
... is The central nervous system of FIM. The Synchronization Service Manager is where you configure your Management Agents (MA's) to do 'stuff'. I will gloss over some concepts (such as importing, synchronizing and exporting) to keep it simple and will try to relate this to a real world scenario.

Management Agent
FIM uses Management Agents (MA's) to connect to 'stuff' (ok, you get the picture i am trying to keep this general, right?). Some of the things you can connect to right out of the box are: Active directory (of course), SQL, SAP, Text files, Novell eDirectory and the FIM Service Management Agent (Se ...

I've previously written about my opinions on 'market leading' antimalware such as McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro. The point of that post, though, was to encourage people to re-evaluate their malware protection - because so much of it is utter crap - and to highlight the need to focus on just more than the desktop.

A couple of days ago, Ed Bott of ZDNet posted his findings on Microsoft Security Essentials versus McAfee (short story: McAfee failed abysmally), and later updated with a further test, on which McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, and others all performed poorly.

"In this case, at least, that protection wasn’t as complete as the free Microsoft product it was comparing itself to.

As an aside, it’s worth noting that criticizing Microsoft Security Essentials because it’s free misses an important point. MSE uses the same scanning engine and definitions as its enterprise-grade Forefront product, which is most assuredly not free."

...

Over the time I've been using Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager, I've had several reasons to recover the database, such as rebuilding the server, migrating to Windows 2008 R2 and DPM 2010, and reverting from a service pack that proved to have bugs. There's some great guidance on recovery on TechNet, but some of my experience may also be useful to you.

As you may know, DPM comes with a SQL Server license - SQL Server 2005 for DPM 2007, and SQL Server 2008 for DPM 2010. Funnily, I just discovered the the SQL Management Studio that's installed on our production server believes it's part of a trial version that has expired. This more than likely comes from running the DPM 2010 beta and release candidate, which used trial licenses. I'll have to fix that, but it's not a massive deal because the SQL services themselves appear to be unaffected,

In any case, you can either install this local full copy of SQL Server, or use a remote server. It's recommended to use the local SQL for perf ...

Google got in trouble here for accessing wifi networks and potentially downloading commercial data, email and other data. It went to the AFP, who, surprisingly, took it seriously. Here is the bit I don't get. If you haven't bothered to secure your wifi network and you are running a business, you get what you deserve - a wake-up call. Basically, as the Google streetview car drives down a street, uploading images on a wifi hotspot, it interrogates hosts and, if they are open, connects. Not rocket science. If the connection isn't a defined hotspot, and Google connects, who is at fault? the Google wifi system for daring to connect, or the idiot who hasn't set up any form of protection on the access point? Even Bigpond has defined WPA Passkeys for home wireless networking.

Sysadmins know to protect the network. why would wifi be any different? it is just a network without cables. What really got to me was that Google notified the sites it realised had been connected to in error. Why didn't these operato ...

Social media is great. we can contact people globally, we can form relationships with strangers on face value, we can gain business and expand our reach.

There is a side to social media that we seem to miss. Social media can be damaging. through casual comments, we can put our companies at risk, or ourselves. We share so much info online, who can tell what we are sharing that is dangerous?

If you look at the various mediums in Social media, the standout for damage is facebook. de-friend someone in a cleanup of contacts may hurt their feelings, de-friend them on purpose surely will.

Comment on what has happened recently at work - lazy colleagues, inept bosses, etc, and someone out there, somewhere will probably know them. Not a good way to get a meeting with HR. Facebook or Fb also has other surprise ways to offend. Groups are set up for everything. Join a group that is offensive to someone else you know and get a fast track to losing that friend or colleague's good opinion of you, o ...

I was going to wait for the new AuTechHeads After Dark section to post a review of my Windows Phone 7 experiences. That's still waiting on some final software features, though, and I've had a number of inquiries as to what I think, so I thought I'd give you a snapshot of what I think so far.

Some caveats here - I already predicted its failure, so it's difficult at best to claim objectivity. I have indeed tried to be objective, apart from some (mostly) joking around on Twitter. In spite of personal misgivings, I have made a genuine effort to use the phone on an ongoing basis, and taken feedback and suggestions from others where it's been offered. I also refused to form a solid opinion over it after just a few hours, because that's not a healthy way to review any phone.

I am also at a disadvantage with my review. The only model we were able to acquire via our business account with Telstra initially was the HTC Mozart, and this was not available until early November. I have ...

Note: Crossposted from my blog

It’s raining, you know how I know it’s raining? Not because stuff falls from the sky, but because my bloody phone is not working again.

I shouldn’t be so selfish – it’s not just my phone, it’s the whole street. The 80yo widower, the 75yo couple with severe health problems, the 35yo with the 2 young children, the 60yo with epilepsy.

They are the people I worry about. Not me – I have a mobile phone an old copper line (my main line), and a pair gain telephone line (newer type), they do not. The only reason I have the pair gain is because I was told I couldn’t get ADSL, I had a 2nd line installed to enable access to the internet, which in itself was a nightmare and I had to wait 3 months for.

This problem is not something that’s just occurred. This problem has been occurring for the better part of 50-60 years. I know this because the first line installed ...

A lot of traditional backup runs on the basis of a single daily backup - often incremental or differential - and perhaps a weekly full. This operates on the assumption that nothing will happen during working hours to cause data loss. Sadly, I've seen all too many instances of this assumption being wrong.

This has a lot to do with my liking of System Center Data Protection Manager. It doesn't offer fully continuous data protection - which is something I don't regard as particularly necessary for most usages - but it does offer near-continuous. I've seen this to be a point of confusion for some.

DPM will allow you to synchronise data as frequently as every 15 minutes. For file system data, this is just a copy of all changed blocks since the last sync. For Exchange and SQL data, though, this is a copy of the logs generated since the last sync. If you haven't enabled circular logging or, for SQL, simple recovery, this is a great feature. It will allow you to restore your database ...

I’ve never been a huge Blogger, never had the need really.  I must say after doing a few and using the sites editor stumbling though it and accidently hitting the back button too many times to care to admit, I took a look at and installed the latest Windows Live products and “Window Live Writer” rocks. Thanks to @delic8genius and @coatsy for mentioning it in a #Franklyspeaking podcast. I’m sure there are other cooler and bigger than Ben-Hur apps for this out there but for me it’s cool handy and on all my machines.

I find that for cross posting between sites it’s great.  once set up and what a breeze that is it retains all the appropriate setting and connection and all you have to do is calve up you post select the site you post to and upload.  I does the rest for you.

The interface is a cut down word, if you can use word 2010 you are set.  Makes formatting so much easier and adding pictures, hyperlinks and video etc. a breeze  Shit just noticed it has spell chekc to.& ...

The aim of the seminar series is to generate discussion between the small to medium business owners in our target regions and their existing IT consultants around utilising Virtualisation, Cloud, Communications, Green Technology and ...