Futurecat - Michael Karek

Microsoft is providing the official Expedition Software with Windows 7, Bing, and Windows Live Messenger for Summit on the Summit: Kilimanjaro.

Summit on the Summit: Kilimanjaro, the brain child of musician and philanthropist Kenna, is an effort to drive global awareness around the clean water crisis facing the planet with celebrities  and educators such as Jessica Biel, Lupe Fiasco, Santigold and Elizabeth Gore climbing to the top Mt. Kilimanjaro. The climb starts January 7th, 2010. You can track the climb via the Summit on the Summit website.  1 billion people today don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water.

You don’t have to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro to be involved. You can sponsor a foot and donate to the cause. You can also download the Summit on the Summit theme for Windows 7 and the Summit on the Summit theme for Windows Live Messenger too! There are lots of tools you can take advantage of to show your support of this effort here.

HP is providing the official Expedition Technology for Summit on the Summit: Kilimanjaro. HP PCs will come with Windows 7 with Bing as the search engine and Windows Live Messenger installed.

UPDATE 12/31: Added a bit more information regarding the climbers and background on the effort.

The 2 videos below were recently created to showcase all of the features found in Windows Home Server in 1 minute.

The first video gives an overview of how a family uses Windows Home Server in their everyday lives. It shows how Windows Home Server will keep all family memories safely backed up and stored in a vault-like box, and how it can also stream large collections of media throughout the house.

In this second video, you will see the benefits of using Windows Home Server in your Small Office/Home Office (SOHO). Windows Home Server provides an IT team for your office to help protect, organize, and connect to all of your data without the expensive price tag.

You can find more demos and videos about Windows Home Server on our demo page.

-Nicole

Having saved my proverbial bacon more times than I can remember the Bing application for Windows Phone squeaks ahead in to my number one slot in my Top 10 Mobile Apps countdown. "The Bing app is your central stop for maps, directions, and local searches."

Well that wraps up my top 10 apps for this past year. My son is home from college for winter break and I have had a peak on his first generation HTC Touch and have seen that there are quite a few more applications available for touch screen Windows Phones than are available for my HTC Ozone running Windows 6.1. Do have a touch screen phone running Windows Mobile 6.5? If so what are your favorite applications?

Gotta run now. I am heading on a family vacation trip where I will be using my top 2 applications quite a bit. IncaX Live Media GPS will be used as part of capturing the whole event and we will be using Bing to navigate around the town. Have a great New Years everyone and keep on living the Windows Phone mobile dream!

You can grab a copy of the Microsoft Bing for Windows Phone from the Windows Marketplace for Mobile.

Michael Gannotti is a Technology Specialist for the Microsoft Corporation and the author of the blog SocialMedia Talk. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows,WindowsMobile,Mobility,Gannotti,Technology

Timothy Daleo, author on the site http://usingwindowshomeserver.com, penned a very clever rendition of “Twas the Night Before Christmas” written by Clement Clarke Moore.

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house,

Not a creature was stirring, not even a Microsoft Wireless 6000 Mouse;

The computers were sleeping on the network with care,

In hopes that Windows Home Server Backup soon would be there…

Read the full version at http://usingwindowshomeserver.com/2009/12/24/twhsas-the-friday-night-before-christmas/.

In the number 2 slot for Michael’s Top 10 Mobile Apps countdown is LiveMedia GPS by IncaX. Okay folks, between this application and my number one it was soooooo close. For pure coolness and usefulness in a variety of corporate scenarios to include use in the travel industry, R&D, events, and more LiveMedia GPS is my hands down, number one application. With LiveMedia GPS you can capture all the rich data, video and geolocation information around virtually anything. I personally use it all the time to create geocasts while traveling. Leveraging a stack of Microsoft technologies including, Windows Server, Bing Maps, Silverlight, and more, LiveMedia GPS loads as an application your your Windows Phone to provide for compelling mobile geocast scenarios. As a great example check out the Microsoft case study "U.S. Navy Research Exercise Demonstrates Microsoft®-based Mobile GPS Solution’s Potential"

You can check out some of my own geocasts on my blog on my geocast page here.

• Check out the case study: "U.S. Navy Research Exercise Demonstrates Microsoft®-based Mobile GPS Solution’s Potential"
• Download LiveMedia GPS for you Windows Phone here.

Michael Gannotti is a Technology Specialist for the Microsoft Corporation and the author of the blog SocialMedia Talk. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter.

In the number 3 slot for Michael’s Top 10 Mobile Apps countdown is Twikini. I am an avid user of the Twitter SocialMedia web service. Twitter provides great functionality for ad hoc linkage, messaging, and such. When I am on the go I want a rich application that helps me leverage to power of Twitter and that is exactly what Twikini on my Windows Phone does for me.
From the Twikini site: "Twikini offers a powerful and efficient way to use Twitter on your phone. It conveniently updates your favorite feeds in the background, and leverages the camera, GPS, media, touch screen, keyboard, graphics and storage capabilities of your device."

I use Twikini throughout the day, every day. It is absolutely a staple of my everyday must have Windows Phone experience and for that it comes in at number 3 in my Top 10 Mobile Apps countdown.

You can get Twikini for your Windows Mobile device here.

Michael Gannotti is a Technology Specialist for the Microsoft Corporation and the author of the blog SocialMedia Talk. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows,WindowsMobile,Mobility,Gannotti,Technology

Hi, my name is Arthur de Haan and I am responsible for Test and System Engineering in Windows Live. To kick things off, I’d like to give you a look behind the scenes at Hotmail, and tell you more about what it takes to build, deploy and run the Windows Live Hotmail service on such a massive global scale.

Hosting your mail and data (and our own data!) on our servers is a big responsibility and we take quality, performance, and reliability very seriously. We make significant investments in engineering and infrastructure to help keep Hotmail up and running 24 hours a day, day in and day out, year after year. You will rarely hear about these efforts – you will only read about them on the rare occasion that something goes wrong and our service has run into an issue,.

Hotmail is a gigantic service in all dimensions. Here are some of the highlights:

• We are a worldwide service, delivering localized versions of Hotmail to 59 regional markets, in 36 languages.
• We host well over 1.3 billion inboxes (some users have multiple inboxes)
• Over 350 million people are actively using Hotmail on a monthly basis (source: comScore, August 2009).
• We handle over 3 billion messages a day and filter out over 1 billion spam messages – mail that you never see in your inbox.
• We are growing storage at over 2 petabytes a month (a petabyte is ~1 million gigabytes or ~1000 terabytes).
• We currently have over 155 petabytes of storage deployed (70% of storage is taken up with attachments, typically photos).
• We’re the largest SQL Server 2008 deployment in the world (we monitor and manage many thousands of SQL servers).

You can imagine that the Hotmail user interface you see in the browser is only the tip of the iceberg – a lot of innovations happen beneath the surface. In this post I will give a high level overview of how the system is architected. We will do deeper dives into some specific features in later posts.

Architecture

Hotmail and our other Windows Live services are hosted in multiple datacenters around the world. Our Hotmail service is organized in logical “scale units,” or clusters. Furthermore, Hotmail has infrastructure that is shared between the clusters in each datacenter:

• Servers to handle incoming and outgoing mail.
• Spam filters (we will talk more about spam in a future blog post).
• Data storage and aggregation from our service health monitoring systems.
• Monitoring and incident response infrastructure.
• Infrastructure to manage automated code deployment and configuration updates.

A cluster hosts millions of users (how many depends on the age of the hardware) and is a self-contained set of servers including:

• Frontend servers – Servers that that check for viruses and host the code that talks to your browser or mail client, using protocols such as POP3 and DeltaSync.
• Backend servers – SQL and file storage servers, spam filters, storage of monitoring- and spam data, directory agents and servers handling inbound and outbound mail.
• Load balancers – Hardware and software used to distribute the load more evenly for faster performance.

Preventing outages and data loss is our top priority and we take utmost care to keep them from happening. We’ve designed our service to handle failure –our assumption is that anything that can fail will do so eventually. We do have hardware failures—with hundreds of thousands of hard drives in use, some are bound to fail. Fortunately, because of the architecture and failure management processes we have in place, customers rarely experience any impact from these failures.

Here are a few of the ways we keep failures contained:

• Redundancy – We use a combination of SQL server storage arrays to host our data. We use active/passive failover technologies. This is a fancy way of saying that we have multiple servers and copies of your data that are constantly synchronized. If one server has a failure, another one is ready to take over in seconds. All in all we keep four copies of your data on multiple drives and servers to minimize the chance of data loss due to a hardware failure.
• Another benefit of this architecture is that we can perform planned maintenance (such as deploying code updates or security patches) without downtime for you. Key pieces of our network gear are also duplicated to minimize the chance of network-related outages.
• Monitoring – We have an elaborate system for monitoring hardware and software. Thousands of servers monitor service health, transactions (for example, sending an e-mail) and system performance for customers all over the world. Because we’re so large, we’re tracking performance and uptime metrics in aggregate as well as at the cluster level, and by geography. We do want to make sure that your individual experiences are reflected back to us, and not getting lost when we look at averages for the entire system. We care about every single user’s experience. We’ll talk more about performance and monitoring in a future post.
• Response center – We have a round-the-clock response center team that watches over our global monitoring systems and takes action immediately when there is problem. We have an escalation process that can engage our engineering staff within a few minutes when needed.

Engineering process

I’ve talked a little bit about our architecture and steps we are taking to ensure uninterrupted service. No service is static however; in addition to growth due to usage, we do push out updates on a regular basis. So our engineering processes are just as important as our architecture to provide you with a great service. From patches to minor updates to major releases, we take a lot of precautions during our development and rollout process.

Testing and deployment – For every developer on our staff we have a test engineer who works hand in hand with him or her to give input on the design and specs, set up a test infrastructure, write and automate test cases for new features, and measure quality. When we talk about quality, we mean it in the broadest definition of the word: not just stability and reliability, but also ease of use, performance, security, accessibility (for customers with disabilities), privacy, scalability, and functionality in all browsers and clients that we support, worldwide. Given our scale, this is not an easy feat.

And because we’re a free service funded largely by advertising, we need to be highly efficient on an operational basis. So deployment, configuration, and maintenance of our systems are highly automated. Automation also reduces the risk of human error.

Code deployment and change management – We have thousands of servers in our test lab where we deploy and test code well before it goes live to our customers. In the datacenter we have some clusters reserved for testing “dogfood” and beta versions in the final stages of a project. We test every change in our labs, be it a code update, hardware change or security patch, before deploying it to customers.

After all the engineering teams have signed off on a release (including Test and System Engineering) we start gradually upgrading the clusters in the datacenter to push the changes out to customers worldwide. Typically we do this over a period of a few months – not only because it takes time to perform the upgrades without affecting customers with downtime, but it also allows us to watch and make sure there is no loss of quality and performance.

We can also turn individual features on or off. Sometimes we deploy updates but postpone or delay turning them on. In rare cases we have temporarily turned features off, say for security or performance reasons.

Conclusion

This should begin to give you a sense of the size and scope of the engineering that goes into delivering and maintaining the Hotmail service. We are committed to engineering excellence and continuous improvements of our services for you. We continue to learn as the service grows, and we take all your feedback seriously, so do leave me a comment with your thoughts and questions. I am passionate about our services and so are all the members of the Windows Live team – we may be engineers but we use the services ourselves, along with hundreds of millions of our customers.

Arthur de Haan
Director, Windows Live Test and System Engineering

In the number 4 slot for Michael’s Top 10 Mobile Apps countdown is a very cool application that brings a wealth of possibilities to events, the travel industry, and more. Microsoft Tag is a slick application that “transforms everyday things in the real world into live links to online information and entertainment.

From your mobile phone, simply snap or scan a Tag image anywhere you see it – in editorials, advertisements, product packaging, signs and storefronts – and gain instant access to Websites, videos, reviews, schedules, contact information, social networks, discounts, promotions and more!

All you need to do is download the free Tag reader on your web enabled camera phone and when you see a Tag, snap or scan it to interact with the world around you in new ways.”

With Tag:

• Makes offline media (print ads, billboards, posters, television) and physical objects (product packages, storefronts, T-shirts, museum exhibits) interactive.
• Dream up your scenario; engage with your audience in real time, in the real world; and know how successful you were.
• Remember what you saw, and share it with friends.

You can grab a copy of the Microsoft Tag for Windows Phone from the Windows Marketplace for Mobile.

Michael Gannotti is a Technology Specialist for the Microsoft Corporation and the author of the blog SocialMedia Talk. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows,WindowsMobile,Mobility,Gannotti,Technology

Thinking about deploying Windows 7? Need to crunch the numbers to show your boss the  reduced TCO and quick ROI that Windows 7 will have for you’re company?

The Windows 7 Return on Investment (ROI) Tool, powered by Alinean, can help you evaluate your current PC total cost of ownership (TCO) and identify the potential benefits of deploying the Windows 7 operating system to help lower costs, improve service levels, and increase productivity.

This new tool can quantify the tangible value of Windows 7, estimate migration costs, and calculate the financial metrics necessary for your a project review and approval.

To check out the the Windows 7 ROI Calculator visit the Pilot and Deploy area of Springboard or just click here.

In the number 5 slot for Michael’s Top 10 Mobile Apps countdown is a nifty application that combines geolocation services with SocialNetwork alerting, Glympse. From the Glympse site: "Glympse™ is a groundbreaking new way to share your location with anyone for a specified period of time using patent-pending GlympseWatch™ timer." You can grab the Glympse application for your Windows Phone device from the Windows Marketplace for mobile.

You can grab a copy of the Windows Live application for Windows Phone from the Windows Marketplace for Mobile.

Michael Gannotti is a Technology Specialist for the Microsoft Corporation and the author of the blog SocialMedia Talk. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows,WindowsMobile,Mobility,Gannotti,Technology