Switch Systems Blog

The new November Microsoft Dynamics CRM update brings facebook and twitter style social feeds (activity streams, walls, etc) to CRM, better windows phone 7 support, tighter integration and more.. There’s also the promise of Firefox/Chrome/Safari support in the first half of 2012 (yippee!). Check out the video posted.

Recently released was “Mouse without Borders“, a Synergy like program which lets you share one keyboard/mouse/monitor across multiple computers. The killer feature of MouseWithoutBorders is that you can copy&paste, drag&drop files (!), and lock/logon multiple workstations simultaniously. Unfortunately it only supports up to 4 devices, but it’s definately worth trying out.

On site the other day, had a very strange problem where DNS requests from windows server boxes were not working. No firewall rules in the router, and nslookup still fails, but it would work absolutely fine from my laptop on the same network.

Codecademy is a new website which teaches basic programming concepts in a nice easy to use website. I imagine that they plan to add extra (more complex) courses over time, hopefully it will take off!

From the SBS blog: “The integration module will enable small businesses to simply administer their users both local and cloud in one single place, for instance adding all local users into Office 365 and effortlessly using a single custom domain name for both SBSS 2011 Essentials and Office 365.”

Expect it sometime this autumn.

Ars Technica has a first look at Windows 8, with it’s Metro (Windows Phone 7) touch interface.

Whilst I appreciate what Microsoft are doing, and it’s great for tablets and other touch based devices, I can’t see this bringing any benefits to the vast majority of office based workers who spend 90% of their time inside office applications and programming IDEs.

We’ve been beavering away on the website with a brand new look & feel, plus new content including our twitter feed and software section. Let us know what you think!

We’ll be adding even more customer testimonials, software development information and other pages as we get round to them.

Some general references that i’ve been using whilst checking out Lync Server 2010

Configuring users from powershell

http://blogs.technet.com/b/csps/archive/2010/06/28/wtlenableuservoice.aspx

Changing port information

This will return all current service information.

DNS entries to setup

DNS SRV record for _sipinternaltls._tcp.contoso.com domain over port 5061 that maps to lyncserver.contoso.com

Useful URLs

• https://server-name/cscp – Management Address
• http://www.cjwdev.co.uk/Software/ADPhotoEdit/Info.html – AD Photo Editor
• http://blogs.technet.com/b/nexthop/archive/2010/11/22/microsoft-lync-2010-photo-experience.aspx – How lync gets it’s photo data

Some severe snowfall in Exeter means that on-site visits and callouts for today (Monday 20th December) will run at reduced capacity. For more information, please call the office.

Google have put up a website where you can send ‘care packages’ to an email address, showing them how to do things like copy & paste, resize pictures, attach files to emails and so on – pretty handy in this holiday season!

Check it out at www.teachparentstech.org