Microsoft

KEMP Load Balancer Certified for Microsoft Lync Server 2010

February 14, 2012

KEMP Technologies today announced that its LoadMaster hardware-based and virtual appliance load balancers are now approved for Microsoft Lync Server 2010. If you recall, I spoke with Kemp last year about their Exchange 2010 load balancer, so adding Lync load balancing certainly rounds out their Microsoft portfolio. KEMP’s LoadMaster products offer server load balancing, optimized application delivery and built-in SSL acceleration. These features enable the LoadMasters to seamlessly integrate with Microsoft's Lync server pools.

By adding load balancing, traffic can be scaled wide across Lync 2010 Front End, Director, and Edge server pools. With Layer 7 health checking, the LoadMaster ensures that should a server become inaccessible, the load balancer will take that server off-line and automatically re-route and reconnect users to other functioning servers keeping application uptime guaranteed.

“Having our entire product portfolio approved for Microsoft Lync Server further strengthens the LoadMaster’s ability to deliver highly available, reliable and secure solutions to our business customers utilizing Microsoft applications,” said Peter Melerud, executive vice president of product management at KEMP Technologies. “The Microsoft -approved LoadMaster solutions for Lync Server 2010 continue to reduce the price barrier for any-sized business while ensuring high availability across all applications.”

The entire portfolio of LoadMaster products -- hardware-based, Virtual LoadMaster (VLM) for Hyper-V and Virtual LoadMaster (VLM) for VMware is approved for Lync Server 2010. Pricing starts at only $1,490.

Posted in Microsoft, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

Windows on ARM - New Tablet Operating System With Some Limitations

February 10, 2012

Microsoft Windows President Steven Sinoksky OR is this Bruce Willis?

The next version of Windows will run full-sized desktop applications on low-power ARM-based tablets. However, the only desktop applications approved to appear on ARM devices will be those designed by Microsoft such as Internet Explorer 10, Office, and the Windows file explorer. Affectionately known as WOA (Windows On Arm), it includes desktop versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

In an lengthy blog post, Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows division explained how WOA will work. In a nutshell, you can think of WOA as a specialized version of Windows 8 designed for ARM processors.

Posted in Computer Software, Microsoft, Tablets, Technology and Science

Microsoft Leverages New Google Data Sharing Policy

February 1, 2012

Microsoft comes out swinging at Google - saying the search leader has changed its policies to make your personal data more valuable to advertisers. While this is obviously true, the goal of all companies is to make more money and since Google makes most of theirs through showing ads, this data-sharing change makes lots of sense - right?

The first question which comes to mind of course is did you ever think we would get to a point where Microsoft would be calling out Google for being evil?

What this shows is how important search and the cloud are to Microsoft. The cloud is the future and MS needs to figure out how to compete more effectively in a non shrink-wrapped world.

Will this ad campaign be successful? Possibly but only if Microsoft backs it up with an online and TV campaign.

Redmond's timing is good as there is an increased focus on privacy with an article in the New York Times even equating the Facebook IPO today with selling of your privacy.

The bottom line is Microsoft could have a solid strategy here to paint Google into an anti-privacy "we are evil" box.

Posted in Microsoft

Symantec - Disable pcAnywhere Now! Who the Heck Still uses it?

January 27, 2012

Symantec suspected in 2006 that its network had been breached, but when Anonymous started talking publicly about Symantec source code it confirmed their suspicions. According to Wired: The company surprised the public last week when it disclosed that hackers had obtained source code for its pcAnywhere software and other products, and that the code had likely been stolen in a six-year-old breach that Symantec had never disclosed.

Symantec said in its announcement that users should disable pcAnywhere until the company had time to update the software to ensure that hackers are unable to exploit holes they might find in the code.

Disable pcAnywhere? Disable pcAnywhere? Now I was a huge fan of pcAnywhere ... back in like 1996.

Posted in Internet, Microsoft, News, TMCnet, Technology and Science

Lync Federation Tool Makes it Easy to Find Lync-enabled Business Partners

January 23, 2012

Who wouldn't want to join the Federation? No, not the United Federation of Planets, commonly referred as the Federation, though it would be cool to play on the Star Trek Enterprise's holodeck. No, we're talking Lync Federation here. Matt Landis has a cool WCF Tool (Who Can Federate) that will scan through your Outlook contacts and tell you which contacts have public Microsoft Lync or OCS federation enabled. The utility works simply by checking for a specific Lync DNS SRV record for each domain name in your Outlook contacts.

You don't even need Lync installed to try this tool.

Posted in Microsoft, SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, Video Conferencing, VoIP

Begun the Search War Has! Google+ Social Search Results in Bing Defections

January 13, 2012

Could Google's recent change "Search, Plus Your World" be a "Netflix" faux pas causing a similar mass exodus of users from Google to Microsoft's Bing search engine? Well, at least one high-profile website, Gizmodo has one of its columnists jumping ship. The new search integrates Google+ (Google's Facebook competitor) content directly into search results. It includes "personal results" which include Google+ status updates, Picasa photos, blog posts, etc. that have been privately shared with you as well as your own content. It will also examine your past searches and display results based on your search activity or what you clicked on.

All the personalized search results pushes other relevant content down by being placed at the top of the page.

Posted in Google, Internet, Microsoft, TMCnet

Microsoft Lync 2010, Asterisk & Skype Integration Tutorial

December 28, 2011

I came across an excellent tutorial on installing and integrating Microsoft Lync 2010, Asterisk and Skype. The tutorial covers installing AsteriskNOW within a virtual machine on Windows, so you don't even have to have spare hardware lying around to install Linux + AsteriskNOW on. The tutorial mentions integrating with Skype using Skype for Asterisk (SFA), which unfortunately was killed earlier this year. You can of course use Skype Connect (formerly Skype for SIP) to create SIP trunks, but the integration isn't as "tight".

Posted in Asterisk, Microsoft, SIP, Skype, Unified Communications, VoIP

Windows 8 CPU Slow Benchmarks!

December 20, 2011

I tried out Windows 8 developer preview (32-bit) on a Dell E6500 dual core 2.26Ghz laptop and while the new UI is slick, the CPU processor is much SLOWER that the prior Vista 32-bit operating system it was running. Using PerformanceTest v7.0 (popular PassMark benchmark), the CPU benchmark went down from 2000 to 800! Similarly Windows Experience Index score for the CPU category went from 5.2 to 2.4. That's a 1/2 performance drop! Now, I did have to install a Windows 7 nVidia Quadro NVS 160M video driver and a few other Windows 7 drivers (memory card reader), but nothing CPU-related. I understand this is a "preview" version of Windows 8, but it certainly isn't installing confidence.

Posted in Microsoft, TMCnet, Technology and Science

Data Consumption Comparison: Microsoft Lync vs. Communicator Mobile for Windows Mobile

December 16, 2011

Matt Landis has some nice analysis comparing how much mobile data usage there is for Microsoft Lync vs. Communicator Mobile for Windows Mobile (CoMo). Go check it out.

Image above via Matt Landis

Posted in Microsoft, Mobile Phones, Unified Communications, VoIP, Wireless

Sprint Nextel Throws Out 489 PBXs - Switches 100% to Microsoft Lync

December 16, 2011

Sprint Nextel thew out 489 PBXs and switched over their 39,000 employees to using Microsoft Lync, a unified commutations solution gaining in popularity. Sprint Nextel said their goal was to "reduce its environmental impact, improve employee productivity, and reduce costs and administration for its cumbersome telephony systems". Whether they truly "threw out" the 489 PBXs and they're sitting in a landfill somewhere or they sold off the PBXs is unknown, but I'm hoping for the latter or it would defeat Sprint Nextel's purpose of "reduced environmental impact".

Here's what their Lync deployment / voice infrastructure looks like now:

Sprint Nextel claims that switching to Microsoft Lync has saved them nearly $13 million annually by reducing the TCO of maintaining hundreds of hardware-based PBXs, on-site maintenance fees, and annual upgrades. It went with Microsoft's software approach and leveraged Sprint's Global MPLS network and SIP trunking to connect their 39,000 employees together seamlessly allowing them to retire 489 PBXs scattered across the country.

Posted in Microsoft, Polycom, SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, Video Conferencing, VoIP

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