Switch Systems Blog

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

In a recent blog post, Microsoft explain their reasoning for removing the Drive Extender technology which was to allow WHS style drive pooling and fault tolerance.

Whilst a lot of people will see this as a step backwards, I’m personally happy with this decision – drive extender tech makes it a lot harder for us ‘real’ sysadmins to determine where data lies in a disaster recovery situation, plus we’re much more familiar with RAID based solutions.

The ‘virtual experience’ website is now live at http://vepexp.microsoft.com/cloudtransition/ – Silverlight only i’m afraid. The closing video is at http://vepexp.microsoft.com/cloudtransition/?s=39356

A big part of our business is supporting Microsoft’s Small Business Server (SBS). SBS is a collection of Microsoft technologies consisting of Windows Server, Exchange, Sharepoint, all of which are tightly integrated to make a good value offering for small businesses to step up their infrastructure to a more efficient, secure and centrally managed solution.

Microsoft have just announced the latest editions of SBS. Codenamed “Aurora”, SBS 2011 Essentials aims to align with Microsoft’s strategy of storing data in the Cloud (distributed on-line servers, much like Web E-Mail), while maintaining the already mature features like Remote Access, automatic server backups and remote web workplaces.

Another SBS name change, SBS 7 is now to be known as SBS 2011 Standard.

We continue to look with interest at Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy, and no doubt will be testing the final releases of SBS 2011 in our labs as they become available.

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Microsoft have been busily refreshing their Server offerings, and one heavily in development is Windows Small Business Server “7″. One can only assume they’re still quarrelling with the marketing department on what to call it. Refreshingly for me at least is the effort they are putting into the user interface, not using the rather awkward Windows Classic Vista-ish-but-no-Aero theme. Our intern Hannah O’Neill has a few tips for those wanting to get to grips with the latest Small Business Server.

Something everyone should be aware of when installing SBS 7. You must have a partition of 80GB as a minimum but 120GB is the recommended partition size! I made the mistake of trying to install it on a 79GB partition and had to start again!

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After playing with the IE9 beta, we’ve identified some issues web developers may have with their existing javascript/css code. Here are the details:

• Many IE workarounds for canvas management (i.e. excanvas hacks) are not now required. Hit the jump for a jquery.jqplot.js diff file.
• Some other random IE8 fixes are now no longer required, but are still triggered by IE9. Hit the jump for an updated TinyMCE build.
• IE specific CSS stylings are now not really required as they once were, so if you have CSS conditional definitions, update them to exclude IE9 (again, hit the jump for how we’ve updated this)
• IE9′s user agent is now Mozilla 5.0 instead of Mozilla 4.0 (hooray!). This blog post explains all.

For those of you still running windows XP look away now – this new IE9 beta will only run on Vista/7/2008. But for the rest of us, Microsoft have built upon IE8 and added a raft of new GUI features and hardware graphics acceleration….